aworks :: "new" american classical music

The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012). John Adams /lot of things i haven't tried before/

From the Wall Street Journal on the new piece by John Adams and Peter Sellars:

"I feel an enormous amount of pressure," Mr. Adams said, "because I've written a huge piece and done a lot of things I haven't tried before. And I have no idea if the vocal writing will be buried by the orchestra, or if the writing is too high. I just don't know. And I think if I did know, it would be a bad sign—because that would mean I'm not pushing myself."

aworks on repeat :: white noise for baby boomers

This time, it's some Philip Glass-associated music plus white noise for babies, etc.

White noise for babies, Spanish title edition here. Tweets of the text from Einstein on the Beach here.

• Imidiwan Ma Tenam (Gypsyphonic / Bobby Mac Remix). Tinariwen - Remixed.
• Suite from the Hours: 1. The Poet Acts. Philip Glass: Vassily Primakov in Concert, Vol. 2
• In C with Canons and Bass (Nico Muhly Remix). Terry Riley: Nico Muhly - In C Remixed
• Ten Seconds (Sketches Version). Ane Brun - Sketches
• Space Drift (Moog Generated Space Shuttle Ambience). White Noise Research - White Noise for Baby: Soothing Sounds for Newborn Babies to Aid Sleep
• Dance 1. Philip Glass - Einstein on the Beach
• Music in Twelve Parts - Part 3. Philip Glass
• Suite from the "Marriage at the Eiffel Tower." Lou Harrison

Einstein on the Beach (1976). Philip Glass /@einsteinbeach/

Brooklyn Academy of Music:

Starting at sunset tonight (8pm) we will tweet the entire libretto from the handle @EinsteinBeach. Tweets will be sent out every 15 minutes. We encourage you to follow along, retweet your favorite lines, and comment using the hashtag #Einstein2012. ...

All these are the days my friends and these are the days my friends...

Wonders (2008). Nico Muhly /of a plethora of music options/

I prefer the rdio interface but the social playlists are better on Spotify, primarily due to the efforts of ulyssestone and his Spotify Classical Playlists. His latest includes music arranged and composed by Nico Muhly.

I admit to having a hard time focusing this morning. I started out with the John Cage 25th Retrospective concert album on rdio, then I listened to Messiaen on Q2, and then George Walker on counterstreamradio. Now it's Jonsi from the Muhly playlist.

I Want to Tell You (1966). George Harrison /revolver is better than any/

Some relevant lines from Epileptic Fits of Blogging:

• Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass are all half-great composers. Utter geniuses of musical organization and all capable of stultifying boredom.
• Haydn, not Bach, is the foundation of all music that comes after him.
• The giants of twentieth century composition are (in descending order) Shostakovich, Mahler, Janacek, Richard Strauss, Puccini, and Ives, (Britten, Bartok, Stravinsky, and Schnittke get honorable mentions). From Elgar and Debussy onward, all others are ultimately of second rank at best.
• Had Gershwin lived longer, and had Bernstein not taken the job at the New York Philharmonic, they would have become giants equal to the aforementioned half-dozen.
• Aaron Copland wrote good music for about a dozen years, and wrote crap on either side of that line.
• I don’t know how Aaron Copland developed his great period. There were at least half-a-dozen American contemporaries who were just as talented.
• Elliott Carter has spent the better part of a century creating music that nobody will ever care about.
• Conlon Nancarrow is interesting, but interesting is different than good.
• Morton Feldman’s primary objective is to bore the audience.
• Revolver is better than any classical composition of the last fifty years save late Shostakovich.
• No amount of pot will make Terry Riley sound like a great composer.
• Philip Glass is a truly gifted composer. He’s put that gift in the service of writing some of the most boring great music ever written (and a lot of the most boring bad music).
• Steve Reich’s early music was dumb as hell. But he keeps getting better and better as he ages.
• Even if he isn’t a giant on the level of Beethoven or Shostakovich, John Adams writes some fantastically great music.
• No one would know who John Luther Adams was if he didn’t share John Adams’s name.

Strangely, although the Beatles were my musical first love, I'm most surprised by the comment about Revolver. I can quibble with others but they may all contain some truth.

Blue Curve of the Earth (2011). Tina Davidson /just the left fingers/

Hilary Hahn played one of her commissioned violin encores at her appearance with the San Francisco Symphony (via Not For Fun Only):

Ms. Hahn gave us an encore by Tina Davidson, which begins with the violinist making sounds by pressing down forcefully on the strings with just the left fingers. The piece was lovely, & its use of multiple voices evoked Bach. 

Colin Blogs says it was "a scintillating piece of restrained energy with much use of pizzicato playing that I rather enjoyed."

Relaxin' at Camarillo (1947). Charlie Parker /enduringly enjoyable/

The late Philip Larkin from the New York Review of Books on High Modernism:

I dislike such things not because they are new, but because they are irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it. This is my essential criticism of modernism, whether perpetrated by [Charlie] Parker, Pound, or Picasso: it helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being more mystifying and more outrageous: it has no lasting power.

On rdio, here's Charlie Parker's Relaxin' at Camarillo, still enduringly enjoyable...

North by Northwest (1959). Bernard Herrmann /music for a comedy!/

David Thomson:

Living in San Francisco, I have had my fill of Vertigo. I mean, I love it to death; I admire it; I live with the deepest fears it invokes--which are not those of heights, but the ones that make imagination a prison. But the other day I woke up and realized, for the first time, that North by Northwest is better, because all the fears that this film touches on--a fear of trains, of blondes (above all of blondes who ask no questions), of inane national monuments and flat desolate fields--are rendered as comedy. You see what I realized was that North by Northwest is only pretending to be a suspense thriller, an action-adventure picture or a road movie. It's actually a screwball comedy--and one of our greatest...Bernard Herrmann is laughing to himself and saying, I knew I always wanted to do music for a comedy!

aworks on repeat :: may 19, 2012

(Wikipedia)

Franz Schubert

• Winterreise: Gute Nacht. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
• Winterreise: Auf dem Flusse. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
• Winterreise: Die Wirthaus. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau
• Winterreise: Der Leiermann. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau

Philip Glass

• Music in Similar Motion. Signal, Brad Lubman
• Music in Twelve Parts: 4
• Einstein on the Beach: Dance 1

Thelonious Monk

• Abide with Me. The Complete 1957 Riverside Recordings

Lou Harrison

•  Philemon and Baukis. Gamelan Music

Radiohead

• Pyramid Song. Matt Haimovitz, Christopher O'Riley.

Amadou & Mariam

• Mogo (feat. Bertrand Cantat). Amadou & Mariam

Related articles

• beyond aworks :: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau /we'll also mention "winterreise"/ (rgable.typepad.com)
• beyond aworks :: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau /honoring with lps & pillows/ (rgable.typepad.com)
• For Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (therestisnoise.com)
• Ian Bostridge: 'Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was a titanic figure' (guardian.co.uk)

beyond aworks :: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau /we'll also mention "winterreise"/

(Getty Images via @daylife)

Obviously, the blogging overlap between aworks and opera chic is minimal but even I have to respect this quote:

One doesn't want to get too eschatological, too misty, but if one day we're called to justify humanity's presence on this planet and we're called upon to list our accomplishments as a species to try to offset the carnage, war, brutality and destruction that accompanied us throughout human history, man-made trauma for legacies & legacies that surviving generations continue to bear witness to, we'll make a list where, quite simply, together with Greek tragedy & the Sistine Chapel & King Lear & the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen & Beethoven's symphonies and "Ladri di Biciclette", we'll also mention"Winterreise" sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.