Deconstructing Jim

Symfonietta

2012-01-11T09:08:00.004-05:00

World Premiere of my

Chamber Symphony

January 29, 2012

www.symfonietta.nl

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On the Fence

2011-12-08T10:00:00.001-05:00

While it's always been difficult to pinpoint the reasons behind the musical urge (or addiction), there does appear to be a segment of society that thrives on the benefits of organized sound. I guess that musicians and composers are contributing members of a distinctive clan - or share a common mutation of genes that promotes the impulse within our environment.

Taking the long view, I've been impressed with the scientific discoveries that have been made in our life-time: Gernomics, Information Technology, Robotics, AI, Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, Brain-imaging with fMRI, Biotech, Mathematics, etc, etc, etc.

It's a completely different world today than what existed in our childhood. And yet, if you peal away all the superficial aspects of musical expression and look at the fundamentals, Music is basically an age-old art-form more akin to religion or some esoteric philosophy.

If you have to ask "why" or "how" music is so pervasive and influential, you are either asking the wrong question or oblivious to the inherently vaporous patterns of the basic impulse. It's clearly more intuitive than scientific.

But, sometimes when in a state of dubious rationality, I do question the blind faith that is required to accept the fundamental premise of the musical experience. Taken as a whole, the status quo often seems so relative and arbitrary.

Is it possible that our artistic lives are based on a falsehood, that music is nothing more than a residual organ of an obsolete cultural norm? Or, as practicing musicians, are we way ahead of our time and in fact early practitioners of a brand new, yet-to-emerge, science?

At present, I remain on the fence: a Musical Agnostic.

Tanglewood 2012 Announced

2011-11-18T15:49:00.003-05:00

Hot off the press...

The 75th season of the Tanglewood Festival coming this coming summer will premiere works by eight composers: John Harbison, Michael Gandolfi, Andre Previn, Gunther Schuller, Edgar Meyer, Ju Ri Seo, Adam Roberts, and Matti Kovler.

See you there.

Let's give Chance a Chance

2011-11-08T11:00:00.003-05:00

How does the cultural hierarchy amass itself to select winners and losers in the arts, and what common methods, strategies, and so-called “best practices” do they deploy to determine results from a selection process that is (for the artist) not always transparent or obvious?

My interest in this topic stems as much from plain old curiosity as it does a self-interested desire to be understand the rules. After all, hasn’t everyone wondered at one time or another how and why this or that contemporary work - and the artist who created it – was a success, while many others were not? Finding a rationalization for this process is something that composers in particular should be cognizant of, since as professionals they are significantly invested in having their music performed and in the integrity/viability of the selection-system as a whole – to say the least.

As a composer myself, I strive to observe and understand how this process plays out in the arena of contemporary serious concert music, although to be honest, the subjective data I’ve gleaned thus far only provides a faint hint of the obscure rules that lay underneath. And yet, subtle indications of a mysterious systemic process rise to the surface and reveal themselves to those who pay close attention to the details. The selection-system in the field of music, as I see it, is fairly generic and generally applicable to other fields of art as well.

But how do we construct a viable theory out of fleeting impressions if we can’t peer directly into the black box of social interaction and observe for discernable patterns of information on which to base our claims? What if you can’t be a fly on the wall and observe the powerbrokers at work?

Having never been on a jury myself, I can only base my theory on cumulative results and outcomes of the selection process rather than on an internal narrative that occurs behind closed doors. We can’t see the hidden processes that hide beneath the hood and out of public sight. Although events of day-to-day decisions that reflect and represent inner-mechanics and social patterns that lie submerged are clear enough, it’s the larger trends and the patterns they form that are much more difficult to grasp. Local events generally exist out of sight and out of mind, and are distributed over the course of years of activity and spread among many individual recipients working in isolation. But the establishment always maintains the upper hand. The long-term impact of their positive or negative rating forms an over-arching and cumulative series of events that ultimately creates the pattern of winners and losers. Their mission is decidedly strategic, although they claim to be open-minded and neutral.

Acknowledging there is actually a systemic gateway for art and that it functions on a grand scale could be considered socially taboo, since the conventional wisdom is that outstanding and unique original art (and music) will always bubble up to the top of the vat to reveal itself as a superior product. It’s another incarnation of the survival of the fittest principal. We are trained to believe that true talent can’t be suppressed. On the other hand, it’s painfully clear to many observers that the number of producers of art far outnumber the limited supply of cash-carrying consumers. By hook or by crook, society must rely on a methodology to filter out (as with a cultural “sieve”) the “worthy” from the “worthless.” This concept is nothing new. The assignment of artistic value is an age-old process that has found application throughout time and across culture – yet this all-important filtering mechanism is also underplayed, perhaps in the interest of perpetuating the mystique about the greatness of individual works of art, artistic movements, and even colorful narratives about individual artists themselves. One thing is true: without a working conscious or unconscious filtering process, the public would be completely overwhelmed, besieged with information and the market (by which new art and new music is created and sold) would collapse under its own weight.

Several key factors are at play here. For one thing, there is good art and bad art, but unfortunately not everyone can (or will) agree on a unified criterion of aesthetic judgment to make value assessments on a universal or collective basis. There is no gold standard for art of exceptional quality, and if there were, we’d have other problems to deal with.

Some see the selection filter in purely financial terms. They mistakenly assume that art will succeed only if it has commercial potential, even what could be considered a niche market. I don’t take that view. It’s too simplistic.

While it is presumed that every consumer has a right to make decisions about what is good or bad art, by practical necessity most people tend to defer to eternal experts or specialists to help them form an “opinion” of their own. Here is where professional pundits and power brokers enter into the picture. Often they lend themselves out as experts - even as judges on decision-making committees - and directly influence the outcome of awards, commissions, and grants. It’s rather mercenary.

Several systems and mythologies have evolved over time to satisfy the need to limit the quantity of art in an open and free market. While anyone with means can produce art, the arts establishment oversees commerce in a marketplace that is internally subject to rules it establishes, controls, and self-regulates. It’s fundamentally a dark market, and its operations occur behind closed doors and out of public sight. The public has no idea about what the rules and regulations are, or how decisions are ultimately made. Even worse, the rules and their application are opaque to the creative artist as well.

For a sense of direction and cognitive security, consumers of art sometimes look for prevailing winds, and when they find it, fall in line with their cohorts like a flock of Canadian geese heading south for the winter. They follow this or that trend according to the dynamics of horde psychology. Following along with the masses has become a prevalent mode of group-based decision making in the information age where the number and veracity of Internet-driven spikes is a precise metric for social networking sites, and ubiquitous access to multimedia has made everyone a potential participant.

To put this in historical perspective, we should acknowledge that many artistic movements are as much the result of consumer fad as they are the product of a genuine artistic resonance based on a particular collective idea shared and distributed by the creator. I don’t advocate suppressing fad, but I do suggest that artists and consumers rise about the fray, self-educate, and become cognizant of the mechanisms that potentially fuel the fire of artistic movements – right down to understanding how limited resources are distributed to individual artists, musicians, and composers (or their constituent support organizations).

Perhaps it is because resources are so limited (and dwindling as we speak), that a cadre of so-called arts management professionals and self-appointed experts have inserted themselves to refine the process. In some cases management professionals have pre-selected concert programs before the musicians contracted to perform it have had a chance to provide their input. For these experts, randomness is neither virtuous nor a functional component of their organizational toolkit. Almost by definition, these people want complete control over the selection process and seek to wield absolute power in shaping concert programs (and ultimately the careers of those they manage). In the end, their well-intentioned (but usually misguided) actions determine what the public will be exposed to. Arts organizations experiencing financial stress tend to listen to their wise marketing advisors who may (or may not) have a personal aesthetic axe to grind. But as self-proclaimed experts, they allegedly know what’s best when it comes to the bottom line: ticket sales. Randomness - on any level - is their enemy, since they can’t control it.

The status quo in concert management is to propose and recommend a moderately conservative menu of musical offerings. This approach most often results in solutions that are predictably pre-determined and limited. Using their approach, the number of new works scheduled for a season will typically be very limited (if indeed any local or world premieres are scheduled at all). The prototype program offering of a major symphony orchestra is a case in point, where one hopes that the Music (or Artistic) Director is given at least some artistic leeway to create the season’s program. But it is more likely today that members of the Executive Management team will either lead the effort, or be heavily involved in the selection of actual programs (although in Europe there is a more complicated tradition to involve a mix of orchestral members in the program selection process).

The problem with the “music selected by committee” approach is that in the end there may be little if anything on the smorgasbord that actually appeals to the overall public’s sensibilities. It tends to promote a generic (and boring) outcome. On every level music ensembles are caught between the rock of selecting what a select few might consider interesting and exciting music verses the hard place of a boring alternative that will bring in a broader audience and hopefully maintain (if not increase) ticket sales. And as we have learned, what works in the short-term does not always translate to long-term success.

In some venues, concert programs are still “curated” by an Artistic Director with a particular point of view – which may or may not align with the interests of composers on one side, or an audience on the other. But at least with this singular approach, a unique vision is presented, implemented, and allowed to sink or swim based on its own intrinsic merits or limitations.

Public radio is an interesting example of a system where music was at one time selected by an individual DJ with a particular set of ideas and preferences. If you disagreed with their individual selections of music, you could always turn the dial to another station that conformed to your tastes or wait for the next show. Over time, commercial and public stations merged and their net number of listeners for a particular program grew. Management felt that in the new commercial paradigm the task of selecting specific music to broadcast was far too important on the bottom line to delegate to individual hosts or DJs. Behind the scenes, radio stations adopted committees of experts and consultants to analyze and tailor programs of music based on surveys, analysis, and studies. It’s now all very scientific, like Muzak.

The result of this change is that the independent selection of music for broadcast by local DJs was superseded by pre-selection of works (or at least categories) by a global committee. Their aim and objective was simply to apply pseudoscientific methods to appease the largest number of subscribers and maintain or increase market share as well as to centralize and optimize budgets.

Many people have an aversion to rationalizing the pre-selection of art by systemic means because of a widely held assumption that the consumption of art transpires on a purely emotional level. While both hemispheres of the brain are important factors on the receiving side of the artistic experience, many social and economic hurdles still have to be negotiated by the artist post-creation of his or her work. Although their work may be “pure” or even inspired by the aid of a creative muse, it ultimately has to go to market. In this regard art is a product, and in this sense it is no different than fish, coffee, fresh produce, hamburgers, or pork bellies.

In the case of contemporary music composition, the composer does not exist in a vacuum. Generally, his/her works are created for a venue and performed live (or with electronics) by skilled and trained musicians. The term “professional” is oft-applied to a performer and/or composer if they have formal training coupled with a formative list of accomplishments indicating extensive experience in their field. These incidental facts tend to be prominently published in the bios and webpages of such professionals along with acumens that strongly acknowledge this or that composers’ presumed success. How many times have we read, “X is generally acknowledged as one of America’s leading composers.”

But what do we mean by “professional” and how does society formally or informally assess Composer X’s success in the field? In an uncertain market, what are the criteria by which success and failure is measured? What framework is used to regulate the system or make selections? If it were a business, we could ask for a balance sheet and an analysis of the corporate metrics, but struggling artists and emerging composers don’t come equipped with that data. Even if such things could be measured objectively, our culture is not inclined to think of art in those terms.

It really seems that an entire infrastructure has evolved to assist modern society with the fairly ugly problem of narrowing down the selection of art before it reaches the public’s eye. Specialists and experts have appeared out of the woodwork to fill this niche. For example, to simply the process, consumers often read the recommendations of professional critics for helpful advice. Conversely, critics feel a responsibility to guide their readership in the “right” direction. While I agree there is a role for the well-versed music critic, since on occasion they can provide a common thread for public discussion centered on one or more important topics, there is a risk that critics can become more than mere commentators and cross over the fine line into a role of cultural activist. This editorial transgression should stand as a clear and present danger to the integrity of the selection process. Critics who take sides in the musical or artistic debate do so without actually being a direct stakeholder. For the most part, they are not creators themselves. The media’s recommendations often carry considerable weight. For instance, when a city-wide newspaper publishes their selected “picks” of concerts and venues, the beneficial impact on the featured presenting organization can be rather significant. But the adverse effects on artists and presenting organizations routinely ignored by the press tend to be equally devastating. For them, being ignored is poisonous.

On another front, academia has self-appointed itself as a mediator to provide formal credentials for artists and composers who seek to obtain legitimacy in a woefully over-saturated market. In the hope that a MFA or DMA will provide a competitive edge over their peers, many artists and composers have invested heavily in this academic-based strategy. While some musicians have on occasion found this career path fruitful, the formula has been less successful in recent years and appears to be losing steam and credibility as time marches on. I sense that audiences care less these days about the quality and quantity of degrees listed on a composers’ bio. With a market flooded by credentialed artists, the credential itself becomes less of a distinguishing factor.

And yet credentials seem to matter. A number of new music specialty ensembles in my geographic area appear to perform works by the same small group of credentialed composers more or less ad nausium. I find it interesting that some of these same ensembles are recipients of various awards for “Adventurous Programming.” What’s so adventurous about performing works by the same two dozen mostly academic composers over and over again?

Academia is heavily involved in controlling the filtering process at the source of funding as well. This occurs in instances where a foundation is based at, and administered by, a university. The significant potential for conflict of interest lies here, since the same organization that assigns credentials is tasked with distributing benefits and awards. The filtering process in this context tends to weigh heavily on personal connections and preexisting relationships. Academics tend to award other academics, and inside-politics has been known to reign. For example, if the jury of a grant selection committee were to actually listen to all of the recordings of the submitted works, they would never have enough time to listen to everything that was submitted. Therefore the trend has been to use a system of selection criteria that typically filters out the unwanted based on factors of familiarity and personal bias. From my experience on the submitter side of this equation, this filtering method is not optimal either.

Government subsidy of the arts is related to his discussion in that public money is often used to fund art projects – particularly major ones. I’ve seen both good and bad outcomes from art projects funded by Federal and State agencies in the US and by various European subsidies as well. While this discussion is not about the merits of public funding of the arts, it does raise the issue of cultural filtering when governments are forced to cut back on funding (as they have recently in Europe). The painful discussion about how and where to make these cuts becomes even more relevant when funds are in short supply. Deciding about what to sponsor in the arts is the mirror image of deciding what to cut. Recently in the Netherlands, politicians have decided to take a populist route: future funding will be determined the financial “success” of organizations. The hard metrics of audience size and ticket sales will become the primary determining factor of future support.

I find the “popularity contest” method of filtering to have significant limitations too. It’s an American model, and (from what I can see here in the United States) it does not serve the interests of those who hold a minority perspective in the arts. While select commercial ventures could exist on their own without the infusion of public monies, there is a much smaller market for certain art forms – including some important cultural warhorses such as the chamber and orchestral music. The classical music industry has from the outset never been completely self-sustaining, so it’s simply Pollyannaish to believe it would thrive (or survive) in a purely free-market economy. Recently two commercial British musicals won Tony Awards, which in itself is not surprising other than the fact that the British Government provided seed money to the producers of these stage works. This initial government funding allowed for the kind experimentation in theatre that is not likely to occur with free enterprise alone. My argument is not about reducing funding for the arts (in fact I think it should be increased), but about re-evaluating the means and process by which it is allocated.

Internet-driven crowd-sourcing is an interesting recent variation on the popularity contest. It uses Information Technology to systematize the mass market tabulation of winners and losers. It has commercial application too: collecting SMS texting fees for each “vote” has proven to be quite profitable for Simon Cowell’s American Idol’s empire. The YouTube phenomenon has made more than a few artists famous, if not infamous.

Thus far I have surveyed just a few of the methods in use by the arts establishment to whittle down an overly broad spectrum of art and music into a smaller, more manageable pot of finalists. The finalists then compete for diminishing resources of public and private funding, or get voted off of the island. We’ve seen how professional arts managers have a financial agenda that does not always align with artistic trends. We’ve seen how the juries at foundations often resort to personal bias and inside politics as a filtering method – usually out of practical necessity. We’ve seen how some professional critics inject bias into the public arena and use the power of the media to influence the filtering process. We’ve seen how academia has attempted to influence outcomes by throwing their weight behind their graduates and using credentialing to validate one class of artists over another. We’ve also seen a recent trend to filter art using the tools of social media with “crowd-sourcing” to empower the public through voting electronically for whatever they desire in the moment. This is impulsive and art by the numbers.

Frankly, I’m not a fan of any of the above methodologies. Yet, I fully acknowledge that not everyone can be an artist. As ugly as it, there needs to be a filtering process of some sort. That’s a reality.

Let me propose an alternative system: that of randomness. When someone has an encounter with art that is purely random; something clicks and the resulting experience is often quite positive and memorable. Serendipity has always been an important factor - not only for the consumer, but for the creator.

With human nature being what it is perhaps the best way to bypass back-room politics, personal bias, and insider trading in the art markets is for the distribution of funds and awards to be randomized. Randomization would equalize the playing field and virtually eliminate the potential corruption of committees and outside influence of self-proclaimed experts. While using chance does not guarantee that the “best” work of art will always be selected, it does provide a wider spectrum of options and more points of view than we have today. After the work is initially presented to the public, its intrinsic value is open for interpretation and vigorous debate. The new work will ultimately sink or swim based on its own merits. But the issue we face today is that poorly filtered selections of work make it to the public. By randomizing the selection process we would do a much better job at picking potential winners for society.

Randomness is not to be feared. For example, I am an advocate of open stacks in the library where one can browse books at will and discover new ideas purely by chance. Although I have a very extensive audio collection of recorded music, I often prefer to listen to the radio because the selection of music is out of my control. Random selection takes us beyond our narrow box of ideas and concepts, and can provide us with experiences that would not be part of our self-defined set of values.

How does one implement a system of randomness? I propose using a lottery system to achieve this goal. It’s rather easy to implement and would save funds and reduce (if not eliminate) administrative overhead. Artists would simply apply for a grant by obtaining a lottery ticket after establishing that they met a minimum set of requirements (the subject of another discussion). Foundations and cultural organizations would hold periodic lotteries to select the recipients of their awards or commissions. It’s that simple, and completely fair. It’s as easy as rolling the dice. You can’t get any more efficient than that.

It would require a paradigm shift for cultural organizations and foundations to demote their managers and panels of experts and migrate toward an organized system of chance. But I’m convinced that positive surprises would ensue from the adoption of this new filtering method, not to mention that fact that it would be far more equitable all around. At worst, the lottery system might provide results that are just as mundane or drab as the offerings we have today as the result of filtering by the existing pre-selected calculation methods. Nothing could be more boring than determinism in the arts, and randomness can stir things up.

Under the current system, the more awards an artist accumulates, the more suspicious I become of their work. Art should be about original ideas, not about an artist’s ability to schmooze and work the system to their advantage. If it does nothing else, the lottery system equalizes the playing field.

Is it fair? It depends who you ask. Certainly well-established artists and composers might feel threatened by the idea that their next commission or grant would be awarded on the basis of a lottery. But for many others, perhaps the majority, it does provide at least a chance of success and access to potential financial and artistic resources that they have difficulty accessing. While the odds would not be in any particular recipients favor and generally quite low, at least every basically qualified artist would get an equal shot at the prize.

Some will argue that with a lottery system everyone will suffer. This fear is overblown. The truly committed with continue their work and regularly apply for funding and commissions via the newly instituted arts-lottery system - while the dilatant will grow bored and seek other ways to pass their time. Those who apply more often will improve their success rate. In some cases an individual would have an equal (or better) success rate with the randomized selection method than the existing systems of selection utilized by the status quo.

Ultimately, the proposed lottery selection system would be generally accepted by the majority of creators of art and music, but it would also hold tangible benefits for the public at large too. Some of its positive outcomes in the field of music would include randomized listening tracks on the radio, new pieces of concert music by completely unknown composers, and an open and unregulated playing field unhindered by politics. These would all be welcome contributing factors to a newly vitalized new music scene, and I would embrace all of them as a positive trend toward something better than what we have today.

A few defining moments in music

2011-10-07T16:00:00.001-04:00

Few moments in the history of music seem to engender the gravitas and weight of a major inflection point. By this I mean that these musical events take on a meaning that transcends the individual musical composition or the career of one individual. These performances become defining moments (of almost mythical proportion) in the arc of history that we all learn about, internalize, and assimilate. A few examples that come to my mind are:

•The première of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1824 in Vienna.

•The riot that occurred when Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Le sacre du printemps was premièred by the Ballets Russes in 1913 at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris.

•When Leonard Bernstein - having recently been appointed assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra - stepped in on short notice for an ailing Bruno Walter in 1943.

•When Van Cliburn achieved worldwide recognition in 1958 at age 23 by winning the International Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow.

•When Jimi Hendrix achieved fame in the United States following his 1967 performance at the Monterey Pop Festival.

What are your defining moments in music?

Professional Development

2011-08-28T22:00:00.004-04:00

A little history...

I began this blog over three years ago after losing my day-job. At the time I thought it would be good to record my activities, thoughts, and impressions in a format that resembled a diary – only online and available to friends, family, and anyone who cared enough to read it. As the blog progressed my primary area of focus morphed into an open-ended discussion about my thoughts on music and other random rants of the day. My semi-frequent posts have tended to focus on aspects of contemporary music composition and items of interest that relate to it in the periphery, both historically and in the present.

In retrospect, “Deconstructing-Jim” has also served to function as a personal digital soapbox and electronic therapist in an age where, in the spirit of Reality TV, it’s socially acceptable to spill ones guts online. I’m appreciative of all those who have read my blog posts over the past years and have taken the initiative to contact me, reply online, and find out a little more about my music. In the end there has been value if this blog leads one to consider (or reconsider) aspects of my musical work. Over the duration, it’s been an interesting ride.

My blog posts have included random (and not-so-random) thoughts about the challenges of being a 20th/21st century composer, including some of the more mundane and practical matters of self-sufficiency and self-preservation. It’s a story that often goes untold. Yet, I think it is useful at times to explain to the public what many composers actually do to earn their living, and how they maintain their motivation over the long haul. The game of survival often involves jumping through hoops like a circus dog just to make ends meet and to move on to the next level.

Everyone knows that not all composers have the privilege and support of a university position, or even the sporadic income of royalty checks, and/or major commissions. But there are some - a lucky few - who are in that position. If they are diligent and disciplined in their work, they will be successful - almost by default.

