aworks :: "new" american classical music

Koyaanisqatsi (1983). Philip Glass /buildings/

Carey Cuprisin has a short but funny description of the film Koyaanisqatsi. Me, I've been listening to the 1998 recording but deliberately not watching the video. I'm trying to disassociate the music from the film to determine if the score is as dramatic as I think it is. Reading Carey's post refreshed my memory of the buildings being blown up, though.

Vanessa (1958). Samuel Barber

  In Variety, Alan Rich reviews the LA Opera's production of Barber's Vanessa with Kiri Te Kanawa in the lead role:

"Vanessa," his first major opera, thrives on the peculiar virtue of providing hobby-horse possibilities to leading singers somewhat past their vocal prime. Currently the latter opera is stabled at the Los Angeles Opera, where New Zealand's much-admired Kiri Te Kanawa, who owns up to 60, rides it very well. 

U.S. Opera has a reference page on the opera.

Update:  Marc Porter Zasada reviews the production:

Hang in there Mr. Barber, wherever you are: You may yet get the last, rich, ironic laugh, after all.

He points out various ironies and that Te Kanawa is right for the role of Vanessa:

Te Kanawa has always been a consummate actress, and she brings precisely the right degree of neurotic splendor to her part: brittle and desperately lonely, but holding on to a kind of grandeur.

Frank's Wild Lunch was less impressed:

Very little about this opera makes any sense, and aside from an interesting short fugue in the third act, the music sounds like a 50s film score.

The Well-Tuned Piano (1964-73). La Monte Young

Kyle Gann blogs about his external hard drive and the challenges and joys of filling it up with music, including La Monte Young's 5 CD set of The Well-Tuned Piano. Note to self: find said CD set so I can rip it to MP3, although if it shows up as hour-long tracks, that may not work so well in shuffle mode. Note to family: I've been eyeing an external hard drive for Christmas.

I searched five years to find the La Monte Young recording after reading an intriguing article about the composer in downbeat magazine. Eventually, Rhino Records in Westwood had it, although by the time I got it, CDs had supplanted LPs. Amazon has a used CD copy at $199, although the comments may indicate it is Just Stompin' instead, a blues improvisation 2-CD set by La Monte Young and the Forever Bad Blues Band. Unlike that guy who is blogging his entire record collection, album by album, I don't remember where I bought Just Stompin''.

I also agree with Gann about not abandoning CDs after ripping. In times of need during college, I sold parts of my LP collection and I vowed never again. 

Kyle Gann on the tuning of The Well-Tuned Piano:

The premise of this tuning is actually very simple, and analogous to the tuning from which European classical tuning evolved. Young's tuning can be arranged in a grid in which the perfect fifths (3/2 ratios) run in one direction... and the pure minor sevenths (7/4 ratios) in another...

Quartet No. 4 "The Ancient Tree" (1970). Alan Hovhaness

I was in rural eastern Indiana for Thanksgiving. This area being, of course, quite conservative politically and socially. One of my family members said that 16% of the county voted for the Libertarian presidential candidate; this may have just been a Farmlander teasing his Upper Coaster relatives (political geography here). Still, the last thing I wanted to do on a day of gratitude was discuss politics. So, I took the dog and my iPod and went outdoors.

Twice in fifteen minutes, an Amish horse and buggy passed by. This was a bit of a shock, even though the high school I attended (elsewhere in Indiana) had several Mennonite girls; I also remember a horse and buggy hitched at a grocery store. Anyway, there I was listening on my iPod to some Alan Hovhaness music played by the Shanghai String Quartet, and thinking I live a rather different life than the Amish. For starters, I presume they don't have iPods, and even though this music is quite conservative, they don't listen to Alan Hovhaness.

My next thought was how important religious freedom is. But do those who benefit care about other, different religions? The extreme example that came to mind is that church in San Francisco where they worship Saint John Coltrane, which presumably has little in common with Amish practices. In any case, the Amish are very community oriented but on a local basis.  We had a family member in the hospital last week, and one of the Amish women had called to ask if things were better (they were).  Interestingly, she telephoned at night from  their barn, where they do have electricity for milking machines (although probably not for recharging iPods).

On the flight home, Esquire magazine had a column by Noah Feldman where he talks about how the relationship between American church and state evolved as religion has diversified. The American founders decided to not have an official state religion, which was a novel idea at the time. During the early 1800s as new denominations proliferated, the nation became nonsectarian, with a morality sufficiently compatible to all. As Catholics immigrated, we became a Christian nation and with Jewish immigration, a Judeo-Christian one, albeit one with a firmer separation of church and state. Feldman speculates we are headed toward a religious crisis as America expands to include large numbers of Muslims, Hindus, and others, and maybe the US ending up as a monotheistic nation.

The other thought that occurred to me is that if there is a catastrophe and we lose the "grid," the Amish will be better prepared. Me, I'll be staring at my iPod trying to decide what last work I'll listen to for inspiration--maybe Coltrane's A Love Supreme or Adams' Shaker Loops.

