aworks :: "new" american classical music

Organ and Silence (2000). Tom Johnson

After Ned Rorem's "noisy silence" comes Tom Johnson's "silent silence."

Organ and Silence is a two-hour organ work (the Wesley Roberts recording is about an hour), distinguished by lengthy periods of silence. A set of notes or a phrase will be followed by complete silence. It might be a short pause or it might be say a 10 second gap and then another musical phrase. All sixteen movements follow that same pattern of short musical fragment, pause, then repeat for three or four minutes.

The effect is provocative, to say the least. After listening for awhile, the music acts as prelude for the silent breaks, rather than vice versa. And what to do during the silence? The musical rhythm does not really allow for counting beats; listening to ambient sounds as in Cage's 4'33" is difficult as music keeps interrupting; echoing the just played fragment in the mind does not necessarily fit in the silent time allotted.

On the Pogus website: This work is conceived not "for organ" but, really, for "organ and silence", as the silence is a fundamental part of it, and it’s not possible to give it up. It’s an attempt, as the author explain " to permit as much silence as possible, without allowing the music to actually stop"...CAUTION: Listening to POGUS CD's may cause you to become one with the universe (or at least your immediate environment)

The site says this is a 1000-copy limited edition CD. A distinctive CD to say the least.

Johnson was clearly influenced by his teacher Morton Feldman and quotes Feldman: "Let the music do what it wants to do." His collection of columns written from 1972 to 1982 for the Village Voice, The Voice of New Music, is available here, as PDF or Word. No MP3 or streaming of this piece, though.

Dig Deep (1998). Julia Wolfe

I am confounded by Julia Wolfe's string quartet Dig Deep. I find the fast, edgy parts tense and exciting. But much of the work also has a recurring "shovel-like"rhythmic element that really annoys me.

From the Cantaloupe record label website:

In Dig Deep the players dig deep into the strings to create a dense, thick, intense, reedy sound. The music wrestles back and forth between the deep attacks and frenzied tunes. The piece reflects a personal struggle, digging deep for compassion and understanding. Dig Deep was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet with support from Nora Norden.

Daniel Felsenfel in Strings Magazine talks about the:

...raw power of Dig Deep (in a fantastically open-throttled performance by the New York-based quartet Ethel)...

Alan Rich in LA Weekly comments on the CD:

The quartets are outwardly alike: big, gritty blocks of still, repeated sonority. Perhaps I have erred in not listening with my amplifier turned up to 11, as the rubrics demand at live BOAC events; prolonged exposure to BOAC’s kick-ass music making can breed discomfort, as Alex Ross noted in a recent New Yorker piece.

Apparently, I like open-throttled frenzy that I can crank up loud...

A founder of Bang on a Can, Julia Wolfe is a New York-based composer. With diverse influences like Beethoven and Led Zeppelin, she explains her pop background in an excellent interview with David Krasnow:

dk So folk and classical music really came to you at the same time.
jw My natural music is pop. I'm not from one of these families where people are raised strictly on classical music, if those still exist. I'd play piano and my mother would come in and sing, we'd do the most corny show tunes. In terms of classical training, I started taking flute lessons, and I would play in chamber music groups. And I sang in madrigal groups. I sing alto. It's incredible to be in the middle, because you feel a part of the chord, and part of the harmony.

Cantalopue has an MP3 sample of Dig Deep.

Ethel is a New York-based new music ensemble, but I have yet to hear their CD. For classical music, the cover is distinctive.

A Quaker Reader (1976). Ned Rorem

Serene and noisy, somber and mysterious, the organ work A Quaker Reader is an attempt by Ned Rorem to link his Quaker religion and his vocation (composition). As evidenced in his many published diaries, he was greatly influenced by his Quaker upbringing, be it through his pacifism, reflection, or truth-seeking. This piece does not offer the joy or redemption of say, Bach's Lutheranism, but is substantial nonetheless.