I’m not one of those composers.

For me, the music profession has never been fertile ground for generating income. For better or worse, I have never earned a penny from the trade. I’ve never held a teaching job, taught private students, or received a paid commission. It’s not that I haven’t applied myself, but rather that the music I create has had (for whatever reason) minimal commercial success.

Fortunately I’ve been able to survive into middle age with most of my teeth and all of my fingers by working day-jobs of various sorts. I’ve been employed as a dishwasher, security guard, retail sales clerk, house painter, technical trainer, car salesman, technical instructor, and made a career in IT for a time. Some of my day-jobs have been better than others, but all of them taught me something. I’ve also been fortunate in that my wife works (albeit part-time) and has benefits. As a family we’ve been able strive toward the iconic middle class American dream, even though I have made vigorous efforts on the side to promote my own music and career in whatever way I can.

I have to say that given the challenges, when trying to balance composing music with earning a living, all has gone fairly well. That is, at least up until now.

After the loss of my full-time job and benefits in 2008, my personal financial position has declined. As we all know too well, the economy has taken a precipitous plunge into the abyss of recession. The unemployment rate in the US is officially over 9%, but some say that in reality true unemployment hovers around 20%. Any semblance of financial recovery does not seem imminent, at least not in the next few years. The experts say it may take decades before things return to normal.

Since 2008 I landed some part time and temporary contract work in IT for a period, but that also came to an abrupt end. The latest news is that our family lifeline, my wife’s long-term steady job, may in jeopardy due to corporate reorganization.

The timing could not be worse since the employment outlook is dire. After having no success applying for jobs in IT or in higher education, it became clear that I couldn’t continue to burn through personal savings in the hope that the US economy will turn around anytime soon. I found myself applying for entry level jobs that pay a fraction of what I once earned. Yet, even those jobs are now more difficult to acquire - especially for someone in their late 50’s. At one of many job fairs I heard a story about an open position at Barnes and Noble in downtown Boston that attracted 1,000 applicants. That dire fact is fairly representative of what it’s like in the general job market today, and it’s pretty unsettling to anyone who is unemployed.

Recently my luck improved. I was invited to a job event hosted by a large supermarket chain. I spent the day interviewing with them, and came away with a job offer. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the salary is $10/hour. After some consideration, I accepted the offer and have begun work.

In my new role at the supermarket is working as a bagger. I’ve done jobs of this sort before. I can do it again. Although standing on my feet for eight hours a day will be a challenge, I’d rather work than not, be able to pay my bills, and not fall into debt or spiral in downward path financially. I also have a son who could use our assistance in paying his college tuition. I am grateful for the income.

My emotions about my new day-job are mixed. While it is a relief to finally find something after such a long search for employment, it also is unsettling to know that trying to live on a much lower income stream will be a significant challenge. I’m also perturbed about the current economic impact that has resulted from mistakes made by a number of our country’s political leaders, policy makers, and by the grandiose power grab by greedy corporate executives that initiated the global financial meltdown in the first place.

And yet I realize that I’m in the same sinking boat as many Americans, and better off than a lot of them. But it is disconcerting to realize that what I thought would eventually be my retirement years now seems so much farther away in time. It’s as if my retirement future has disappearing from sight as it slips over a moving horizon in a Las Vegas magic show. Counting the additional years to retirement creates a sinking feeling.

I’ve long accepted the fact that I’ve never been able to compose full-time as a profession. That dose of reality has always been mitigated by the notion that I could use my retirement years in pursuit of that lofty passion. Now, unfortunately, even that goal looks less promising.

The success and survival of the new music trade is more important than the success of any particular individual. For that reason I’m glad that at least some of our nation’s composers are thriving and able to create work in the down economy. At least there are still some resources available to them. There are only a limited number of commissions, university jobs, and prestigious foundations to support and aid their work, and I’ve come to conclude that there is just not enough funding to go around to support a broader spectrum of composers such as myself. The tendency has been to award commissions, grants, and academic accolades to composers who have already demonstrated success – based mostly by the quantity and quality of awards they have already received. My unscientific analysis indicates that: as more awards and distinctions are presented to a composer, the more he/she is inclined to receive them in the future. It’s an interesting relationship. [Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls this the “Survivorship Bias”].

I do believe that it is important for someone fill the societal role of “professional composer” since a world with a few good pieces is better than a world without any. Given the state of the U.S. economy, not everyone in the field is worthy of that unique privilege.

My new job as a supermarket bagger is physically demanding. Pushing trains of shopping carts in from the parking lot tires me out. Standing all day is an acquired skill.

I have begun to dream about my job, and an unscripted scene from an imaginary encounter runs through my head. In it, I’m at work bagging groceries for my customers passing through the checkout line. The next customer arrives at Register 8 with a carriage full of items to purchase. I look up and notice that they are a distinguished American composer with university tenure. I smile, and then ask the critical question, “Paper or plastic?”

Found in the archives

2011-08-06T16:44:00.013-04:00

(Difficult to read, but here's what it says....)

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Burney

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Everyone loves a celebrity

2011-07-22T11:24:00.015-04:00

It’s human nature to lend our attention to those who have acquired Stardom and the accruements that come with it, namely: fame, success, and personal wealth. Movie Stars, TV Personalities, and Pop Music Icons are among the household names that everyone – I mean everyone – knows. It’s as if in mass-culture we assume that everyone has a basic understanding of the most popular trends in art and music.

For several generations now, media has been the de facto conveyor of popular aesthetic norms, and anyone without cable television and/or broadband Internet access will find themselves solidly on the wrong side of the proverbial Digital Divide.

While I have accessibility to new media today, it wasn’t always that way. After graduating high school in the early 1970’s I went off to college and for several decades intentionally lived in a self-imposed cultural bubble. It’s as if I choose to limit the sensory input of mass-media around me, and focus primarily (and very intensely) on a select area of musical endeavor: contemporary concert music. I attended live concerts constantly, hung out with practicing musicians and composers, and fully immersed myself in what I found to be exciting new music scenes in Boston and New York. I considered this to be part and parcel of learning my trade, and an essential ingredient for developing my personal style. The only technology that connected me to the world was a rotary dial telephone, a record player, and a FM radio for the news.

Filtering out mass media, and the pop culture that fuels it, has a downside too. One can quickly become a nerd and social outcast. Even today I often feel like an alien in my own country when people I meet discuss personalities and celebrities I’ve never heard of. Social settings can be awkward. Conversely, many of the musicians and composers that I know (and who inspire me) are virtually unknown to everyday individuals. It’s a sad fact, but I’ve gotten used to it.

Fortunately, there are still a few who co-exist with me in my cultural bubble. It does seem that the bubble population has been in decline as the elder members, the old guard of the new music cult, pass away. But through the magic of social networking and with the influx of a few eager, similarly-minded souls, there is still enough oxygen in the bubble to provide the elements of basic life-support.

My cultural bubble included some late, great heroes - “eminent” composers that not everyone has heard of: Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Luciano Berio, John Cage, Edward T. Cone, Ross Lee Finney, Lukas Foss, Andrew Imbrie, Leon Kirchner, David Lewin, György Ligeti, and my teacher Donald Martino. Other composers, still alive and active in the bubble today include: Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, George Crumb, Mario Davidovsky, John Harbison, Meredith Monk, Shulamit Ran, Steve Reich, Gunther Schuller, Stephen Stucky, Charles Wuorinen, Yehudi Wyner, Chen Yi, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. That's quite a diverse group.

All of the composers listed in the paragraph above are examples of musicians who have exceled to the highest level of accomplishment in the field of contemporary concert music. They have written cutting-edge chamber and orchestral works. Although not superstars in the celebrity sense, they’ve achieved a modest following within the field and won the respect and admiration of their peers. If there is a valid measure of success in the niche discipline of new music composition, these composers have clearly demonstrated it.

What I find strange about current trends in culture is the idea that a cultural bubble (such as the one I was nurtured in) is in some way academic or elitist. If one looks from inside the bubble to the outside world, it looks a little different. My decision to self-isolate during my youth and develop within a limited space was one of personal choice. Everyone has the right to do so, if they wish.

At least some people have opted to limit their exposure from the onslaught of mass culture to focus on the finer details of a different brand of art and music. It’s not elitist to focus one’s attention on a narrower area of expression by filtering out the collective noise of modern society. True, some practitioners of contemporary music composition are employed by a university, but I wouldn’t hold that against them. Everyone’s gotta make a living. Not everyone has the resources, notoriety, or income stream of a celeb. But not all academics are academicians. Let’s avoid guilt by association as a default argument.

Here's my point….

The list of composers mentioned above was of inducted Members (and Honorary Foreign Members) of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) in Somerville, MA. The AAAS is one of the several long-established pillars of scholarly accomplishment. Its “elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.” The Academy was founded in 1780, and has been one of the few non-profit scholarly organizations willing to recognize and endorse serious composers on an equal footing with professionals in other distinguished fields. Kudos to the AAAS.

But recently the AAAS seems to be allowing itself to be swayed by the monolithic gravitational force of pop culture. In recent years, the numbers of musicians inducted into the AAAS have broadened in scope. While fewer composers of serious concert music have been admitted over time, celebrity-artists seem to be making the cut ever more frequently. It’s as if there is a conscious effort by the general AAAS membership to avoid selecting composers who may be avant garde or obscure in favor of entertainment personalities with names that everyone knows.

Composers of serious concert music will never be able to compete on equal footing with Rock Stars and Pop Icons. They don’t have the name-recognition, backing, wealth, or fame that goes with that job description. That’s one of the reasons why an organization like the AAAS should exist, to provide recognition and support for artistic creators with a minority viewpoint. The size of an artist’s audience and bank account should not be a measure of their creative or professional success.

I have nothing against Rock Stars. I hold no ill feelings toward them. However, before you send threats and hate mail my way, let me admit that I too appreciate what they do (for what it is). But, I have to wonder what the broader social value is of inducting Superstars into the AAAS?

What benefit or value does Bono (Paul David Hewson) derive from his AAAS membership? (Mind you, Bono’s election to the AAAS was based on his career in music, not for his admirable work with the UN, social justice, and charity). Bono's rock band U2 is said to have earned $195 million dollars in 2010 [Forbes].

For the Class of 2011, the AAAS will induct singer-songwriters Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, and Leonard Cohen - while not a single composer of concert music will be admitted. Do Megastar celebrity artists actually give a hoot about the accolades of academic distinction? On the other hand, most composers of serious concert music elected to the AAAS would likely regard such appointment as a great honor and a significant milestone in their career. The award has historically lent at least momentary recognition and encouragement to a composer’s life-long creative work.

Is this a sign of our times? Aren’t there enough living composers of sufficient talent to merit inclusion in the 2011 Class of the AAAS? Could it be that society defines success by how much fame an artist generates rather than the innate quality and uniqueness of their expression? Are there too few serious composers with the prerequisite name-recognition to qualify for inclusion?

Offhand I can think of at least two dozen contemporary composers who are highly qualified and worthy of inclusion in the AAAS. In years past, they probably would have been inducted without hesitation.

As I see it, this is endemic of a general societal trend toward Populism. Most distressing is the long-term prognosis for my self-erected cultural balloon. It’s one thing when a group of musicians voluntarily choose to isolate themselves from the media hype of celebrity culture to practice their trade within the peace and seclusion of a small self-defined and dedicated artistic community. It’s another when the bubble is rudely penetrated from the outside, and the sanctity of the semi-private artistic space is violated.

It’s getting harder to selectively tune out the deafening noise of our collective popular culture. Its presence is all pervasive and persuasive. However I worry that there will still be a place left in the bubble for those of us who prefer to tune into a different, non-commercial radio frequency.

But, I admit, everyone loves a celebrity.

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Force of Nature

2011-03-19T11:00:00.005-04:00

American composer Milton Babbitt (1916-2011) was a Force of Nature. I have never met, and may never encounter again, anyone quite like him. His close friends, colleagues, and students have already published numerous eloquent online tributes since his passing on January 29th. I feel inclined to contribute something too, if for no other reason than to make an attempt at personal closure.

I have been a great admirer of his work, and will continue to be going forward. I wish everyone could share my enthusiasm about this man and his music. But how does one begin to describe a person who was truly amazing on so many levels? I find that it’s not easy to summarize my impressions about Milton Byron Babbitt since he was enigmatic in many regards. Babbitt had a multi-dimensional personality, and his music and theoretical writings were as equally complex and diverse.

To set the record straight, I can in no way lay claim to have been an official student of Milton Babbitt. While I took every opportunity to attend his frequent lectures and public presentations and met him socially perhaps a dozen times, I never formally studied with him. But over the years we did grow to know each other on a first name basis and shared many mutual connections that spanned across the close-knit network of contemporary music. I was not unique in this regard. It seems that just about every American composer had met Milton at one time or another. He treated everyone he met in his wide travels both professionally and with respect.

Babbitt’s academic career began at Princeton in 1938 where he taught hundreds of composers, musicians, and theorists bridging several generations across the many decades of his long university tenure. Along with Princeton colleagues in other fields such as Albert Einstein and John F. Nash, Babbitt earned a reputation as the quintessential Princeton professor by elevating the university’s music department to comparable levels of academic distinction.

His reputation was in part that of a teacher. It seemed as if all of my college professors in the 1970s and 80s had studied with him. Princeton was the place they had chosen to study – largely because of Babbitt’s presence (his teacher Roger Sessions was on the faculty as well). My teachers had nothing but praise, respect, and plenty of fascinating stories to tell. One such composer, Donald Martino, was among the list of Babbitt's better-known students. Martino eventually became my teacher at New England Conservatory and Brandeis. It’s probably my connection to Don that enabled my relationship to his former teacher and mentor.

For composers of my generation, "Uncle” Milton’s legendary reputation preceded him like a steam locomotive barreling down the tracks. In my youth his electronic music was widely available on LP, his articles were published in Perspectives of New Music, and his notoriety as a new and experimental composer was already very well established. I first learned of Babbitt in high school where his name often appeared in print side-by-side with John Cage. In the late 60s I’d trek from the suburbs to uptown in NY to hear performances by the Group for Contemporary Music of Babbitt’s work by pianist Robert Miller, cellist Fred Sherry, and flutist Harvey Sollberger. These performances made a notable impression on me as a teenager. The music was unlike anything I had ever heard, and it was strangely addictive.

Many of Babbitt’s innovative and infectious ideas concerning musical structure and pitch organization were methodically passed down in academia by well-schooled Princeton graduates. If American Serialism could ever be labeled a historic trend, aesthetic movement, school, or ism, then Babbitt fell into the role of de facto leader and public representative - not out of self-motivation or ambition, but simply because he happened to be present at the historic moment and was the best spokesperson for the job.

As we all know, times change. Starting the late 1970s and up until his recent death, what might be considered a cultural backlash against serial (or “maximal”) music and everything it represents has progressively gained strength in the broader world of contemporary music. Undeterred, perhaps even spurred on by the stiff opposition and challenge, Babbitt continued his work throughout this period of rising negative criticism, contentious debate, and never-ending negative commentary in the press. As an objective realist he acknowledged that his music was not going to win any popularity contests, even within the small and highly-resilient, self-sustaining subculture of contemporary music.

Babbitt was perceptive enough to see that general interest in his unique vision of music had been rapidly waning in recent years. Yet he persisted in forging new and ever-more complex pieces written quite expressly for what came to be a very select pool of dedicated supporters and performers. Reluctantly he had to abandon composing electronic music on the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center for reasons related to hardware failure and technological obsolescence, and began to write exclusively for the new breed of extraordinary instrumentalists and singers who committed themselves to push the boundaries of what is musically possible. They took on the formative challenge of performing his increasingly complex work on traditional instruments. It’s interesting to note that Babbitt’s acoustically generated music takes full advantage of discoveries regarding sound, modern acoustics, and the psychology of musical perception that he acquired during years of hands-on research with the RCA Synthesizer. His early experimentation and creative output in analog electronic music clearly informed his technique for later compositions written for acoustic instruments and orchestra.

Initially, I spied Babbitt as an outside observer during the period when he joined the faculty at the Juilliard School of Music in 1973. I heard his Correspondences for string orchestra and synthesized tape (1967) when it was conducted in 1976 by Pierre Boulez at a Festival of Contemporary Music and other works. Babbitt was a frequent participant on various composer panel discussions at Juilliard and elsewhere in NYC, and he always tended to standout with his lucid commentary and articulate discourse on a wide-array of topics during these diverse formal and informal talks. He seemed to be at every significant new music concert throughout the city.

After I moved to Boston in ‘73, Babbitt visited us frequently as guest lecturer and composer, partly because his daughter lived in the area. He accepted visiting professor stints at most of the area’s conservatories and universities and was often invited by the local new music ensembles to be a featured composer, including Collage New Music, Alea III, Fromm Players at Harvard, Boston Music Viva, and Dinosaur Annex. At these events I noticed that he always seemed to wear the same suit, and was usually long overdue for a haircut on the sides of his head. His large-frame plastic glasses were an icon, and some of the local grad-students would consciously or unconsciously emulate his 70’s fashion statement. (It is said that the majority of composers in the Music Department at Princeton during the1950s took after Babbitt and became chain smokers).

In the summer of 1981 I decided to travel to Indiana to attend a one-week lecture-seminar and composition forum where Babbitt would be the featured Composer in Residence. His wife Sylvia had driven them the long distance from New Jersey (Babbitt did not drive, and Silvia did not fly). On the Monday morning of the seminar I strategically positioned myself front-row center for his lecture in full anticipation of what others had forewarned would be an exciting intellectual roller-coaster ride.

There were perhaps a hundred people in the large room, largely composers and theorists from all around the country. Babbitt was introduced by the Dean of the music department, who I later had heard made his reputation in the Mid-west as a leader of marching bands. The Dean wore a bright yellow polyester blazer that may have later found its way to the wardrobe department for David Lynch’s 1986 cult movie mystery “Blue Velvet.” The Dean’s flowery recitation of Babbitt’s bio during his introduction included the statement, “Dr. Babbitt’s music is performed by major orchestras all over the world.”

After the Dean’s introductory remarks, Milton began to speak. He thanked the Dean for his comments, but corrected him with a smile, “With all due respect, my music is NOT performed by major orchestras all over the world. I wish it were.” And then, without batting an eye, Babbitt began scribbling tiny note heads on the chalk board. First one and then two. Step-by-step he methodically laid out a neat and concise view of a Musical Universe – full of order and logic – like I had never seen or heard before.

His lectures that week were scintillating, full of high energy, and mind-bending. I had intended to take notes, but failed to keep up with the rapid-fire flow of information and personal antidote. In some ways it seemed that he was improvising, like the saxophonist he had been in his youth. He lectured for hours on end, and didn’t need to refer to notes. Everything was done from memory. Yet the lecture was well organized, very specific, detailed, and interesting. Years later I discovered some of the same subject matter in the book Words About Music: The Madison Lectures where two of Babbitt’s former students at Princeton were finally able to transcribe and capture the content and essence of his famously endowed pontification.

It’s no secret that Babbitt could really talk. He’d take a deep breath, and sentences would flow out like steam blowing from a pressure cooker. But the dialogue always made perfect sense, both syntactically and contextually. His streaming prose was elegantly constructed and a joy to listen to, even if you didn’t comprehend at first the deep meaning, intricacies, and context of the content. His unusually fast pace of speech made it possible for the listener to connect longer strings of ideas and associate them on a much broader scale than we are ordinarily accustomed to. His words were, on some level, punctuated like music itself.

The week-long event in Indiana was also an occasion to hear his new work, Ars Combinatoria for small orchestra (1981). Babbitt had just completed the piece, and one of the reasons he was invited out to the Mid-west was to attend the world premiere.

In the afternoon while most of the composers and theorists would retreat back to the dorms to avoid a sweltering Indiana summer heat wave, I’d walk across the sprawling campus to hear the student orchestra rehearse his new work. At the first rehearsal Milton sat with his former student John Eaton. I was surprised when the conductor greeted the orchestra and told them that Babbitt’s Ars Combinatoria was a “set of variations.” He then proceeded to point out the bar numbers that mark each variation. I learned later from Babbitt that this was the conductor’s ploy to make the music more accessible to the orchestra. The composer had reluctantly gone along with it – at least for the rehearsals.

As you might expect with a summer student pickup orchestra, the rehearsals did not go well. At the second rehearsal, I sat near Milton in the center of the concert hall. He appeared to be more and more disappointed with how the rehearsal of his new work was going. At one point the first violin section fell completely apart while playing what I recall was the following rhythm…

Milton looked up from his score, looked over at me, and quietly uttered in his trademark bass voice, “Now don’t tell me that’s hard!”

He confided in me his suspicion that a few unruly members of the orchestra had intentionally conspired to sabotage the performance, particularly the clarinetist. Whatever the motivations, it is clear that the work needed more rehearsal time than had been allocated. Yet it seemed to me that most of the rehearsal time was dedicated to music on the second half of the program - Sheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Undaunted by the shaky rehearsals, Babbitt’s daily morning lectures continued with the same intensity throughout the rest of the week. All of the participants in the lecture hall were simply dazzled by his brilliance, vast knowledge about music, and experience.

As part of the Indiana Composers’ Forum, I was to have a work sight-read by the student contemporary music ensemble. Babbitt and my fellow students would be there to observe. Although I had greatly anticipated this opportunity, it turned out to be a little different than I had hoped: the pianist never showed up, the rest of chamber orchestra sight-read miserably. Everyone was out of sync, and the dynamics and pitches were way off. As a result I had a minor-meltdown.

After the musicians packed up and left, Babbitt - who had followed my score and knew exactly what I was going through emotionally - calmly said, “Now Jim, tell us about your piece.” I caught my breath, and began to discuss what I had intended to achieve musically. From there Babbitt led an interesting dialogue with me and my fellow students about the craft of musical composition, and about ways in which a piece can be put together and organized. One thing that surprised me at the time was how he focused more on the parameters of rhythm and instrumental tone color than on pitch. For example he thought I had over-used the vibraphone in the piece (having gotten his full dose of the instrument from overuse in 1930’s pop music). In retrospect, he was exactly right. Fortunately I had a recording of the same work performed by a different ensemble, and when my short private lesson with Babbitt occurred later as part of the Composers Forum, we listened to a much better performance on cassette tape.

