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."

Slonimsky's Earbox (1995). John Adams /i did not feel disappointed/

Axel Feldheim:

...I did not feel disappointed. John Adam's Slonimsky's Earbox is a loud, frenetic ride using the full resources of the orchestra. It begins with a rapid upward run that is a kind of leitmotif. Vänskä made sure that the orchestra kept up a tense level of energy. Mr. Adams himself was in attendance in box A for the entire evening & took a bow on stage after his piece.

For the record, the lack of disappointment was due to the fine conducting of Osmo Vänskä. Also for the record, I just did a copy/paste of the conductor's name.

The composer on earbox.com:

The new piece seems in retrospect to have pointed toward a successful integration of the older minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse and stable harmonic areas) the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces. 

More "for the record": I still don't understand how to use copy/paste after several months with an iPhone. Also, I just admitted to the local spouse that I still miss the phone from my old Palm Treo (as I explained why I hadn't called her back). Browsing and apps were a disaster, though.

Off the record, this is not a favorite John Adams piece...

Grand Pianola Music (1982). John Adams /this programme is no longer available/

John Adams via last.fm

Not For Fun Only points out a Proms concert with a multi-handed version of John Adams' Grand Pianola Music as well as George Antheil's Ballet mécanique.

If I read the BBC site correctly, six pianists were used for these works. Unfortunately, the stream is no longer available.

String Quartet (2009). John Adams /serious yet sheenful/

Joseph Haydn via Wikipedia

The St. Lawrence String Quartet played at Stanford yesterday afternoon. I don't get out much but I'm surprised I was surprised at the demographics of the audience. Still, it's good that older, white, females so fully support their aesthetic interests. The other surprise was the cost of tickets. Let's see: $49 is the equivalent of purchasing 490 tracks at lala...

The first work was something by Haydn. Since I had spent the morning listening to an older, white, female of a different sort -- Pauline Oliveros -- it took me about half the work to come to terms with how mundane the texture of a string quartet is compared to early electronic music. Fortunately, the musicians played with a verve that eventually caught my interest. Still, I'm no Haydn lover unlike some bloggers even if several years ago, I did immerse myself in the Haydn symphonies and listened to the Greenberg CD lectures. I remain unmoved. The violinist Geoff Nuttall jokingly suggested the group would like to do an all-Haydn series next year. Yikes.

For the West Coast premiere of John Adams' String Quartet, Nuttall and then the composer made some introductory remarks. It was mentioned that Adams' son, Sam, has graduated from Stanford. The composer went on to apologize for a short program note. After all the social and historical hoopla over his other works, this one "is just pure music. Leave me alone." He also pointed out an advantage of writing for a string quartet over larger forces is that the opportunity for the performance to get better and more precise as it is performed over time. The group has played it ten times in concert and spent two hours in the morning rehearsing it with him.

The composer was inspired to write this work after hearing the St. Lawrence String Quartet play at Stanford his earlier John's Book of Alleged Dances as well as a Beethoven work. Adams is a funny, witty, and smart guy but his new quartet benefits from including no post-modern humor -- no cartoon music, no Bay Area geographical references, no emphatic bass drum etc. The result was serious substance along with the usual Adams' sheen. The performance was exciting and concentrated.

It's also good to see the Stanford Lively Arts series has some fringe events. Thursday is a David Harrington "Deejay Session" (apparently at the Stanford Coffee House). And on May 15th, Mark Applebaum features his Concerto for Florist and Ensemble.

* And in honor of the Opera Tattler *

During the quiet parts of the Adams piece, there was noticeable coughing, program rustling, and candy unwrapping. Before the end of the first movement of the Dvorak, a woman made a swooning sound. During the second movement, this blogger stifled a yawn. And someone sneezed precisely during the rest before the last note of that movement.

Grand Pianola Music (1982). John Adams /impressively bold and banal/

Samuel Vriezen on a John Adams work:

Grand Pianola Music does manage a level of banality that I find somehow impressive.

I obviously favor Adams' music more in general but I agree with that comment. And Wikipedia reports on its reception:

Grand Pianola Music was actually booed by a significant proportion of the audience at its premiere. According to the composer,"True, it was a very shaky performance, and the piece came at the end of a long series of concerts, many of which featured serialist works from the Columbia Princeton school....Grand Pianola Music must have seemed like a smirking truant with a dirty face, in need of a severe spanking". Despite the reaction, Adams maintains that the piece was not intended to 'thumb its nose' at the rest of the 'high art' pieces being performed at the event. The composer admits to be alarmed by the severity of its reception. Retrospectively, Adams finds that he is "impressed by its boldness".

lala:

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aworks ordered list :: john adams videos on youtube

1. Matthew Cmiel conducting Shaker Loops
2. Short Ride in a Fast Machine played by gamelan
3. Act 1 Scene 1 of Nixon in China ("news, news...")
4. lego version of Christian Zeal and Activity
5. the realism of Penny Woolcock's The Death of Klinghoffer
6. ballet set to Century Rolls
7. Short Ride in a Fast Machine, except it's a Suburu
8. a photo of a grasshopper kicks off a video of Hallelujah Junction
9. Mandy Kelly  does a mercifully short  I'm the Wife of Mao Zedong and then, with her sister, apologizes (real opera version follows)

Century Rolls (1996). John Adams /back to the future, again/

SF Chronicle film reviewer Mick LaSalle asks an interesting question about which music will last longer -- that of Pink Floyd or that of composer John Adams?

