I got to write a really overly-technical post over at the Music 10 blog recapping the presentation I made there about the vielle a roue. I feel like such a rock star getting asked to write on someone else’s blog. So go have a look. (Music 10 being the festival/composition workshop I’m presently attending)

An addendum to that post - last night I played in Louis Andriessen’s Workers Union free-for-all. It was way harder than the Philip Glass.

On that note, my trio for violin, cello, and piano is getting its premiere tonight here in Blonay. Exciting!

Tomorrow, Wednesday, June 16, stop what you’re doing at 10:30pm France time (4:30pm EDT, 1:30pm PDT, etc.) and turn on France Musique and listen to Couleurs du Monde. At some point during the show, they’re going to play Thibaut Frasnier’s, Alvaro Martinez’s, Fabrice Richaud’s, Gabriel Rigaux’s, and my arrangement of Algerian songs. Perhaps they will even announce our names, though this is far from certain. In case not, mine, Yelha Wurar, is the up-tempo, crowd-pleasing number that they’ll probably play at the end?

If you’d like to avoid any confusion with the France Musique site, go straight HERE.

I have an opinion: John Cage’s Roaratorio should be performed outside.

Well, perform is maybe not quite right for a tape piece, but still, it should be outdoors and amongst the people. Really, what other avant-garde “classical” work is so ideally suited to being public art? It will get the attention of unsuspecting passersby and, as it were, bring them in from the cold. (It will make them pause for a minute, thinking, “what is this I hear?”) For the “sophisticated” crowd it has all kinds of cool weird noises. For the conservatives in the audience, there’s Irish music. It isn’t narrative, so no harm done if you wander in and wander out again.

So, IRCAM, for next year’s Agora, I want to hear Roaratorio piped out onto the place Stravinsky for the people to hear, instead of hidden down and away in your Espace de projection.

And while you’re at it, could you maybe please put Cage’s voice back into the mix! It’s really a travesty that this fellow Sarkis has seen to remove him from the piece, I think. Sure, it’s a work of sound art, but it’s also explicitly a response to a piece of literature, and removing the words robs the work of a lot of its continuity and its humanity. The stream of words in a single voice connects what otherwise becomes a random mix-up of noises.

So put Roaratorio outdoors and bring back the Cage vocals! Please! Good sirs, I beg you.

“Now that — uncertain ends, confident means — is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know.”

-Peter Schjeldahl in the October 12, 2009 New Yorker

(It’s a reminder not to try to control a work’s outcome)
(which turns out to dovetail nicely with some comments on a post from last year)

I just got back from a percussion concert put on by le cabaret contemporain, which is one of the few groups in France that seems interested in taking new music to the people. I support them whole-heartedly. This show was at the Studio de l’ermitage, where I saw tango last night and where next week there’s a chanson française party. Excellent! It was a good show - the percussionist, Laurent Mariusse played energetically, musically, subtly, emotionally, everything you want from a concert. His improvisations with Mr. Buddy-on-laptop (that would appear to be Gérard Assayag - there was no program and I missed his name) were inspired. But he did something that percussionists seem to like to do, which is not stop between pieces. The kids at Stony Brook did this all the time - they’d put on these crazy marathon concerts where all the percussion set-ups, sometimes involving living trees, surrounded the audience and we were supposed to get up and follow them, and stuff like that - and most percussion recitals I’ve been to since have also displayed some variation on this theme. It must be a response to the amount of time it takes to set up each piece, which is admittedly a pain in the ass to sit through. Since it can take much longer to set a piece up than to play the piece, having everything put together ahead of time is a good move.

That is different, however, from not stopping to acknowledge applause/tell us what the next piece will be/generally stop the flow of music for a few moments. I don’t entirely understand this, since the difference between an marimba and a bunch of tom-toms is so huge, and so much bigger that, say, the difference between and string quartet and piano quintet, but it seems to me that percussion is particularly poorly suited to not taking breaks between pieces. For some reason, percussion pieces tend to bleed into each other, even if their instrumentation is radically different. The best I can guess, it may have something to do with the way we perceive struck instruments with sharp attacks and fast decays - or maybe it’s the high volume - but whatever the reason, in order to really articulate the difference between one piece and the next in a percussion recital, you really have to stop for a while and let the previous one sink in. Denying that results in a fluidity that makes a perfectly normal hour-and-a-half long recital feel like a completely crazy mad two-and-a-half-hour feat of endurance. That Mariusse filled in the spaces between works with improvisation made it even more difficult to tell what was going on. Again, the improv was exceptional - I want more - but I would have preferred to have had the concert split into discreet parts, including a few discreet improv sessions please!, instead of everything coming at me all the time.

