aworks :: "new" american classical music

The Fog of War (2003). Philip Glass /screening/

Philip Glass hosts a screening of the film The Fog of War as part of the Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues, and Ideas in New York:

This is a benefit event for Clear Path International (www.cpi.org). Clear Path works to rehabilitate present day landmine and bomb accident survivors in Vietnam's former DMZ.

Philip Glass:

I don't belong to any party. But with issues of privacy and liberty and free speech it doesn't matter what party you belong to: These things must be protected.

Prior The Fog of War post.

On the Transmigration of Souls, for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir and pre-recorded soundtrack (2002). John Adams

The Standing Room has an excellent introduction to John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls, out on CD this week:

"Transmigration" is Adams's Pulitzer-winning commission from the New York Philharmonic to commemorate those who died on 9/11 -- a >20-minute work for orchestra, choruses (adult & children together) and a taped surround soundtrack created by Mark Grey. The texts are tiny excerpts of very personal remembrances from relatives and friends, pulled primarily from the missing persons signs that were posted in the aftermath...

I have yet to hear this other than the 30-second Real clip on Amazon.  Update: Mark Kanny reviews in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Adams has composed a masterpiece of public music, not limited in appeal to classical music fans or to any political perspective. He is one of America's top composers, a compelling candidate to be a Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra composer-of-the-year sometime, and serves a national role in this piece.

Clark Bustard reviews in the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

"On the Transmigration of Souls" is not great music in the usual sense. No melody, figure or gesture of musical rhetoric may linger even after repeated hearings. What sticks with you is the effect - maybe the better word is affect, in the old meaning of music that imposes feelings or opens one up to them - of the combination of abstract and representational sounds and the resonance of the words.

An Associated Press review:

It's a daunting task for any artist to create a work that reflects the seismic impact of 9-11. Yet On the Transmigration of Souls comes remarkably close to achieving that. Adams' artistic skill and contrapuntal ingenuity weave this sonic collage into a heart-breaking, deeply moving memorial that seems to encompass all of the grief, anger and transcendance of those tragic events of three years ago.

Update 2: Bradley Bambarger reviews in the Star-Ledger:

That said, "On the Transmigration of Souls" isn't a work to be played repeatedly; the piece's extramusical associations are just too potent. Adams drew the text from notices for missing persons posted in New York after the World Trade Center tragedy. As sung by the chorus and read on tape, the notices run like a red thread through the musical fabric, with the words ranging from simple physical descriptions to outpourings of love. Each has a deeply touching resonance. Although scored for vast orchestra and double chorus, the work reserves full volume for a few gut-wrenching measures.

Stephanie von Buchau in the Alameda Times-Star:

Well, Adams has written a true Pulitzer piece. It may not be academic, but it is a safe, craftsmanly 25-minutes, an elegant combination of orchestra (NY Philharmonic), chorus (New York Choral Artists), children (Brooklyn Youth Chorus), solo trumpet (a la Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question) and text readers...Still, it is not much of a thing musically -- too tame, too ephemeral, a project that seems a far remove from Adams' usually flinty Yankee humanism. I much prefer his contentious, roiling choruses of Jews and Palestinians from "The Death of Klinghoffer." They are political-social events actually made into art, not just underlined in once-removed sorrow.

Charles Ward in the Houston Chronicle:

At times, Adams' multilayered style diminishes the shot-in-the-gut power of the quoted text, but the compensation is a brooding, powerful meditation on a horrific event. On the Transmigration of Souls is not music to fill time or the background. It demands careful, detailed listening.

The Dharma at Big Sur (2003). John Adams /Proms stream/

Dan Mitchell's Music News points to some temporary Real streams of John Adams' The Dharma at Big Sur and Doctor Atomic - Easter Eve 1945 on the BBC Proms site.  Available only through Sunday, August 29th.

In the introduction to Dharma, Tracy Silverman points out that the electric violin part is notated, not improvised. 

Related posts: The Dharma at Big Sur, Easter Eve 1945

Update: Via ionarts, Andrew Clements of the Guardian reviews the recent John Adams Proms concert and makes the following observation about the electric violin part:

The instrument does not make a very varied or beguiling sound; it's more effective in the propulsive second movement of Adams's 25-minute piece than in the first, where it has to spin a long melodic line over a murmuring orchestral backdrop. But in the end only the energy of the music was memorable, never the musical ideas themselves.

Having only heard the work twice via the recent stream, I nonetheless concur.  In comparison, Adams' Violin Concerto has both the energy and musical interest.

