composer's notebook
essays & criticism on musical matters
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Sunday, February 07, 2010
Two for two
If you're like me (Lordy I hope not) you turn through the Sunday Arts & Leisure section with a pace that slows significantly as you move toward classical (reading a physical paper, you'll find it after theater, film, television, and sometimes dance--but always before architecture). The dread has a lot of sources, but mostly it's just because I expect to see either a fawning publicist-written puff piece about an upcoming event that rates as cool/interesting (but not too cool/interesting--just cool/interesting enough to keep everyone comfortable), or a profile on someone I vaguely know. The latter usually sending me into a career-questioning emotional tailspin.
But this week I found two pieces which not only did I read all the way through without stomach pain, but really quite dug: Allan Kozinn's excellent essay on performer interpretation vs. composer intent in contemporary music, and Matthew Gurewitsch's piece on the following page on (interesting!) opera productions made for Swiss television.
Enjoy with coffee (no spit-takes necessary).
Monday, February 01, 2010
Best ... album notes?
So very many categories. It takes me something like 5 complete minutes to scroll down the list of winners ("Best Zydeco Album"? Really?) to see if LA-ex-pat Aussie and big band rock star Tim Davies won for his track Counting to Infinity off his recent Dialmentia album.
Nope. Not surprised. Way too interesting. But the loss is no excuse -- go pick up the record and enjoy the fabulous crazy. His band is hot, and the tunes are creative, completely nuts, and brilliantly arranged.
For extra fun, click his "Scores" tab and check out Tim's score videos. An ingenious idea I will one day steal without remorse.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Loose Symphony
Next week I return to Tempe, where two years ago the brilliant Gary Hill hosted me in a residency featuring the amazing Liz Buck playing my Concertino with the Arizona State University Chamber Players and Gary conducting Avenue X with the ASU Wind Symphony. This time I work with my friend, the brilliant Stuart Sims, as he conducts Symphony No. 1, My Hands Are a City. This in itself would be terrific, as Stuart's interpretive skills are unparalleled, but the coolest part is that he performs the work as his doctoral lecture recital. Titled "The 21st Century Symphony". That's definitely a first for me. I saw a friend perform a Berio Sequenza as her lecture recital once, but he was already dead and couldn't attend. So there, Luciano.
Stu is one of those guys who make you feel lazy and dull. No one thinks more about, well, everything, than this guy. When he was conducting at CSU Stanislaus, he organized a Chunk performance where he provided not only the most extensive program notes ever to be written about a wind ensemble concert based on rock/funk music, but also rented an authentic Hammond B3 organ for the concert. Then he cajoled Maestro Reynolds to shake his money-maker in a Chunk performance at USC. I'm not exactly sure how Stuart managed that, but the result was hot. And unsurprisingly fun to watch.
The weblog/podcasts he does with Dustin Sosieth on The Loose Filter Project are consistently spot-on, and as a Loose Filter fan I'm psyched that we'll be preparing something for the site while I'm there. I'll take some supplements before we start taping so I can keep up.
While at ASU I'll meet with Gary's conducting students, and it looks like I'll also be guest lecturer for the ASU Honors College. I'll also see the composition students of my amazing longtime friend Roshanne Etezady (we were Tanglewood classmates 20 years ago). It's worked out to be an added bonus that I get to catch up with Roshanne, who, besides being a beautiful composer, is famous for simply being awesome.
Stuart performs the work with the ASU Wind Symphony twice on 2/4, so log on to your Facebook account and check out the official event invite.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
iPod Thursday
If next week this happens again, we'll call it a weekly feature. Otherwise, it's just a random day in which I'll mention the podcast that is so flipping cool I've been listening to it at any conceivable moment I can stick earbuds in my head: A History of the World in 100 Objects. BBC Radio 4's brilliant series is mesmerizing; each 15-minute episode discusses a single object from the British Museum, selected by the Museum's director Neil MacGregor, and how it relates (chronologically) to the history of humanity. The result is kind of a miniaturized and compacted Guns, Germs, and Steel, or at least I'm hearing them develop basically the same thesis from Jared Diamond's book. But the angle of the single objects picked from the museum is a killer one. The website has detailed photos and videos of the pieces, and links to listen online. Subscribe to the iTunes podcast feed here.
I would warn you to stick it out through the first episode on the Mummy of Hornedjitef, which is fairly dull. It gets quite a lot better as it goes along, and certainly more meaningful as each 'object' takes you further along humanity's development.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Frank v. Met
A close friend (who I know reads this notebook) recently suggested that I might perhaps consider updating these pages a bit more than I do. That maybe, just maybe, I'm thinking a little bit too much about this, and that current, if not perfect, content trumps extended essays. And that perhaps everyone might find the whole exercise more enjoyable if I clicked "Submit" with a bit more alacrity. Shocking, I know.
To that end, I'll attempt to catch up with the Robert Frank exhibit at The Metropolitan. The subject is far less than timely, as the exhibition ended on January 3, but Better Half and I did manage to catch it before it left town, and it was flipping terrific. Basically it was everything from The Americans (seminal work of photographic brilliance, and less interestingly, the meat of the 2nd movement of Symphony No. 1) in gorgeously giant prints, laid out in order with comments about the images from Frank and the curators. But the gems of the exhibit weren't the photos from the book, which I can basically see on the inside of my eyeballs at this point ... it was the rows and rows of Frank's negatives and proofs -- evidence of what didn't make it into the book, and completely thrilling insight into his process of choosing exactly which photo of the series of almost identical shots was the one he wanted.
My take-home favorite part of the exhibit was actually non-photographic: there were some letters and correspondence in a case (Frank apparently kept an epistolary relationship with Walker Evans), where the curators had laid out Kerouac's typewritten draft of his foreword for the book. Like the On the Road scrolls, it looked drugged and feverish, like it was banged out in a sweaty fit of overnight inspiration. And yet, the pencil corrections and insertions were detailed and exacting. I love this. Evidence that an artist we collectively like to believe feels rather than thinks, is actually...thinking. Really, really hard.