My next project is an odd one for me. I’m taking a course in Gregorian chant, and each time we sing a sanctus (holy, holy, holy…), I just get the feeling I should be singing in Hebrew instead of Latin. So I thought, maybe I’ll set the Kedusha in a Gregorian chant style one day. I shared the idea with a friend in February, and she said, ooh ooh, my old voice teacher would love that! So she put us in touch.

A brainstorming session later, and now I’m working on a piece to be premiered at Jane’s vocal workshop in Croatia, in late June. And because of the Balkan setting, I find myself now not only setting the kedusha as Gregorian chant, but also adding the Old Church, or just plain Church Slavonic version of the sanctus, and also whatever version of the prayer I can find in Arabic. The idea is basically to “surprise” the largely-Catholic audience with Catholic-sounding music in the sacred languages of the two other large religions in the region, plus my own tradition, which also has deep roots in the Balkans. This is the sort of thing that I think I’d normally find silly, but for whatever reason, I’m getting more and more into it.

I’m still looking for the right Slavonic and Arabic texts. I’ve established that the Orthodox church uses the holy, holy, holy bit, but I haven’t found it in side-by-side translation with the Cyrillic (which thanks to my trip though the Balkans last year, I can sort of decipher, slowly). And the Arabic is proving to be a mess. Not only does holy, holy, holy not seem appear in the Quran, but, it would apparently be worse if it did.

I’ve been communicating with an Iranian friend who has lived in the US for the past dozen years trying to figure out what sort of text to use for the piece. The first thing he told me was that he didn’t think he’d ever seen holy, holy, holy in the Quran. But he continued, introducing me to the idea of “Ghena.” The definition of Ghena (at least in the Shia world) is subjective and open to interpretation by individual members of the Muslim clergy, but the main idea is that the Quran shouldn’t be set to music in certain ways. (more…)

The tea shop outside our building hosts a band each Sunday morning. It’s a big shopping time in our neighborhood, since most stores close at around 1pm, and everything is closed on Mondays. Normally, when I walk out the door on the way to the green market, I’m serenaded by chanson française, or something a little like Mahler’s second exploit, or maybe if the band is being really edgy, they might be playing something like Puff the Magic Dragon. All family-friendly stuff designed to get the kids to stop and listen and dance and cry a little bit, thereby sucking mom and dad into the cute tea shop.

This morning, I left the house and immediately burst out laughing because the band was playing Sweet Child O’ Mine. It was embarrassing, especially since I was still laughing when I crossed in front of the band. I wasn’t laughing because I don’t like the song (as I confided to Sarah a few days ago, though I probably shouldn’t admit to it here, Sweet Child o’ Mine is probably a candidate for my five favorite pop songs ever - but in my defense there are probably one or two hundred contenders for the list and I don’t know how I’d possibly narrow it down). It wasn’t even because it was incredibly bad - they weren’t exactly a great band (and the drummer was playing some sort of African-looking lap-drum, which didn’t help), but they played passably - but because of how unexpected it was. Last week was Klezmer, so for some reason I was really expecting the same thing again, and when it turned out to be cheesy but excellent 80s hard rock, it made me laugh.

When I go running, I’ve found that the best breathing pattern for me is to breath in for 2 steps and out for 3. In other words, I jog in a 2+3 mixed meter. I don’t run with headphones, but I typically have a tune in my head, and it tends to be the same one each time, possibly because there isn’t that much 5/4 music to choose from. Back in New York, I typically ran to a distorted version of a Brahms symphonic movement. I started running again semi-regularly again here in Paris at about the same time that all my tonal writing assignments were reminding me of Tchaikovsky’s 6th. So now I’m running with the second movement, the waltz-out-of-whack, of that piece, and I’m finding that it’s the second theme, the sad one but also the more repetitive and obsessive one, where I get stuck. Because jogging is a repetitive and obsessive activity, and more than a little sad, no?

Does anyone else think about this sort of thing while exercising? I know it’s weird enough to be thinking about classical music while running (don’t most people put on heavy metal or (contemporary) dance music?) - but how about this mixed meter thing? Should I be trying to jog in 5 while listening to music in 4 in order to improve my feeling for polymeter? (as though running isn’t already enough of an “it’s good for me” activity)

Since I got back from New York, I’ve been listening to Piano and String Quartet by Morton Feldman. It’s been like coming home. When I first listened to Feldman back in the summer of 1999, it was transformative - all that stillness that was still beautiful and evocative and completely gripping - but somehow I’ve gone pretty much from then until now with just one CD of his music. (that I could get rich off of if I decided to sell it?????)

