aworks :: "new" american classical music

Scircura (1982). Chas Smith

After listening to the Books' Be Good to Them Always, which is packed  with found voices and unidentifiable pop-like sounds, and which could be the aural-equivalent of a quick cutting music video, Chas Smith's Scircura sounds positively tranquil. It's possible I'm on a slippery slope that may lead to regularly listening to KDFC radio...

Prior Scircura post.

Poème Électronique (1958). Edgard Varèse

Herr K. at totally fuzzy links to the music video associated with the Varèse piece Poème Électronique. The video has death and destruction, ancient figures, culture, animal life, and humanity,  architecture etc. along with various swatches of color and for some reason, footprints-- in other words, your standard mid-century visual modernism. The short clip of living hair six minutes into it was the oddest image.

Columbia University has a description of how Le Corbusier, aided by Iannis Xenakis, built the multimedia art work for a Philips exhibit at the 1958 World's Fair in Belgium (the first major exposition since the 1939 New York World's Fair), incorporating this commissioned music of Varèse. From the notes:

The technology available to Varèse at the time he created Poème Électronique was out of reach for most of his life (image 4), forcing him to realize his unique vision through conventional instruments. When early electronic instruments became available, Varèse was quick to use it towards his goal of "organized sound."

Varsity Pewter (1997). Charles Amirkhanian

In a review of a concert of music by Charles Amirkhanian and Paul Epstein, Kyle Gann defines some terms:

Minimalism, broadly speaking, is a music of linear process, carried out with only a few elements; post-minimalism is also a language of few elements, but not of linear process. Like [Gertrude] Stein's texts, it follows a logic felt but not evident.

Varsity Pewter uses the names of composers like Milton Babbitt, Irwin Bazelon and Thomas Oboe Lee in the text as well as the phrase "drifter factoid."

Update: Kyle Gann has put an MP3 of Epstein's Palindrome Variations up on his blog.

Happy Ending (1999). David Garland

From David Garland's song Happy Ending:

For a happy ending, you should see a movie and hope that dreams can still come true.
I sure hope so, cuz' even I can see that reading the newspaper isn't an end in itself.

Kyle Gann on the song:

Listen to "Happy Ending"—it's a silly enough rock song on first hearing, but the way the harmony pirouettes around the tonic key, slipping back in at the right moment, reveals a sophistication that he's scrupulous about never showing off.

Bokonin on same:

"Happy Ending" suggests Tom Lehrer playing electric zither badly and ocarina (or is that the rebec) on one note over and over.

Anna-Bianca Krause quotes Kyle Gann:

Das erinnert an den verschrobenen Van Dyke Parks, an den Beach Boy Brain Wilson, ist aber meist David Garland pur. "Er ist der beste Songwriter meiner Generation", schrieb Kyle Gann im Village Voice.

Other David Garland MP3s here. I disambiguate Peter Garland and David Garland in an earlier aworks post.

I've just started David Thomson's The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. I can't yet decide if the book, like David Garland's music, is compelling or eccentric. Both are imaginative and clever, though. The book does start with an interesting quote from Gore Vidal:

Find out the movies a man saw between ten and fifteen, which ones he liked, disliked, and you would have a pretty good idea of what sort of mind and temperament he has.

Hoodoo Zephyr (1992-93). John Adams

Steve Reich on John Adams' electronic composition Hoodoo Zephyr:

Weidenbaum: I wonder about composers coming to further blur the line between the tools they write on and the instruments they see as performance-ready, along the lines of what John Adams did on Hoodoo Zephyr.

Reich: Um, I've heard a couple tracks on John's record, and I don't think it's the best thing he's ever done.

[We both laugh.]

On the Transmigration of Souls (2002). John Adams /music/

I'll interpret Kinjo's off-hand edit to mean that Schoenberg, for better or worse, is no longer contemporary. More importantly, Kinjo comments on the music of On the Transmigration of Souls:

The piece is comprised of street noises, choral voices, spoken word, and the symphony orchestra. The musical aspect of the piece is slightly disappointing to me. It doesn't reach the emotional nadir that Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings set (IMHO) as the gold standard for mournful music. Neither is it formless enough to really feel experimental or expressionistic.

On the other hand, he likes that among the voices used are "foreign-sounding" ones.

Music for 18 Musicians (1976). Steve Reich

Nathan Andrew Seifert lists 10 albums he considers "brilliant." What strikes me is that I can endorse some of his choices, that I really don't like David Byrne's music, and that I have major gaps in my listening as I haven't heard the specific albums he mentions by Everclear, Cocteau Twins, Sonic Youth, and My Bloody Valentine although I have heard other albums by each of them. Probably, those albums came out during my "marketing years."

On Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians:

This is a piece of neoclassical brilliance that, quite possibly, changed my musical tastes more than anything else I've ever listened to. The micromanagement of every little tone and every instrument is perfect. Minimalism, as 1970's it is, still rules, to put it oh so eloquently.

Reich acknowledges the influence of Coltrane and talks about how he would go see Coltrane play in San Francisco. Reich apparently also saw Davis:

By which I mean this: when I was 14 I used to go down to Birdland, which was the reigning jazz club of the 1950s and early '60s, and see Miles Davis and drummer Kenny Clarke, who really turned me on, and later I went to hear John Coltrane, both here in New York and when I was a student out in San Francisco, as often as I possibly could.

An American in Paris (1928). George Gershwin /meme/

The Standing Room sends me the music meme going around. While I don't have a particular interest in online quizzes like a fifteen-year-old girl, it occurs to me that much of my music perspective was shaped in my youth...