SineClock (1997/2003). Douglas Irving Repetto

(Via Gizmodo). Douglas Irving Repetto has made some conceptual art in an attempt to create a functional albeit unconventional clock. SineClock uses different sine waves to indicate hours, minutes, and seconds. While impractical for time-keeping, I found the sounds surprisingly appealing, in an ambient kind of way.

From the artist's site:

SineClock uses three sets of two sine waves. One wave in each set is static, sounding at 200Hz, 300Hz and 450Hz (two stacked perfect 5ths). The other wave in each set is detuned slightly (0-5Hz) based on the time. For the first set, the detuned wave moves from 200Hz to 205Hz and back in one minute. The second one moves from 300Hz to 305Hz and back in one hour. The third moves from 450Hz-455Hz and back in one day.

There is a Real sample but better, there are Mac and Windows downloads (you need the Java Runtime Environment 1.4 pre-installed for it to work). I never thought of a software app as a way to express art music exactly, but as in the music of John Cage, since it is expressed as rules or algorithms, why not...

This post was inspired by beepSnort's criticism of music critics being too focused on big names and offline music. While I am not a critic nor do I necessarily believe that critics, given the constraints under which they write, can address this, I did decide to be more open to musical diversity. This is the first result of my "diversity training." Coincidentally, I received a periodic email from the Authentic Happiness Coaching project where the topic was open-mindedness. Quoting:

What Encourages Open-Mindedness? · Research suggests that people are more likely to be open-minded when they are not under time pressure. (Our gut reactions aren’t always the most accurate.)

Disclaimer: I was about to rant why, unlike SineClock, Steve Reich's Pendulum Music was a painful work to listen to (beyond the initial sample). But alas, I have a conference call with India in five minutes so I can't vent.

Nixon in China (1985-87). John Adams /future value/

Dan Mitchell points to an article in The Independent which quotes John Adams as hoping that a piece like Nixon in China will still have listeners in one-hundred years or more.   While I think this opera does have historical significance, both in choice and content of the subject, is it good enough musically to sustain itself for the long term? 

I was studying my referrers to aworks this week and was surprised at the number of hits on the canonical minimalism pieces of the sixtes and seventies (In C, Music for 18 Musicians, Come Out etc.).  But as much was I want to praise Nixon in China, I don't think it reaches the transcendent level of those other pieces or some of the Philip Glass operas.  I hope am I wrong. 

Perfect Lives (1983). Robert Ashley

Kyle Gann uses Robert Ashley as an example of his premise that composers are blooming later in life than they used to:

Robert Ashley, despite some early notoriety, didn’t get started on his seminal work Perfect Lives until age 48, and he’s now, at 73, in his most fertile period - best opera composer of our era and still almost unknown to classical audiences.

Note that Steve Reich and Philip Glass are both in their late sixties and of course, Elliott Carter is still composing in his nineties.

Related, Steven Rubio has blogged about pop stars and their career trajectory by analyzing members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame regarding their productivity as they age and concluded very few maintained their peak after age fifty.

Is classical composition fundamentally different?  How much of the difference might be due to composers not necessarily as dependent on performing, Reich and Glass excepted?

Gann concludes with an interesting idea:

Maybe it not only takes decades for composers to assimilate and master the influences they draw from now, but longer for audiences to assimilate a composer’s life’s work - and with the number of composers around, no one receives any very big chunk of an audience’s time. It won’t surprise me if, as we grow older, a lot of my contemporaries begin hitting their stride, and get revealed as more important figures than anyone had thought.

More on the opera Perfect Lives here.

All the Rage (1992). Bob Ostertag

The Real music store is having a download sale. However, you cannot buy the Kronos recording of Bob Ostertag's All the Rage at any price. Or so it appears. After 15 minutes of installation/registration, I made it to the Kronos Quartet page of the store. From there, I clicked on the CD I wanted. However, at that point, there was no "buy" button. The labeling on the page:

• The title says "Bob Ostertag - All the Rage (single). "
• Below the title, it says "This album is only available on a track by track basis."
• Below that warning, it says "Bob Ostertag - All the Rage (1992) (LP version) album only"

I presume the glitch is the store not handling a one-track CD.

The store only had an Adams count of 2. In addition to the MTT New World Symphony CD, the only other Adams CD was the Rattle recording of Adams' Harmonielehre and even so, only the first movement of that work was for sale. At least that's the movement wth the 40 chords pointed out by The Rest Is Noise. Philip Glass' The Hours was $4.99; the Stephen Drury/John Cage In a Landscape (highly recommended) was even cheaper. But I couldn't find any bargain albums of interest so I bought two individual tracks for 49 cents each. More precisely, I bought some digital rights to two tracks: Jon Gibson's Stalling into Elation and the Michael Thompson Wind Quintet's recording of Barber's Summer Music.

