aworks :: "new" american classical music

naive and sentimental music (1999). John Adams /me, i'm naive and apathetic/

German Joys complains that the liner notes for John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music name the wrong Schiller:

Now, I'm not going to tear into Marshall here, we can all get out Heins and Frieds confused.

Since I get more and more of my music via the web, since I rip what CDs I do have into MP3s and then box them up, and since my eyesight is getting worse, I no longer read liner notes. So the error doesn't bother me.

However, I may be bit anti-intellectual with this practice even if I do google when curious about something. I was surprised to see aworks in the top page of "search results for 'on naive and sentimental'."

I never responded much to the recording of this work but Joshua Kosman speaks highly of a recent performance (and gets the right Schiller):

That's not to say that the piece is crammed full of ideas. On the contrary, the materials that Adams puts to work are beguilingly restricted. But what he does with them is dazzling..."Naïve and Sentimental Music" (the title comes from an essay by Friedrich Schiller) takes its rhetoric and sense of scale from the symphonies of Bruckner, Mahler and Sibelius, and its musical content from the nexus of pop melody and old-style minimalism a la Steve Reich.

Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). John Adams /robert spano/

Robert Spano had to cancel his Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performance but a suitable replacement wasn't found to conduct Naive and Sentimental Music:

"Only four people have ever conducted 'Naive and Sentimental Music,'" said Moir of the piece that premiered in 1999. Those four -- Alan Gilbert, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen and David Zinman -- were unavailable.

"We had to give up the program," said Moir, who found out late Sunday about Spano. "It is a 47-minute piece that is profoundly complex. There is no way that someone who had not prepared the piece could do it in such short notice. We felt if we couldn't get someone to do the piece who had done this before, we shouldn't do it."

Naive and Sentimental Music (1998-99). John Adams /NPR/

NPR's Robert Siegel interviews Joseph Horowitz, author of Classical Musical in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (stream here). It starts with the story of how Dvorak's premiere of the New World Symphony was treated as a moment of ecstasy in New York while the Boston elite were outraged that native and African-American sources were treated as "emblematic" of the United States. There was also a discussion of the conductor Arthur Nikisch, complete with an example of an old, idiosyncratic performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Horowitz also made his argument that, unlike how European classical music was driven by an indigenous canon, American classical music is associated with the "culture of performance." Horowitz also points out,  as have Alex Ross,  Marja-Leena Rathje and Lisa Hirsch, how Finland shines as a beacon of classical music, including its own contemporary composers.

The last third included an assertion that John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music was an example of what we should be hearing in the concert hall, and that disappointingly, it has only been performed by five conductors in the United States, including the composer himself.  Horowitz offers that the leading American composers, Glass, Reich, and Adams are also performers, for what it's worth. FInally, he thinks we are at a "propitious" moment where American orchestras need to take note of Post-Classical music and interact with it.

From studying the index, the book seems more composer-focused than I thought, given its premise.  It also has a website with, via Naxos, sixteen relevant and streamable selections of American-composed music as well as a page of representative performance examples.

This book may be more important than I first thought.

Naive and Sentimental Music (1998-99). John Adams /Colorado/

Marc Shulgold suggests Colorado is an exception to Josesph Horowitz's argument about the decline of American Classical Music:

I bring this up because the book arrived around the same time as the Colorado Symphony's season announcement. Even a casual glance at the 2005-06 lineup leads us to question Horowitz and others who warn that the sky is falling.

The Colorado Symphony Orchestra will play, among other contemporary works, Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music.

I haven't read the Horowitz book yet so I don't really know what his argument is. Although I'm clearly a "long tail" listener, living in a land of Cowell, Coltrane, Copland (and this week Roger Reynolds), I'm buried in American music I like. So much so that the amount of European "legacy" music I hear is dwindling. This may be one reason Euro-centric classical musical outlets be it KDFC radio or the San Francisco Symphony are increasingly irrelevant to me (especially the former, of course). I don't necessarily expect the abundance of niche musical choices available to me to continue, but for the moment, it's great...

Update: Greg Sandow talks about respectable, conservative classical musical institutions versus Warhol pop art, and it occurs to me that I have little interest right now in the "mainstream classical concert hall" (well, unless they play Adams). But fortunately, in my mind anyway, "classical music" doesn't just equate to "mainstream..."

And so where was pop art in classical music? You can find a few examples, here and there, but almost all of them would be in music not designed for the mainstream classical concert hall. So basically pop art never happened in classical music. And it especially never happened in the '60s, when Warhol was doing it.

Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). John Adams

Like The Standing Room, Lisa Hersch attended the San Francisco Symphony performance of John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music: It's a dynamic piece; there are places in it where I can imagine getting up and dancing, if only there were a dance floor handy.

I remember a jazz buddy of mine taking the position that to move one's body when listening was, at best, a show of disrepect to the art being performed.  While I don't personally dance to John Coltrane (or John Adams), I welcome others to express themselves...

• Prior aworks post.

Naive and Sentimental Music (1999). John Adams

Forager 23 grooves down the highway to Naive and Sentimental Music (as well as Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Saint-Saens, Century Rolls, and Lollapalooza [the Adams work, not the festival]).

...first, I listened to John Adams' Naive and Sentimental Music, performed by the L.A. Philharmonic, as I drove south down routes 7 and 22A. The blend of Coplandish Americana and French Romanticism fit perfectly with Vermont's rural sophistication.

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Andrew Clements of the Guardian says Naive and Sentimental Music 's orchestration is "subtle" and "transparent" and from a "visionary."