aworks :: "new" american classical music

Les Moutons de Panurge (1969). Frederic Rzweski

eighth blackbird will be in San Francisco on Friday, February 4th at the Jewish Community Center. Via the new Amazon Yellow Pages, the picture to the left is probably the JCCSF. Similarly, San Francisco Performances does not list the precise works to be played:

The program will include five works selected from music by FITZELL, LERDAHL, HIGDON, RZEWSKI, SHEFSKY, CRUMB and BERMEL.

Based on recent blackbird concerts (via Steve Layton's NetNewMusic and notes by Jay Weitz), the program may include Jennifer Higdon's Zaka, George Crumb's Vox Balaenae, the Canadian George Fitzell's violence, Derek Bermel's Tied Shifts,  Fred Lerdahl's Fantasy Etudes (streamed on an Art of the States page), and Frederic Rzewski's Les Moutons de Panurge

About Rzewski's composition:

In his work with MEV, Rzewski emphasized the concept of collective improvisation, leading both to a penchant for socialist political compositions and a style that often combined notated and improvised passages...To this day, the phrase ‘sheep of Panurge’ implies a person who blindly follows the lead of another.”

Is "Shefsky" a mistakenly inserted phonetic pronunciation of Rzewski? I couldn't find any composer with that name. I did find some Marx Brothers dialogue, including a mythical Shefsky:

Lucille : You can't stay in that closet.
Groucho : Oh, I can't, can I? That's what they said to Thomas Edison, mighty inventor; Thomas Lindbergh, mighty flier; and Thomas Shefsky, mighty like a rose. Just remember, my little cabbage, that if there weren't any closets, there wouldn't be any hooks, and if there weren't any hooks, there wouldn't be any fish, and that would suit me fine.

Cheap Imitation (1969). John Cage

BH Lang, a young student and aspiring classical musician, has just started The Bayan Blog:

This Blog is intended to be a documentary of my efforts to reach my life's goal - founding the first Classical Accordion Department at the Juilliard School in NYC.
So in my spare time, I will be updating this blog with my work status, little steps I take down the big path to my goal. I am hoping that in the meantime, I can begin to inform America about the Classical Accordion.

OK, I'm one American who knows little or nothing about classical accordion. Actually, Google lists aworks for the search american classical accordion music because I posted last year about, among other things, an MP3 of John Cage's Souvenir played on accordion.  Still,  Accordionlinks.com (Accordionlinks.com?) reports more on classical accordion than I would have ever guessed. I expected accordion renditions of traditional classical music  and maybe a mention of Pauline Oliveros. But I also found Gershwin for the accordion, and surprisingly, this historical note:

Although Gershwin didn't actually write for the accordion, Doktorski said his music has always been popular with accordionists. In fact, the second recording ever made of "Rhapsody in Blue" was released in 1928 on Victor Records and featured the accordion stylings of Basil Fomeen and Nick Hope.

For music written for accordion, George Antheil wrote an orchestra piece Accordion Dance (instrumentation: 1+pic.222/4331/timp.perc/acn[=hmn]/str).  Charles Wuorinen wrote Buttons and Bows (or, Superparticular Variations), for cello and accordion, and original compositions for accordion were also written by Henry Cowell, Virgil Thomson, Alan Hovhaness, Otto Luening, and William Grant Still (and many more including Lutoslawski. Lutoslawski?).

William Schimmel has an essay What Constitutes a Classical Accordionist in America:

I like to think that my accordion work is about the accordion than around the accordion. It's not much about me anymore. My own compositions (realities) explore other works. My recent accordio-shinto work explores our American accordion ancestors such as Deiro, Frosini, Ettore, Contino, Palmer, Pino and yes, Lawrence Welk.

Here's a description of the bayan instrument (as opposed to the Welk-ian piano accordion as described in Wikipedia) and of an organization of interest-- The Classical Free-Reed, Inc.:

a nonprofit educational and cultural organization dedicated to the advancement of the free-reed instruments i.e. accordion & bayan, concertina & bandoneón, harmonium & reed organ, harmonica, shêng, sho, khaen, kobing, etc.

In film, Morgan Boatman's Princess Isabelle:

The lead character: the eccentric and artless Emery Ried (portrayed by Richard Rouse), an outdated relic from a bygone era, one of the last survivors from the golden age of the accordion (ca. 1920-1955). His wife, Rose (portrayed by Mary Kate Sawert): a jealous woman on the verge of filing for divorce because of her husband's all-consuming love affair with his mistress: an accordion which he affectionately calls Princess Isabelle.

Finally, on CD, I found more classical accordion than I would have ever imagined, including the soure of that Cage MP3 I blogged about -- Stefan Husson playing the music of John Cage and William Billings (William Billings?). Notably, I also found this CD by Teodoro Anzelotti on Amazon, an all-Cage accordion CD. It duplicates two works from the Husson CD (Dream and Souvenir) but also includes Cage's Cheap Imitation.  Even in three thirty-second Amazon samples, Cheap Imitation on the accordion sounds haunting and probably more resonant than on the violin (via emusic).

Good luck to BH Lang and thanks for revealing the vast world of the classical accordion.