The performance of Babbitt’s Ars Combinatoria occurred on Friday evening. While some of the details of the work may have blurred in my mind and been obscured from the passage of time, the rich sonorities of the music still stick in my memory after all of these years. From what I recall, the piece is chock-full of interesting chords, all uniquely spaced, orchestrated, and voiced. Like much of his music from this period, it’s rather dense in texture. The orchestra in his hands sounds organ-like, or perhaps similar to the RCA Mark II Synthesizer in some regards. Hearing the piece performed live, even in a questionable performance, was exciting.

There was an interesting interaction between a member of the audience and Babbitt at intermission just after his work was premiered. It was an encounter that I will never forget. An Indiana farmer wearing a cowboy hat ventured into the university concert hall directly from the adjacent corn fields. He still had his soiled coveralls on, and I imagined that he drove to the concert in a red pickup with bales of hay loaded on the back of his truck. The farmer approached Milton Babbitt and asked a very direct and honest question, “Dr. Babbitt, what is the story of your piece?” (Remember, Sheherazade was the next work on the program).

All week Milton had skillfully danced around answering any specific technical questions regarding his own music. These probing questions generally emanated from a select group of intellectually prying music theorists. But, in this case, this night, and after this premiere, Milton replied very directly to the farmer’s question… “The story of my piece is the piece itself.”

The farmer took Babbitt’s reply as a matter-of-fact answer, and he even appeared to comprehend the self-referential philosophical concept that Babbitt was alluding to. There was no need to supply a footnote to Nelson Goodman’s obscure book “The Structure of Appearance” or reference the detailed row charts that underlay the galaxy of serialized combinatorial structures embedded within Ars Combinatoria. On that hot Indiana night, for farmers, grad students, and composers alike, it was just music.

Just having the privilege to meet Babbitt in person (both in social and formal settings), hearing his lectures, being exposed to his music, and attempting to comprehend his complex articles made me a better composer. For me, the amazing thing is that out of all the people I've ever met or have come in contact in life, Milton easily stands out as the most brilliant - by a mile. His mind, capacity for logic, and encyclopedic memory about everything from cutting edge mathematics to competitive sports to the best place to get Southern cooking continued to flow out of his large brain like a gushing reservoir of knowledge. Even when he was in his 90s, it was hard to keep pace with his rapidly spewing thoughts, deep contemplation, bawdy humor, wisdom and insight. He thought, spoke, and wrote music that moved in hyper-speed.

Knowing my own limitations, I can safely say that I don't comprehend all the intricacies of his theoretical work. I once privately mused that Milton came from another planet and was dropped onto Earth to share his vast knowledge of a new and advanced ways of looking at things – particularly music. He had ideas that far exceeded what has previously been known in the world, and he shared them freely with anyone who would listen.

And yet, he was down to earth. Milton could be funnier than the best of stand-up comics, and at times engaged as a party animal indulging in boutique beer. He was a scholar, a gentleman, a confidant, a family man, and he networked with tens of thousands of people in the profession of music and music theory all across the world.

Personally I am indebted for Babbitt for his attempts to assist me in my career. In 1985 he very kindly wrote a Fulbright recommendation on my behalf. Later, he wrote another recommendation to the Fromm Foundation at Harvard. In 2001 after I sent him the score to my newly completed (but yet-to-be performed) orchestra piece Tone Poem, he wrote back that he had decided to nominate me for a prestigious award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters - a distinguished organization where he was inducted as a life-time member in 1965.

Babbitt’s support provided a boost to my self-confidence, and I credit him for providing me with courage to continue on in what is often a difficult profession. I was particularly honored that out of all of his students at Princeton and Juilliard, Babbitt decided to nominate me that year for the American Academy of Arts and Letters award. Even though his recommendations and nominations ultimately didn’t pan out in my favor, I can always look back and say that at least Milton Babbitt liked my music.

It seems as if every composer I speak with has a similar story about Babbitt - how he helped them in their career one way or another. He always advocated for younger composers, and would not hesitate to stand up to fight political battles on their behalf if necessary.

In his last years we corresponded by back and forth by letter. I’d keep him abreast of news in Boston, and he’d always reply back. When James Levine commissioned his Concerti for Orchestra (2004) for the Boston Symphony, I saw it as an opportunity to facilitate a meeting between Babbitt and his famous student, Don Martino.

Martino had not been in good health. He was recovering from various surgeries and had difficulty getting around. I offered to be his driver, and with Lora Martino’s assistance, Don was able to get from the curbside at Symphony Hall, up the steps, and inside to his seat. He was clearly in a great deal of pain, but wanted to be present for Babbitt’s important Boston premiere in January of 2005. I had given Milton a heads up that we were coming, but mentioned some of the logistical difficulties.

The Martino’s and Milton met briefly just before the concert, and exchanged greetings. Don seemed surprised that Milton knew he would be there, and that he was aware of some of his recent news. “How did you know that?” Don asked. Milton glanced over in my direction and said, “A little bird told me.”

After Babbitt’s piece was performed and he returned from his bows on the stage, the Martino’s and I caught-up with Milton by chance at the door just before he reentered back into the concert hall seating area. I happened to have a camera and caught the instant they met. I kept my distance as an outside observer, but the moment was truly instilled with at least a half century of history. Regrettably, the moment was all too brief and it would be the last time the two illustrious 12-tone composers would meet face-to-face. Martino died later that year.

I have always been acutely aware that someday the world would lose its most remarkable people, great composers and mentors like Milton Babbitt and Don Martino. I suppose that is one of the things that made me appreciate them so much while they were alive. In my mind they were heroic. What makes the loss even more challenging is the realization that, at least in the world of music composition, people of that level of talent and ability are an increasingly rare breed. It’s really seems like the void they left behind hasn’t been filled by anyone else.

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Collage New Music

2011-02-08T20:32:00.004-05:00

http://www.collagenewmusic.org/

http://classical-scene.com/2011/03/08/collage’s-sextet/

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Piano Quintet (2001)

2011-01-22T15:00:00.008-05:00

Here is my Piano Quintet (2001):

(best if viewed at 1080p HD)

Movement I:

Movement II:

Movement III:

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Musical Interude

2010-10-31T21:00:00.000-04:00

and now for a little flute music...

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Concert schedule

2010-10-01T21:00:00.023-04:00

Harold in Italy (2008)
for Alto Saxophone and Piano

Rachel G. Cox, saxophone
Robert Jeter, piano

October 2nd, 2010 7:30 PM
Composers Forum
ETSU Music Dept., Mathes Hall
East Tennesse State University
Johnson City, TN

Soliloquy (2010)
for solo flute

Willemien Insinger, flute

Music to Cure MS Benefit Concert
Oct 24th, 2010 3 PM
Park Ave Congregational Church
50 Paul Revere Rd.
Arlington, MA

http://singtocurems.org/index.html

http://artsfuse.org/?p=13126

Song without Words (2005) for Piano

I-Yun Chung, piano

November 18th, 7 PM
Steinert Hall, Boston MA
http://www.msteinert.com/home/

November 19th, 7:30 PM
The Lily Pad, Cambridge, MA
http://www.lily-pad.net/

Three Perambulations (2010)
for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion

Collage New Music
David Hoose, Music Director
Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 8pm
Pickman Hall
Longy School of Music, Cambridge MA

http://www.collagenewmusic.org/index.html

Song without Words (2005) for Piano

..."an evocatively musing and third-laden essay subtly tinged with early Berg" - www.newmusicon.org

Cathy Remus Shefski, piano

Saturday, March 19th , 2011 (Revised Date!)
2011 Salon Concert Series
The Music Studio
Clarks Summit, PA

http://allpiano.wordpress.com/
http://www.timesleader.com/AbingtonJournal/aande/Chopin_Piano_Salon_at_The_Music_Studio_May_14_05-11-2010.html

Upcoming Performance

2010-09-12T23:00:00.000-04:00

I'm honored to have an upcoming performance

at ETSU (East Tennessee State University)

on October 2nd, 2010

of my piece for Saxophone and Piano titled

Harold in Italy.

The performers will be...

Rachel G. Cox received a Master’s Degree in Saxophone Performance from the University of Georgia and a Bachelor’s Degree from East Tennessee State University, where she was a student of Thomas Crawford. She plays bass clarinet and saxophone in the Symphony of the Mountains and the Johnson City Symphony Orchestra. In the past, she was a member of the nationally recognized Watauga Saxophone Quartet. Ms. Cox was also a semi-finalist in the Kingsville International Young Performer’s Competition. The Floyd Cramer Scholarship and the Frank E. Little Outstanding Student Award were among her academic awards. In addition to working as a postal clerk in Jonesborough, Tennessee, Ms. Cox directs the orchestra and Selah Brass quintet at Central Baptist Church in Johnson City. She also performs in the Johnson City Community Concert Band.

Robert Jeter received his Master of Music degree in piano performance in 2006 from the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, studying with Phillip Kawin. He earned his Bachelor of Music degree from East Tennessee State University in 2004 studying piano with Dr. Lynn Rice-See. Mr. Jeter has served as adjunct faculty at ETSU since 2006 teaching in the Music Theory department.

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Program Notes:

My sonata for alto saxophone and piano “Harold in Italy” has nothing to do with Berlioz’ work of the same name. The title refers to the American neoclassic composer Harold Shapero with whom I studied with at Brandeis in the early 1980’s. Harold Shapero is a musical institution that made an indelible mark on the modern music of his generation. He kept students engaged with his seemingly endless stories about the important musical figures that he was so closely associated with: Igor Stravinsky, “Lenny” Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Nadia Boulanger – just to name a few.

Harold strived to pass down to his students the fundamentals of music making, including the elements of traditional fugue, tonal harmony, and sonata form. His admiration of select popular music and the great classical composers – Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven – was inspiring.

So, when I had the opportunity of writing a piece celebrating Harold Shapero’s birthday, I felt it would be interesting to abandon my usual “modernist” style and attempt to compose a piece in a language that would more appropriately reflect an aspect of my student experiences. For example, towards the end of the Divertimento, my sonata combines a jazzy sax “improv” accompanied by an extended verbatim excerpt from the Andante movement of the Mozart A Major Piano Concerto Nr. 23 K.488. The slow second movement is an attempt at a musical theme for an imaginary Italian art film. In the final movement, I “deranged” the Presto of Haydn’s Sonata No. 43 in E Flat Major (Hob.XVI:28) and turned it into a Latin American Tango. These disparate influences conspire to form the intentionally jovial nature of the work.

Finally, the title also refers to the historical fact that in 1941 Harold Shapero won the prestigious Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome, but had his residency cancelled because of World War II. Fortunately, in 1970 he was able to belately claim his trip to Italy in the capacity of Composer-in-Residence at the American Academy in Rome.

The piece was first perfomed by Kenneth Radnofsky (sax) and John McDonald (piano) on April 29th, 2007 at a LUMEN Contemporary Music concert held on Shapero’s 87th birthday.

Link: http://www.etsu.edu/calendar/EventList.aspx?view=EventDetails&eventidn=4534&information_id=18449&type=&syndicate=syndicate

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Thin Ice

2010-09-11T09:00:00.001-04:00

The new music group Sequitur has released a CD of Concertos that offer reassurance, if not absolute proof, that the modern Concerto (as an art-form) is alive and well [Albany Records, TROY 1181].

The CD includes fine works by Ross Bauer, Steven Burke, and Martin Matalon. All three are composers of exceptional talent and formidable skill, but the piece that stands out in my mind is Thin Ice by Ross Bauer.

Bauer's piece is a Concerto for cello and chamber orchestra. The work is elegant, precise, and razor-sharp in its execution of logical and dramatic form. Thin Ice draws me in, seducing me to listen to what the soloist and orchestra have to say. It's not a "one idea" work, but rather an extended multi-leveled narrative with an internal dialogue that promotes thought, excitement, and repeated visits to the CD player.

This Concerto, and the language Bauer has carefully honed over the course of decades of professional practice, resonate with me in ways that I can't fully explain. It's as if his music speaks for me, on my behalf, with a clarity and sentiment that I can fully relate to. It's so convincing that I'm solidly on board for the voyage, wherever it may lead.

Bauer's music is all about content; not novel gimmicks, sensational effects, or unusual devices. From the outset, Thin Ice presents a consistent and unified harmonic language that lays a groundwork for the progress that both folds and unfolds - not unlike the age-old practice of Japanese Origami in the hands of a master.

Lasting nearly 24 minutes and organized into four contrasting movements, Thin Ice enlists the extraordinary abilities and talents of the Violoncello soloist (Greg Hesselink). From a performance perspective, Hesselink performs acrobatics that truly push the envelope of what's possible on his instrument to the edge. At times, especially when he plays high in the stratosphere, we really do feel as if he is an Olympic skater performing feats of dazzling acrobatic wonder on ice. Working collaboratively, Bauer's writing and Hesselink's performance maintain our long-term interest and undivided attention. Although this is a sizable work, time passes quickly.

The sound of the chamber orchestra is not shabby either, and the members of Sequitur under the direction of conductor Paul Hostetter sound agile and confident in this recording. Sequitur, from their home-base in NYC, is led by co-Artistic Directors Harold Meltzer and Sara Laimon.

Check it out.

Links:

http://www.sequitur.org/
http://www.dramonline.org/content/notes/albany/tr1181.pdf
http://www.rossbauermusic.com/
http://music.ucdavis.edu/people/ross-bauer
http://www.albanyrecords.com/

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On Originality

2010-09-10T09:00:00.003-04:00

One of the more perplexing questions that looms underneath the hood of creativity is the notion of originality.

Every time I begin a new work, internal voices of discontent rise to contradict a slew of emerging ideas put forth by my personal Muse. The voice of Mr. Antagonist is often louder than that of Mr. Muse, who tends to be a rather loosy-goosey naïve chap who doesn’t care much about practical matters such as follow-through and delivery. One of the nagging questions that my Antagonist keeps harping on is a Big Kahuna: the big fat question about originality.

Now, if I or any of my immediate colleagues were to pre-screen our ideas against the body of musical work that has been produced to date, we would probably find a lot of precedents for what we are writing. As much as we would like to think we are original, we very often draw upon the stored memory of works that reside in our collective past experience, works that have influenced us profoundly in one way or another. From that wellspring, we remodel those techniques, patterns, and sounds into a seemingly new framework that (one hopes) will reflect our thoughts and ideas within the context of our uniquely personal tone of voice.

I am not one of those composers who has an ambition to invent a brand new syntax, create an entirely new musical language, or start a brand new artistic school or movement. I’m too preoccupied just writing down what I hear. That task tends to be challenging enough and a full-time job in itself. But as a composer of comparatively conservative tastes, I my internal Antagonist occasionally asks the question about the relevance of my work. Seeds of doubt are sown throughout my psyche.

The basic set of standard resources of contemporary classical music have been rather consistent and surprisingly static over the past 100 years or so. The primary materials are about as generic as they can get. I work with 11 pitches to the octave, rhythms that are easily played, and instrumentation that hasn’t changed much since the good ol'days of Papa Haydn. A lot of other composers work within the same baseline of raw materials. In other words, we design sound-art to be implemented with vocal cords, drums, pianos, flutes, and assorted strings. You can't get more fundamental than that. It's not unlike banging rocks together for entertainment while sitting around the campfire at night. Primitive, but timeless fun.

When it comes to musical form, there is also a predisposition on my part to lean toward structural patterns and musical dialogs that have been hanging around for a while. For example, something as banal as ABA’ form seems agreeable enough to most, and apparently is still possible within a contemporary modernist context. To take this not-so radical idea to another level, there is almost an expectation by the audience that some sort of musical “return” should occur – at least somewhere in the overall design of the musical work.

One law that my Muse and Antagonist can agree on is that "Contrast and Unity are polar opposites." The problem is that they can't agree on what the proper balance and middle ground for Contrast verses Unity should be. The New Complexity school advocates information overload and maximal contrast. The Orthodox sect of the Minimalist party seems to advocate minimal contrast as their overriding virtue (hence their label). I'm in neither camp.

Sometimes I succumb to the voice of negativity in my head and give in to my Antagonist. For example, I had been working on an orchestral piece this summer but shelved it because it just didn’t seem original enough. Following my intuition, I was experimenting with rich chords drawn from late 19th century harmony along with grand orchestral clichés and gestures. But after many weeks of struggle, it finally occurred to me that my audience would be so much better off listening to Richard Strauss or one of David Del Tredici’s lush Alice pieces from the 1980s instead.

My Antagonist regularly attends concerts with me, and is not shy about offering harsh criticism of the works on the program. I’m quite use to his brash cynicism, and sometimes agree with what he says about individual works. His nihilistic attitude about what is considered to be state-of-the-art in this sometimes hokey pokey world contemporary music makes me grin.

I can't fire my Muse or Antagonist. This is a profession I did not volunteer for, and they are necessary partners in crime. I was drafted into this wacky business against my will. I'm incapable of doing anything else, so I better make the most of it. Mr. Muse and Mr. Antagonist are like annoying but unavoidable co-workers assigned to the cubicle next to mine.

One particular example of 21st century self-consciousness arises in the area of musical form. For instance, the concept of the Concerto seems to retain durability in modern times. Yet some composers, such as Boulez, have abandoned the concept entirely. For them it is an impoverished art form, a legacy of past centuries - although their music is clearly virtuosic in every degree.

In contrast, many other composers have embraced the Concerto idea and have chosen to run with the ball. Master American composers such as Peter Lieberson, Elliott Carter, Martin Boykan, and Yehudi Wyner all come to mind as composers who have adopted the Concerto form rather successfully. They have done so even though the classically-derived concerto is probably not up-and-front in the minds of our 21st century European counterparts. It could be that Concertos are just another “American” fetish.

My Antagonist is unrelenting in his brutal analysis of contemporary musical discourse. Just the other day he said that nothing new can be written within the existing framework of standard musical materials (I’m paraphrasing). In other words, I’m redundant and should retire ASAP. Concertos are old hat, and chamber or orchestral works written for traditional instruments using traditional notation and traditional tuning systems are hopelessly old school. To use a metaphor borrowed from the business of Information Technology, it’s like writing code in “COBOL” when the industry has migrated to “dot NET” or “JavaScript.”

Now and then I sit down with my Antagonist and try to prove him wrong. “Originality is not equivalent to Change!" I scream.

I go on to make my case... "Salient examples of new and original music are created all the time in our present culture. These works still blow my socks off – even though they are by common standards of measurement neither radical nor revolutionary. A composer does not have to create a paradigm-shift for every piece they write. As Charles Wuorinen once famously said, 'How do you create a revolution when the guy before you said anything goes?'"

My Antagonist looks up at me with a Devilish grin and blurts out, "You are an idiot."

My Muse sits by silently, paralyzed and afraid to say a word while holding back tears.

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Taking (in) the Fifth

2010-06-14T10:30:00.000-04:00

I spent some quality time yesterday with a recently released CD from Albany Records.

Donald Martino – later works (TROY1167 - ASIN: B00005RGK9) is a professionally produced and exquisitely performed collection of four very significant works composed by Martino in the few years before his untimely death in 2005. The disc includes two Trios: one for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (2003); and another for Violin, Violoncello, and Piano (2004). The recording is rounded out with the Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano (2004) and Martino’s Fifth String Quartet (2004).

As a disclaimer, I should mention that I have closely followed this composers’ music, and over a period of time lasting nearly three decades had been amongst Martino’s circle of friends and former students. I’ve always considered him a grand master and I have tried to advocate for his work in whatever ways I could. In fact, two of the pieces on this CD (Sonata No. 2 and the Trio for Vln, Vlc, and Pno) received their first public performances shortly after the composers’ death at a concert sponsored, curated, and organized by my group the LUMEN Contemporary Music Ensemble. The concert at Harvard University’s Paine Hall was originally intended as a 75th birthday tribute. Sadly, it turned out to be a memorial concert, and Don never got to hear these two works performed live.

For me, as I listen to the new CD on Albany Records, it evokes multiple layers of experience, personal history, context, and emotion – all of which are inexorably entwined and complex in nature. After all, I was in frequent contact and relatively close to the composer personally when he created these amazing late works and was privileged to witness first hand his penultimate burst of musical creativity even as his physical health was in steady decline. I recall visiting him at a Boston rehabilitation hospital where he was recovering for one of his many surgeries and wondered to myself how long he would survive his ordeals. Yet Martino somehow found clarity of strength, focus, concentration, and mustered enough physical energy to compose some of the finest work of his long and distinguished career.

My memories of those final years are bitter-sweet. The four works on this CD were composed from 2003-2005, yet only the earliest - the Trio for Cl, Vlc, and Pno - was actually requested by an ensemble and commissioned. All of the other works from this period were labors of love, composed with little more than a hope that they might be performed by competent musicians: somehow, somewhere, someday. At least to me, this seemed to be surprising and unjust predicament for an Internationally-known Pulitzer Prize-winning composer to find himself in. By most standards of measure, he should have been entering the pinnacle of his career. And yet, while coping with ill health, Martino crafted his final masterpieces undeterred by an apparent lack of interest in his work. He avoided being distracted by the noise around him.

It’s really a sad state of affairs that Martino’s late music wasn’t performed in his lifetime. Although this wonderful CD on Albany Records goes a long way to makeup for the transgression, there is still an important piece of recent music history that in my view is waiting for the light of day. Martino’s last completed work was a Concerto for Orchestra. In my view it is a piece of music equal in quality and significance to Béla Bartók’s work of the same name. Martino’s Concerto was not commissioned by any orchestra, is ready to go, but for reasons that I don’t fully understand - has yet to be programmed and performed. To this day, I find this odd. Compared with some of the new works that have been commissioned and performed by major orchestras in recent years, it seems strange indeed that Martino’s remarkable Concerto is still sitting idle in the drawer of his publisher. The work is a hidden treasure, and my hope is that an enlightened music director with a first-tier symphony orchestra will in time make the discovery and give Martino’s Concerto for Orchestra its just due.

However, there are also reasons for fans of Martino’s music to be optimistic. The Albany CD by the Group for Contemporary Music is one such example. We should be grateful for the sensitivity, dedication, and skill of the performers who perform on this recording. Chris Finckel (cello), Stephen Gosling (piano), Gregory Hesselink (cello), Margaret Kampmeier (piano), Aleck Karis (piano), Alan R. Kay (clarinet), Curtis Macomber (violin), Lois Martin (viola), and Fred Sherry (cello), and Carol Zeavin (violin) all perform Martino’s music with an informed sensibility and artistic grace. Martino surely would have been overjoyed and thrilled with the quality of their astute performances.

