One is this exploration of the New York City Subway.

Another is the French word décalage, which is about the most useful musical term I’ve come across in French. Means something like “shift” or “displacement,” along with “not-togetherness.” Heterophony, polyrhythm, imitation, you can pass it all off as décalage.

Thursday night, our friend brought out a whole big box of pâte de fruit (think: fruit roll-ups, but sweeter and gooier and better), thereby setting in motion a weird bender of sugar and music. The next morning I had my last Friday analysis class of the school year, devoted this week to the 50-minute sixth scene of Messiaen’s opera, Saint-François d’Assise. The only comment I could muster, especially in the desperate thralls of a massive post-sugar downer, was “c’est fatiguant.” The “bird symphonies” are cool but almost entirely undifferentiated, and the score as a whole shows the classic post-War French inability to continue a thought past the point that it becomes recognizable. At least Messiaen repeats the barely-thoughts many times, but maybe too many times. I’m all into repetitive music, as they like to call it here (more on this coming in a few days, I hope), which is to say, music based on repetition, but this scene has the disadvantage of, instead of being based on repetition, not being built around repetition, which makes the repetition irritating repetition. Let me try that again; it’s a linear scene, but stuff keeps coming back without any clear reason to. I feel like this has something to do with Messiaen’s religiosity. In my limited exposure to his work, he seems to get so caught up in expressing the divine that he forgets to worry about scale, so he repeats passages endlessly to no effect. Or maybe, because he’s expressing the divine, he has no use for human scale. Either way, with humans listening, there’s a problem. I’d love to see the scene staged though - I suspect that the simplicity of the surroundings would add a great deal of depth to the scenario.

It also came up that the first use of electroacoustic music with an orchestra, and also the first use of recorded bird-song in a piece, was probably The Pines of Rome by Respighi.

That night I went to see John Zorn at the Cité de la Musique - though I didn’t realize until I got there that Zorn himself wasn’t going to be playing. When I arrived, scalpers were all over the place. I know Zorn is hot shit and everything, but I was taken aback - how cool is it that there are scalpers at a new music event?! But then I got to thinking, I bought my ticket on Wednesday. Can there be scalpers for a show that hadn’t sold out two days before? Something must be on at the Zenith. Indeed. Damn! Concert hall was about 3/4 full.

I have stuff to say about Zorn, but it won’t fit in this post. Soon…

Yesterday, we discovered obliquely that our friend Ben was playing trombone with The National that day at the Furia Sound Festival way outside of Paris. So we hopped on the train and went out there.

It was good show. But the thing that got me was something that had been in mind since the Zorn show and the one-man claque* who was sitting behind me. What do you do about applauding songs and pieces that end quietly and/or introspectively? (more…)

I got back from my sojourn in Grožnjan, Croatia on Wednesday, and I don’t know where to start my post about the place. I guess the logical place to start would be with my experiences with the piece that I wrote for the International Vocal Arts Workshop, since that’s what brought me there in the first place – but maybe I’ll try to talk about the setting a little bit first. Grožnjan is a hill town in Istria that seems to have been walled by the 12^th century, and which was part of the Venetian empire from the 1400s until the Napoleonic Wars, when it passed into Austrian hands. It’s full of mostly unpainted stone buildings and dark wooden doors and tiled roofs separated by narrow cobbled streets and small piazzas with flowers and vines bursting from the surrounding windows, balconies, and roofs. It interests me that the church and old municipal buildings are at the top of the village and not in the middle. The village commands an incredible view of the verdant (I don’t like that word, but I can’t think of a better description) valley beneath, and in the not-so-distance, the Adriatic Sea. The area is abundant with olive trees and grapes vines, and most other types of tasty vegetation. And truffles, they say, though I only saw them as part of dinner. (Sometimes it pays to be vegetarian: the meat eaters got polenta with a meaty stew, we got a truffle-cream sauce on our cornmeal.) They have managed to keep almost all signs of modernity, besides electric lines and a public phone, out of sight, so once you leave the parking lot on the outskirts, you can try to forget when you live. Surveying the view outside the dorm window, I got to thinking pretty quickly about how muchlittle the scene has changed in the past 800 years.

This was the backdrop for the street theater performance that I wrote Rising for. To recap, Rising is in a quasi-Gregorian chant style but using texts related to the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic. The piece was written as an experiment, both in notation and in sound. The idea of the piece was to have three completely independent vocal lines singing in separate modes, each with a different final,* all surrounding a D-natural drone. But instead of creating total chaos, I wanted to have a few points where the lines sort of lined up – not in pitch, but in character. I composed each part separately, but planned the piece out by dividing it into larger “melismatic” sections and shorter “recitative” sections.** That way, there would be breaks in the texture when the recits connected. The tension of the interlocking lines would give way to brief moments of repose when not quite so much would happen. (more…)

Isn’t that cool? I get to go to beautiful Croatian Istria, and it’s a business trip. I’d say that of the places I’ve gotten to travel as a composer, it’s the top so far - Berlin and NYC aren’t bad, but Berlin’s a little cold in winter, and New York is familiar; it doesn’t so much feel like a vacation. Croatia’s sure way better than the Hague.

Anyway, the point of all this is to announce the impending premiere (and seconde) of Rising, the tentative title for the piece I referred to back here and here. The piece is a gloss on the Sanctus in Hebrew, Old Church Slavonic, and Arabic, sung in a quasi-Gregorian chant style, accompanied by an active drone, just about any instrument will do. The premiere is planned for June 20, as part of a street performance festival in Groznjan, and it we’re also planning to perform it on June 23 in Izola - still Istria, but across the border in Slovenia. The project was commissioned and abetted by Jane McMahan, who runs her International Vocal Arts Workshop in Groznjan. I’m particularly excited that this piece is being presented outside of the confines of the concert hall, and will reach an audience of locals and random, unsuspecting vacationers.

I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?* (more…)

At border control at JFK yesterday, the border guard, as usual, asked me a few unobtrusive questions. How was your trip? Actually, this is my trip, I live in France. (apparently he hadn’t gotten to the “country of residence” line on my customs form yet) What’s life like there? It’s great. Nothing peculiar, the standard stuff to make sure I’m not a shifty-eyed threat to American security.

There’s a pause.

But then he brings up an odd topic. He says something like –Y’know we have all these immigrants here, and they have such a hard time. They probably ought to go to France, right? –Well, yes, life as an immigrant in the US is very difficult. –I mean, people here are busting their butts for $7 an hour and they don’t get anything for it, while in France they get $14/hour and they get all those social services, like health care, too.*

It made me very nervous to have my border guard talking to me about the politics of immigration. As a US citizen, of course, there’s very little that could happen to me at the border, but because of my involvement with American Purgatory (also, here) not to mention the myriad bizarro border control stories I’ve heard from (mostly Canadian) friends, I found myself being particularly circumspect, with this vague fear that if I bad-mouthed US immigration policy too much, I could somehow be charged with sedition or something and end up sent back to France. Or, worse, in immigration detention. I’m actually astounded I let myself say something as strong as “It’s tough being an immigrant to the United States.”

So I said something about having to be legal to get the benefits, and he agreed with me and handed me my passport, and I walked away, full of strange thoughts. I’m sure he was just being friendly, but I found the experience incredibly unnerving.

In other news, I woke up, irrevocably, at 5 o’clock this morning. Sigh.

*minimum wage in France is 1000 euros a month, or with the 35 hour workweek, about 7 euros per hour - at the current exchange rate, what, about $278.35?

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)