aworks :: "new" american classical music

Alien Bog (1967). Pauline Oliveros /crazygravy/

Pauline Oliveros (via last.fm)

I was considering a post of how lala is great for novelty but for whatever reason, doesn't help find the truly "a" works. Then tonight, it's a stream of Pauline Oliveros'  Alien Bog (via Jeff L's CrazyGravy lala playlist, with some other interesting tracks including Ornette Coleman, some odd Herbie Hancock, John Cage by Stephen Drury, an excellent early Eric Dolphy track etc).

I probably listen to more older electronic music than most, I'm an "aworker" after all, but while I can never make up my mind about say Charles Wuorinen's Time Encomium, these kinds of pieces tend to sound as timbrally dated as you might expect. Alien Bog on the other hand, while clearly early electronica, might be a more substantial work.

aworks links etc :: february 27, 2009 /auto nostalgia edition/

Pacer Image via Wikipedia

I spend entirely too much time these days at The Truth About Cars. It's partially my MI/IN auto-town nostalgia coupled with a need to forecast the outlook for the the local eighty-seven-year-old's pension checks from GM and Chrysler.

A post today encouraged readers to list their car ownership history. In particular, this one caught my attention:

1988 Audi 5000 - This was my first car. I was a teenager. I had never had a car. My parents forced me to go to a used car dealer. I remember thinking something about how I didn’t want to participate in society or something. I looked around. Something caught my eye. There it was - a Bauhaus slab of somber silver subtle gloom and non-conformity. The German Leadsled. I drove this quite well in my teenage years. Not even one traffic ticket, no accidents, tapped a bumper. I remember going to Hastings to purchase CD’s in the 90’s quite a lot with that Audi. I purchased weird music, like Aphex Twin Selected Ambient Works 2. The car had a few electrical problems, however, on the whole, was a nice ride.

I'm envious of this one:

1966 Corvette Stingray Convertible, with the 454 and side pipes.

And I wonder about the guy who owned, among other fine driving machines, a Corvair, an AMC Pacer, a Lincoln Town Car and two Plymouth Volares. "Dude."

For the record, here's what I've owned:

• 1975 Plymouth Duster - Way fast with a 318 cubic inch engine. Good handling as long as you never had to actually turn. Wired up a cassette tape deck so I could listen to Al DiMeola. Was asleep in the trunk when my friend drove it off the road on I-75 in the middle of the night on our way to spring break in Florida.
• 1983 Renault Alliance - Designed by the French, assembled by Wisconsin's finest, sold by American Motors; not so good after that. No radio and no air conditioning. Barely enough power to make it "over the hill" on Highway 17, back when regularly attended the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz. Rode public transportation for several years after it broke down. The fact I mildly miss that car astounds me ("Despite the auspicious Car of the Year award, the car would not live up to expectations of owners, who may have assumed that the award also reflected on the reliability of a car.")
• 1993 Mercury Tracer station wagon - Assembled in Mexico complete with discarded cigarette pack wrapper in Spanish. A true factory-installed cassette deck to allow listening to George Lloyd tapes. Durable enough to have visited The Magic Flute in Vancouver BC, the Princeton Record Exchange in NJ as well as all three Amoebas in CA. Finally totaled when rear-ended in CA while listening to Aphex Twin.
• 2009 Toyota Camry Hybrid. Assembled in TN or KY, forget which. Purchased 4 months before gas prices tanked. The local eight-year-old likes it since it doesn't pollute (more or less). A true factory-installed input jack for iPod. Has a CD-R permanently stuck in the four-disk changer. Has also visited all three CA Amoebas. 

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Update: I'm still reading that Truth About Cars post and remembered that the Duster only had AM radio until I installed the cassette tape/FM radio combo. So, that meant several years of only WLS (Chicago), CKLW (Windsor, ON; "the blackest white station in America"), WJR (Detroit) and WNDE (Indianapolis). I can't recall the fifth radio button. It's also possible I've suppressed until now memories of all those Karl Haas Germanic Adventures in Good Music shows on WJR. To this day, I don't really like German classical music and this may be why.

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• Big Three: Clean up your dealerships (37signals.com)

aworks ordered meme :: albums from the past

Cover of Hoodoo Man Blues

Via Iron Tongue of Midnight:

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life or the way you looked at it. They sucked you in and took you over for days, weeks, months, years. These are the albums that you can use to identify time, places, people, emotions. These are the albums that no matter what they were thought of musically shaped your world. When you finish, tag 15 others, including me. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you're it.