So percussionists, I beseech you! Please take a few seconds between each piece. Let the audience clap for you. It’ll clear their ears for the next piece, it’ll allow you a moment of rest and meditation, and it’ll also let you revel in all the more adoration. It’ll be good for everyone!

I went to see Salome at the Paris Opera on Thursday. It was a pretty good show. The production was adequate - the set was stark and beautiful, at once a modern interpretation with clean lines and still fully timeless, with a backlit set that could just as well have been 2000 years ago as today. The Dance of Seven Veils was, as usual, rather embarrassing to all involved. My companion points out, this lady is here because she has a great voice, not because she knows how to move. Why not put her amongst the ballet corps? She could sort of stand in place and wave her arms a bit while the dancers did what they’re good at. A good Bob Fosse-style number would work. Heck, you could probably insert the choreography directly from the video of Cold-Hearted Snake, complete with the scaffolding and it’d be perfect!

Anyway, the Paris Opera also has some weird defect by which they don’t seem to notice that some of their exceedingly strange characterizations border on offensive. I wrote about the midget-dance in Cardillac last year; this time it was the rabbis. There was something weird about the costuming to start with: the Romans guards were wandering around in period dress except the ones who had clearly wandered in from the set of Aida, Salome in a seventies-disco gown, and King Herod in, well, he looked just like Henry the Eighth. John the Baptist was dressed in period clothing, as were the couple of Jews (”The Nazarenes,” they are apparently called) who sing beatifically about Jesus. And then the rabbis, who looked like a group of Jews from the 13th century. There’s not much you can do about Strauss’s politics in casting in the rabbis as a bunch of squabblers - stereotypically Nietzschean Semites who toss about thinking rather than acting. But you can buy into physical stereotype a little bit less. You don’t have to give them all black, curly wigs. You don’t have to give them the wide-brimmed hats that medieval Christians made Jews wear. They probably ought to have been wearing priestly garb if they were priests, and if they weren’t they really shouldn’t have looked any different than the Nazarenes.

I would have also liked to see a bit more madness out of Salome. She played a timid teenager well, and a reasonable seductress, but the last scene, maybe the director could have given her a bit more to do? Something a little bit more deserving of King Herod’s devastating finale? I agree with the Le Monde review that Camilla Nylund was a little weak for the title role, but I actually thought that by the end, she was projecting perfectly well. Maybe she got fully warmed-up, or maybe she was saving herself for the rather serious work she has in the last few scenes, but in any event, first impressions are tough to break and we could barely hear her first few lines. But she also has her work cut for her, in fact everyone does - the orchestration is good and thick and rich, and hard to cut through. Really, the only leads I heard regularly were Herod’s wife Herodias, and Jokanaan (Saint John the Baptist). What I really want to write about is the scoring for Jokanaan. The review in Le Monde says Vincent Le Texier sang “pâteusement,” a good French-English dictionary word that means “mushily.” (The root is, now that I think about it, pâte - paste.) I didn’t find that particularly, but then, my ear was elsewhere, focusing on the extraordinary clarity of the orchestral writing beneath his lines. Strauss does this perfectly. He wants Jokanaan to be the musical center of an otherwise totally-nutso opera. Everyone is unstable or worse except Jokanaan, and their music swirls and swirls and gets muddy and foggy and all the other words you can use to describe messiness and lack of clarity. It gets in the way! It is their, can I say subconscious? Everything that’s wrong with them - a petty, directionless tyrant with an eye for pretty young things; his wife who was his brother’s wife; their precociously beautiful teenage daughter learning to use her beauty to get attention but at the same time freaked out by how dad totally wants to get with her; even Narraboth who’s so into Salome that he, as an aside, sees it fit to stab himself when she starts seducing Jokanaan… But Jokanaan has it all figured out. He’s nuts in his own way, he’s a prophet after all, but in Strauss’s opinion, he’s a prophet for the right guy. And he has the courage of his (possibly loony) convictions.