Rorem in the liner notes:

But if there exists no Quaker music, there can be music by a Quaker. And if my religion means silence while my craft means sound, that craft (that sound) has always very consciously been devoted to banishing the noise which forms an ever vaster cloud between humdrum and mystical realities.

Speaking of his diaries, what I remember most:

• the high-class fun and friendships he had in Paris in early adulthood
  
• his antipathy towards Elliott Carter
  
• his dislike of classical recordings played as background music during dinner parties
  
• the contrasts between his life in Manhattan and on Nantucket Island
  
• his entries over time (and books) that chronicled the progress of the AIDS epidemic; first reports of a gay pneumonia, the progression of medical knowledge about GRID (Gay-Related Immune Deficiency) which in turn led to what we now know as AIDS, and finally the death of his long-time partner in the 1990s from same)
  

Amazon samples A Quaker Reader including the fifth movement "The World of Silence" (Real format), which is anything but.

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Update: Allan Kozinn reviews the recent organ recitals by Gregory D'Agostino of Rorem's complete organ music. Kozinn describes how in some cases, Rorem's titles shape the listener's expectations but in other cases:

Just as often, though, Mr. Rorem puckishly frustrates those expectations. "The World of Silence," "One Sigh Rightly Begotten" and "Ocean of Light," all in "A Quaker Reader," are robust and at times ferocious movements.

Gnarly Buttons for clarinet and chamber ensemble (1996). John Adams

Erika's Bloglet dismisses modern music and specifically, John Adams' Gnarly Buttons:

Although [it] isn’t atonal, it still manages to sound incoherent, and his borrowings from popular styles only make it sound twee.

She does speak positively of Philip Glass.

For myself, I never much liked the banjo in Gnarly Buttons although how many CD covers have a cow? William F Olive III on Amazon  calls the piece "goofy."

I'll have to ponder if Adams' music tends toward "twee-ness."  Eros Piano, a "gloss" on Toru Takemitsu, has some of that quality and is one of my least favorite Adams works; Grand Pianola Music is bombastic but yet still refined; El Dorado, Shaker Loops or maybe Harmonium are good representatives of the "non-twee."

Interestingly, Peter Gutmann points out that the work has a poignant context despite its surface. Adams wrote it in tribute to his clarinet-playing father, who ultimately suffered from dementia. Here's Adams'
overview of Gnarly Buttons:

I. "The Perilous Shore": a trope on a Protestant shape-note hymn found in a 19th century volume, The Footsteps of Jesus...

The melodic line is twisted and embellished from the start, appearing first in monody and eventually providing both micro and macro material for the ensuing musical structures.

II. "Hoedown (Mad Cow)": normally associated with horses, this version of the traditional Western hoedown addresses the fault lines of international commerce from a distinctly American perspective.

III. "Put Your Loving Arms Around Me": a simple song, quiet and tender up front, gnarled and crabbed at the end.

Boosey & Hawkes samples in Real Audio.

Phrygian Gates (1977). John Adams

Philip Glass on the piano music of John Adams:

John Adams has become one of the best known and admired composers in today's concert music. He has achieved this renown through his widely performed operas, oratorios and symphonic music and is considered by now a true master of the modern orchestra. It may come, therefore, as a surprise to some listeners who come across his piano music for the first time. As it turns out, his piano music is equally evocative -- exploting fully the sonorities and range of the modern concert piano. Far from being adaptations of instrumental work, they represent new sensibilities for the piano on it's own terms -- in turn refreshing, playful and sensual.

That was a quote from the liner notes written by Glass for a CD by the pianist Bruce Brubaker on Arabesque Records.  The CD has music of John Adams (Phrygian Gates, Pat's Aria from Nixon in China, China Gates) and Alvin Curran (Endangered Species, Inner Cities I). 

Amazon samples the CD.

  Brubaker's previous CD has music by Cage and Glass.

Harmonielehre for Orchestra (1984-5). John Adams

The American Mavericks website has a good set of (Real Audio) streaming American music in their Listening Room. I've started working through the San Francisco Symphony performances conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. First up is Harmonielehre by John Adams, which to me sounds rather long and benign, especially in comparison to what follows: George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique.