Donald Martino – late works is the brainchild and polished product of Howard Stokar – who served as the project instigator and executive producer. He deserves much credit for bringing this important CD to the public. It’s a recording worthy of a Grammy Award in the new music category for 2011, and I sincerely hope that it wins one.

While I know all four works on this recording from score (published posthumously by Dantalian), and have a sense about their place in the trajectory of Martino’s impressive body of work, I’d like to focus the rest of this blog post on one particular piece - The Fifth String Quartet since I can offer some anecdotal information that may be of interest.

Don Martino composed his Fifth String Quartet in 2004. Unlike his earlier work in this medium composed more than twenty years earlier for the Juilliard Quartet, his Fifth was not written with any specific group of musicians in mind. As with other works from his late period, the Fifth bares no explicit dedication. However, the work was programmed by the Lydian String Quartet and premiered on their concert series at Brandeis University early in 2005 on a concert that included another work with similar characteristics: Beethoven’s C-sharp minor Quartet, Op. 131.

I recall the first performance of Martino’s Fifth String Quartet rather well. The Lyds are an excellent ensemble, and draw large and dedicated audiences – although not necessarily from the ranks of the small but committed new music crowd. In fact it was not easy to obtain tickets to the concert since it was part of the Lyds regular subscription series. Fortunately I had a connection with the Chair of the Brandeis Music Department at the time, and responding to my desperate inquiry, he magically pulled out of his desk drawer a secret stash of VIP tickets and handed them over to me (thanks Davy!). Aside from a few members of the Brandeis composition faculty, there were very few composers present in the audience. I’ve rarely missed a premiere of any of Don Martino’s works over the past three-plus decades, and this is one that I really enjoyed. Martino’s music is often hard to take in on the first hearing, but to me the Fifth Quartet sounded rather classical – and in some ways the musical language seemed to reflect the influence of Arnold Schoenberg.

At this point I need to indulge in a quick digression about my studies with Martino and the influence that Arnold Schoenberg had on a significant number of composers spanning over a period of several generations. Clearly the 12-tone “system” was central to Martino’s thinking. In the mid-1950s Martino studied 12-tone techniques with Milton Babbitt at Princeton, and later as a Fulbright student studying in Italy, he would develop his own comprehensive indexed catalogue of pitch set types listing all of their properties, interconnections, and combinatorial characteristics. This work was not unlike what many composers have done in the past – including what has been referred to as Elliott Carter’s “Harmony Book.”

In the classes he taught at New England Conservatory and at Brandeis, Martino would often bring up and discuss the Schoenberg Fourth String Quartet - often playing themes from the work on the piano from memory. I’ve seen his personal copy of the score to Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, and it is heavily annotated in colors from front to back and filled with analytical markings and indications that aim to explain the derivation of every note in the work.

At least in the 1970s and 80s (and perhaps in the 50s and 60s), Schoenberg seemed to be a composer that Martino not only respected, but looked up to as a source of inspiration. Sure, Martino’s music was quite different in many ways, but I’ve always felt that there was a musical connection of sorts.

My perception - as ill-founded as it may have been - turns out to be not mine alone. In the detailed, eloquent, and informed program notes for the Albany Records disc, Robert Kirzinger (who is a composer and a writer/editor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra) makes a number of observations that are similar to mine...

“Martino was deeply concerned with the continuity with his predecessors; his conversation about music, and sometimes the music itself, often related to specific musical examples from the great tradition, and he was himself involved in teaching this tradition for many years. He shared this position with regard to the past with his most important mentors...”

Kirzinger goes on to observe...

“The most substantial piece on the disc is the Fifth String Quartet, a four-movement work of over twenty minutes’ duration. In some ways it’s the most clearly traditional of the pieces. The prevailing texture is contrapuntal, and there is little doubt that Beethoven’s late quartets and the quartets of Schoenberg lie somewhere in this work’s ancestry.”

But it appears that Kirzinger and I got it wrong!

In the brief moment I had to talk to Martino after the premiere of his Fifth String Quartet, I uttered something to affect, “Parts of your new work remind me of Schoenberg.” I truly meant it as a compliment.

My impromptu, off-the-cuff, and possibly naive statement would ultimately turn out to be the source of a rather interesting point of contention.

A few weeks after the concert I received the following email from Don Martino:

3/22/2005
Was it you who suggested that my quartet sounded Schoenbergian? I know the music of Schoenberg very well and I know of no scherzo or slow movement that even remotely resembles mine. This is also true of the first and last movements. Throughout the work the textures, sonorities, even the types of surface gestures and attendant expressivities are so very different. Is there any work or works that you might have had in mind? best, Don

I cautiously replied by email to my former teacher and esteemed mentor. I wrote that I sensed a vague similarity in the harmonic flow, phrase structure, use of repeated notes, and rhythmic texture between his new piece and some of Schoenberg’s works - such as the Op. 29 (which I had just heard Gunther Schuller conduct in a performance with the Dinosaur Annex Music Ensemble). Perhaps all of this discord could have been avoided if I had kept my mouth shut and asserted my Constitutional right to remain silent, i.e. taken the Fifth (amendment) on the subject of his Fifth.

In July Martino replied...

7/23/2005
Dear Jim, I know you have a vast record collection-- I do not. Is there any chance you might have a score of Schoenberg Op 29 and/or a CD that I could borrow for a few days? Is there any way you can send the recording via e-mail? If so that would be a quick way to do it and after I listen to the piece again I may not need the score. All best, Don

This was a bit of a surprise. Martino’s basement music room was full of scores, and I would have thought he’d have a copy of Schoenberg’s Op. 29 – or at least a recording. I promptly sent him a copy of my score and a CD of the Boulez performance of the work on Sony.

Don replied a week later...

7/30/2005
Dear Jim, AS arrived this afternoon and I have had my way with him. I will return materials on Monday if I get a chance to get out of the house.
Many Thanks Don

Another month passed, and I received this long email [excerpt]...

8/28/2005
...As to the Schoenberg Suite -- it has nothing to do with our concert. I am still pondering with wonder your comparison of my new work with him. I have most of the scores but I wanted to refresh my memory of the Suite. My work is different from his in so many ways, I can't find a single similarity. My music according to A. Porter is lyric even when it is edgy -- S's music is to my ear (after Pierrot) uniformly ugly and pedantic with the countenance of stale and heavy German pastry. Our concepts of form, melodic shape, gesture, harmony etc. are totally dissimilar. I haven’t got time to detail it but let me point to just one aspect: rhythm. In most cases in his music after Pierrot he uses repeated notes (usually two but sometimes they grow) and repeated two note interval figures (like c up to Bb)(usually in 16ths) to excess in his accompaniments as well as the repeated note anticipation in his melodies. Brahms -- and I learned from him--always ties the anticipation to the main note and slurs the entire figure. In that way he avoids the march-like quality that is to me so much a part of S's stuff. What’s more, he tends to do this in every movement, except the slow movement (and he often can't avoid the repeated tone temptation even in a slow movements as the movement unfolds, of a single piece so that all the movements have a sameness about them regardless of whether he uses the movement description Allegro, Comoro, Intermezzo, Rondo... You find this in the Wind Quintet, the third quartet...and just as I had recalled, the Suite is perhaps the worst offender. By contrast I hardly ever use repeated tones. IN THE NEW SONATA THERE IS NOT ONE INSTANCE OF REPEATED TONES OR REPEATED FIGURES. That does not make my music better than his but it sure makes it different. I hasten to add, for what it's worth, that if I found this tendency to do the same thing in every movement in a student's work, I would sharply criticize it and I'd send him/her back to the drawing board.

I find this discourse via email about the relationship between Martino’s and Schoenberg’s music to be highly intriguing. His comments should be of interest to anyone interested in tracing the roots, connections, and influences that exist between significant composers working in the 20 and 21st centuries. Clearly, Martino and Schoenberg shared a common musical ancestry: namely the masterpieces of Beethoven, Brahms - and perhaps more generally to the works of 19th century Romanticism as a whole. As an example, I recently observed how Martino’s piano writing in Fantasies and Impromptus for solo piano (1981) utilize trills in the same way that Beethoven did in his late piano sonatas (Op. 109 was one of Martino’s favorite works). Perhaps that is the reason why some of us intuit a similarity of style between Schoenberg and Martino. The great classical tradition served as a common wellspring for both of these composers, and each in their own way drew inspiration directly from it, and independently from one another.

In the end, the fact that Schoenberg and Martino both used the 12-tone system is an insignificant detail and an irrelevant fact. The fact that their music is closely attuned to and solidly grounded in the same venerable tradition of Western classical music is undeniable. Regrettably there are those who don’t harbor a respect for music history, and they won’t appreciate the weight of this similarity.

The music of Martino’s late period does in fact mark a departure for a composer who was beginning to venture into new and fertile ground. Perhaps it was the onset of the new millennium that instigated it. Or perhaps it was his failing health and a growing sense of his own mortality that triggered his shift in perspective and attitude. In the few years before his untimely death in 2005, Martino had rekindled an interest in one of his early musical inspirations: the music of Béla Bartók. It is not surprising that given his quickly evolving and transformative musical language born late in life, that Schoenberg would be seen by him as overtly square and reactionary. When one considers all five of Martino’s String Quartets as an expansive collection, his compositional evolution becomes clearer. His quartets numbers Two and Three were composed in 1952 and 1953 respectively. As a self-publisher, Martino revisited his early work, and added these non-serial pieces to his published catalog. In some sense, as a composer, he was completing a great circle when he wrote his Fifth String Quartet.

One bright light regarding the Martino’s Fifth String Quartet is that the world-renown Juilliard String Quartet has adopted it for their 2010-2011 concert series. It will be on one of the pre-set standard programs that the esteemed group will take on its’ world concert tour. It will likely be performed hundreds of times for thousands of people who are not associated with or incessantly entrenched in the usual new music ghetto. I’m glad to see this composer finally gain the worthy recognition that he deserves with new recordings and major-league performances – although it is a shame that he spent the last years of his life working in relative isolation and without much notice. I hope that the broader public will be drawn to this unique composers’ music and that the labors of his perfected craft will in time become a mainstay of the musical tradition he himself so adamantly admired.

Links:

http://www.dantalian.com/
http://www.juilliardstringquartet.org/
http://www.albanyrecords.com/
http://www.amazon.com/Donald-Martino-Group-Contemporary-Music/dp/B00005RGK9

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Conducting the Rite

2010-06-07T09:00:00.000-04:00

This 5-year old makes it look easy...

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The Best Parsifal Ever

2010-05-07T10:00:00.003-04:00

In the Spring of 1985 I was semi-homeless. I had given up my tiny studio apartment in the North End of Boston and was traveling around like a hobo staying with every friend and/or relative who had an available couch to sleep on. It was after I had finished my classes in grad school, but before I was able to secure respectable employment or establish an address to call my own.

My way of dealing with this tenuous status was to take in as much high culture as possible - but on a shoe-string budget.

While visiting my Aunt Helen in NY, I attended concerts every night. But the one I recall the most was a production at the Metropolitan Opera of Wagner's Parsifal. The Metropolitan Opera House was then, as it is now, a major venue with about 3,800 seats. The premium seats in the orchestra cost a small fortune, but there are also 195 "standing room" tickets that can be purchased on the day of the performance for small change. It's a popular option for students and opera enthusiasts who don't mind standing for long durations.

Parsifal is over five hours long. As it turned out, on the week night I was there many of the patrons sitting in the orchestra section didn't have the stamina to hang in there for the duration. After the first act many prime seats became vacated. From the back of the hall I could see that two front-row center seats were empty, and I made my move.

I like seat #108. It's kinda like being in virtual reality. It's also as close as the general public can get to sitting "in" the orchestra, or being up on the stage with the singers. I was literally inches away from Maestro James Levine, and could read the notes of his musical score. I was tempted to reach out and rub his bushy head, but restrained myself from doing so.

The sound was superb too. To be able to observe the expressions on the faces of the singers adds a dimension to the live opera experience that few people are ever able experience.

When sitting in that comfortable seat, the 3,800 people sitting behind me simply vanished. They were out of sight and out of mind. That night, Wagner's final opera was presented to me as a private performance - and I loved every second of it. Oddly, it warped my perception of time. It was perhaps the shortest five hours of my life.

I believe the members of the cast were as follows:

PARSIFAL

at the Metropolitan Opera

opera in three acts

words and music by Richard Wagner

Conductor: James Levine
Production: Nathaniel Merrill
Set and costume designer: Robert O'Hearn
Stage director: Bruce Donnell
Choreographer: Milenko Banovitch

Cast:
Parsifal: Peter Hofmann
Kundry: Kathryn Harries
Amfortas: Simon Estes
Gurnemanz: Martti Talvela
Klingsor: Franz Mazura
Titurel: Julien Robbins

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Factoid

2010-04-15T09:00:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting fact that I just came across...

American casinos pump synthetic human pheromones into the air to encourage aggressive gambling.

"According to a 2004 press release from Enhanced Air Technologies, a firm based in British Columbia, at least one major Las Vegas casino also pumps synthetic human pheromones into the air to increase business. The company claims its 'Commercaire' pheromone instills a sense of comfort and security in humans, which makes them feel more at ease and increases the likelihood of repeat visits."

Who knows what other interesting human emotions and desires can be artificially stimulated this way?

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Food for Thought

2010-04-13T11:00:00.002-04:00

On a recent trip on IcelandAir with a stopover in Reykjavík, my wife Willemien ordered a vegetarian in-flight meal. The food wrapper on her veggie wrap included the following tidbit of information:

One of the specialities of the Icelandic cuisine is "Hrútspungar." It's ram testicles pressed in blocks, boiled and cured in lactic acid. While the taste is not particularly distinct, the texture is. Some say the testicles taste sour due to the lactic acid. Others think they're just tasteless, no matter what they taste like. Many Icelanders really have a ball munching on "hrútspungar" at the annual feast called Þorrablót.

Besides Súrsaðir hrútspungar, the cuisine includes many other popular menu items:

Sivð - burned or boiled sheep heads (your choice)

Selshreifar - seal's flippers cured in lactic acid

Lifrarpylsa - a pudding of liver sausage

Also consider, blood pudding, smoked sheep's thoracic diaphragm, or you could just have some fresh whale meat.

I'm seriously considering becoming a vegetarian. :-)

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Eorramatur

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How ET Ruined Harmony (and why you shouldn't worry about it)

2010-03-24T08:00:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I caught an interesting lecture at the Longy School of Music by musicologist Ross Duffin. He is the Fynette H. Kulas Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

His lecture was about his new book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care), which has been called by his critics as "the most subversive book on a musical subject I've ever read." He refers to Equal-Temperament by the acronym "ET."

I didn't exactly know what to expect from Professor Duffin. Based on the provocative title of his book, I feared that he would rail against all music written after Bach. But in the end it was scholarly, well-balanced, and rather informative.

As a musician who grew up playing keyboard instruments and fretted-string instruments, I never really had to deal too much with subtle tuning issues. In practice, singers and string players had to adjust to me - since I was the one who was "out of tune."

Duffin's research aptly summarizes the dysfunction that has existed regarding tuning systems, theories and performance practice since the Renaissance. Is is clear that virtually all of the solutions that have been proposed over the centuries are messy, ad hoc, and less than elegant.

If you are the sort of person who likes certainty, uniform standards, and mathematical precision, you should avoid Duffin's book like the plague. In this regard the world of musical temperament is similar to law-making in Washington DC: you really don't want to know how they make the sausage.

Here were a few interesting tidbits and takeaways from the lecture...

ET is recent invention in music history - a kind of worst-case totalitarian system that arises when everyone is made to suffer for the common good of uniformity and standardization.

In the 18th century, Mozart, Haydn, and probably Beethoven thought of the octave as having more than 12 notes. For them, D-sharp was a very different note than E-flat. Sharps were LOWER in pitch than flats. For example E-flat was a higher note than D-sharp. Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang's father had published the definitive treatise on violin playing with charts indicating these very distinctions.

And it's not only string players who abided by this system. The flutist, composer, and music theorist Johann Joachim Quantz published a fingering chart indicating different fingerings for enharmonic notes. For him, sharped and flatted notes were quite different.

In the 19th century, some musicians - often virtuoso string soloists who played unaccompanied - reversed the paradigm. As performers they tended to focus on the linear aspects of music. For them, D-sharp was played as a leading-tone and would sound HIGHER in pitch than E-flat because of the voice leading. This was the opposite practice of what was done just a century earlier, and this is the current belief, concept, and standard today. It is the convention practiced by the majority of mainstream classical musicians in the 2oth and 21st centuries - although this norm apparently has little acoustical, historical, or theoretical ground to stand on.

The current practice of tuning pianos with ET seems to be a bit of a fraud too. When one analyses what piano tuners actually do in terms of temperament, the result is somewhat sketchy and amorphous. Find me two different pianos, and I'll show you two different tuning standards. It's the invisible elephant in the room. Good piano tuners and excellent chefs don't share their secrets.

Our contemporary bias in favor of scientific and mathematical clarity with tuning systems too often seems to go against our better musical instincts and natural hearing.

While I found Duffin's talk very enlightening, I'm not a music historian. Overall I consider myself pretty liberal when it comes to performance practice.

For me, music is not the acoustical properties of the sound, but the ideas behind its presumed imperfect acoustical representation. In my mind, the tuning and temperament purity argument is a little like saying it's better to read a book printed at 1200 dpi than 300 dpi. The higher resolution allows for a better and more accurate representation of the typeface.

Isn't that kind of missing the point of what music is all about?

Duffin played a few musical examples to illustrate his points. One example utilized an electronically produced and scientifically accurate realization of a piano work in two contrasting temperaments. While I have to say there was a subtle but discernible difference between them - and that the non-ET version sounded less strained, warmer, and had less beating of upper harmonics - I was not overly impressed with the improved version. It wasn't at all like seeing a movie in 3D for the first time after having only known the standard format.

Given all of the factors that go into experiencing a work of music, the tuning aspect pales in comparison. To my ears, the version of temperament that is used is fairly trivial. I don't go to concerts to listen to intonation, and "imprecision" in performance normally doesn't bother me (unless it is really, really bad).

Another thing I realized from Duffin's presentation is that the social aspects of music making override the theoretical rules that theorists claim exist. It could be that every accomplished musician has their own unique tuning system. This is what makes one great violinist different from another. They just hear notes and intervals differently - as if it were part of their musical DNA or cultural context. In practice the range of expression possible in the production of a major-third, or a perfect-fifth can vary enormously. There are more gradations than even an enharmonic sharp or flat. Ask any microtonalist.

ET is no more than an approximation and a guidepost. It has never been more than a musical version of lane-lines painted on the highway. No musician in their right mind would expect all music to conform to such a limited and restrictive tuning system. It's a framework, not a Draconian pitch-grid where your teacher will swat your fingers with a ruler if you go outside of the lines.

On the other hand, alternative tuning systems to ET that have been (or likely will be) proposed are also a compromise. I hate to break the news, but no tuning-system Utopia exists - at least with the 12-note to the octave standard. In the end, ANY tuning system will only function as a rough and imperfect road map for the fabulous musical excursions that practicing musicians will inevitably take us on.

I don't buy the argument that equal-temperament has ruined harmony, and I don't think we have to worry about it either. There are much bigger bones to pick. You can sleep soundly at night knowing that music will still be there for you the next morning, equal-temperament or not.

Links: http://music.case.edu/~rwd/RDWorks/RD.bio.html

-----------------

Dutch Invasion

2010-03-20T18:00:00.002-04:00

For March Madness, a Sports Factoid...

Towering at 6 feet - 10 inches, Dutchman Kenneth van Kempen plays basketball for the Ohio Bobcats. He is a Senior at Ohio University, but his hometown is Weert in the Netherlands.

http://www.ohiobobcats.com/sports/m-baskbl/mtt/vankempen_kenneth00.html

---------------

Reading Karl Kraus

2010-03-14T14:00:00.006-04:00

It's a rainy weekend, perfect for catching up on some reading.

I'm enjoying Harry Zohn's biography and critical analysis of the Viennese writer and satirist Karl Kraus (1874-1936). Zohn published his book in 1971, and I was a student of his at Brandeis University where I failed to learn even basic German rather quite miserably. But Zohn, who chaired the Germanic and Slavic Language Department, was a real expert in turn of the century Vienna, and in particular the artistic, literary, and musical movements of that fascinating time.

Harry Zohn (1923-2001) was an excellent translator - bringing to English such works as Freud's "Delusion and Dream," the complete diaries of Theodor Herzel, and some 40 other volumes. He was a violist in the Brandeis Symphony Orchestra, and made all of his students (including yours truly) sing Viennese wine garden songs in class (I still have the sheet music). We also sampled a wide-variety of German Beer and pub food during a research-oriented field trip to Boston's Jacob Wirth House.

Kraus was a creative force of nature who embodied the Zeitgeist of his generation. Today we would probably call him a Performance Artist. For example, he held some 700 recitals in his traveling show billed as "Theatre of Poetry." It included readings of poetry and prose, satire, opera, and lieder. His circle of intellectuals included composers such as Schoenberg and Mahler, painters such as Klimt and Schiele, and scientists and philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Freud.

Kraus was not a musician. According to Zohn...

Kraus's inability to read music was not compensated for by any great vocal resources. His singing voice was really Sprechgesang in the manner of Schönberg or Berg, but it was considerably enhanced by this great intuition and empathy, his rhythmic acuteness, his talent as an imitator, and his pervasive moral fanaticism.

The pianists who accompanied him were among the best, including composers Ernst Křenek and Josef Matthias Hauer. Zohn observes, "In January, 1932, he gave a program of poems and scenes by Bert Brecht, accompanied on the piano by Kurt Weill."

Kraus's 60th birthday was celebrated with a musical-literary matinee and a film about him. Composer Alban Berg was in attendance. Musicians Eduard Steuermann and Rudolf Kolisch were also amongst Kraus's close friends.

In Zohn's concluding statement ends with the following observation"...Karl Kraus may have been a failure. But surely he was one of the grandest failures in world literature."