In rough order of listening:

1. More of the Monkees. The Monkees.
2. Symphony No. 5. Leonard Bernstein. New York Philharmonic. (Beethoven).
3. White Album. Beatles.
4. We're an American Band. Grand Funk Railroad.
5. Born to Run. Bruce Springsteen.
6. Mysterious Traveller. Weather Report.
7. Bitches Brew. Miles Davis.
8. Interstellar Space. John Coltrane.
9. Hoodoo Man Blues. Junior Wells. or Hard Again. Muddy Waters.
10. Reich: Variations; Adams: Shaker Loops. Edo De Waart. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
11. Early Works. Steve Reich. or Chamber Music. Wilhelm Killmayer.
12. Einstein on the Beach. Philip Glass. or The Well-Tuned Piano. La Monte Young.
13. Amnesiac. Radiohead.
14. In a Landscape. Stephen Drury. or Daughters of the Lonesome Isle. Margaret Leng Tan. 
15. Ives: Symphonies no 1 & 2. Neeme Järvi. Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

Let's see. Pop, Deutsche Gramophone, rock, jazz (followed by adulthood), a side-trip into Chicago blues,  minimalism/contemporary classical, Radiohead and finally Cage/Ives. Yes, that's a reasonable overview of my musical journey...

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /via obama and williams/

Image via Wikipedia

I've decided the Obama inauguration was the apex of post-modernism and we are headed in a different and hopefully better direction. When the conservative David Brooks accuses the Republican Party of nihilism, clearly we are in a time of change.

Back to music, consider the John Williams composition Air and Simple Gifts. I did a crude inventory of the response to the piece. A month later, any outrage over the lip synching has disappeared. How much of that is because Obama now has his sea legs is hard to say. It may also help that the former President has been released to pursue his latest agenda.

And from an aesthetic point of view, I think Russell Platt got it right:

John Adams, responding to the catastrophe of 9/11, wrote a masterpiece, “On the Transmigration of Souls”; Williams, responding to a request for a Presidential entr’acte from Mr. Obama, made a touching little tribute to Copland’s “Appalachian Spring.” Sure, it’s a response to a different kind of assignment. But it could have been more.

Since my (aesthetic) mission in life is to discover and amplify the best works in American classical music, I'd like to thank John Williams for his help in recognizing and publicizing Appalachian Spring as an official "a" work.

Also, lala has Williams' new "single:" Air and Simple Gifts - Yo-Yo M...

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• Kenneth Woods also suggests Appalachian Spring as America's great work.
• 100 or so Appalachian Spring tracks on lala.
• Clearing the Air about John Williams' Simple Gift (netnewmusic.net)
• Barack Obama inauguration music was mimed (telegraph.co.uk)
• Experts defend pre-recorded inauguration music (thestar.com)

aworks links etc :: february 23, 2009 /it's an idiosyncratic world/

Image via CrunchBase

Clusterstock links to what is supposedly economist Paul Krugmans' Amazon wish list. I agree it's a bit on the "wussy new age" side of the musical spectrum. But hey, even mine is idiosyncratic (and reminds me I still want to buy the punk rock version of West Side Story.

Composer David Schiff comments about The Rest Is Noise: Instead of examining how Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, among others, cultivated the new form to an astonishing early maturity, he focuses on the trans-atlantic imitations of Satie, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, Hindemith and Weill. 

I've decided to catalog every link I find related to American classical music (as well as standout tracks from lala). More or less. Until I get bored with delicious again. Still, it seems like a better idea than trying to compensate for my underdeveloped sense of identity.

Renegade photographers run amok at Alice Tully Hall. Me, I still don't know what to make of the guy behind me at Music in Twelve Parts who described how he was appalled when some kid wore a white t-shirt.

links, quotes etc. :: february 22, 2009

Image via Wikipedia

The former Mystery Science Theater 3000 writer and performer has pledged to eat only bacon throughout February...To avoid dehydration, Nelson will allow non-bacon fluids such as beer, wine, martinis and water. (Wired)

The interface immediately below will stream in sequence six recent favorites from the site’s Downstream section, which focuses on legally free downloads on the Internet — all six are solo recordings of guitar-based music, ranging from unmediated live performance to sounds that are heavily processed digitally. (Disquiet). The new streaming interface is enticing and useful and the music is well-chosen.

Visually having Marin Alsop conducting upon a large stage populated by four flutes and an army of empty chairs was bad theater. (HurdAudio)

Stomp (re-lit) (1990/2009). David Schiff

In an interview, composer David Schiff makes the following comment:

[Duke] Ellington’s music influences everything I do. I go to school with his music every day and I find his melodies, rhythms, harmonies and instrumentation endlessly inspiring.

aworks operational note :: temporary delay due to economic crisis + ear-worm

America's greatest composer? via Wikipedia

I still have more comments to make about "the" concert. And, I want to highlight other interesting responses to same. FInally, I have a meme response backlog as well as a desire to reply to the perceptive person who pointed out all the "new" American classical music I've yet to blog about.