So Jokanaan’s music is clear. It’s mostly well-spaced brass chorales (one could say that the musical allusions to Jesus get a little over-the-top, but that’s basic scoring even when he’s not talking about Jesus) that leave the center completely clear for Jokanaan’s mellifluous baritone. One of the important things in writing for voice and orchestra - or solo instrument and orchestra - is to leave the soloist’s range relatively empty so that he or she can cut through the 100 people playing busily behind. The effect can be like bursting sunlight when done right. When done wrong, the soloist is lost and has to work terribly hard to be heard at all. Salome often has to contend with syrupy violins playing in exactly her prime register. Jokanaan never has such trouble. This is the sort of thing that made Salome, despite the numerous flaws, my best opera-going experience so far with the exception of Don Giovanni. Hoorah for Richard Strauss!

Let us now praise standing room tickets at the Bastille Opera House. For five bucks, you can get standing room tickets (if you get there in time, you do need to get to the box office a few hours early), but unlike at the Met, they are not desperate to make you feel like second class citizens. So if there are, and there always are this is the opera, scads of empty seats in orchestra seating, in go the standing-roomers. So you get two row 22 seats for 10 euros. Not bad, eh?!

Also, Meg Z (who wouldn’t want to be called the Z if given the chance?) describes a much more, umm, exciting production in 2006.

I haven’t written anything of substance here in a while, but today I read an article in the Times today and it fired me up. The article is by Michael Kimmelman, who recently also wrote about, among other things, how people walk absently through art museums instead of looking at the art. This museum article actually gives a pretty good context to the impression I get of Kimmeleman’s point-of-view: he’s trying to get at the purpose that art serves in these crazy modern times we live in. In the Louvre article, he posits that art’s role has degraded with the advent of technology - hardly a unique argument but framed nicely in the Louvre’s non-Western art room. In the Dresden article, he’s coming up with, well…

To summarize what you’ll read when you read the article, a pregnant Egyptian woman was murdered in a courthouse in Dresden by a Russian man who apparently is a racist psychopath. They were in a room together awaiting his trial for insulting her because she wore a veil. Kimmelman goes on to note that East Germany, and especially Saxony (Dresden is the capital of Saxony), has more problems with racially-motivated crime and especially racially-motivated violent crime than the rest of Germany. He then observes that Dresden is a marvelously beautiful city, now fully restored from the firebombing at the end of World War II.

Finally, Kimmelman accuses art of having not sufficiently altered the character of Dresdeners. If the city’s trove of architectural and artistic treasures had done its job, he implies, this terrible murder would not have occurred, and indeed all Dresdeners would live together in blissful multicultural harmony. (more…)

OK, so my compositional career basically began in Sulzberger Parlor, the venerable Barnard College meeting room that is also one of the main musical performance spaces on campus because of the presence of a reasonably nice piano, in about 1997. The last time I had a concert there was in December 2001, in an epic airing of three of my Notes from the Subway.

Tomorrow, Nissim Schaul’s music returns to Sulzberger Parlor, as part of a Worldmuse concert, being sung by people who mostly were in middle school in 2001. (Or were they in elementary school? Oh my god?!). I’m trying not to be too reflective about it, and somewhat fortunate that I can’t be there, since I won’t be hit over the head with my lost youth or something.

However, you should go, because the program is incredible. There’ll be the world premiere of possibly the entirety of Rising, or at least the New York premiere of the first section. There’ll also be premieres of pieces by Joseph Rubinstein and Ursula Kwong-Brown, Indonesian, Indian, and Philippine dancing, and “an improvised soundscape by composers Jeff Yang and Sarah Wald.” I don’t know what the last part means exactly, but that makes me even more upset that I’m going to miss it.

So, first a reminder:

* March 26, 2009, noon: Nuevos Misterios (slightly truncated), performed by Flying Forms, at the Schubert Club Courtroom concerts in St. Paul, Minnesota. That’s in Courtroom 317 of the Landmark Center in downtown St. Paul, 75 West 5th Street.
* March 29, 2009, 4pm: Nuevos Misterios, performed by Flying Forms, at House of Hope Church in St. Paul, Minnesota. House of Hope is at 797 Summit Avenue. map!

Rehearsals are going nicely, and the electronics are coming along…

Second, Marc, Tami, and I will be on the radio on Friday! We’ve been asked on Minnesota Public Radio Classical’s afternoon show with Steve Staruch. We’ll be on sometime between 3 and 5 pm.

If you’re in the great state of MN, you can find the station to listen to here. If you’re not, you can listen online.

Do motives that gain their power from a tonal context work in a mostly-atonal setting?

I’m onto the second straight piece in which I have to confront that question.

The opening bars of Omie Speaks go like this:

(listen here)

See that A-sharp in the first chord and that A-natural in a different voice in the second? (a voice is defined by its left-to-right motion and how high it is) That’s called a cross-relation. (more…)