Note: Did I mention I'm grateful to Berkshire Record Outlet for online cheap music shopping, Amoeba Records for offline cheap music shopping, singingfish.com for online, free and legal music searching, and Amazon for linkable content?

Double Music (1941). John Cage/Lou Harrison

I was inspired by tonight's Olympic synchronized platform diving:

Nine judges assess synchronised diving. Four judge the execution of individual dives, and five assess synchronisation - how the pairs mirror height, distance from the springboard or platform, speed of rotation and entry into the water.

And in a posthumous honor surprisingly not covered by NBC, Olympic gold medals for synchronized composing were awarded to John Cage and Lou Harrison for their Double Music. In a successful act of simultaneity and collaboration from 1941, John Cage composed two percussion parts for the piece (soprano and tenor) and independently, Lou Harrison the other two (alto and bass). Instruments included bells, brake drums, etc., all of which makes for a fun, fast work. johncage.info calls it "festive." Amazon samples.

Synchronized composers Philip Glass and Ravi Shankar were awarded the silver medal for Passages. Olympic judges are still searching for a third pair eligible for the bronze.

In 1941: John Cage was teaching at the Chicago School of Design. Comedian and actor Bob Hope staged his first USO show. Gilbert Gable, an Oregon mayor, announced that seven counties in Oregon and California should form their own state of "Jefferson."

Adagio for Strings (1936). Samuel Barber. /Olympics/

The DJ Tiesto mix of Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings was playing at Tower Records in Mountain View today.  I also noticed more than the usual number of google searches on aworks for Adagio MP3s etc.  My own Google Search found DJ Tiesto providing music for last night's Olympic opening ceremonies in Greece:

Tiesto from Amsterdam played about two hours of nonstop dance music as the world's athletes took their first steps onto the world's biggest stage. It was the first time a DJ has had such a role at the games.

Then, I found Twiddledee explicitly recognizing the piece and  suggesting Adagio was too sad for the event.  In any case, 800 million people (or whatever) were exposed to Adagio, albeit in au courant style i.e. more harsh and driving than the Ferry Corsten remix (via William Orbit), let alone a traditional orchestral, vocal, or string performance.   I suppose this proves the universal appeal of the underlying music.

Yesterday I happened to be reading Lawrence Kramer's Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History where he says that the Adagio from Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata is at present morphing from an implication of romantic fervor to a relaxing, tranquil usage:

...In the context of the default musics of the present day, it may be that classical music is "relaxing" for the simple reason that it has no rhythm track; its pulse is always already idealized. In this context the arpeggios that thread the Adagio take on a new significance, dispersing the rhythmic impulse into an undulation perceived as more languid than insistent; more berceuse- than serenade-like...

Going in the opposite direction, Barber's Adagio, through dance remixes, is taking on rhythm to make it more insistent (and more popular).  Hmm.

No Amazon sample of the Tiesto remix but sanity.com.au does sample (Windows media format).

Prior Adagio posts: Autechre dance remix story Sheens web miscellany

One Amazon note: the Tiesto CD was, based on customer purchases, the "#12 Early Adopter Product in Dance & DJ." How about an equivalent Amazon feature for american classical music?

Update: The Paralympics Closing Ceremony in Athens also used Barber's Adagio: 

Low and somber, it gradually built up to a crescendo.

Concerto per Corde (1990). Christopher Rouse

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music started last week in Santa Cruz. Phyllis Rosenblum reviews Concerto per Corde by Christopher Rouse, among others:

In "Concerto per Corde," composer Christopher Rouse limited the orchestra to strings alone, distilling his musical intensity in the sonorities of violins and their larger relatives.

Rouse without percussion, it was a foreign concept to festival-goers! But it displayed the versatility of this festival-favorite composer and the precision of the orchestra’s strings.

From a review of the album on Amazon by 127:

Any damage that may have been done to the phrase "modern music" by composers who write music that is both difficult to perform and to listen is being quickly repaired by Christopher Rouse. It's been a long time since I've heard such a beautiful string piece as the Concerto Per Corde written by a modern composer. The players do nothing but play their instruments very beautifully using only conventional means. There are no extended techniques or gimmicks - there is only beautiful playing and writing.

Commissioned by Absolut vodka, this is a re-working of Rouse's String Quartet No. 2 and is dedicated to the late Stephen Albert. Amazon has Real samples.

In 1990: Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland died; the Hubble Space Telescope was launched into orbit.