Zohn's scholarly but assessable book on Kraus ends with "An Aphoristic Sampler." Here are just a few of the choice translations Zohn made of Kraus's work:

I can say with pride that I have spent days and nights not reading anything, and that with unflagging energy I use every free moment gradually to acquire an encyclopedic lack of education.
I dreamt that I had died for my country. And right way a coffin-lid opener was there, holding out his hand for a tip.
Am I to blame if hallucinations and visions are alive and have names and permanent residences?
In one ear and out the other: this would make the head a transit station. What I hear has to go out the same ear.
I ask no one for a light. I don't want to be beholden to anyone - in life, love, or literature. And yet I smoke.
I hear noises which others don't hear and which interfere with the music of the spheres that others don't hear either.
I already remember many things that I am experiencing.
Solitude would be an ideal state if one were able to pick the people one avoids.
Kokoschka has made a portrait of me. It could be that those who know me will not recognize me; but surely those who don't know me will recognize me.
"He masters the German language" -that is true of a salesman. An artist is a servant of the word.
I have decided many a stylistic problem first by my head, then by heads or tails.
Today's literature: prescriptions written by patients.
The superman is a premature ideal, one that presupposes man.
A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.
Diplomacy is a game of chess in which the nations are checkmated.
A Gourmet once told me that he preferred the scum of the earth to the cream of society.
The devil is an optimist if he thinks he can make people meaner.
Democracy means the permission to be everyone's slave.
Medicine: "Your money and your life!"
I do not trust the printing press when I deliver my written words to it. How a dramatist can rely on the mouth of an actor!
The development of technology will leave only one problem: the infirmity of human nature.
If the earth had any idea of how afraid the comet is of contact with it!

More satirical quotes of Kraus can be found on the web here...

Karl Kraus Quotes

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Kraus

http://www.jacobwirth.com/

------------------

Notenkrakers

2010-03-12T08:30:00.003-05:00

Yesterday at Harvard University, composer Rob Zuidam delivered the second of three lectures on contemporary Dutch music. The ongoing series is presented by the Harvard Music Department in conjunction with the Erasumus Lectures on History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders.

Zuidam focused on what's known as Hoketus - or "ensemble culture" in the Netherlands and how it evolved.

It really all began in 1966 when a group of five Dutch composers organized to protest against the artistic direction taken by the Concertgebouw Orchestra. The group called themselves The Five and led a larger group known as Notenkrakers ("Nutcrackers" - which has multiple meanings, including "note" and "nut").

The Notenkrakers wanted the orchestra to hire Bruno Maderna as a second conductor to work along side with their current Music Director, Bernard Haitink. Maderna was perhaps the leading conductor of contemporary music at that time.

Over the course of the next few years little progress was made by Concertgebouw to purge the conservatism from their programs and inject music composed by the younger generation of Dutch composers (such as members of The Five). The Notenkrakers made little if any progress with the Concertgebouw managements on this matter.

It all came to a head in November of 1969 when The Notenkrakers stormed in and disturbed a concert about to begin in the Concertgebouw. This "notenkrakersactie" (nutcracker action) was a historic event that some say changed level of acceptance of new music in Holland.

Just before Haitink was able to complete his initial downbeat, the protesters had skillfully disrupted the concert with their noise makers and megaphones. The group of students passed out leaflets and confronted the orchestra and audience.

Peter Schat (1935-2003), a member of The Five, used his megaphone to demand that Bernard Haitink come down off the podium and address The Notenkrakers and the audience in an open public discussion. The confrontation instilled a a minor riot, and the police were soon called to eject the protesters from the concert hall.

Besides Peter Schat, members of The Five included Misha Mengelberg (b. 1935), Louis Andriessen (b. 1939), and Reinbert de Leeuw (b. 1938) - all of which had studied with the composer Kees van Baaren.

To the disappointment of The Notenkrakers , their protest was denounced by their philosophical mentor: Matthijs Vermeulen. The Five had held Vermeulen (who was the subject of Zuidam's first lecture) in high regard for his harsh reviews of the Concertgebouw and their lack of interest in performing contemporary music. But to their surprise, Vermeulen released a public statement that The Five was off-base. Vermeulen wrote that hiring Bruno Maderna would be impractical and that Concertgebouw actually supported modern music rather well compared to other international orchestras.

Undeterred, throughout the 1970s and into the early 80s, members of The Five independently formed and led ad hoc new music ensembles throughout Holland. Effectively, younger Dutch composers had largely abandoned the idea of the symphony orchestra as an instrument in favor of more responsive new music ensembles that were fluid and dynamic. Louis Andriessen's group Hoketus is a prime example of the resulting "ensemble culture" which continues on today.

(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oNZtjnOjSY )

In the end, the incident of the November 1969 notenkrakersactie when The Notenkrakers stormed in at the Concertgebouw resulted in a positive change for musical performance in the Netherlands. The Five has been credited with "shaking Dutch musical life out of its suffocating provincialism."

Links:

www.Robertzuidam.com/essays

http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2010/02/discovering-vermeulen.html

-------------------

Elliott Carter Rocks!

2010-03-11T08:00:00.001-05:00

A short little guitar piece by Elliott Carter (b. 1908)...

Shard (1997)

I like the fast music at the end, starting at 1'40"

It reminds me of Jimi Hendrix.

( Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpWyFSBX7-Y )
--------------

Ralph Towner

2010-03-10T09:00:00.002-05:00

Jazz guitarist Ralph Towner (b. 1940) is coming to the Regattabar in Cambridge on March 23rd. He's performing on baritone and 12-string guitars along with Paolo Fresu. The set starts at 7:30 PM, and tickets are $22.

I vaguely remember Towner from his presence as a sideman on Weather Report's jazz fusion album from 1972: I Sing the Body Electric. But his music today is mostly acoustic. When not on tour, Towner lives the good life in Rome.

Here is a YouTube clip of Towner performing the jazz standard I Fall in Love Too Easily by Sammy Cahn. He mentions in his introduction that Sammy passed away just recently, and that the well-known jazz guitarist Steve Kahn is his son. I had studied guitar with Steve Kahn when I was still in high school.

(Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xZnx87M3ns )

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Towner

----------------------------

Spread Spectrum Communications

2010-03-10T08:00:00.013-05:00

I teach a course in Data Communications (aka Network Standards and Protocols). I enjoy providing a little history when the course gets to the unit covering Spread Spectrum (SS) technology, which has evolved today into Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11).

Spread Spectrum communications uses wide band, noise-like signals. It's been a favorite technology for the military, since SS signals are hard to detect, hard to intercept, hard to jam, and hard to demodulate.

Students love their Wi-Fi, and look a little puzzled when I explain how that technology was invented by a famous movie actress and an avant-garde composer.

Yeap, that's right.

The story is amazing. If you made it into a movie, nobody would believe it.

Austrian-born actress Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) and composer George Antheil are universally credited for discovering and patenting this communications technology.

Hedy Lamarr (1914 - 2000), is better known for the many movies she made at MGM Studios in Hollywood. Lamarr was born to Jewish parents in Vienna, and studied ballet and piano at an early age. She later worked with Max Reinhardt in Berlin, who called her the "most beautiful woman in Europe." Later Lamarr would end up marrying a controlling and wealthy Vienna arms manufacturer who was 13 years her senior. He'd lock her up in the residence, known has"Castle Schwarzenau." Lamarr objected to her husbands' support of Hitler's war machine, but both Hitler and Mussolini were frequent guests at their lavish parties in the castle. It is said that Lamaar dressed as one of her maids and fled to Paris. In 1933 Lamarr created a scandal when she appeared nude for an extended period in the movie "Ecstasy."

George Antheil (1900 - 1959) is know primarily as a daring modernist composer who's music shocked audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. His most famous piece Ballet Mécanique was originally conceived in the 1920s for 16 synchronized player pianos, two grand pianos, electronic bells, xylophones, bass drums, a siren and three airplane propellers. It's often performed today in a scaled down version for percussion, four pianos, and a recording of an airplane motor.

Well-known in both America and in Europe as being an "ultra-modern pianist/composer," Antheil influenced many avant-garde composers, including Edgard Varèse and John Cage. He held wide interests such as publishing articles and books on female endocrinology, and in his spare time wrote a mystery novel (blogs didn't exist yet).

It was Antheil's interest in female endocrinology that brought him and Lamarr together. Antheil had a theory about how men could tell the availability of women based on the glandular effects of their appearance. He consulted with Lamarr on this, and the result of this research was published in his book, "The Glandbook for the Questing Male."

Their research broadened, and after much joint discussion they devised a secret communication system that is now regarded as the predecessor of the today's Spread Specturm "frequency hopping" technology used in communications systems all around the world. Antheil had already applied this technique to control the 88 keys of player pianos in his strange musical compositions.

Lamarr and Antheil submitted their idea to the US Patent office in June of 1941 and were granted a Patent (US Patent # 2,292,387). One of the figures for the patent is show below.

It was clear that they believed their technique could be applied to radio-guided torpedoes and aid the war effort. The US Military took notice, but in 1942 it did not possess the technology to implement Spread Spectrum-based control systems to guide their torpedoes. However, in 1962 during the US blockade of Cuba during the infamous "Cuban Missile Crisis." Lamarr and Antheil's technology was deployed and proven to work (although their Patent had long expired).

Here is a very short YouTube clip about Hedy Lamarr. (Feel free to explore the others posted on YouTube)....

And here is the beginning of George Antheil's Ballet Mécanique in a recent performance by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble (Peter Jarvis conducting)...

( Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wJjDmIwKL0 )

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamarr

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Antheil

--------------

CD Review: Sheila Mac Donald

2010-03-09T08:00:00.007-05:00

Regular followers of this blog might be surprised to see this CD review, since I don't regularly write about Folk music. But the fact is that I listen to all kinds of music, and at earlier stages in my life as a guitarist I accompanied and performed widely in Rock, Jazz, C&W, and Folk venues.

This review is of a new Folk CD released in January of this year by Boston-based independent recording artist Sheila Mac Donald. The album is titled This Way. She is a songwriter, vocalist, and guitarist.

Mac Donald's new CD is comprised of interesting and mysterious songs with lyrics that hint at harsh realities and matters of personal loss. Yet, at least on the surface, the songs transcend the ordinary to provide a rare insight into the human experience.

(photo by Karen Holland)

There is a high degree of imagination, fantasy, and wisdom in Mac Donald's lyrics. She writes and sings from the heart, even though at times her songs seem deeply philosophical, metaphorical, abstract, or even pensive and dark.

Musically, the melodies and accompaniment are spirited, joyful, and very pleasant to listen to. Mac Donald's songs have a simplicity and honest quality that's clearly hard-earned and rings true. It's hard not to tune into and receive the bittersweet message that this artist portrays in her album of songs.

Her song "The Blue" is a song about workplace imprisonment. It reflects on the psychological mindset of a creative person eking out a living while working in retail. It is a song that I can fully understand and sympathize with.

Mac Donald was born and raised in Quincy, MA, and hails from a combination of Irish and Scottish heritage (her paternal grandparents were from Nova Scotia). This Celtic ancestry can be heard in some of her songs - particularly "Bare Branches" and "Burning Slow" - which have an explicit Irish sound. But the songs are also quite contemporary and individual.

When I inquired about the genesis of her music, Mac Donald provided the following bit of information, "Most of the 14 songs are recent but I pulled some out of the notebooks that were older. I wrote Sarah and Sandra in 1993, Grazna, and Burning Slow in 1998."

Mac Donald has composed many songs, and recorded several of her works for Fast Folk Musical Magazine (organized by Jack Hardy in the early 90s and available on Smithsonian Folkways). Her song "Night Bird's Song" was covered at a Fast Folk Live at the Bottom Line show in NYC and recorded on CD. Mac Donald's "My Wallet" was included on the Chill Out East Coast Edition, Vol. 10 compilation CD (2008).

This Way is Mac Donald's first full length CD. It was recorded, engineered, and mixed at blue fish sound productions in Marblehead, MA. Mac Donald collaborated with some of Boston's finest musicians on this album, which was skillfully produced and arranged by Raymond Gonzalez. Gonzalez plays guitar, bass, mandolin, and keyboards on many of the tracks. Violinist Pam Kuras joins them for two tracks with her Celtic sounding violin playing. The CD is professionally mastered by Toby Mountain at Northeastern Digital, in Southborough, MA.

Mac Donald's training includes formal academic studies in music and composition at Brandeis University in the 1980s. At Brandeis, she was awarded two of the music department's most prestigious awards: the Remis and Reiner. She studied composition, counterpoint, harmony, and music theory. I once had her as a student myself. Her avant-garde musical compositions from that period include a wonderful but edgy atonal solo violin work that was performed in concert. But it is in Folk music that she has found her true voice.

Mac Donald is a member of ASCAP.

Links:

"This Way" can be purchased directly on CD Baby at:
http://cdbaby.com/cd/SheilaMacDonald or from iTunes

The Artist's MySpace page provides more information about the singer/songwriter as well as ways to purchase the CD by mail: www.myspace.com/wwwmyspacesheila

Information about Mac Donald's Folkways recording:

www.folkways.si.edu/find_recordings/FastFolk.aspx

-------------------

The Bohlen-Pierce scale

2010-03-08T10:00:00.015-05:00

Boston is hosting an interesting symposium and concert series this week (March 7-9, 2010). It began yesterday and continues through tomorrow evening.

The event is drawing a diverse crowd of composers, musicians, mathematicians, music theorists, computer scientists, researchers, neurologists, and musical instrument builders from all over the world - all because of an intriguing and unifying idea.

The idea that has caught their imagination is a new scale. The scale was conceived independently by two microwave engineers and a computer scientist in the 1970s and 80s. It is now referred to as the Bohlen-Pierce or "BP" scale. Heinz Bohlen, Kees van Prooijen, and John R. Pierce all had a hand in it's discovery.

The BP scale is rather unique. There are several variants, but the primary idea is that BP utilizes the 3:1 ratio instead of the 2:1 ratio that defines the traditional even-tempered scale used in most Western music.

With traditional Western music, the octave is a basic and primary interval. It's derived from the 2:1 ratio, and from that we divide the octave into 12 equal steps. BP replaces the octave with something they call a "tritave." Arriving at the tritave in the notes of a rising BP scale does provide a melodic sense of closure or completion.

With the BP scale, the 3:1 ratio defines the lower and upper degrees of the scale (which happen to be the span of what we usually think of as an octave and a fifth). That range is then divided into 13 steps.

The Bohlen-Pierce Symposium and Concerts are sponsored by the Boston Microtonal Society and Georg Hajdu (Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater) in partnership with the Goethe Institute of Boston, the Berklee College of Music, Northeastern University, and New England Conservatory. The conference website is http://www.bohlen-pierce-conference.org/.

I was intrigued by the idea of this new scale, and attended the first concert at the Fenway Center at Northeastern University last evening to hear what composers are doing with it. The concert featured nine pieces - although the BP conference in total will showcase 24 premieres of pieces written by composers from around the globe who are utilizing the BP scale.

My first impressions of this new musical structure are mixed.

While there seems to be a solid theoretical basis for BP, how composers and musicians apply the raw material of sound is the ultimate proof in the pudding. There seems to be a number of aesthetic and logistical issues regarding the execution.

First, it's pretty hard to abandon the interval of an octave. It's so universal and ingrained in virtually all the music we have known up to this point, that skipping over the octave seems strange. In the BP sound world, the octave is an an invisible elephant sitting on the stage.

Electronic realizations of the BP scale sound so much more convincing than realizations produced by singers or instruments. I'm not convinced that musicians have yet attained the needed hearing and performance skills to accurately render the BP scale. Nor have our ears grown familiar enough with it.

For instance, one of the more successful works on the concert was Five Moods by Anthony De Ritis. De Ritis recorded BP clarinetist Amy Advocat and produced a tape piece based on those sounds and pitches. From his piece, I could hear the totality of the scale, and how it has some very consonant properties.

All music is cultural. The basic premise that the BP system seems to ride on is a notion that the current 12-note equal-tempered scale is somehow inferior. The BP scale, while still imperfect, strives (at least theoretically) to make a better map onto the frequencies implied by Nature's Grand Dame - the overtone series.

My beef with that objective is one of personal bias. Who says that musical systems should follow Nature's lead? Why the heck should human-kind not divide musical intervals as they please. I like to hear my music served up on a plate with "in-harmonic" intervals. I like the sound of notes and their overtones beating "out of tune." I like dissonance. I like tone clusters, scalar symmetry, and the certainty of an equally loaded 12-gage keyboard. The traditional semi-tone is one of my favorite intervals, and I don't desire anything smaller - particularly when it is dispersed using octave-equivalence over several spanning registers. Octave equivalence is an amazing property.

As with the Early Music folks, the BP advocates seem to want just intonation and tonal consonance. They believe that the modern day piano is corrupt, evil, and ugly. Frankly, I just don't share that point of view.

I'm a composer who works mostly in an atonal universe. For that sound scape, a 12-note even-tempered scalar system works rather nicely. Musicians are trained to hear it, read it, and perform it. It doesn't require relearning a new system.

A very good notational system exists for the 12-tone system which has evolved through the collective efforts of musicians over centuries of practical use and applicaton.

BP music notation (or the prevailing version of it) uses the standard five-line music staff and traditional clefs that musicians are familiar with, but the seven notes C-D-E-F-G-A-B are augmented with H and J. The thing that throws me off is that while the musicians may be reading the note G - what actually sounds (and the interval it creates with the preceding note) is something entirely different. BP notation and keyboards need to go through a lot more development.

Will BP catch on and become mainstream?

Probably not. It's hard to create a tradition when only six BP tuned clarinets exist in the entire world (four of which are in Boston for the concert series). The BP clarinet should be the hallmark for this scale, since the clarinet is acoustically ideal for it. It over blows in the correct ratio, and it's "square wave" timbre nicely reinforces the gestalt of the scale by providing energy on the odd-numbered overtones.

The bottom line is that composers will end up writing what they want to hear. What they want to hear is, in the end, approximated by whatever system or scale they happen to be using. Musical ideas fall onto a pitch-frequency grid, and while the grid can vary, the musical ideas themselves transcend the surface characteristics of the aural medium. There is no magic bullet, and no substitute for genuine and substantive musical ideas regardless of the tuning system it is constructed on top of. Tuning systems are secondary - almost arbitrary.

There were some pieces on last evening's program that caught my attention. For example Liebesleid (2010) , a short work by James Bergin, seemed classical in conception. Bergin took a rather conservative approach to the BP scale, and worked within the constraints of a simple melodic materials. His piece was straight-forward and elegant. His intervals in the BP language sounded large compared to other pieces that I've heard from him, although the same unique composers' voice still comes through regardless of the underline pitch system.

Julia Werntz's piece Imperfections (2010) was also for solo BP clarinet. It too was short and simple, and to me sounded like a transcription of her 72-note microtonal music. In fact, she converted the BP scale and notation into a subset of the language she usually composes in (a 72-note system devised by Ezra Sims), and back again after the piece was conceived. Having heard her music before, Imperfections sounded like a subset of her normal sound world. The ending of the piece intrigued me. The wide leaps did point to a coherence in the BP scale. It did make me wonder if BP is actually a universal chord, rather than a scalar set of distinct stand-alone pitches related to one-another. When heard as a chord, all the notes seem to be cut from the same cloth, and seem intuitively related - like members of a family.

I want to keep abreast of developments in the BP field. But at present, I don't see it as a new panacea or musical Shangri-La. I'm quite content to keep composing in the system that has done me well over all of these years. I'm find no shortage of relationships to exploit in the 12-pitch even-tempered system. It's not lacking in any way. In fact, 12-pitches per octave is about all that I can handle.

Link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohlen%E2%80%93Pierce_scale

---------------------------

A Concert of Spectral Music

2010-03-07T10:00:00.014-05:00

On Friday evening March 5th, 2010 the sounds of Spectral Music could be heard at Boston University's Marsh Chapel. That's where the Xanthos Ensemble presented a program featuring music of four composers whom - each in their own way - represent a unique approach to this still emerging movement of contemporary musical composition.

Spectral music is a hard to define. The term was coined by the French composer/philosopher Hugues Dufourt. Dufourt used his term Spectral music in an article published in the early 1980s, and the label caught on. The Spectral music movement has evolved into a bona fide musical trend. It has functioned as an aesthetic school of thought since the late 1980s.

Composers working in this methodology typically embrace the framework of a generalized musical approach rather than a specific style or "ism." Spectral music does not espouse any particular technique, but rather is passionately indicative of working methods that are rooted deeply in current scientific research, psychoacoustic theory, as well as digital sound analysis and synthesis.

Today, Spectral music - at least in the United States, is still a sub-genre of the overall mainstream new music scene. Practitioners of this art form appear to be united, organized, and well-placed. They seem to have plenty to talk about, and easily quote from scientific studies or cite from memory passages of Hermann von Helmholtz's classic treatise On the Sensations of Tone.

It seems at times as if they view musical instruments as sound generating devices that can be scientifically manipulated to realize interesting and novel spectral patterns. In their world, cellos and pianos function as hardware that can be called up to execute the coded instructions of their creative software.

The Spectral music concept has some merit. Many important discoveries about the nature of sound have emerged in recent decades. Scientific resources and acoustical data are more available to composers today than ever before in history. With the help of ubiquitous software programs for spectral analysis, composers can study sounds, and then re-generate those very specific overtones in a musical work using a combination of traditional instruments and extended performance techniques (such as wind instrument multiphonics and microtonality).

Composers working in this discipline could in theory make a cello sound like a screaming chicken, or replicate the hum and buzz of a modern factory - using only traditional musical instruments as their sound generation equipment.

But rock solid technique does not automatically translate into a viable artistic movement. Does Spectral music have feet to walk on?

It seems to me that the relative success of the Spectral music movement has more to do with filling a void. The public's desire to move on from the staid and entrenched (albeit broadly misunderstood) period of musical exploration that dominated the 1950s and 60s could have been fulfilled by any "ism." According to Wikipedia...

Spectral music represented an alternative to the prestige of the serialists and post-serialists as the vanguard of serious musical composition and compositional technique.

In the mid-1980s, Spectral music was new, cool, and very European. It engendered an aesthetic predominance practiced by a slew of followers led and inspired by the French composer-conductor Pierre Boulez. They were a new generation of composers, theorists, scientists and technicians who worked at the famed research institute in Paris known as IRCAM.

