Santa Cruz surfing image via Wikipedia
Renewable Music on the power of concert performances, as he comments on Terry Teachout's thought experiment where we have not regional orchestras:
A live performance of music is a unique event in time, space, audition and memory for which there is no adequate substitute.While I will acknowledge the potential power and glory of live music, for me, it's the opposite -- concerts supplement recordings. I suspect that's because I have a strong need to discover new and good music, rather than fully immersing myself in music I've already heard, as fine as it may be. On the other hand, there's nothing better in life than hearing a track and being able to hit the repeat button to savor it again.
Maybe it's just an efficiency issue. I went to the Three Trapped Tigers recorders concert earlier this month in Berkeley. 2 hours for transportation, 90 minutes of the concert, 60 minutes of hanging around in town before the concert; all for maybe 6 or 7 works. 4 hours in total, the concert was enjoyable and the modern music by Cage, Oliveros, and Tom Bickley was certainly interesting. But spending that time at home with my new favorite toy, rdio, would have meant hearing maybe 40 tracks, seeing what other listeners I respect are paying attention to, and getting to re-listen to the best of all that.
Daniel Wolf is also less than enthusiastic about Santa Cruz's yearly Cabrillo Festival. That used to be a great source of new music for me 15 years ago, and I enjoyed the feeling of immersion. Somehow it now has less appeal. There is at least one concert this year of interest with Kronos Quartet and eighth blackbird although I suppose that's not a regional orchestra, as in Teachout's speculative scenario. Maybe I just miss seeing the composer Lou Harrison.
eighth blackbird will play, among other pieces, Missy Mazzoli's Still Life with Avalanche. The composer:
There's a moment in this piece when you can hear that phone call, when the piece changes direction, when the shock of real life works its way into the music's joyful and exuberant exterior. This is a piece about finding beauty in chaos, and vice versa. It is dedicated to the memory (the joyful, the exuberant and the shocking) of Andrew Rose.