I found this Feldman quotation about the nature of his super-long pieces:

As soon as you leave the 20-25 minute piece behind, in a one-movement work, different problems arise. Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale.

Piano and String Quartet is only an hour and twenty minutes, so it doesn’t quite reach the proportions he’s talking about, but it has such form. It’s a microscopic form, a form of gestures. (more…)

I neither endorse nor repudiate Mr. f.m’s music. It’s an interesting idea - pop music with string quartet backing instead of electric bass. I’m not a fan of his approach to Blondie (too cold and scientific), but his original music sounds pretty neat, and sometimes has some really nifty, crunchy harmonies.

But this guy is not entirely unrelated to my post about post-rock.

But am I the guy on the couch, or the strange man with a French horn head?

More fallout from my lecture at Stony Brook.

One of the students responded to the music I played them - 2 of the Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio by comparing the sound of the harpsichord to horror movie music, or even better, to the music in the haunted houses or the especially the castle worlds in Super Mario Bros. This took me totally off-guard, but as soon as I heard it, it was pretty obvious. The harpsichord at the beginning of the first movement - high dissonant chords in funny rhythms kind of like screaming - does everything it should to fit the part.

The fact that I didn’t think of the harpsichord’s connotation in the popular imagination as a spooky instrument beforehand makes me nervous. I thought about The Doors, even though I sort of hate them, and of course I know the classical literature from the Baroque to Ligeti etc. But how did I miss the most basic contemporary cultural allusion that the instrument implies? (more…)

I’m back from New York. It was a long trip, and a good one. Two premieres is always a good thing. I also got to give two talks about my music and came back with a litany of new projects to work on.

The first of the talks was a nearly-impromptu affair for a first-year seminar at Stony Brook. The professor, who is running Stony Brook’s big premieres festival and for whom I used to TA, wanted me to come in and talk about the creative process. So, obviously, the conversation turned largely to a discussion of humor in music. Why not?

But the most interesting thing happened after the talk, when I got an email from one of the students in the class. The student asked me if I knew any “instrumental post-rock,” particularly Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Mogwai, and The Red Sparowes . Of course, I’d heard of Godspeed (how could you forget a name like that?), but I’d never delved into the genre. In fact, I didn’t really know there was a genre called post-rock. I knew there was stuff kind of like this, but I didn’t know it had a name…

So I gave each of the above a listen. The first thing that surprised me was how bright each band sounded, not including Godspeed’s spoken word material. I was expecting something little more like Judas Priest or Pantera - relentless loudness and darkness - but found that especially the latter two were producing textures more like Nico Muhly, whom, as we all know, writes too prettily for his own good. (I don’t know why precisely so much of my blog seems to involve Nico, whom I’ve never met. I find his blog very engaging, and when the New Yorker writes a feature about you, you have to expect some snarky references, but that doesn’t explain it entirely…)

The second, well, not-exactly-surprise, was the extent to which I have a hard time hearing this music as “rock.” Which I guess makes it “post-rock.” But at what point does the pendulum swing far enough to make this stuff into genre no longer affiliated with rock? It struck me that there’s a parallel between the idea of post-rock and Kyle Gann’s concept of the post-classic. (more…)

Two days after attending the Paris Opera’s production of Paul Hindemith’s opera, Cardillac, I am left with two nagging, unsettling questions:

1) Mr. Hindemith, a major triad at the end? Was it really that happy an ending?

[note to self: In the future, resist the urge to end your pieces with a perfect chord unless it’s really musically justifiable!]

2) What was up with the midget in the dream sequence in the second act?

[I use the word midget here instead of something more sensitive because it really felt exploitative watching him. Like not, I’m watching a small person, but really I’m watching a midget, good god! Was this in the stage directions - in which case why wasn’t it ignored?! - or, even worse, is it some sort of contemporary reinterpretation? Or, if I simply attended the opera more often, would I discover that there’s a small person in the troupe, who’s gotta have work????]

Those incidents aside, it was an interesting trip. The opera itself is a bit uneven - some parts, like the final scene other than that major chord, glisten while others fall a bit flat. There’s not much to hold on to other than constant gyrations, though certain textures and harmonies clearly cycle back regularly. (I wonder whether the regularly-returning jostle-y dotted music connoting devious action was exactly the same figure each time or not) But some of the problem here might be that I have a very hard time perceiving the connection between melodies operatically sung and what’s going on in the orchestra. (more…)