Perhaps too Spectral music replaced Serialism as the latest nexus between musical and scientific thought. It became a space for composers to exercise their proclivities of rational thinking and scientific method in service of their more primitive musical instincts. It allows composers to "bang on a can" while at the same time rationalizing the sound using a host of convincing algorithms, formulas, and/or spectral diagrams.

Spectral music seems to play by a slightly different set of rules than traditional modernist music. It avoids traditional notions of form. Pitch and melody tend to function secondarily to the parameter of timbre. Spectral music is obsessed with the micro-events of acoustical phenomenon over the role of traditional musical narrative and development.

I did not follow the progress of Spectral music too closely when it hit the music scene with a vengeance in the 80s and 90s. So, as you can imagine, I was interested to hear a concert dedicated to this musical genre. The Xanthos concert was an opportunity to hear four mature pieces by skilled composers working in this specialized field for some time.

The composers Xanthos Ensemble program were Tristan Murail (b. 1947), Ronald Bruce Smith, Joshua Fineberg (b. 1969), and Gérard Grisey (1946-1998). Murail and Grisey are two names closely associated with this movement.

The first work, "Seven Lakes Drive" (2006) by Tristan Murail was for flute, clarinet, horn, piano, violin, and violoncello. According to the composers' program notes, "The material of the piece is built on the natural resonances of the French horn and the piano." I noticed that the cello often played in the stratosphere, in a register well above the violin. The French horn explored the overtone series, and much of the music resonated in the piano's open shell.

The second work on the program was a Boston premiere by the Canadian composer Ronald Bruce Smith. He is currently on the faculty at Northeastern University. His piece Remembrances of a Garden is inspired by paintings and concepts found in painting - namely Paul Klee and Claude Monet. The work is scored for flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and violoncello. Remembrances of a Garden is a formative work, full of rich detail and interesting sonic occurrences. It presented well in the acoustical space of Marsh Chapel.

Joshua Fineberg's Veils for solo piano was a real discovery. The shimmering sounds of the piano filled the air with vivid colors, vibration, and a blanket of interesting musical objects flowing through time. The composer wrote in his program notes, "It is not the notes (or not only the notes) which draw me to the piano; rather, for me, the real magic of the piano is its resonance." For me, Veils makes a convincing argument in favor of timbre over pitch. Eunyoung Kim was impressive and commanding at the piano, attacking the keyboard at times with Zen-like force and an intuitive conviction about the notes. She can make the piano sing, like a chorus of 10 thousand voices.

The concert ended with a Spectral music classic, Talea by Gérard Grisey. Grisey died in 1998 at the age of 52, so we will never know where the trajectory of his music development would have eventually led. But his work Talea (1986) seemed rather traditional to me in many ways. It contains a primary motif in the form of a well defined (but not-pitch specific) gesture. That central idea is developed and transformed in ways that remind us of music of the past. That's not so revolutionary!

The musicians of the Xanthos Ensemble met and exceeded my already high expectations of this Boston-based new music sensation. They played with grace and panache. Joanna Goldstein (flute), Alexis Lanz (clarinet), Brenda van der Merwe (violin and viola), Leo Eguchi (cello), Joseph Walker (French horn), Eunyoung Kim (piano), and George Nickson (percussion) were directed by conductor Jeffrey Means.

A nice reception followed the concert. Most of the Boston University music department composition faculty were there in force.

I look forward to hearing what the Xanthos Ensemble dreams up for concerts in the future. They are the real deal.

Xanthos Ensemble
Presented by the Boston University College of Fine Arts - School of Music
Marsh Chapel, Boston University
March 5th, 2010

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectral_music

http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2009/05/xanthos-ensemble-in-concert.html

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Musical Palindromes

2010-03-05T10:00:00.004-05:00

I just finished a new work for flute, Bb clarinet (doubling on bass Cl.), piano, violin, cello, and percussion. It's a pretty big piece - in three movements and lasting over 15 minutes in duration.

The first movement exploits a musical technique that I've always wanted to experiment with, but never got around to. It plays with palindromes. I've titled this movement Immagine Speculare.

While the musical flow of Immagine Speculare tosses around large phrases of its' thematic material within its' multi-dimensional mirror-image layered texture, the music on the surface progresses in a continuous and transparent way that should appear to the listener as logically constructed and naturally derived. It's also a fast and furious work that demands a lot of physical and mental energy, not to mention calorie expenditure on the part of hard-working performers.

But I'm certainly not creating anything original by using this technique, since musical palindrome has been around for a long time. It goes back to at least the "crab canon" where one voice is reversed in time and pitch from the second voice (Crabs walk backward).

Haydn's Symphony #47 has a minuet and trio in musical palindrome.

Mozart's Scherzo-Duetto plays this game too.

One of my favorite musical palindromes is from Alban Berg's opera Lulu. He was influenced by the technical possibilities that were emerging in the avant-garde silent film industry at the time. His opera used palindrome on the level of drama and within the structure of the music. In my view, the interlude contains some of the best music in the opera.

Béla Bartók too was very fond of "arch form" which allows the composer to frame the structure of a movement (or the larger work) according to a palindromic pathway of musical association. For example: A B C D C' B' A'.

Anton Webern is another shinning example of someone who liked this structure. Webern is one of my musical heroes, but his music at present seems to virtually ignored by the reigning musical establishment. Yet he never met a palindrome that he didn't like. You could say that Webern was symmetry obsessed - choosing symmetry to organize every structure imaginable in the time and pitch domains of his musical works (both vertically and horizontally). His beautiful Symphonie Op. 21 (second movement) has a cool palindrome right near the beginning.

Igor Stravinsky's rendition of Edward Leer's famous nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussy Cat is another good example of palindrome. The composer scored it for boy soprano and piano in 1966 when he was 84 years old, and it turned out to be his final original composition. The music uses the 12-tone technique, yet it is tuneful enough for a child to sing (with some practice). And of course The Owl and the Pussy Cat music utilizes palindromic structure.

And then there is the famous example of Der Mondfleck, the 18th movement of Arnold Schönberg's history changing Pierrot Lunaire op. 21. After the piano introduction, the music is palindromic. Here is a spirited performance of Der Mondfleck conducted by Pieter van der Wulp with Ensemble 88 in Holland. The soprano is Bauwien van der Meer. Enjoy...

-------------------

A few palindromes

2010-03-04T14:29:00.008-05:00

Hannah,

devoted

madam.

Yo, banana boy!

No lemon, no melon.

No cab, no tuna nut on bacon.

Dammit, I'm mad.

Dennis and Edna sinned.

As I pee, sir, I see Pisa.

Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna.

A Toyota. Race fast, safe car. A Toyota.

Wow,

Devil lived

devoted

solos.

Boston did not sob.

Not so, Boston!

If I had hi-fi.

Paris, I rap.

Nina Ricci ran in.

Can I attain a "C"?

"La" - not atonal.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Air an aria.

In Italian...

odo (to hear)

ossesso (obsessed)

ottetto (octet)

animina (little soul)

onorarono (to honor)

ingegni (ingeniousness)

otto (eight)

ala (wing)

In Dutch...

Legovogel (Lego bird)

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Today's Google Doodle

2010-03-04T09:00:00.001-05:00

Today's Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of a great Venetian baroque composer. Thank you Google for bringing a composer to our attention. Happy Birthday Antonio!

Q: How old are you now?

A: 332

That's old!

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Vivaldi

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Going Rogue

2010-03-04T08:00:00.013-05:00

Waves are everywhere.

Most of the time they are very predictable. The mathematics of probability theory show that the size of waves fall within a very clearly defined window of measurable and predictable amplitude.

But is size everything?

Earlier this week a 26-foot rogue wave came out of nowhere to hit a cruise ship in the French Mediterranean. Two passengers were killed and six people injured.

The study and science of "rogue" or "freak" waves is rather new. It's really in the past decade that researchers have had the tools to study the phenomenon in depth. Many didn't even believe that the phenomenon existed, since there was no clear scientific evidence on record.

The entire world-wide shipping industry has evolved on the assumption that waves will never attain a height beyond 50-feet. Ships are designed to withstand that "worst case" scenario, but anything taller is likely to inflict damage or disaster. But in the last two decades over 200 supertankers and container ships exceeding 200 metres in length have been damaged or were sunk by this random and freakish act of nature.

Then on New Year's day in 1995, the Draupner platform in the North Sea was pounded by one of the mysterious rogue waves. It was massive, and oddly enough, it was the first time a rogue wave had ever been recorded.

A rogue wave is not the same as Tsunami. They come out of nowhere, and can occur anywhere in the sea. They also defy our assumptions about how waves are created.

The new paradigm regarding rogue waves utilizes a different mathematical model, one that is associated with quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics does not neatly conform our old rules of classical physics. Rogue waves are not possible in Newton's world

In a nutshell, rogue waves are thought to be nonlinear.

If you are the sort of person that needs an equation to explain the ocean surf, then you will be comforted to know that the nonlinear Schrödinger equation (NLS) does the job.

For those of us who are math-challenged, all you really need to know is that rogue waves start off as a "normal" wave, but then suck up energy from its' adjacent neighbors. The waves just before and after the emerging rogue wave are demoted to mere ripples. Their energy is transferred to the rogue wave, and it becomes a solid wall of moving water.

The upper limit is not known, but past encounters have shown that rogue waves can attain a height of well over 100 feet. Think about that the next time you book a vacation cruise.

As someone who in inclined to think defensively, I began to wonder if the nonlinear Schrödinger equation might apply to other areas of the physical universe. For example, is there such thing as a rogue sound wave? Is it possible that a non suspecting audience at Symphony Hall attending a concert by the Boston Symphony might be subjected suddenly to a "death wave" of sound emerging randomly from a performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony?

I've heard a lot of rogue pieces of music in my life, but so far the random killer piece of music has resulted from acts that are purely human in origin. But it does beg the question since this nonlinear phenomenon is proven to be fact (albeit relatively rare): Is there even a remote possibility that a freakish synergy created by some strange combination of audio frequencies could behave in this deadly fashion?

To be honest, I wouldn't rule it out.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_wave

------------------------

Thoughts about Novell

2010-03-03T08:00:00.004-05:00

There's a little M&A activity to report in the news, and I'm not talking about Music and Art.

Yesterday after the stock market ended its session, a NY-based hedge fund firm called Elliott Associates offered to buy out the software and networking company Novell for an even $2 billion dollars. It was an unsolicited bid (aka hostile takeover).

The hedge fund's modus operandi is to take "an activist approach to investing, frequently amassing significant but minority stakes in distressed or under performing companies and attempting to foment change."

Elliott Associates (and its' parent Elliott International) manage more than $16 billion of capital for large institutional investors and wealthy individuals. They clearly see an opportunity and bargain in Novell.

In after-hours trading Elliott offered to pay $5.75 a share in cash for Novell stock. That's 21 percent higher than Novell’s price at close yesterday. Predictably, there was a upward tick in Novell’s share price: it rose $1.23, or nearly 26 percent, to $5.98 in after-hours trading.

Elliott Associates - an investment firm that specializes in "distressed companies" -currently holds more than eight percent of Novell’s stock. It is offering an additional 1.8 billion to take over the company from stock holders.

Novell’s Board of Directors received a letter from Elliott Associates explaining the rationale for the firm’s bid:

Over the past several years, the company has attempted to diversify away from its legacy division with a series of acquisitions and changes in strategic focus that have largely been unsuccessful. As a result, we believe the company’s stock has meaningfully underperformed all relevant indices and peers. With over 33 years of experience in investing in public and private companies and an extensive track record of successfully structuring and executing acquisitions in the technology space, we believe that Elliott is uniquely situated to deliver maximum value to the company’s stockholders on an expedited basis.

While I do not own any Novell stock personally, I have worked with their products over a period that spans decades, and am quite familiar with the company history. Their corporate HQ is actually nearby in Waltham, MA. I've been to the tech giant's "Brain Share" conference in Salt Lake City numerous times, and know or have worked with scores of folks associated with the company.

I'd be sorry to see Novell bought and cannibalized for it's remaining cash, trademarks, patents, and software inventory (such as SUSE Linux). In this ailing economy, the vultures are having a field day.

There is some truth that Novell has made famous and grandiose mistakes in strategy and marketing over the years, but their technology has for the most part been innovative, ahead of the curve, and rock solid.

I was very hopeful when ex-Sun Microsystems CTO Eric Schmidt took over as Novell's CEO in 1997. Schmidt had a clear understanding of the importance of the Internet and how cloud computing would eventually dominate the industry. At Sun he led its Java development efforts.

I recell being invited to a top-level executive briefing with Eric Schmidt at Novell's office in Wellseley, MA. Schmidt wanted to hear first-hand from Novell's customer base. The international company I worked for at the time (Zurich Scudder Kemper Investments) was a significant corporate client.

The meeting was informative and pleasant. Schmidt had just flown into town on Novell's corporate jet. I recall that he parked his plane at Hansom Field in Bedf0rd, preferring it over Logan International. Schmidt spoke to the small group about Novell's initiatives, listened to our ideas and concerns, and met with us individually. Customers were provided with lunch, and I received a nice leather notebook case and cool ball-point pen with the Novell logo inscribed on it. The future looked rosy.

In 2001 things changed. A local IT consulting company that was heavily invested in Microsoft technology - and who's core business was outsourcing software development - was "acquired" by Novell. It was called Cambridge Technology Partners (CTP), and their offices were in a renovated brick factory building along Memorial Drive in Cambridge across the Charles River from BU. The street talk at the time was that the merger was a good idea, since Novell would benefit from the additional talent of CTP's programming staff. In reality, CTP assumed the upper edge, took over Novell's management team, robbed it of cash, and led the company down a confused and ultimately dire path.

Schmidt left Novell soon after the acquisition of CTP. The rumor was that he found managing the new Novell quite difficult. The remaining senior management of the company was still entrenched in their old business models, and a myriad of complications had been introduced by the merger with CTP. Lingering complications from Novell's prior mergers (such as WordPerfect) contributed to the dysfunction. The magnitude of the organizational turmoil set Novell firmly into a state of classic management gridlock - and for an IT company that is a bad state to be in.

Around this time Google founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin met secretly with Schmidt. They realized that they had a lot in common (such as flying airplanes). The trio hit if off in a way that only geeky software engineers can do, and Schmidt agreed to assist the dynamic duo in transforming Google into a real company. The rest is history.

Novell's loss was Google's gain.

I still have my spiffy black leather Novell executive case and pen. I retain my obscure Novell certifications of CNE and Master CNE. But although Novell's customers still exist, they are much harder to find. I know that from looking at the employment pages.

All of this technology (and the companies that created them) appear to be dissipating into the proverbial "cloud."

---------------------

Factoid

2010-03-02T10:00:00.000-05:00

Japan consumes 10 percent of the world's fish. 40 percent of that is imported.

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Concert Review: Hirsch-Pinkas Duo

2010-02-21T19:50:00.021-05:00

Sunday afternoon should be reserved for listening to live chamber music.

This afternoon I attended a Faculty Artist Recital at the Longy School of Music Edward Pickman Concert Hall in Cambridge. The featured performers were the Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo.

The Hirsch-Pinkas Piano Duo is comprised of two of the best well-known pianists in the Boston-area: Evan Hirsch and Sally Pinkas. I've followed both of their solo careers closely since the 1980s, but it is only since about 1995 that they have teamed up to perform together as an ensemble. They also happen to be husband and wife.

It turns out that there is more than enough two-piano (and four-hand/one-piano) literature to keep them busy. Not only is the repertory rich with music written originally for their instrument(s), but plenty of transcriptions made from other pieces are abundant. In addition, the Duo actively seeks out new works to record or perform both locally and on their numerous world tours.

The concert earlier today included a nice selection of pieces by Edvard Grieg, Robert Schumann, Alexander Tcherepnin, Nathan Davis, and Aaron Copland.

The work by Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) was a four-hand arrangement in 1976 by the German composer Adof Ruthardt (1888-1892) of five selections of Grieg's popular Incidental Music for Peer Gynt. It's a familiar work that we have all heard in an orchestral version. In fact, two orchestral suites exist: Opus 46, and Opus 55.

It was interesting to observe the detail and clarity of articulation that Hersh and Pinkas summoned from their grand piano in the Peer Gynt selections. They were very careful to match and coordinate every small and subtle detail of their articulation, particularly when one or more melodic lines shifted between them. As a listener, I could clearly comprehend the unity and coherence of their combined musical expression and thought process as performers. They were clearly on the same page, and in a manner that is not only precise, but extremely musical in character.

The acoustic of Pickman Hall is rather good, and the Steinway pianos at the Longy School of Music sound superb. It was almost obligatory to hear their playing as orchestral in the Grieg (and later in the Copland). It made me realize that the piano is more than an autonomous stand-alone instrument, but can also function as a surrogate for other combinations of instruments too. For example, composers often do their work at the piano while thinking about other instruments. It's not uncommon for them to imagine actual piano sonorities as strings, winds, or percussion. Thus the piano can function as a musical chameleon, assuming different tone colors depending on the performers' ability to express them, and the listeners' imaginative capacity to hear them.

Tone color does play a major role in music, and the orchestra is a unique beast in this regard. For the most part, Ruthardt's transcriptions of the Grieg were a sensitive and faithful rendering of the original orchestral score, but with one possible exception: the second movement (Aase's Death Op. 46, No.2). When it's played on the piano keyboard the music does not seem to resonate with enough color variation to sustain the slow and contemplative musical discourse. Unfortunately, the pondering suspended block chords of this movement as played on the piano can only die out. In the orchestral version Grieg surely had more options available in his pallet to "colorize" his musical statement.

The second work on the program was Bilder aus Osten, Six Impromptus for Piano four-hands, Op. 66 by Robert Schumann (1810-1856). Schumann composed this set in Dresden as a surprise Christmas present for his wife Clara in 1848. It's a mature work by the composer and full of wonderfully complex 19th-century tunes and harmony. It's piano music at its' best. You could detect a mutual admiration for this piece in the confident and cozy performance by this couple. It was intellectual, yet warm and fuzzy.

After the Intermission, the Hirsch-Pinkas Duo focused on music from the 20th and 21st centuries (as they often do). First, we were treated with an energetic Rondo in D Major (Op 87a) by Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977). Just as we may hear the piano in transcription as a proxy for the orchestra, so too are we inclined to hear native piano music as potential material to be orchestrated. Such is the case with this piece. The pounding rhythmic nature of this two-piano work implies an application of colorful orchestration. After hearing them play it, I read in the program notes that Tcherepnin did in fact transcribe his spirited Rondo for orchestra. It became the fourth movement of his Suite Op 87.

Tcherepnin's Rondo reminded me at times of Stravinsky's famous ballet Petrushka (which also exists in a piano version) - but without all of the "dissonance." It was nearly a neo-classic work, exploiting the D-Major scale, but also mixing in other coloristic tonal and quasi-tonal materials as well. As I listened to this short and peppy piece for the first time, I wondered if it was really composed by a Russian. The music is rather joyous, happy, and unabashedly optimistic - not exactly what you'd expect from a Russian.

Perhaps the explanation is that Tcherepnin composed the Rondo during his American period. He had long left his St. Petersburg home where his father Nikolai was a prominate composer. As a "White Russian" he moved from place to place with his family - first to Tbilisi and then to Paris, also spending some years in China and Japan. I recall learning about Alexander Tcherepnin as a child from piano books when I was growing up. His easy piano pieces (such as the "Happy Stowaway" and "Mic and Mac") along with simple piano works by other Russians (such as Kabalevsky and Prokofiev) were amount the stables of my initial introduction to modern music. Somewhere in my archives I keep a worn and faded newspaper clipping of Alexander Tcherepnin's 1977 obituary from the NY Times.

It's difficult for me not to associate Alexander with his son, Ivan Tcherepnin whom I had made acquaintances with before his untimely death in 1998. Ivan was a composer who taught at Harvard and who specialized (along with his brother Serge) in analog electronic music synthesis- a speciality that was all of the rage in the early 1970s. I've heard that the distinguished Tcherepnin composer dynasty continues on even today.

Following the Rondo in D Major, the Hersch-Pinkas Duo returned to the stage to present the Boston Premiere of a new work by Nathan Davis (b. 1980). The World Premiere had occurred earlier this week when the Duo performed at the Hopkins Center for the Arts in Hanover NH.

Davis' piece, Passacaglia, was composed in 2009. Davis grew up in New Hampshire, but currently resides in Madison, Wisconsin ("with his wife and their two cats"), but he has a strong connection with the Boston-area. Davis obtained several degrees from Brandeis University in music and mathematics. At Brandeis he studied piano with Evan Hirsch and music composition with Marty Boykan, David Rakowski and Ross Bauer (to name a few). Davis went on to obtain his PhD in music composition at UC Davis. He has written his own software for electronic music synthesis and composition, and is founder and owner of his own securities trading firm based in New York City. [readers should note that there is another (but unrelated) composer-percussionist based in NYC with the same name].

Davis' Passacaglia is on first impression a very strong piece. It's carefully written for piano four-hands with both the vertical and linear aspects of pianistic sound production in mind. We hear the chromatically rising "ostinato" very clearly at the onset of the work, and can follow how the composer deduces the variations that flow on logically from it. The short work is thematically convincing, resonates resoundingly, and appears to be constructed with a rock-solid methodology. I was impressed.

I was not surprised to read in Davis' bio that he had worked extensively in the field of electronic music, since one section of his Passacaglia reminded me of an acoustical phenomenon known as "Shepard's Tones." Electronically produced Shepard's Tones create the audio illusion of constantly rising pitches - as in a never ending spiral of sound. One section of the Passacaglia gave me this impression.

While there was an embryonic inkling and a subtle hint of impending fast melodic finger work in Passacaglia, it never got to a point where that idea erupted into a fast frenzy of musical hyper-activity. I was expecting lift-off, but was equally satisfied with a safe, sound, and uneventful flight.

Billy the Kid is one of those pieces of music destined to become an American classic - if it isn't already one. It's best known today in its' 1940 concert suite edition which Aaron Copland extracted from this acclaimed ballet. The first performance of the work took place on October 6, 1938 by Ballet Caravan in Chicago in Copland's original conception of the work for two pianos. That's the version that the Hersch-Pinkas Duo performed on Sunday.