His answer:

In the case of Pink Floyd, and I'm not even a fan of theirs, millions upon millions upon millions of people love them and thousands upon thousands of new people are exposed to them every day. Parents will pass on an affection for Pink Floyd to their children; thus, their work stands a better chance of being perpetuated. John Adams is dealing with a much, much smaller fan base.

Well, for posterity's sake among other reasons, I'm doing my part by continuing to buy every John Adams CD I can find. I'll admit this includes multiple copies of Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer plus the one with Grand Pianola Music.

Note that the Adams Indoctrination Program for the local eight-year-old is still in the planning stages.

And if you are reading this hundreds of years from now, my stack of recordings is over by the bookcase. Probably, you should start with Nixon in China...

Fellow Traveler (2008). John Adams /longstanding titan/

The Kronos Quartet plays Carnegie Hall tonight:

John Adams, that longstanding titan of American minimalism, brings gravitas to the program with his compact, exhilarating new work, Fellow Traveler.

Son of Chamber Symphony (2007). John Adams /aws 2007.5/

Here's the final post to finish my slow-blog of the Alarm Will Sound concert at Stanford...

Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth. -Peter Ustinov

In today's Ask Mick LaSalle, Mick reiterates the idea that each work of art should be judged based on its intent, rather than in comparison with other works. As a consumer rather than a producer of art, I don't necessarily agree with this. Regardless, in the case of the premiere Friday night of John Adams' newest work, Son of Chamber Symphony, given the title, it's all but impossible to not compare it with its precedessor, Chamber Symphony.

Some comments based on a first impression of a first performance:

• Compared to Chamber Symphony, Son of Chamber Symphony is less wacky and probably more worthwhile. The work strikes me as more grown-up compared to its parent.
• Compared to the original, Son of Chamber Symphony more effectively uses the smaller and compact ensemble, provides richer timbres (was that a hand drum?), and has a surprisingly subtle ending.
• Adams' use of woodwinds was some of the best work I've heard him do for those instruments, both combined and individually, except for maybe Gnarly Buttons (the latter's moo not withstanding).
  
• Chamber Symphony was inspired by, among other things, cartoon music. In Son of Chamber Music, I imagine the second movement being about cartoon characters at the end of filming an episode and having to transition back to the normal banality and concerns of everyday life. Think Bugs Bunny asking "what's really up, doc?" versus the more superficial "what's up, doc?"
• Lately, I've been listening to Thelonious Monk, Conlon Nancarrow, and Duke Ellington. Son of Chamber Symphony could be said to build on the rhythm and clarity of the latter two composers (although not the idiosyncratic Monk). There's a Conlon Nancarrow interview by Charles Amirkhanian where Charles suggests that unlike other serious composers of the time, Nancarrow had an authenticity derived from actually playing jazz trumpet. Similarly, at least in this chamber setting, I suspect Adams has benefited from his clarinetist father, from listening as a kid to Bennie Goodman, and from playing clarinet himself in a small community orchestra.
• This will get me booted out of the contemporary electronica music club but uncharacteristically, I found the amplified strings somewhat annoying.
• Since Son of Chamber Symphony does not have the benefit of fifteen years of cultural assimilation that its parent has had, feel free to check back with this blog in 2022 for a follow-up assessment...

In April, Son of Chamber Symphony will be used with choreography by Mark Morris in a San Francisco Ballet program. Finally, Frank Oteri's program notes talk about the significance of the commission:

Its birth into the world is the result of a rather extraordinary commission involving the sister and brother-in-law of Stanford Lively Arts Artistic and Executive Director Jenny Bilfeld. Eddi Van Auken and her husband, Van, a Stanford Business School graduate are both cancer survivors and decided to commission Adams' new work in honor of the Bonnie J. Addario Lung Cancer Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that is the nation's largest philanthropy devoted exclusively to eradicating lung cancer.

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aws aworks posts: 2007.1 2007.2 2007.3 2007.4 2006.1 2006.2 2006.3 2006.4 2006.5.
chamber symphony aworks posts

 

Tromba Lontana (1986). John Adams

Congratulations on John Adams' fortieth birthday. Ok, that was twenty years ago but at least it was documented in a KPFA radio show (now available on archive.org) where Charles Amirkhanian interviewed the composer. I've listened to the first hour so far and I have several comments:

• Twenty years later, I'll  say the novelty of the "digital compact disc" has worn off, and it is quaint to hear the two gentleman discuss the tradeoffs between CD and LP.
• This was recorded while Adams was writing Nixon in China, and it's not clear they knew the impact of what was about to happen.
• The always erudite composer was in the middle of reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and was hinting at parallels with the U.S. Several decades later, here's hoping he is still wrong.
• Uh, the parallels between Tromba Lontana and Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question never occurred to me. Adams also comments how he was trying to orchestrally reproduce the delay effects of tape and electronics.

Wikipedia: Tromba Lontana (lit. "distant trumpet") is a piece written by American minimalist composer John Adams in 1986. The piece was composed for the Houston Symphony in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Texas' declaration of independence from Mexico. It contains the muted voices of two trumpets, as if expressing the ghosts of the past.

I now have an ear-worm of the trumpets in said piece. This replaces Radiohead's A Punch Up at a Wedding that has been repeating off and on in my head since Tuesday.

Thom Yorke: The thing I remember most about America is that it's silly. That can be quite a relief at times.