Next up, the three B's (Babbitt, Billings, and Brant) and then the four C's (Cage, Carter, Copland, and Cowell). I expect I will prefer the C's to the B's although what I have heard of New Englander William Billings' 18th century songs and hymns I've surprisingly liked.

Music Mavericks also streams two "radio stations:"

• Smooth Channel - "Smooth and no lumps. Minimalism, drone, nature influenced, ambient."
• Crunchy Channel - "All the chunky richness non-conformists love. Foreground, attention demanding, modernism, electroacoustic, found sound, chance operations, machinery, music to wake up your world."

Smooth and crunchy are relative labels here. "Maverick smooth" may be a bit harsh for a typical orchestra patron and "Maverick crunchy" is too crunchy even for my rock/electronica/Cagean-experienced ears. In particular, I can do without the twelve second scream of Yoko Ono's Voice Piece for Soprano. To counter that, I did learn about Charlemagne Palestine's Schlingen-Blangen via Smooth.

This year, Minnesota Public Radio won a Peabody Award for the American Mavericks series and website. And the ever-present Kyle Gann blogs that the series is based on a script he wrote.

Tempest Fantasy (2003). Paul Moravec

Paul Moravec, head of the music department at Adelphi University, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his work Tempest Fantasy.

Ken Smith/Gramophone: The piece, written for solo clarinet and piano trio, was premièred by clarinetist David Krakauer and Trio Solisti (violinist Maria Bachman, cellist Alexis Pia Gerlach and pianist Jon Klibonoff) at New York’s Morgan Library on May 2, 2003. A recording of the work, which will also include Moravec’s Mood Swings, B.A.S.S Variations, and Scherzo, will be released later this year by Arabesque Records.

Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint and Peter Lieberson’s Piano Concerto No 3 were the other nominees.

The work is a meditation on Shakespeare's The Tempest. NPR samples a promising four minutes of it here.

J. Jioni Palmer/Newsday: As a composer, Moravec is considered a member of the "new tonalists," a group of composers who shun hard-edged, complex avant-garde sounds in favor of harmonic tones.

Prominent prior winners include Aaron Copland (Appalachian Spring), Charles Ives (Symphony No. 3), Gian-Carlo Menotti (Music in the Consul), Samuel Barber (Vanessa and Piano Concerto No. 1), Elliott Carter (Second String Quartet and String Quartet No. 3), Ned Rorem (Air Music), George Perle (Wind Quintet IV), John Corigliano (Symphony No. 2) and last year, John Adams (On the Transmigration of Souls).

Two Pieces for Piano Solo (1978). Michael Jon Fink

In commenting on the lists of recent contemporary music from myself and The Rambler, Lynn S. at Reflections in d minor says:

I wish I could respond with my own list of beautiful music written in the past forty years...

Which in turn triggered an "ah-ha" moment for me. My list wasn't necessarily confined to "beautiful" music but music that had made an impact in my life. Some of it is arguably beautiful (China Gates by Adams?, Vertical Thoughts by Feldman?), but the list also contains music that is intellectually challenging (Carter's Night Fantasies) or fun (Adams' Short Ride in a Fast Machine, Bolcom's Dead Moth Tango) or of historical import (Riley's In C).

Ok, so now the game changes to explicitly seeking beauty. And so what constitutes beauty? Topically, "post-classicist" Kyle Gann just blogged about simplicity in music:

Simplicity has always been an artistic virtue, and it remains one still - not an essential virtue, for there is too much enjoyable complex music to believe that. But other things being equal, one remembers simple music far better than complex music, and I come back to the simple pieces that have impressed me far more consistently than I do the complex ones.

And Virginia Postrel in The Substance of Style says:

Beauty begins with universals but its manifestations are heterogeneous, subjective, and constantly changing.

