composer's notebook

essays & criticism on musical matters

commentary

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Aftermath

I often enjoy a few rituals after I complete a piece ... all mostly due to necessity. Now that THE RIVERS OF BOWERY is safely in rehearsals, I've started slowly ticking off these usual post-piece-completion activities:

As those are the standards of the post-piece-completion rep.—here are some more specific and timely items:
Since we've mentioned the exciting New Year's Thievery, last night I also started replacing some of the other items that were in the stolen backpack. For one, while browsing at the venerable Strand Bookstore on Broadway and 12th St., I finally re-purchased Jumpha Lahiri's novel. But a more newsworthy purchase was found while browsing in the Strand's newly-organized music section (if you haven't been there in a few months: Holy renovations, Batman. Now all of 3 floors, the overcrowded and jumbled stacks are now luxuriously spread out in a disconcertingly spacious layout), I came across a motherlode of C.F. Peters chamber music scores among the usual crappy Dovers (Ursula Mamlock, what the heck are you doing here?). The no-brainer impulse-buy was a clarinet/cello/piano trio by the terrific Marjorie Merryman (a former professor from BU for whom I've always been in awe—she's one of those composers who doesn't know how to write bad music). Price: Three American dollars. Sad, yes, that well-crafted chamber music from 1993 costs $3 in a bin at a used bookstore, but like that awkward puppy in the window, it still deserves a decent home. And so I just had to bring it back to Avenue C to be among it's own in the chamber music section of The Library (bottom right of the Ikea bookshelf) where, among the Unsuk Chin piano sonata and Del Tredici Acrostic Song it will, (unlike its bin-home at The Strand, where its neighbors were a Dover Grieg 4-hand reduction and a Mel Bay Guitar Method book) be surrounded by friendly faces.

The biggest item for post-New Year's Thievery replacement is of course is the PS2 (which of course, would have been a welcome home appliance this weekend off). But I'm hesitant. Do I wait a year for the inevitable PS3? Or do I chuck all caution to the wind, ignore my self-imposed ban on all things Microsoft, and just pony-up for the X-Box?

Gratefully, these are the lofty thoughts my spent and aching mind will turn over this weekend.

3:45 PM   0 comments


Monday, January 10, 2005

EOS, Adios

Hidden amidst the press release trash thrown out during the holiday season (exactly because no one was paying attention) lay the spicy stunner that the EOS Orchestra, chamber orchestra to The Stars, folded. Wow. I tell you, I did not see that coming. And I guess no one else did either, because the community seems to have been stunned into silence. Sure, there were a few rote regurgitations of the press release (posted in The Times on 12/23...you can't get much more hidden than that), and it looks like the conservative New York Sun ran a short piece, but I've seen little else.

Despite the crickets chirping soulfully in response to my cry of "Huh?", the news is huge. Here lies dead before us the glitziest New/20th Century music ensemble ever to hit this town (sorry Ethel, you're hip and fabulous, but not glitzy). Ignoring the sad fact that now there's one less place to get one's music played, I'm simply going to miss those concerts. EOS concerts were affairs. They were see-and-be-seen DOs, Schmooze-a-thons of the highest order. An EOS concert was a chance to rub elbows with the glitterati of the West Side: Fashion Designers. Choreographers. And, of course, every composer in town (a much less glamorous crowd, but I take it wherever I can get it). EOS evenings were worthy of unusual forethought and planning ("What will I wear? Can't eat now, the food will be too good later... Must remember to ask after ____'s opera when I see him there..."). Lord, no one ever went for the music, that's for sure. Jonathan Sheffer's programming was always laudable and creative, but he never got his core group (the usual suspects of freelancers, basically the same crowd that plays in the Brooklyn Phil, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke's, etc.) to hone their sound into anything beyond that of a pickup group, and so the performances, as exciting or interesting as the programming often was, were never quite as good as everyone wanted them to be. Under stronger artistic direction that kind of problem is likely surmountable, but that never seemed Sheffer's priority, as his hands were always full with some artistic can of worms of his creation: ("I want to do Copland's complete score from The Heiress!" "Uh, OK, well, the score is lost." "Well we'll put it together from the parts, from the piano score! Find the parts in Copland's attic! Let loose with a team of copyists!"). Like I said, his energies were elsewhere, and thank goodness they were, because who else would be willing to root through Paul Bowles' trunk full of never/rarely-played manuscripts and record them? Who even knew that Paul Bowles wrote music? So we brushed aside the quality of the performances, and we always returned ... because we had a comp (who didn't?), and who could resist the spread at Josephina's afterwards?