Total volume of music in your computer: iTunes reports 6683 songs in 48 Gigabytes. I got the record collecting bug early in high school, probably when I bought Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run (BTR lyric drinking glasses here),  Devadip Carlos Santana and John McLaughlin's Welcome, and a Shostakovich Tenth Symphony. Also around that time, my cousin brought back from Germany a Leonard Bernstein Beethoven album on Deutsche Gramaphone that struck me as the ultimate in sophistication. Note that I didn't hear opera until my twenties and even today, without that early introduction, it is low on my list of interests.

Maybe a third of my American classical music has been ripped to MP3s but most of my pop/rock/European classical music remains as seldom played CDs (or no longer played LPs). I sold part of my LP collection in college (at the great Second Time Around in Indianapolis). I vowed to never sell another recording again and have since updated my vow by deciding to never delete an MP3.

Last CD you bought: The Spamalot original cast recording, as a surprise gift for Laura who really, really wants to see the show in New York.  I was a hard-core Monty Python fan in high school, though my plan to drive with my buddy all the way to see them live at City Center fell through. Probably won't drive to see this one either. Of course, Spamalot is not your father's Broadway show, and it has reawakened that initial attraction. The Song That Goes Like This is meta-genius.

Song currently playing? Mark Anderson playing a piano arrangement of Gershwin's An American in Paris. I have an amazing talent to misidentify this piece. Before dinner, I was listening to the Varese streaming orgy and when I came back after dinner to turn on iTunes, I thought I had resumed the stream but not realizing it, I had selected An American in Paris instead. My first thought upon hearing what I thought was an unknown Varese piano piece was how impressive his music sounds when you strip away all that orchestral noise.  Oops. Earlier this year, I was driving my 83-year-old Mom home from a hospital stay in Indiana and we were listening to classical music on the (surprisingly good) Ball State public radio station. An American in Paris came on and I thought to myself, what is this? Copland? Bernstein? Unprompted, Mom speaks up suggesting this is An American in Paris. Of course.

Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me?  Again, I'll focus on songs as I grew up. At age six, watching my brother listen on the car radio  to I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles was a seminal moment as I realized the excitement and power and social significance of pop music (ok, maybe I didn't realize all that at the time but the image is still burned into my mind) . Playing Adagio for Strings by Barber as a tenor saxophonist in a 15-piece woodwind ensemble was probably my deepest creative experience. On the jazz side, I began to learn to improvise by transcribing Dear Lord by John Coltrane -- it was slow enough that, after some effort, I could begin to make sense out of it. Although, now that I think of it, I also invented saxophone riffs while listening to Pink Floyd's Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun.  Even from an early age, boundaries between different kinds of music were there for me to cross. Back to the present, I've listened to Everywhen by Massive Attack probably fifty times in the last month. I told myself yesterday I needed to give it a break.

Five people to whom I'm passing the baton? Sorry, I'm more of a meme sync than a meme propagator which may help explain why my career move into marketing in my twenties was, shall we say, not a great fit. I will point out that Don Nunn is one of my favorite "meme-sters" to read (mildly unpleasant childhood tricycle accident meme response here).

By the way, I no longer have any desire to listen to Bruce Springsteen and I don't actually have any Beatles MP3s. Maybe I am waiting for the respective (and hypothetical) Broadway shows. And for some reason, I  greatly prefer Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue over An American in Paris, although I don't think it has anything to do with Broadway.

Un grand sommeil noir (1906). Edgard Varèse

vilaine fille points out, among other orgies, the Varèse orgy tomorrow at 5pm PDT on WHRB, playing through the works of the composer in chronological order. I've never heard of let alone heard Un grand sommeil noir. Unfortunately, if all goes well, I'll be headed home on Caltrain at that time. Still, I really like the idea of hearing an artist's works in this way, even if it is the pApAs fritAs orgy currently streaming as I write this. The Romanian Enescu plays Enescu in another five hours...

From the WHRB notes:

First encounters with Varèse (1883-1965) always seem to shock. Certainly few of his contemporaries knew what to make of him. Even today, Varèse seems easier to dismiss as an eclectic than appreciate as a composer. Looking back at the past four decades since his death, we are left with more questions than answers: In our world of even stranger sounds and music, does Varèse matter? Is there more to his music or is it all in the shock? Can the music of Varèse really speak to us? Though we’re more puzzled by these questions and never satisfactorily answered, there remains that elusive something which pulls us back to Varèse.

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

Time for this month's download of 40 tracks at .25 each from eMusic. The selection is generally obscure but with back catalog of Frank Zappa, Innova Recordings, Canteloupe Music etc., I can always find tracks I'm interested in.  This month, I chose two versions of Samuel Barber's Adagio, one by the  Flutes Fantastique, apparently a Chicago-based flute quartet, and one by Danney Alkana, on an album entitled Rock the Bach. I was wary about the flute recording, thinking back to fourth-grade flutophone but the performance was somber and low-key. No liner notes from eMusic but I gather that the quartet includes alto and bass flutes, giving the music more gravity than I expected.

On the other hand, the Danney Alkana recording... It starts off with some gratuitous thunder but then splits off into the standard Adagio played on keyboard but with an electric guitar solo on top throughout the piece. Granted, the solo is tasteful and my jazz side says that this is arguably analogous to the practice of improvising on top of chord changes of a standard pop song. But nonetheless, my classical side is appalled. 

At 25 cents a pop, I also bought Alkana's recording of Vivaldi's Concerto in B Minor. This has a lead rock guitar, playing what was probably close to what was written. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that the timbre of the electric guitar gives the music some of the shimmering feel that baroque music can have at its best. But the drum kit and synthesizer solo seem completely out of place. Emerson, Lake, and Palmer anyone?