However, all of this is temporarily on hold due to:

Practical considerations of the economic crisis i.e. work has been overly interesting this week.

Ear-worm eradification i.e. since Monday's Philip Glass Music in Twelve Parts concert, the recorded versions have been playing from time-to-time, without prompting, in my head. I successfully self-treated for my previous ear-worm of  Charles Ives' Ann Street (and an unnamed Journey song I'm afraid to type for fear of re-starting playback). So I am hopeful the same treatment will allow me to resume regular listening and blogging this weekend.

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Update: Did you know the recent US stimulus package has some good COBRA insurance provisions?

Update 2: Apparently, I've had Radiohead and John Adams ear-worms.

Update 3: And another John Adams ear-worm.

Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74). Philip Glass /in the flow, parts 1 thru 6/

Music in Twelve Parts

More on last night's rare performance of Music in Twelve Parts:
1 Within two minutes of the beginning of the concert, I decided I didn't like the sound. With three-plus hours to go, this was not an auspicious start. The keyboards were too tinny and I couldn't hear the woodwinds. Since I am on record as saying that amplification in the concert hall can be a good thing, I implausibly blamed it on the legacy acoustics of Davies Symphony Hall. Curiously, it appears I didn't like the amplification at the premiere of John Adams'<Son of Chamber Symphony either. Fortunately, Part 1 is a favorite with its tranquil, soothing quality (well, compared to the usual Glass music that is), so I decided to just relax and take it in.

Then, I realized there are three keyboards on stage, not two. In all my years of listening to the recordings, I don't think I grasped this. I also made a mental note to confirm Bitches Brew by Miles Davis only has two keyboards as I remember it, not three.

At some point in this part, the ensemble may have gotten lost. Michael Reisman, one of the keyboardists, kept giving cues and looking at the other members. He didn't do this in subsequent parts.

2 The second part was when I let the visual experience take over. In the 1990s, I sat in the first row in Berkeley for the live accompaniment to the Koyannisqatsi films and it was captivating to watch. This time, I was farther back in row O. Still I could see all three keyboardists, their hands looking like possessed spiders. I couldn't see the sax players as well nor could I see if Jon Gibson was circular breathing. A video screen with close ups would have helped. Still, as I relaxed, the middle of Part 2 was probably the most transcendent section of the night.

3 During this part, I had the feeling that the audience and musicians were "pod people" automatons at the service of the extremely repetitious music. Who am I to question our place in the world? So I finally loosened up, sat back, waited for the section where hyper-drive kicks in, and enjoyed the resulting ecstasy.

4 After a much needed ten minute break, the next part sounded natural, like a well-meshed machine. Did my ears or my preconceptions give way? Or both?

At the end of this part, Glass stroked his head, either in a gesture of relief in making it this far or else a sign of the daunting challenge ahead.

5 This part for me was about how much the players and audience could express themselves, remembering it is a marathon not a sprint. There was almost no movement from the players, other than the intentional queues by Glass to signal the next repeated segment. In the audience, there was a gentlemen who did serious head and body flexing, in the manner of Keith Jarrett's funky movements during Miles Davis' Isle of Wight concert (YouTube). Me, I tapped my toe in rhythm with the woodwinds. Hey, at least I didn't start whistling like I do in the car.

6 My only explicit memory of part 6 was the thought of what a dub version of this would sound like i.e. more bass, extra reverb, no vocals etc. I think this indicates how much I was in the flow of the music by this point. Twenty four hours later, I am still in that musical flow.

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newest recording: Music In Twelve Parts - The Ph...

Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74). Philip Glass /we have positive confirmation/

Image via Wikipedia

I'm just back from the Philip Glass Ensemble's rare performance of Music in Twelve Parts at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco.

I had some trepidation about this, after my experience finally hearing Glass' Akhnaten by the Oakland Opera several years ago. While that performance was excellent, it confirmed my belief that the first act was stellar but the rest of the opera tails off in quality.

Since I liked most but not all of Music in Twelve Parts, I wondered if I would, after hearing the whole work live and suffering through the weaker moments, end up downgrading my overall opinion of it as one of the composer's best. Alas, this was a false worry and the piece, all four hours or so (plus an hour break for dinner), proved more sophisticated and pleasurable than I expected.

Keith Potter in Four Musical Minimalists makes it clear this piece is really post-minimalist:

A work of such length offers considerable scope not only for structural and other kinds of technical variety but also for a significant, and progressive, extension of Glass's musical language and expression.

More thoughts later...