aworks :: "new" american classical music

Sweet Hardwood (1996). John King

Back from a long holiday weekend in Los Angeles, the car stereo offering the primary musical experience...

In this musical "snapshot," the Ethel CD provided music of contemporary string quartet. Specifically, John King's Sweet Hardwood is a strong, un-sentimental work with an American vitality, as heard in its three movements: Hard Wood, Spiritual, and Shuffle. Amazon samples.

Yesterday afternoon, listening to Sweet Hardwood, we drove down Sepulveda Boulevard, past the entrance to Bel Air, past the Getty Museum, and parallel to the big wall on the right that is the 405 freeway, Then. on the left, I noticed the Los Angeles National Cemetery, a large military cemetery for fallen soldiers of previous wars. The green lawn on the hillside had thousands of white grave markers; each soldier's marker with a small American flag for Memorial Day. Current politics aside, it is clear the significance this sacrifice represents.

I wouldn't presume to say what music might appropriately honor these military dead. However, I might suggest Sweet Hardwood as an appropriate tribute to the faithful American families seen visiting the grounds this holiday weekend.

Today is a day to acknowledge the 84,369 military people there in Los Angeles as well as those elsewhere who gave their lives. Wikipedia:

Memorial Day is a United States public holiday that takes place on the last Monday of May. It was formerly known as Decoration Day. This holiday commemorates US service men and women who died in military service to their country. It began first to honor those who died during the American Civil War. After World War I, it expanded to include those who died in any war or military action.

The Hours (2002). Philip Glass

   (Via Philip Glass fan Pondblog and the Guardian), The Hours soundtrack by Philip Glass won the Classical Brit award for contemporary music.  The other nominees were Gidon Kremer for Happy Birthday and John Rutter for Distant Land.  The Kremer and Glass are both on Nonesuch; the Rutter is not yet available in the US.

The filmworks recommendation for The Hours:

Buy it... if you relax to atmospheric classical music led by piano and strings, harmonious by nature, but without clearly defined themes.

Avoid it... if you prefer scores with more sharply defined cue changes and thematic swells, or if you never plan on sampling any of Glass' work.

And from the BBC account of the ceremonies:

American soprano Renne Fleming, the recipient of this year's outstanding contribution to music award, joined Terfel for a duet of Bess, You is My Woman Now from the musical Porgy and Bess.

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An aworks operational update:  I've fixed the problem where the About Me was pointing to the wrong content.  The intended content, including a statement of "principles" guiding this weblog, is here.  On the other hand, my bookmark feed of relevant news and links is not working, due to a problem at feedroll.  Here's the HTML-equivalent as well as my underlying del.ici.ous RSS feed.  Today anyway, I'm more satisifed with America's classical music than its software engineering... 

Studies for Player Piano (1948-68). Conlon Nancarrow

An Australian blogger with courage, intelligence, and sophistication...

Angus at I Feel Love, who lists his interests as:

electronic dance music, twentieth-century classical music, nineteenth-century fiction, French literature, crime fiction, movies, television, Buffy, Australian football

was looking for blogging inspiration and asked for people to submit any three questions.

With my usual focus/obsession, I waringly asked the following:

1. What work of American classical music do you like best and why?


2. Should John Cale's experimental music of the sixties be considered "classical"?


3. If Oliver Stone hadn't selected Barber's Adagio for the movie Platoon, would it still be popular today?


As for best American classical music, he answers with a surprising but astute choice: Conlon Nancarrow's Studies for Player Piano!

Why do I like Nancarrow? Well, first of all there's the cultural hero aspect—he took something quintessentially middlebrow, a fixture of middle-class homes, and used it to create some of the most uncompromisingly experimental music of his time, music that in its asynchronous method, its blurring of the distinction between composition and performance, anticipates contemporary electronic music as much as Stockhausen or Xenakis do.

You can read the other answers on his blog. Again, I'm impressed.

As for Studies, I am partial to the orchestrated version by Ensemble Modern.  Generally, modern music sounds better to me on piano than by an orchestra, but in this case, the color of the varied instruments makes it unlike any other music I have heard.  Amazon sample here.

Art of the States streams the piano player versions of Study No. 1 and Study No. 36 in RealAudio.

I've not read Kyle Gann's The Music of Conlon Nancarrow.

Easter Eve 1945 (2003-04). John Adams

In the NY Times, Anne Midgette comments on the song Easter Eve 1945 (from the future Adams opera Dr. Atomic), in a concert by the NY Philharmonic:

To say that the orchestra sometimes supported the words, gently rocking beneath the imagery, and sometimes illustrated them — the line "Lit by their energies, secretly, all things shine" unleashed a row of shining strokes of the strings followed by a shining rising figure in the brass — is a reductive description of a partnership between word and note, laid out on a truly grand scale and furthered by the luminosity of the vocalist Audra McDonald. If this was meant to be a teaser, it worked.

In his program notes (PDF), Adams describes the women of the scientists suffering while their husbands labored to build the atomic bomb and how the text he used from the poet Muriel Rukeyser goes from despair to hope.

Here is a brief previous comment by Adams re: Dr. Atomic.