However, the more familiar version of Billy the Kid for full orchestra (completed in 1939 by Copland) is what we are inclined to imagine in our heads as we listen to the two-piano score. Copland definitely thought for orchestra, and had most certainly intended to orchestrate his work from the onset. However, in its initial version, Copland is careful to write pianistically. Hirsch and Pinkas made note of this in their program notes.

The distribution of material between the two instruments takes advantage not only of their antiphonality, but the fact that there are two distinct performers. The pianos sometimes share portions of the same texture, but at other times operate on quite independent planes.

We heard six excerpts from Copland's ballet, beginning with "The Open Prairie" and ending with "The Open Prairie Again." One has to marvel at Copland's ability to keep it both simple and interesting. He spaces triads in unusual ways, and is able to manipulate his notes to create an almost cinematic vision. His cowboy and Mexican music verges on stereotypical, but his overriding skill as a composer makes the journey worthwhile.

As the concert concluded with Copland's American cowboy music (followed by an encore), I couldn't help but think that this Cambridge audience was both happy and satisfied. I think they may have been hungry too, and inspired by the Americana may have ventured over to Redbones in Cambridge for a late lunch or early supper of down-home Texas BBQ with beans, coleslaw, and dirty rice. Yum.

Links:

Artists' website
http://www.hirsch-pinkas.org/

Naxos press release about Circles of Fire by George Rochberg:
http://www.naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.559631

Listen to Circles of Fire:
http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=101

About Shepard Tones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_tone

About Redbones BBQ:
http://www.redbones.com/

--------------

Continuum performs at Harvard

2010-02-21T09:00:00.016-05:00

The rocking new music group from NY that goes by the name Continuum brought their contemporary music show on the road this week with not one, but two marathon concerts at Harvard's Paine Hall. The event was sponsored by the "Fromm Players at Harvard" endowment which the music department oversees, organizes, and curates on an annual basis.

The central theme this year was "Intersections." According to the detailed and elaborate program notes written by Joel Sachs (Continuum co-director, pianist, conductor, and event curator), the raison d'être for the concert was to explore the global phenomenon of cultural interaction - a process of musical fusion that began in the 19th century with Debussy's fusion of musical elements from East and West. Fusion was also a concept championed by the American experimentalist composer Henry Cowell who exhibited an "impetus toward a more all-embracing concept of 'cultural hybridizing.'"

Asserting that "intersections of culture" is a powerful force in today's music, Continuum selected 16 contemporary works for the 2010 Fromm Foundation concerts at Harvard. The two concerts featured 13 composers from all around the world. Their homelands included Mexico, Azerbaijan, Argentina, China, Cambodia, Israel, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Indonesia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It should be noted that many of these composers at one time or another studied or resided in the America or in Western Europe.

While the number of composers is too numerous, and the scope of their work is too broad, to fairly review here, I will say that the performances by Continuum were extremely impressive. They brought an entire chamber orchestra up from NY for our entrainment. Their troupe consists of about 20 musicians and support staff. I commend Harvard for investing in what must have been a pretty expensive new music variety show.

The soloist's with Continuum that stuck out were Taiwan-born cellist Mimi Yu, clarinetist Moran Katz, violist Stephanie Griffin, and pianist/Continuum co-director Cheryl Seltzer. Cheryl had a lot on her plate, and she really played up a storm - both inside the piano and on the keyboard.

(Note that last month in this blog I reviewed a concert by Continuum in NY. The link is provided below).

Taking a 40-thousand foot view of the two Fromm Players at Harvard concerts this year, I came away with some general reactions to the notion of cultural fusion in music. Here is how I see it...

Cultural identity is not only a key aspect of the identity of a musical work, it is a necessary and unavoidable attribute of the composer's intent. On the other hand, cultural identity should not override or preempt the primary objective of the creative endeavor - that of expressing sound as organized into abstract and aesthetically pleasing patterns and ideas.

There are voluminous gray areas here, including the overlap between cultural identity, and say Nationalism. Personally, I've never cared much for Nationalistic music. It often carries with it an overtone of politics and propaganda, or least the potential to be exploited politically without the composer's explicit or implicit consent or knowledge of the fact. Aaron Copland was a wonderful composer, but how many times have we heard his music put into a context to represent the "great American way."

Often "cultural identity" clutters the musical idea, by bringing with it too many external associations. For example, I find the music of Stravinsky's late period to be much more communicative and direct than music his much more popular Russian period. I find Bartók's music to be much more interesting when he composed in a purely modern style, and avoided explicit quotes of Hungarian folk tunes.

Composers who have created something distinctive and original often forge a brand new language to work in. While their new language may have derived in some way from the folk and art music traditions of their native culture, these composers moved on beyond their provincial milieu to invent what in many instances can be regarded as a cross-cultural, universal, and holistic viewpoint. As great composers they stand as a full-fledged contributors on the international stage.

The new music scene today is fragmented, confused, and suffering from a chronic identity crisis. If there ever existed a common international musical language, it was left behind at the end of the 20th century. Perhaps there was once a time when composers from all around the world could write in a similar or common modernist style. For example, I never regarded Tōru Takemitsu as Japanese, Luciano Berio as Italian, or Elliott Carter as American. They all composed darn good contemporary music that has an identity associated with them as individual artists. It doesn't matter which country they come from, since they speak in a more or less universal musical language that apparently has world-wide universal appeal.

But fusion sells. The commercial success of "cross-over albums" is unmistakable. Combining world music and traditional classical music is a profitable enterprise, and the international acclaim of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and Osvaldo Golijov's The St. Mark Passion are testaments to this fact (the later case observed by Joel Sachs in his program notes).

This phenomenon is a fact that does not go unnoticed by composers, especially by composers who are more often than not accustomed to being unnoticed. To put it crudely, by emphasising one's country of origin, a certain degree of marketing cachet can be derived. International bios are always more interesting to read than local and provincial ones.

I'm not sure that I like hearing the world's indigenous music re-tooled, re-interpreted, and performed on modern Western orchestral instruments. Such was my generalized take-way from the two "Intersections" new music concerts by Continuum.

It's not that there is a lot of interesting music and wealth of material to be derived from long-established and diverse musical cultures, it's that exploiting this music merely for self-promotion purposes bores me.

I noticed that "Intersections" concerts focused on composers who in one way or another utilized non-Western materials which derived specifically from their own specific homeland. I'm much more interested in composers who expand their personal horizons, and go beyond their own culture or place of birth. For example, Americans George Crumb, Lou Harrison, and Harry Partch were influenced by Asian music. Luciano Berio's classic "Folk Songs" take the listener on a global trek across many different non-Italian cultures - including the Appalachia mountains of North America. You don't have to be of African-American descent to play jazz. Mozart transcended his culture when he composed the Alla Turca movement of his Piano Sonata No. 11 in A major, K331.

It's my personal bias to avoid explicit cultural associations in my own music. I'm not going to whip out an accordion just because I'm of Italian-American decent. I might incorporate an accordion in a work because it's unique or interesting sounds, but the music would probably bare little if any resemblance to the popular song, "Nel blu dipinto di blu" - more commonly known as "Volare" - sung by the Italian pop singer Domenico Modugno. I prefer my music to be as abstract as possible, original, and with little or no cultural bias or baggage.

In our age we are bombarded by culture. Forging a new culture out of the old sometimes means burning bridges and destroying what has been the status quo. Phoenix rose from the ashes. Contemporary music should be able to stand on its own feet without the crutch of external forces.

In the end I think most composers would like to be thought of as a "composer" rather than as a "[fill the national or ethnic label] composer." The commonalities between composers are much more important and interesting than their national or ethnic differences.

Now here is Domenico Modugno singing "Volare" (Nel blu dipinto di blu) in 1958...

Links: http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2010/01/report-from-ny-continuum-performs.html

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/02/22/new_music_group_continuum_brings_world_fusion_to_harvard_concert/

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Discovering Vermeulen

2010-02-19T08:00:00.007-05:00

Visiting Dutch composer Rob Zuidam delivered the first of three public lectures at Harvard on Thursday afternoon. Zuidam (b. 1964) holds the distinction of being Harvard's "Erasmus Visiting Professor" for the Spring of 2010. The Erasmus Lectures are dedicated to the History and Civilization of the Netherlands and Flanders, and funded by a generous endowment. I already know of Zuidam from hearing some of his music in the 90s when his "Three Mechanisms" was performed at Tanglewood. Since then he has composed four operas.

From Room 2 of the music building (directly adjacent to the composer's office), Zuidam chose for the subject of his first Erasmus lecture a rather obscure Dutch composer from the 20th century. The talk was about a composer who is still rarely heard outside of his native country today, and who was virtually ignored for most of his career within Holland as well. His name was Matthijs Vermeulen (not to be confused with the famous Grand Prix motorcycle racing champ, Chris Vermeulen).

Matthijs Vermeulen (1888-1967) was by all accounts a maverick. He was known for his sharp tongue and outspokenness as a music critic (his primary source of income). He famously yelled "Long live Sousa" after a performance at the Concertgebouw of a piece by Cornelius Dopper - a rather conventional Dutch composer. Vermeulen didn't like music that derived from the Germanic tradition, and he was no fan of Sousa. To make matters worse, much of the audience thought he was shouting the name of a socialist revolutionary who had a attempted to bring down the Dutch government a few days prior. Vermeulen was banned from attending future concerts by the management of the Concertgebouw.

His Second Symphony (page two of the score is shown below) is without a doubt his best-known work.

Vermeulen composed this symphony in 1920. The piece has a complex main theme with no particular tonal center, which is constructed from large interval jumps and a mixture of chromatic/whole-tone interval structures. The theme goes through an elaborate development process which Vermeulen may have honed from his study of the Dutch polyphonic composers. Underneath the relentless counterpoint and thematic development, the Second Symphony pounds away in tone-clusters and a battery of non-pitched percussion instruments. It's very reminiscent of Edgard Varèse - although Vermeulen most definitely came upon his unique stylistic bent quite independently.

The maverick aspect of Vermeulen's career is not unlike that of Charles Ives in America. Vermeulen didn't get along with Mengelberg, the omni-present and all-powerful Music Director of the Concertgebow Orchestra. He frequently hammered the conductor in his published music criticism, and this rift probably resulted in his orchestral music being ignored by conductors for decades - at least in the cultural capital of Amsterdam. Although his Second Symphony was composed in 1920, it did not receive a reading until 1953 at what was said to be a flawed performance. Vermeulen himself first heard this work in 1956 - a full 36 years after he wrote it.

Vermeulen lived in near abject poverty with his family, and had to leave Amsterdam for a journalism position near Paris. In France, he lived in self-imposed exile for decades. His music was largely ignored both in Holland and abroad. His vision of what 20th century music composition should be was in sharp contrast to both the prevailing Stravinsky-inspired neo-classicism and those who adhered to Schoenberg's 12-tone school compositional process. Vermeulen had in fact invented his own musical language which only he was able to converse in. Somehow he found the means to survive in his own self-invented bubble without falling victim to the effects of bitterness, anger, or dejection.

Eventually Vermeulen returned from France to the Netherlands. Toward the end of his life the Dutch took a second look at his music, and Vermeulen ultimately received more frequent performances of his work. Although recordings have finally been made of most of Vermeulen's work, according to Rob Zuidam's comment in the Q&A session following the talk, "it does not travel well." It's not easy to obtain his CDs outside of Holland, and I suspect the only way most of us will be able to hear this music performed live is to travel to the Netherlands.

Even today, the Concertgebouw Orchestra rarely performs Vermeulen, and his name does not appear on the walls of the Concertgebouw concert hall along with the better-known Dutch composers of his generation. In fact, in the great city of Amsterdam where virtually every composer has a street named after them (see my link to "Composer-Streets" below), Vermeulen is conspicuously absent from the map (although there is a street in his name in Amersfoort in the Province of Utrecht).

Vermeulen was never part, and probably never will be, a member of the Dutch musical establishment.

In 1967 Vermeulen died in Laren, a small and idyllic town in the province of North Holland (which I have visited many times).

(The photo on the right is from the

collection of Odilia Vermeulen in Laren)

We look forward to Rob Zuidam's additional presentations about contemporary Dutch music at Harvard's "Erasmus Visiting Professor" lecture series. If you can't make it in person, the text of the lectures will be posted on Zuidam's website (link below).

The two remaining lectures in the series are scheduled for March 11th and April 10th, 2010 at 5:15 PM. It's free and open to all.

Links:

deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/08/composer-streets.html
www.classical-composers.org/comp/vermeule
www.RobertZuidam.com/essays

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Remembering Roger Sessions

2010-02-16T10:00:00.013-05:00

From my perspective, one of the greatest American-born composers was Roger Sessions (1896-1985).

Unfortunately, Roger Sessions is not a household name in the broader world of classical music. While he did command a dominant role in American music for several decades before and after WW II, it's pretty rare to hear any of his music performed today. This oversight is one of the great travesties of our current culture. One would hope that his chamber, orchestral, and operatic repertory would at some point be rediscovered and reintroduced into the concert repertory for a new generation of listeners.

For now, most of what I know about Sessions and his music is from old recordings, dusty scores, and fading memories of the man himself.

I was still a teenager when I watched him from a distance in the halls at Juilliard when I was an Extension Division student there in the early 1970s. At that time I learned about him through his students, such as Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Andrew Violette. He was a very well-liked teacher. Sessions had a very European outlook (having lived there for so many years). This world view stuck with him in NY (and at Princeton, NJ where he lived and taught). I recall that Mr. Sessions liked to have lunch at an upscale Italian restaurant near Juilliard known as "Mario's."

From my naïve and uninformed perspective at that time, Sessions seemed really ancient. In the avant-garde 70s, he was still writing Symphonies - how "retro." His aging hand appeared to be glued to his pipe, although I never saw smoke coming from it. He spoke in a soft voice, and sat silently much of the time looking off into space deep in thought. When he did speak, it was in a nearly incomprehensible drone and with a low-pitched mumble. His pace of speech was agonizingly slow. Sessions seemed to be the antithesis of some of the hyper-charged forces of nature that permeated the Juilliard culture, and in my teenage ignorance, I didn't realize how sharp the old man really was.

Besides his private students in composition at Juilliard, I recall that Sessions taught a class in counterpoint and that his classroom was directly adjacent to my L&M (Literature and Materials) classroom. All I know about counterpoint is probably the result of intra-classroom osmosis.

It was over the course of the next few years that I would hear, study, and experience Sessions music with a more informed eye and ear. His published books about music are amongst the finest I have ever read. His body of music is substantial and of the highest quality. I'm a huge fan of his nine Symphonies, the Violin Concerto, his piano sonatas, and the Solo Sonata for violin - just to name a few.

Sessions was also one of the most influential teachers of the late 20th century, and was the driving force behind an entire generation of composers, some of which I have studied with. I suppose that I'm an indirect recipient of some of his knowledge, since his students included the likes of Earl Kim, Robert Cogan, Robert Ceely, Malcolm Peyton, Milton Babbitt, and Donald Martino. I guess I'm a second-generation Session-ite, a bona fide Sec-session-ist.

Fortunately, up until his death in 1985 Sessions remained active and received a number of major commissions. He completed some of his most important orchestral works late in life, and penned some rather challenging and impressive piano pieces in this period too (Sessions was an excellent pianist).

My shameful first impression of him in the early 70s as "an old man" was quickly rectified. It soon became clear to me that Sessions had more brainpower and musical chops than I could ever hope for, and over the years I have been rather embarrassed by my misinformed youthful first impression.

One of the big turning points for me, where I became a huge fan of his work, came after I moved to Boston. The Boston Opera Company, under the direction and leadership of visionary conductor Sarah Caldwell, mounted one of Session's operas: Montezuma (1963). The opera in three acts, lasts 2 1/4 hours, and contains dense atonal music and great singing from beginning to end. It's a 20th century masterpiece. The thought provoking libretto was written by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese.

While Montezuma had had it's premiere over a decade earlier in Berlin, the Boston Opera Company delivered the American premiere in the Spring of 1976. (Once, at a reception that followed a Fromm Music Foundation concert at Harvard, I met a Sessions-look-alike Physics professor who in 1964 had attended the Berlin premiere of Montezuma - a copy of the program is shown below).

The Boston premiere of Montezuma was a real happening. I still recall the excitement in the hall at the old (and physically decaying) Orpheum Theatre. Throngs of prominent composers had made the pilgrimage to hear Sessions' work. (I recall that Don Martino, Robert Cogan, Malcolm Peyton, Robert Ceely, Francis Judd Cooke, Ezra Sims, Harry Chalmiers, Rodney Lister, and Scott Wheeler were at the performance that I attended). A scan of a page from my copy of the Boston Opera Company program book is shown below...

The vocal roster included Donald Gramm and Phyllis Bryn-Julson. I just noticed some familiar names in the orchestra too, such as Marylou Speaker (Churchill) who was the Boston Opera Company's Concertmaster before moving on to a post with the Boston Symphony. She passed away just recently at the age of 64. Andre Lizotte (who I knew at Berklee) and Robert Annis (from NEC) were in the clarinet section. Robert played bass clarinet in Montezuma. Dean Andersen and Dennis Sullivan were among the battery of six percussionists. In an interesting roll of the dice, 25 years later I would work with Dennis as colleague in the Information Systems group at Zurich Scudder Kemper Investments. The chorus drafted to sing in Montezuma was a rag-tag band of mostly amateur singers from the local colleges, including Lowell State, Regis College, and Tufts.

Given the complexity of the vocal, choral and orchestral music in this work, the Boston Opera Company production was rather good. I think everyone present at those performances knew that history was being made, and that this was a really important musical event - not only for Boston - but the the country as well.

What we didn't know at that time, or didn't even suspect, was that this great seminal work by one of America's leading composers was probably receiving its' final performance.

Montezuma, as important and outstanding as it is, did not enter into the repertory of opera houses across the US or across the world. Even worse, it was never commercially recorded. For the limited number of composers of my generation and older who were fortunate enough to be present at the Boston Opera House to hear Montezuma live, this was a unique and "once in a lifetime" experience.

While I have a piano vocal score of the Montezuma to study, it would be nice to see it performed again on the operatic stage. I'd even settle for a good quality commercial recording of the work. But, given the current musical climate, it's pretty doubtful that this will ever happen.

But all is not lost. Deconstructing-Jim (being the pack-rat that I am) has unearthed some old cassette tapes made of the April 4th, 1976 Montezuma live radio broadcast. The sound quality is not the best, but you can hear the singing pretty well. These rare recordings are all that we have, and I hope that listening to Montezuma in its' entirety will resonate with those of you who never had an opportunity to hear this great work before. Feel free to download it to your media player or iPod. Each of the three Acts are lengthy, and the MP3 file size is approximately 40 MB for each section.

Enjoy...

Montezuma, ACT 1 40 MB

Montezuma, ACT 2 42.3 MB

Montezuma, ACT 3 38.8 MB

Links:
http://www.uncwil.edu/music/Sessionssociety/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Sessions

-------------------------

Factoid

2010-02-15T20:30:00.000-05:00

There are approximately 6.8 billion people living in the world today.

About 5 billion of them have cell phones.

--------------------

Good morning Dushanbe!

2010-02-15T20:00:00.002-05:00

Hello to all of my fans in Dushanbe, Tajikistan!

If we can believe the data generated by Google Analytics, someone in Tajikistan paid a visit to my composer-centric website earlier today.

The mystery visitor launched directly into my site without looking it up in a search engine, or from clicking on a link. Their operating system is Windows XP, screen resolution set for 1280 x 1024, and browser of choice is Chrome. The mystery visitor uses tj-shuhrat as an ISP, and the language configured on their computer is the US version of English.

Dushanbe Tajikistan looks like a nice place. About 679,400 people live there.

Currently Dusanbe is comprised of 83.4% Tajiks, 9.1% Uzbeks, 5.1% Russians, 2.4% other groups. Shown on the right is the Ismail Samani Monument.

Dushanbe was once called Stalinabad, after Joseph Stalin.

Greetings to all of my fans in that part of the world!

I hope that you like my avant-garde modernist music!

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dushanbe

-------------------

Pepsi Refresh Project

2010-02-14T17:00:00.001-05:00

Free money for innovation is always a good idea.

The Pepsi Cola Company has begun a program to give away $1,300,000 each month to fund great ideas voted on by the public. You can apply, and make your project submissions online.

Pepsi accepts up to a 1000 applications per month. Although this month is already filled up, you can still submit your application for the next submission cycle which begins on March 1st.

Grant money will be awarded in amounts of $5k, $25k, $50k, or $250k. That's a lot of cans of soda.

How does it work?

Anyone (with Internet access) can submit their ideas online at

http://www.refresheverything.com/

The purpose of the Pepsi Refresh Project is that "people, businesses, and non-profits with ideas that will have a positive impact."

As a member of the public, you can go online and vote for up to 10 of your favorite ideas daily. If you submit your own grant proposal, you are allowed to vote for it. It's populism on steroids.

The categories are: Health, Food & Shelter, The Planet (Earth, I assume), Neighborhoods, Education, and my favorite: Arts & Culture.

I've already seen some cool music-related projects on the submissions list, including a composer looking to produce a new musical.

Pepsi has enlisted subject area specialists as advisers for each category of grant consideration. For example, the Arts & Culture Ambassador is blogger Rebecca McQuigg Rigal. Ms. Rigal is said to be a "trend analyst, consultant and writer in the areas of arts and culture, new media, youth trends, retail, fashion, marketing and consumer behavior."

(Hey, that job description sounds like what "Deconstructing-Jim" is about. I didn't even know that I was an online "Arts & Culture Ambassador" Look mom, I'm an Ambassador!!!).

It's great that the Pepsi Generation has wrestled control of the Internet out of the hands of the Department of Defense (DARPA). Let's monitor the Pepsi Refresh Project for its results.

Pass me a Coke, err... Diet Pepsi, please.

----------------

Reduce the Guilt

2010-02-14T16:00:00.001-05:00

Kettle Cooked Potato Chips from TRADER JOE'S...

33% less fat than regular potato chips. No preservatives. No artificial colors or flavors. No trans-fat. 120 calories per 6g serving (50 from fat).

You can't eliminate the guilt, but you can reduce it.

-------------------

Passing the torch

2010-02-14T14:00:00.001-05:00

It was a pleasure to hit upon the topic of classical music on today's Sunday morning television where most of the talking heads are typically politicians or political pundits.