So what did happen? Even if no one ever paid for their $60 tickets, the organization smelled of money. Not that old money scent you get at a NYPhil concert—this was Fashion money ... Hollywood money. Probably also Sheffer's personal money. So no element was ever done on the cheap, and even though that kind of business model yields quality results with obvious appeal (I'm sure it's directly related to why concerts were often well-attended), it might have had something to do with the ultimate financial issues. In other words: perhaps the topless/body-glittered all-male waitstaff at last summer's benefit in the Hamptons might have been a bit too much...

But it's a moot criticism at this point, and that kind of spending might never have been the issue. Whatever it was, EOS is gone, and despite glib commentary like the above, we should mourn. For 10 years, Sheffer gave us 10-minute operas, mini re-orchestrations of The Ring, staged Berio Sequenzas, and Spike Jones arrangements. He created a market for this kind of eclecticism where there was none before, and now New Yorkers have a taste for the stuff. So who's going to sell it now?

2:17 PM   0 comments


Friday, January 07, 2005

New Year's Tale

This week I had to write a program note for The Rivers of Bowery, the short concert opener I'm writing for Bill Berz and the Rutgers Wind Ensemble, which will be premiered next month at the CBDNA National Convention in New York. I'm pleased with how it turned out, and it contains a story I've been meaning to post on these pages anyway, so here it is in its entirety:

THE RIVERS OF BOWERY is an overture with a triumphant vision of the City as complex machine, capable of incubating the lowest in human nature as well as harnessing the best of Man’s intentions. The title comes directly from Allen Ginsberg’s glorious chronicle of Beat counterculture, Howl. Written in 1956, in a tenement about 2 blocks from where I live on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Howl celebrates the Beat counterculture by breathlessly rejoicing in the underdog grit of Ginsberg’s beloved bohemia. The image is extracted from the line:

…who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of Bowery.

Ginsberg’s river is a rush of people, and not the usual sunny city dwellers of an E.B. White essay or an O’Henry story, but his specific anti-community of the lost, the drugged, and the outcast. Ginsberg presents his city as possessing a triumphant spirit, neighbors piled on top of each other, never letting each other down despite being torn apart by society and by themselves.

No one is more convinced of this dichotomy than me: Upon returning home after a weekend away in December, I found that my apartment had been broken into. Someone who most likely knows me, perhaps a teen in the building, or a relative of a neighbor down on his luck, had entered my apartment, and in a spirit of criminal benevolence, had taken only a portable piece of electronics (easily replaceable by me, and yet very saleable on the street). But our thief also grabbed my backpack, probably in order to transport the hot goods. As this occurred while I was writing this very piece, the bag contained piles of manuscript paper—all the sketches and drafts for this commission and for others, as well as a music sketchbook containing most of the sketches of every piece I’ve written for years. In taking the bag along with the intended stolen item, he inadvertently defeated his (in a way, thoughtful) purpose and actually took what was in fact most valuable to me.

I knew there had to be a way where I and my (Ginsberg’s!) community could work together to correct his mistake. The contents of the bag (not seeming valuable) were most likely in a dumpster, somewhere in the neighborhood. I posted notices, whispered of a reward. I talked to neighbors, suspects, and relatives of suspects. I made it known that I did not want the stolen electronics back, but needed only the papers in that backpack. Just as I was starting to think that the manuscripts were lost forever and begin the process of frantically re-writing this piece, a homeless man came to the building, and reported that he "found" the papers in the garbage while looking for cans...

Most likely he split the reward with the thief, but the details don’t matter. What is important is that despite our own machinations, we all keep each other afloat on Ginsberg’s river, and my (now appropriately fetid, stinking) manuscripts can make this positive vision manifest in sound and concert.

—JN

It was a Playstation. That's the hot "electronics" mentioned above. My PS2, along with all of my games and controllers, took one for the team. All replaceable*, but since the drafts of Avenue X and The Rivers of Bowery were on the line, I think the Gaming Gods will understand. And as far as what was in the backpack, this will be the first time the commissioners of Avenue X have ever heard this important tidbit. And you read correctly, Sports Fans, every sketch and draft of both pieces were in that bag. Last week, it was a crisis ... this week, a great story. If you are a commissioner of Avenue X and you are reading this, aren't you glad you read to the end of the note now?

Other contents of the bag included:
1) a CD of The Brazilian Wind Symphony (not yet opened)
2) a pair of noise-cancelling headphones
3) a half-read Jhumpa Lahiri novel
All probably still in that dumpster. Such is life in the Naked City. But man, the program note wrote itself...


*Not so much the memory card, though, with about 120 hours of gaming progress on it...Oy.)

2:29 PM   0 comments