Update: A concert review by Breadly Bambarger in the New Jersey Star-Ledger:

With a war-weary text by poet Muriel Rukeyser, the piece serves as a pensive, 12-minute soliloquy for Kitty Oppenheimer, long-suffering wife of the Manhattan Project leader. Composed for McDonald, but in a high-flying modern style far from her terra firma, the vocal role was a challenge she met handsomely.

Adagio for Strings (1936). Samuel Barber /The Sheens/

I just had an associative moment...

The Adagio track from the Platoon soundtrack popped up via iTunes shuffle.  I heard the sound of helicopter blades and then some dialogue from Martin Sheen.  So, I started thinking how young Martin sounds and in my mind I'm seeing the scene where he is drunk and angry in a hotel room.  Then I realized I'm listening to the son Charlie Sheen in Platoon and not the father Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now.  Finally, it dawns on me that father and son each had their own excellent Viet Nam war movie.  I had never linked the two. 

Continuing the disambiguation exericise, I placed the right Sheen in the right TV show (West Wing versus Spin City).  I also knew that Francis Ford Coppola directed Apocalypse Now and his wife Eleanor Coppola the fine documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Film Maker's Apocalypse. But then I had to cheat via imdb to determine that Stanley Kubrick directed Full Metal Jacket and Oliver Stone directed Platoon rather than vice versa, which seems obvious in hindsight.

I also knew the Vancouver Symphony performed Adagio on the Platoon soundtrack, in what is presumably the most listened to performance of the work.  What I didn't know, as reported in a review by Brendan Kelly, was that the conductor, George Delarue composed an alternate adagio theme for the movie that Stone rejected in favor of Barber's.

 

Bacchanale (1940). John Cage

Is it the piano preparation or the playing technique?

Whatever, Margaret Leng Tan's recording of John Cage's Bacchanale is an excellent hybrid between percussion and piano; muffled, damped, rhythmic and yet playful. Intended for percussion, it was Cage's first work for prepared piano.

New Sounds has a Real excerpt although John Schafer talks over it in his introduction to a show dedicated to Cage. Here's an MP3 (via johncage.info and UCLA) of Stephen Drury's recording.

Sky Above Clouds (1992). Elena Ruehr

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) had a concert last night focusing on American composers in their forties: Elena Ruehr (MIT), Evan Ziporyn (MIT), David Rakowski (Brandeis), Augusta Read Thomas (Northwestern), and Stephen Hartke (USC).

Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe quotes Ruehr on her Sky Above Clouds:

"...The title and inspiration come from a painting by Georgia O'Keeffe in the Chicago Art Institute. It has a big pink-and-blue background with white clouds that repeat, but the repeating images are different in detail. My musical repeating images, or cycles, define everything -- the harmony, the melodic lines, the rhythmic placement. There is a kind of kinship with the music of John Adams, but at the time I didn't know his music."

Ruehr is BMOP composer in residence and teaches at MIT (where unbeknownst to me, one can major in music).

Gil Rose leads the BMOP:

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project is one of the few professional orchestras in the country dedicated exclusively to performing and recording works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Sound Stage (2001). Paul Dresher

Adam Hertz on To Wish for Impossible Things blogs about Paul Dresher's musical theatre work Sound Stage:

What an incredible experience. The music is performed on a combination of traditional instruments (violin, piano, bass clarinet, xylophone) and a collection of larger-than-life instruments that Dresher designed specially for the work...The music was deep, moving, sonorous, filled with longing. Violinist Yuri Merzhevsky was superb. Influences of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, etc. I heard snatches of Balinese and Javanese influences, as well as a healthy dose of African-style drumming.

From the composer:

Thus I proposed to [the musicians of] Zeitgeist that I would invent a stage set comprised primarily of large-scale invented musical instruments and that I would compose a work which combined these invented instruments with their traditional instrumentation and electronic music. In other words, a piece that combined pretty much all the important attributes of my work since I was a teenager.

Be-In (1991). Evan Ziporyn

I like string quartet. I like bass clarinet.  String quartet with bass clarinet, in this instance by Evan Ziporyn, is delightful.

John L. Walters in the Guardian compliments the string quartet Ethel on their sense of contemporary rhythm and culture but also favors Be-In:

The most gripping piece is Evan Ziporyn's Be-In, for which the quartet is augmented by the composer's bass clarinet, a hypnotic, spiralling nine-minute journey with a tender conclusion that's both intellectually demanding and emotionally satisfying - like Shaker Loops with heart.

John Sunier says the Cantalopue CD has "brash, up-close sonics."

New Sounds streams a different performance on Real Audio.

Night Fantasies (1980). Elliott Carter

From the New York Times:

The pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard plays at Zankel Hall in Manhattan on Monday:

PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD — Pianist. Carter ("Two Diversions"; "Night Fantasies"), Ives (Sonata No. 2). Zankel Hall, Carnegie Hall, 7:30. (212) 247-7800.

I wasn't aware Aimard was playing Night Fantasies. Carter's best work in my opinion.

At Tower today, I saw the Aimard/Graham Ives CD. I had already exceeded my quota on new CDs with the Nonesuch 25% off sale (the new Adams and the Kronos Harry Partch) and a Godspeed You Black Emperor double CD. Next time...