From an Amazon.com review of the Shanghai Quartet CD:

`The Ancient Tree' (Under the Ancient Maple Tree) is the title of his 4th quartet. It is a touching requiem to a beautiful tree on Hovhaness's uncle's farm in New Hampshire which was destroyed by lightning. As a boy, he remembers the glorious views he commanded from this point. It begins with a beautiful adagio, again modal in feel, which reflects the bitter-sweet memories of things past and gone forever. The inevitable fugue follows but the main theme has the character of a rustic dance. The final movement begins adagio with some music of heart-breaking beauty. A brighter mood gradually appears and the piece ends with a fast, celebratory passage.

Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos (1924). Charles Ives

Art of the States has a new stream of a Stephen Drury/Donald Berman recording of Three Quarter-Tone Pieces for Two Pianos. Apparently, Ives' father was interested in alternate tunings.

I like the second movement, Allegro; the slow movements sound archaic and sad.  From the web site:

"The high-spirited second movement splits rhythmically between the two pianos. The quarter-tone interplay bends the ear and tickles the mind. It features quick ragtime vamping and polyrhythms.

El Salón México (1939). Aaron Copland

Ken Glickman writes in a preview of a Lansing Symphony "orchestral Americana" concert:

American classical music almost seems like an oxymoron.

A provocative thought but the article goes on to describe the usual idea of American classical style being a synthesis etc. from which Aaron Copland and George Gershwin created something unique.

Copland's El Salón México, featured in that concert, was dedicated by Copland to Leonard Bernstein. As his first publication while at the Curtis School of Music in 1941, Bernstein wrote the piano transcription of the work.

I have to say I've heard this piece many times and never liked it.  This year, I bought  Eugenie Russo's American Piano Music CD, heard the piano arrangement for the first time, and changed my mind. Partly, I've been listening lately to so much modernist/ultra-modernist piano music from the 1920s/30s and I finally made the connection between all that dissonance and provocation and the vernacular Aaron Copland (ignoring the early austere Copland or the late experimenter Copland).  I now think he captured the intensity and spirit of that era's music, even if in conventional clothing. Although tame compared to say Cowell bashing forearms on the keyboard or Ornstein writing bold, outrageous, and noisy music, the piano reduction of El Salón México, of all things, illuminated the strength behind the pleasant facade, for example, in the slow section after the fast introduction or in the ending chord of the piece.  From there, to my surprise, I have even started liking the melody.

CD available for $2.99 at Berkshire Record Outlet.

Beaming Music (2002). Nico Muhly

Marimba and organ sound surprisingly good together.

Description and MP3 here.

Symphony No. 2 (1897-1901). Charles Ives

Madbard suggests:

The jig music that plays on Prince Eric's ship in The Little Mermaid sounds suspiciously like a passage in Charles Ives' symphony #2.

As usual, Scott Mortensen has an excellent web page on this symphony:

In many regards, the Symphony No. 2 represents the pinnacle of Ives' success as a respectable composer. By "respectable," I mean that in this symphony Ives was working within the confines of a clearly defined formal tradition. More broadly speaking, by "respectable" I also mean that this work sounds more acceptable to folks regularly listen to Romantic composers like Brahms, Dvorak, and Tchaikovsky.

In the terminology of the Fourth Turning, Ives wrote the piece in an awakening period equivalent to our 1960s and 1970s, in an era of spirtuality, utopianism, and youth attacks on the social order. While this music still sounds conventional, it begins to combine thematic material, foreshadowing Ives' future experiments. "Columbia, Gem of the Ocean" is the notable borrowed tune in the first and last movements.

Ives quoted by David Ewen:

The future of music may not lie entirely with music itself, but rather in the way it encourages and extends, rather than limits, the aspirations and ideals of the people, in the way it makes itself a part with the finer things that humanity does and dreams of.

Fifty years after its creation, Leonard Bernstein premiered the work in 1951, while Ives was still alive. I have a mild preference for the Third Symphony over this one, but both are recommended, although there are some who might find them overly conventional. And unsurprisingly, the first Little Mermaid movie is better than the second.

Threads (2004). Richard Friedman

Bay Area composer (and former KPFA broadcaster) Richard Friedman talks about Threads, his recent work for dance and how productive composing tools are now:

And I was able to deliver draft after draft to the choreographer and adjust the material on demand. Had I a laptop, I could have made adjustments at the rehearsals as well! None of this was possible in 1970.

MP3s here.

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

In the Opera in the 20th Century blog, Grace Cho has written a good background introduction to the John Adams opera Nixon in China:

So it was somewhat of a natural fit when the topic of Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, capitalism and communism should be proposed to him as the subject for an opera.

I had never heard that Adams had shaken John F. Kennedy's hand during the presidential campaign. We saw Kennedy campaign in Saginaw, Michigan that year; I was only one so I was still non-partisan. Four years later, I vaguely remember seeing Barry Goldwater campaigning at a drive-in theatre. Goldwater of course provided political inspiration to conservatives but not any musical inspiration to artists as far as I know.  Ok, actually I checked -- George Thorogood cites Goldwater as an influence, as well as Lee Marvin, Martin Luther King, John Steinbeck and James Coburn.  And this from Wikipedia about Goldwater:

...his capture of previously Democratic stronghold states in the South foreshadowed a larger shift in electoral trends in the coming decades that would make the South a Republican bastion... By the end of his life, the party had moved rightward to such a degree that it frustrated Goldwater himself, who publicly criticized what he saw as a Christian right takeover.