The Four Sections (1987). Steve Reich /orchestra/

Via del.icio.us/thestandingroom, Anne Midgette profiles Steve Reich, mostly about his new work You Are (Variations) but also quotes Reich again on why he gave up composing for orchestra:

"Why write with one arm tied behind your back?" he said. "John Adams is taking care of the orchestral scene beautifully. I don't need all those strings. It's always the same thing, you slow the tempo down to accommodate the larger forces, and you get a nicer, richer sound. But you don't get that kind of probing intensity that you get from the quartet. Look, you have to write music that you're supposed to write, orchestrate it the best way you possibly can and, if it's an ensemble that's not one of the established ensembles, take your lumps."

I like to hear composers compliment their contemporaries.

The Standing Room has previously described why The Four Sections is not Reich's best work. Clearly, the composer agrees, as do I. Amazon samples Reich's Four Sections, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.

A Spider (1971). Ernst Bacon /2004 #1/

Scott Spiegelberg's top play count post reminds me to finally complete the aworks Top Tracks of 2004. As you may remember, I was blogging in December about the top 10 aworks-related tracks for the year as measured by play count. And at number one, with an incredible 415 plays last year, it's A Spider, written by Ernst Bacon, with text by Emily Dickinson and performed by Helen Boatwright and Ernst Bacon!

A spider sewed at night       
Without a light       
Upon an arc of white.

Athough the song is only a minute, A Spider's play count seems abnormally high, since I only remember listening to it maybe five times, in a burst of seasonal activity around Halloween. The play count must be right since iTunes and those new (and highly reliable) electronic voting machines both use the same underlying technology. So I have several theories: one, I left my iPod in "repeat one track" mode for seven hours, or two, a band of art music fanatics broke into the house and listened to this and only this track all night without waking me up (they wore headphones). Probably the latter...

Links to the aworks Top 10: #2 Cage, #3 Cowell, #4 Glass, #5 Glass, #6 Cage/Harrison, #7 Ives, #8 Ornstein, #9 Fink, #10 Garland.

And in keeping with the spirit of Scott's post, here's my non-filtered top 10 list.

1. A Spider. Helen Boatwright, soprano/Ernst Bacon, piano. Charles Ives. Songs Of Charles Ives & Ernst Bacon   
2. Souvenir (1983). John Cage. In A Landscape. Stephen Drury
3. Go To Sleep (Little Man Being Erased). Radiohead. Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Phil Selway & Thom Yorke. Hail To The Thief      
4. God Put a Smile Upon Your Face. Coldplay. A Rush of Blood to the Head 
5. II High Color. Henry Cowell. New Music   
6. Beneath The Southern Cross. Patti Smith. land 1975-2002 disc 1      
7. White Rabbit. Jefferson Airplane. Grace Slick. Platoon Soundtrack   
8. Suicide in an Airplane. Marc-André Hamelin. Leo Ornstein   
9. Metamorphosis Two, for piano. Philip Glass. Aleck Karis
10. Why Does Someone Have To Die. Philip Glass. The Hours Soundtrack

• The Lied and Art Song Texts page on A Spider.
• The Ernst Bacon Society page.

Adagio for Strings (1936). Samuel Barber

High school student the word whisperer captures the spirit of Samuel Barber:

       The Adagio for Strings reflects the distressing years of World War II, and each instrument seems to be a part of this misery: the violins pass on delicate emotions of a frail, beating heart; the lush voices of the violas reach deep into the fragile human soul with questions of anguish; the cellos’ expressions represent the torture of the soul and the despair that is brought about; and the double basses symbolize the strained, pressured burden, as well as the echo of the grave emptiness that follows.

The Banshee (1925). Henry Cowell /kod/

Roger Brandt captures the spirit of Henry Cowell:

What I've heard from the piece is the wail of a banshee  produced by some string scraping of DETH!!! and some bad*** tone clusters produced by some forearm of DETH!!!. Classic DETH!!!ness.

Brandt also recommends Annie Gosfield's Lost Signals and Drifting Satellites.

Today, we go from the essential Keys of DETH!!! (KOD) to Alex Ross on the twang of death. 

Prior aworks post on The Banshee.

Democracy: An American Comedy (2005). Scott Wheeler

Carl Hartman of AP writes about a new opera premiering this week by the Washington National Opera:

Love, politics and corruption under President Grant get comic treatment in an opera that premieres this week based on novels written by a descendant of two presidents.

From the Washington National Opera website:

The libretto by Romulus Linney is set in 1875 and is based on the best-selling novels of Henry Adams, which touch on the actual corruption surrounding the presidency     of Ulysses S. Grant. Democracy: An American Comedy offers a contemporary look at an age-old dilemma—how can love and power coexist.

Scott Wheeler of Emerson College is the composer.