I'm still trying to articulate the universal aspect underlying it beyond simplicity but the most "beautiful" music I have heard recently is Michael Jon Fink's Two Pieces for Piano Solo. From the Cold Blue CD pointed out by Gann, this piece is a simple, short piano line but significant.

Gann again: Equally lovely, if less lush, are some piano pieces from the late 1970s by Michael Jon Fink: tonal, sparse, with a lonely Harold-Budd feel, and beautifully recorded.

Note to self: follow up on the I Love Music thread on music similar to Michael Jon Fink.

Coptic Light (1986). Morton Feldman

I am listening to Morton Feldman's Coptic Light on a CD by Michael Tilson Thomas and the New World Symphony. Feldman's music can be magical and austere; for example, his Rothko Chapel can be found on both recent "Last 40" lists by The Rambler and myself. But I find this piece muddy and too loud.

Is this due to the conductor, the orchestra, the recording, my audio system, my ears, or that Feldman's work is just not suitable for orchestra? The latter is probably true for Steve Reich's music, given its percussive nature.

The title refers to textiles Feldman saw in the Louvre.

Amazon samples the piece and has comments more favorable than mine. Incidentally, there is a Listmania! list of worst revews on Amazon, including a complaint about an Amazon review of the CD. For me to comment on a comment of a review seems a bit removed from the source...

Nocturnal (1961). Edgard Varèse

Alan Little asked if there has been anything to listen to in the last 40 years. Mischievous Constructions responded with the best of Ligeti and The Rambler listed what he treasures most for each year since 1960. Ok, I'll play, of course constrained by the theme of the aworks weblog (so no Ligeti Etudes, for example).

Here's my list of American works by year. These are the works that I have listened to the most or that had the most impact when I heard them. This is not a list of recommendations; too much minimalism, some current favorites did not make the cut e.g. my favorite Carl Stone, Benjamin Lees, and Joan Tower, and I will always be ambivalent about In C. Also, there may be some discrepancies in the dates as I compiled the list before I remembered the Indiana University new music database. Finally, the boundary years 1960 and 2000 did not yield anything on first examination. Despite those caveats, this was an interesting exercise.

1961 - Nocturnal. Edgard Varèse
1962 - Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 38. Samuel Barber
1963 - Vertical Thoughts for Two Pianos. Morton Feldman

1964 - In C. Terry Riley
1965 - It's Gonna Rain, for Tape. Steve Reich
1966 - Come Out. Steve Reich
1967 - Sun Blindness Music. John Cale
1968 - Pendulum Music. Steve Reich
1969 - Concerto for Orchestra. Elliott Carter
1970 - Four Organs. Steve Reich
1971 - Having Never Written a Note for Percussion. James Tenney
1972 - Clapping Music. Steve Reich
1973 - Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices, and Electric Organ. Steve Reich
1974 - Music in Twelve Parts. Philip Glass
1975 - Einstein on the Beach. Philip Glass
1976 - Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich
1977 - China Gates for Piano. John Adams
1978 - Shaker Loops. John Adams
1979 - Mad Rush. Philip Glass
1980 - Night Fantasies. Elliott Carter
1981 - Koyaanisqatsi. Philip Glass
1982 - Grand Pianola Music. John Adams
1983 - Akhnaten. Philip Glass
1984 - The Dead Moth Tango. William Bolcolm

1985 - 44 Studies for Player Piano. Conlon Nancarrow
1986 - Short Ride in a Fast Machine. John Adams
1987 - Nixon in China. John Adams
1988 - November 19, 1828. John Harbison
1989 - Symphony No. 1. John Corigliano
1990 - Chao Nue. Carl Stone
1991 - El Dorado. John Adams
1992 - Four6. John Cage
1993 - Concerto for Violin & Orchestra. John Adams
1994 - Symphony No.9: l'eve future. Glenn Branca
1995 - City Life. Steve Reich
1996 - Symphony No. 4: Heroes. Philip Glass
1997 - Kundun. Philip Glass
1998 - Naive and Sentimental Music. John Adams
1999 - Six for New Time. Pauline Oliveros