I happen to be reading A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists - 1854-1967 by Rachel Cohen. I'll try to blog more about this book but I wanted to mention the chapter which describes Mathew Brady, the civil war photographer, meeting Ulysses S. Grant, resulting in this photograph, now in the National Portrait Gallery. Cohen writes about the situation for Grant at that phase of the Civil War and how Brady took all the credit for work done by his assistants while Grant shared considerable credit with his generals Sherman and Sheridan, despite Grant's political ambitions. More importantly, she describes how President Lincoln and Grant were at that point seeking unconditional surrender of  the Confederates:

And that's what Brady's photograph was really in service of. Grant needed to look like a sure thing, and Brady, who had been photographing presidents and generals since 1849, knew how to give a portrait inevitability.

Wikipedia summarizes Grant's presidential years:

Though a successful general, he is considered by many historians to be one of America's worst Presidents and led an administration that was plagued by severe scandal and corruption. However, historians also agree that Grant was not personally corrupt; it was his subordinates in the executive branch who were at fault. Grant is criticized for not taking a strong stance against the corruption, and not acting to stop it.

Although elected to two terms, Grant the President may deserve a comic opera. Grant the General doesn't. Note to current and future presidents: screw it up at your own risk.

Rothko Chapel (1971). Morton Feldman /love-hate/

John Perkins on afterPostModern reflects on the music of Morton Feldman and also recommends Rothko Chapel.

Feldman's music is quiet and slow and atonal. He became inextricably associated with one musical direction often written in his scores: "as softly as possible." People will either love his music or hate it, I would guess. I'm in the former camp.

And I am in both camps -- I love Rothko Chapel and say, his sparse works for two pianos but don't care much for Coptic Light and am struggling right now with Patterns in a Chromatic Field (despite the new release on Tzadik with Aleck Karis).

Tim Rutherford-Johnson's take on Rothko Chapel.

American Classical Music MFeldman

Violin Concerto (1993). John Adams /meet the music/

Meet the Music is a website devoted to introducing specific classical works that will be frequently played this year in the US -- it's mostly traditional composers so far although Elena Park has a short essay on Arvo Part's Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. Greg Sandow, the impetus for the site, writes on John Adam's Violin Concerto and how Adams sought an alternative to the concerto convention of soloist/orchestra dialogue. Quoting Sandow quoting the composer:

So he came up with the idea of the violin playing nearly all the time. Or, as he put it (if I may repeat the wonderful thought from him I quoted at the start of this): “The orchestra [is] the organized, delicately articulated mass of blood, tissues, and bones; the violin [is] the dream that flows through it.”

By the way, although I vaguely remembered Greg Sandow mentioning the Meet the Music concept on his blog, I found the site today in a roundabout way.  Checking aworks referrers, I found this site, which takes the aworks rss feed and publishes the first fifty words of each post (albeit with a link to my original post). Then, the site throws up Google ads (generating revenue for that site).  Ignoring the money aspect, two things from those ads got my attention in the context of aworks: one, the ad for Meet the Music which was the first I had heard of the actual site and two, that the rest of the ads were all symphonic orchestra links either for tickets or recordings (Pacific, Prague, BBC, Alaska). Would I be doing the community a public service by signing up aworks for Google AdSense?  Would I be endorsing an institution, the orchestra, that isn't particularly meaningful to me right now?  Is it ironic if I were to engage in commerce solely motivated by the public good?

For the record, whether or not I try Google Ads, I'll reiterate my Amazon associate status, where if someone clicks on an Amazon-supplied graphic or link on aworks and actually purchases something, I would, in theory, get a small cut. I also found this site which uses the aworks feed, under the banner of music headlines (scroll down to see my somewhat stale content although without ads). Finally, LiveJournal has apparently automatically created a new shadow user, aworks, presumably to make it easy for LiveJournal users to subscribe to the feed. I'm all in favor of that although it looks strange to see my full content wrapped in LJ graphics and I don't know what to do if someone posts a comment there instead of here.

Glimmer (2005). Jason Freeman

Anthony Tommasini reviews an American Composers Orchestra concert, including the piece Glimmer by Jason Freeman:

In this experimental concert series, conducted by the music director Steven Sloane, the American Composers Orchestra is trying to use technology and improvisation to reinvent the orchestra and break down barriers between composer and listener. If nothing else, Mr. Freeman's "Glimmer" certainly does the latter.

The audience was given glimmer sticks and instructed to turn them on and off and wave them. Somehow, video images of this were then transmitted to the orchestra to guide their playing. Tommasini goes on to say it doesn't take much to make New Yorkers happy and during a piece by Carlos Carillo, he wanted to use his glimmer stick to skip past a slow movement.

The composer on his rationale for the piece:

Glimmer is not a protest against current orchestral performance conventions. It is not a vision for the symphony hall of the future. It is not a marketing gimmick to draw younger audiences to classical music. It is merely an experiment in reshuffling the roles of composer, performer, and listener a little bit, so that they can have something more to do with each other, so that they can all be a part of the same moment. We are sitting in a room — together — so why not?

The orchestra also performed Dan Trueman's Traps Relaxed and Eve Beglarian's FlamingO. I disparaged traditional orchestras in last night's post but this concert sounds fun.

I see via a referrer that  aworks is at the top for the search "new classical music wanted." While I recognize newness is not necessarily the premiere aesthetic organizing principle, and I expect innovation in music to take a breather for awhile, I am enjoying it while I can.