Urban Update on WBZ-TV Channel 7 - a "multi-cultural program that examines news events and issues that have a broad impact on New England's minority communities." The program is hosted by Byron Barnett.

It was a rare opportunity to hear a clip from the world-premiere performance last September of an excerpt of "On Williows and Birches," - a new concerto written by composer John Williams for harpist Ann Hobson Pilot.

Hobson Pilot, who recently retired from the orchestra after a glorious 40-year stint, joined the BSO in 1969 (a few before I moved to Boston). In 1980 she was promoted to the position of principal harpist for the orchestra.

She was joined on Urban Update by her BSO colleagues Mark Volpe (Managing Director), Owen Young (Cellist), and her protege and successor Jessica Zhou (Harpist). Zhou, who was born in Beijing, joined the BSO at the beginning of the 2009/2010 season.

One of the things that struck me after attending a BSO concert last week was how the orchestra personnel has changed so completely over the years. Virtually every member of the orchestra has retired or moved on relative to the time when I was a regular and dedicated BSO patron in the early 1970s. Frank Epstein perhaps would be one of the exceptions, but oddly I did not see him on the stage with the percussion section in Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto last week. I did notice the new harpist Jessica Zhou, since she had a rather important part in Carter's new work.

It's a little bitter sweet that the distinguished Ann Hobson Pilot has passed the torch to Jessica Zhou, but we can rest assured that the BSO harp section (all one of her) seems to be in good hands.

--------------------

The digital_university

2010-02-12T10:00:00.002-05:00

My random thought today is about higher education.

In the United States, there is a rather diverse approach to university learning. There is pretty much something for everyone.

But a new bread of colleges have emerged that are profit-driven, and they do not hide the fact that their primary responsibility is to the stock holders. But, profit verses non-profit is often just a matter of tax-status, book-keeping, and type of incorporation. In some regard, all institutions of higher learning perceive their students as customers, and those customers are most often reliant on Title IV funding to purchase their education. Purchasing a home, car, or college education on borrowed funds has become one of the staples of the great American dream. I'm not disputing that.

But what do you get for your money, and are you buying the real deal or an illusion or dream? It's a murky area.

A few colleges seem to take the approach that their product is "theatre." Everything about their campus is designed to provide an illusion of the prototypical educational experience: clean classrooms, a library, and actors for program chairs, deans, and faculty. Merchandise, such as sweatshirts with the university logo exist to reinforce and support the brand identity. Even the graduation ceremony is part of the Disneyland-inspired illusion.

College is a booming business, and the cost of higher education has risen at an alarming rate relative to GDP. However, the tangible result of a 2 or 4 year degree in many instances is unclear, especially when the "theatre" aspect of an education outweighs the results-oriented approach of traditional learning. At some schools you can attend college without actually doing any real work to improve your mind. Student-customers are sometimes coaxed into purchasing a hefty college experience package - and in some cases it's a pretty darn good simulation for the real thing.

The fact that the public has trouble understanding what is real and what is theatre is part of the charm. Frankly, there are more than a few profit-driven, shady institutions out there. They skillfully use confusion about "what is college" to their advantage, often tout their non-traditional modes of engagement as a new wave in higher education. But in reality their product is simply a cost-effective delivery of a degree.

And if the university as theatre issue was not complex enough, higher education is going through a transformation regarding online access and the granting of degrees. Many believe that the digital_university is the future. It represents a paradigm shift in how a rapidly growing number of Americans will interact with college.

In my view, the best way to offer online studies is to simulate the real classroom setting. In other words, your teacher would have an Avatar, as would you and your fellow classmates. You'd have to raise your hand to ask a question, the the teacher would "see" your Avatar on the screen and respond accordingly. It would bring all of the social aspects of classroom learning back into the equation again. True, it's education as video game, but the paradigm has many advantages too. In reality you could be sitting at home in your pajamas on a cold and snowy day while attending class.

I believe that the Avatar is the future of online programs. The technology is already here, but it still needs to be developed and deployed.

What does this mean for teachers? Well, at some brick-and-mortar colleges teachers seem to be hired purely for their acting skills. They are required to look the part and present the aura of a stereotypical "Professor." Yet, in practice they are merely working on contract as one of many actors in the grand educational pageant show. At some business-run schools, instructors are asked to dress for the part and run through the motions of what people expect college to look like - otherwise they wouldn't have have invested in the illusion.

I guess it's time that we all sat down with our Avatars and had a long talk. The future is coming faster than we realize.

Pretty soon real-world teaching jobs (in a brick-and-mortar classrooms) will become "unreal" - like acting in a performance. On the other hand, the online classroom will become a true reality, with our Avatars leading the charge.

The digital_university is our future.

Embrace it, or become a Thespian.

---------------------

Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto

2010-02-10T10:15:00.002-05:00

Elliott Carter (b. 1908) is still going strong. Really strong.

Last evening I heard the American premiere of his new 14-minute Flute Concerto (2008).

He composed the piece on a joint commission from the Berlin Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra. The world premiere took place in Jerusalem in September of 2008, and it later performed in Berlin in June of 2009.

Carter worked on his Flute Concerto in his Greenwich Village apartment from mid-September 2007 to March 2008.

It is a very lucid and carefully constructed piece. The flute writing is both expressive and virtuosic. Great care was taken to prevent the soloist from being drowned out by the orchestra (an all too common issue with flute concerti).

As his followers have come to appreciate, Carter's music progresses on layers of evolving time lines and contrasting tempi. Non-pitched percussion sounds (including lots of wood instruments) logically tick and tok away in the Flute Concerto. Pointed staccato orchestral events - from isolated solo notes to blaring full-frontal tutti - mark the temporal ictus for a magnificent celestial clock constructed by the composer to represent the patterns of the Universe against an almost perceptible grid of Einsteinian time-space.

There is everything you'd want in a 21st century flute concerto: Fast music, slow music, rapturous romantic tunes, angular virtuosic modernism, orchestral transparency, tone color, a sense of direction and form, harmony, rhythmic excitement, and some just plain old cool riffs for the flute. This concerto was the showcase work for the BSO's new Principal Flutist, Elizabeth Rowe. It was her coming out party as a soloist - and she did a spectacular job.

Elliott Carter is not going to take it easy. He's got a tall stack of commissions on his desk to satisfy. Carter recently completed a new work, Concertino for Bass Clarinet and Chamber Orchestra written for his friend and assistant Virgil Blackwell. It's so new that a premiere has not yet been scheduled.

The composer seems to be exploring some new areas too. In 2008 I heard his fascinating string orchestra work Sound Fields at Tanglewood. The word is that Carter scripted a new piece in the same vein titled Wind Rose.

Other Carter works "hot off the press" include On Conversing with Paradise which was premiered in June of 2009 at the Aldeburgh Festival, and Poems of Louis Zukofsky for mezzo-soprano and clarinet. The later work was premiered at Tanglewood this past summer.

In a few days, on February 11th, Carter's new wind quintet Nine by Five will receive its world premiere in New York.

Look too for a brand new Carter piece to be premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival this coming June. It's a work for soprano and orchestra titled What Are Years and based on poems of Marianne Moore. If you can't make it to England, James Levine and the BSO will give the US premiere of the work this summer at Tanglewood.

The Tuesday evening audience at Symphony Hall was rather sparse. I estimate that only one third of the seats were filled. The only composer I spied in the crowd was Gunther Schuller, but others could have been lurking in the dark nooks and crannies of the voluminous building. Of course, this was the last of a series of concerts with this selection of works, and many of Boston's composers may have attended earlier in the week when Carter himself was sitting in the historic old concert hall.

The BSO also performed works by Schubert (excerpts from the incidental music to "Rosamunde") and the Brahms 4th Symphony. The Brahms was super, and Levine and the BSO practically blew the roof off of the house. I found myself making comparisons between Brahms and Carter, and see some similarity in their technique and relationship to music. Perhaps that's why Levine paired these works up on this week's program.

Elliott Carter is clearly "on a roll." My late father (who was born the same year as Carter) use to say jokingly in his old age, "the first 100 years are the hardest." Perhaps he was right about that. 110 is the new 50.

Here is a YouTube of BSO Principal Flutist Elizabeth Rowe discussing her performance of the Carter. Enjoy...

-----------------------

Herbert Brenon's Peter Pan

2010-02-09T09:00:00.001-05:00

Cable Access TV's "Classic Arts Showcase" aired a sizable clip of the 1924 silent film directed by Herbert Brenon titled Peter Pan.

It was delightful. The plot appeared to be faithful to the original J. M. Barrie book, and also quite similar to subsequent movies and musical versions as well.
(Barrie was very involved in the 1924 film, and selected the actors).

The excerpt I viewed starred Betty Bronson (as Peter Pan - shown on the right in the photo below) and Mary Brian (as Wendy - on the left in the same photo). This film also featured the Chinese-American actress Tiger Lily as the Indian Princes, but I'll have to rent the movie to see her acting.

Actress Brian (Wendy) went on to have a long career in movies and died in 2002 at the age of 96. Bronson (Peter Pan) was a big star Hollywood too, and died in 1971 at the age of 65.

The "special effects" were rather impressive for 1924. You couldn't see the wires that held the kids as they flew around the room - and eventually out the window of the flat. There is also an actor in a rather convincing furry dog costume who displays amazing human facial expressions and expressive body language. As you would expect, Tinker Bell is often shown as a flashing light.

The Peter Pan story is timeless, universal, and great entertainment for all ages.

Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Pan_(1924_film)

--------------------

Jan Sandström

2010-02-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

Last evening while watching "Classic Arts Showcase" on cable access TV, I found something rather surprising. It was an excerpt from a ballet by Swedish composer Jan Sandström (b. 1954) titled EN HERRGÅRDSSÄGEN (A Manor Saga) from 1987.

The dancers, choreography, direction, lighting, and set design were great, but the music really captivated me. The composer created a wonderful soundscape of beautiful orchestral sounds. It was quazi-tonal, but sustained and sospeso. The colors were vivid. I was very impressed.

I've never heard of Sandström. He seems to be a prominent figure in Sweden and as indicated on his website has composed a great deal of music. One of his popular works, Trombone Concerto #1 (the Motorbike Concerto), has been performed over 600 times. The composer studied with Brian Ferneyhough, but you wouldn't know it from the ballet excerpt that I heard. Although I did sense a composer who's music is informed by the techniques and aesthetics of late 20th century practice - including serialism.

I hope to hear more of Jan Sandström someday.

Link: http://www.jansandstrom.com/

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Salzburg-gate

2010-02-08T10:00:00.003-05:00

Where there's tons of money, you can usually find greed, corruption, embezzlement, and fraud.

If this sounds like the subject matter of grand opera, your right.

The European press is buzzing with shocking tales of intrigue, secret foreign bank accounts, and attempted suicide. The news revolves around the world-renown music festival in Salzburg founded in 1967 by the legendary conductor Herbert von Karajan.

Allegedly, the Directors of the Salzburg Easter Festival have created a complex Ponzi scheme utilizing shell companies and a network of intertwined International bank accounts. They are said to have enlisted family members to launder embezzled funds. In addition, their travel expenses have been heavily padded, and now politicians are wondering where all of the generous funds collected from corporate sponsors has gone.

I have ranted about this mindset before in my blog. The classical music biz is big business. I've gone so far as to coin the term "Music Industrial Complex" to describe it.

Apparently, the music industrial complex has an Enron situation on it's hands. I'm not surprised. When greedy businessmen see an opportunity to skim 2.5 million Euros (over $3 million dollars) from the budget of a profitable music festival without getting caught, their temptation is proportionally Wagneresque.

We'll have to wait and see if the fat lady sings as this story develops, but my advice would be to support your locally grown artists, musicians, and composers. Making an investment in the culture and art of your neighborhood is less likely to end up in the pockets of some not-for-profit administrator wearing a $3,000 Armani suit.

Link: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5220087,00.html

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Composer as Interior Decorator

2010-02-08T09:30:00.001-05:00

Today's random thought is about interior spaces.

Q: What's the difference between Interior Decorators and Composers?

A: Less than you might think.

Both professionals deal with selecting, arranging, or rearranging objects into aesthetically pleasing patterns. In both trades the goal is to design the characteristics of a space where the client can experience something out of the ordinary. Interior Decorators and Composers function in a sense consultants - freelance advisers with a unique flair and talent for innovative creation and coherent design. They use their skills to select moods, colors, and thematic elements in a unified way to implicitly or explicitly communicate an experience or make a statement.

While Interior Decorators deal with actual objects and materials to express their art either in the home or office setting, Composers tend to work more abstractly and thrive in the concert hall or on recorded media. Composers make note of the their ideas either with traditional pen and paper, or using special-purpose software to design and notate their sonic patterns. Interior Decorators on the other hand compose with their eyes, and work primarily in a visual environment - although some use special purpose software as well.

In the end, the actual commercial product of both disciplines is rather similar. Wallpaper is wallpaper regardless of the speciality. The primary difference is that one profession relies on light while the other on sound waves. More fundamentally, both professions rely on a customer-base that directly or indirectly contracts for their services and professional expertise.

From my perspective, there is not a lot of difference between pushing notes around on a piece of paper, and designing the space of an elegant and inviting room. It's not the actual material of individual notes on the page or tangible objects that form the experience, but how they are organized for the client that counts. In every sense of the term, a musical composition is an "interior design" that will ultimately reside in the mind of the listener. No more, and no less.

Both trades rely heavily on recycled artifacts. Interior Decorators might reuse old lamps or side-tables. Composers re-engineer from a pallet of standardized sounds, rhythms, and pitch combinations. In both cases, the basic material is rather limited, but the possible combinations and resulting patterns of expression are nearly infinte.

Both professions often exploit and drawn upon prior cultural associations that are psychologically and socially mapped to the artifacts that they deploy in their works. Well-designed musical compositions and physical spaces are more often than not associated with one or more cultural/ethnic patterns. "Cross-over" and "Fusion" is a popular current trend in both domains of artistic expression.

There is one difference: Interior Decorators on average get paid more than Composers.

Next week: ruminations on Composer as Short Order Cook.

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Concert Review: Musicians of the Old Post Road

2010-02-07T14:00:00.002-05:00

On Saturday evening February 6th, 2010 the Musicians of the Old Post Road (MOPR) performed a concert at Harvard Epworth Church in Cambridge under the collective theme "From the Romantic Salon."

Despite the frigid weather, the concert drew a capacity audience in Cambridge (which was a repeat performance of the same work from the evening before in Wayland, MA). Although the heating system at Harvard Epworth was in disrepair, the music provided a cozy setting that warmed all.

Members of the MOPR had done their homework not only preparing well-rehearsed pieces for this public performance, but in researching and finding under-performed or long forgotten gems in the classical music repertory.

The unifying theme of the "Romantic Salon" concert centered on one instrument: the guitar. MOPR guest artist Olav Chris Henriksen was featured in all of the five works on the program. He performed on, and spoke about, his family heirloom - a school of Stauffer six-string guitar made in Vienna around 1805. The instrument has been passed down through generations of guitar playing members of his Viennese-Norwegian family.

The concert featured little performed works by Francesco Molino, I.A. Preis, Nicolò Paganini, Friedrich Burgmüller, Wenzel Matiegka (but arranged for quartet by a 17-year old Franz Schubert).

The work by I.A. Preis was a set of variations for flute and guitar. Nothing is known about this composer, and the MOPR performance was undoubtedly the first time the work has been performed in the 21st century. While not a rediscovered masterpiece, the work was competently constructed and of certifiable salon music quality. It's yet another example of a skilled composer who has faded into the black hole of history. Apparently, even the most adept musicologists have been unable to unearth basic information about this now obscure composer - such as when her (or she) was born and died. No other works by Preis have been uncovered.

Flutist and MOPR co-director Suzanne Stumpf performed on a historic old system flute dating from around 1815. It was also made in Vienna. She indicated to the audience that perhaps her flute and Henriksen's guitar had met before in Vienna in the early 19th century. Stumpf performed on her historic wood instrument with both agility and tonal clairty.

The Paganini Serenade in C Major for viola, cello, and guitar was a delight. Paganini was a master of string writing, and one of a small circle of composers to take on the guitar in an intelligent and engaging way. Paganini could probably play the guitar and viola part himself, but I was impressed with the cello writing too. Cellist (and MOPR co-director) Daniel Ryan often soloed high above the treble clef, and managed to make his instrument sound cantabile the entire time.

The final work for the evening was Notturno for the entire MOPR ensemble - a piece originally composed by the Czech guitarist Wenzel Matiegka but re-tooled and arranged by Franz Schubert. Schubert most likely made the arrangement for his family to play at home. He re-distributed the original viola part between viola and cello. Schubert also added his own compositional improvements as well, such as doubling, and a rambunctious virtuosic cello solo in the theme and variations that concludes the work. The work was originally believed to have been penned entirely by Schubert, and thus assigned a Deutsch number of D. 96.

Violist Sarah Darling played a significant chamber music role in both the Matiegka/Schubert piece, and in the Paganini Serenade as well. She has another life as a new music specialist, and when not performing traditional works with MOPR, is championing the music of contemporary composers. She has been involved with more than 100 premieres.

Refreshments followed the program, and musicians, friends, and audience all mingled at the rear of the hall.

Several concerts remain on the 2009-10 MOPR Season, including "Virtuosi Italiani" in March (in Boston and Worcester) and "Conversations Galantes: Music of the French Baroque" in April (at Wellesley College).

Link: http://www.oldpostroad.org/

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The next great hope

2010-02-07T13:00:00.004-05:00

Recently a 28-year-old composer was described by New York Magazine as “one of the next great hopes for the future of classical music.”

By virtually all measures of success, this young composer's career has rocketed to unimaginable levels of notoriety.

Since I don't get out of the house much, I have yet to hear his music performed. But I see that his works are commissioned and performed all over the world. The composer has over 3000 followers on Twitter, and finds time in his busy schedule while traveling the globe to frequently update his fans on his whereabouts and ruminations - including what, where, and with whom he is dining.

From all accounts (such as the New York Magazine accolade) our long and venerable classical music tradition has been rescued from its' malaise by someone who hasn't even hit his stride. I'm glad to see that a talented young composer has stepped up to the plate, and infused the new music repertory and public consciousness with groundbreaking works that will set the standard for the 21st century.

The last composer that forged such a broad impact on society was Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky's shoes would be hard to fill, but if the buzz, Internet chatter, and mainstream press surrounding this rapidly emerging composer is well-founded, we have a true contender.

Only history will tell.

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Hypermusic Prologue comes to Boston

2010-02-07T08:00:00.002-05:00

Perhaps you read about it here on Deconstructing-Jim back in 2008...

http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/12/hypermusic-prologue.html

Now you can see the opera Hypermusic Prologue live at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge on Saturday, Feb. 27th, 2010 at 7:30 pm.

Here is an excerpt from Longy's Press Release:

Barcelona composer Hector Parra of the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique in Paris, will perform a version of the popular Hypermusic Prologue, a unique project for intercommunication between science, music and art. The opera libretto was written by theoretical physicist Lisa Randall of Harvard and a member of Longy's Board of Visitors. The work has been described as "one of the great achievements of European contemporary music in this century."
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Pierre-Laurent Aimard

2010-02-01T09:00:00.005-05:00

The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard is in town. On Friday January 29th he was the guest of Cathy Fuller on WCRB.

Aimard is one of a few new music specialists who have made significant headway into the larger classical music tent. Completely at home with challenging works such as George Benjamin’s Piano Figures or Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX, Aimard also plays more mainstream works by Ravel and Debussy with insight and passion.

He is in town to perform Elliott Carter's Dialogues (2003) and Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand with James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

After three performances, the pianist, conductor, and orchestra travel to Carnegie Hall for a performance in the Big Apple. The BSO program also includes two of my favorites: Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 and Harold in Italy by Berlioz with the Steven Ansell as soloist.

On WCRB Airmad spoke and played a number of short pieces. His short program included Ravel, Messiaen, and four of the early 12-tone pieces from Notations by Pierre Boulez (numbers 7, 1, 9, and 10). These little piano pieces eventually ended up as humongous orchestral work - expanded and orchestrated by the composer many years after the fact. You can check out my review of the 2008 BSO performance of Notations I-IV (for grand orchestra)... http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/10/concert-review-bso-102308.html

Aimard is a full-fledged member of the inner-circle of 20th century French music. His teacher was Yvonne Loriod - Oliver Messiaen's wife, and he worked a long stint as pianist in Boulez' Ensemble Intercomtemporain. In fact, after the concerts in Boston and NY, Aimard is off to Cleveland where he will make a recording of both the Ravel piano concertos with the 85 year old composer/conductor. Later, Aimard plans to record the Bartók Double Concerto with Maestro Boulez and the Chicago Symphony.

A huge fan of Elliott Carter, Aimard performed a short piece on WCRB written by the American composer for the birthday of James Levine's mother. It's called Matribute. I've heard it before. It consists of just two polyphonic lines (a little sparse for Carter), that contrast and interact with one another. One line is slow and sustained, the other more moody, scherzando, and percussive in nature. The two lines ultimately cross each other in register on the keyboard.

I heard James Levine premiere Matribute for a small group at Harvard last year, and a Ursula Oppens performance at Tanglewood. I liked their performances, but Aimard's interpretation is very pristine and sharp. He and Cathy Fuller discussed the final staccato note in the piece, which not only finishes the work with certainty, but also exhibits a degree of the composer's wit and humor.

I tuned back into WCRB Saturday night to hear the BSO live-broadcast. Carter's Dialogues (2003) led the concert. I caught this work out at Tanglewood at the Carter Festival, but now it seems more mainstream when presented on a program by a major orchestra along with traditional works. Dialogues reminds me a lot of another recent work by Carter, Interventions. Interventions was performed by the BSO in December of 2008, and reviewed by yours truly... http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/12/concert-review-bso-carter-interventions.html

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is clearly a pianist to follow. He can make new music sound convincing and user-friendly to the larger public. That can only be a good thing.

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The Tangelwood Festival of Contemporary Music

2010-02-01T08:00:00.002-05:00

Mark your calenders!

The Tanglewood Music Center (TMC) and the Boston Symphony Orchestra will hold it's annual Festival of Contemporary Music August 14-16th, 2010.

The featured composers this summer will be Gunther Schuller (left),

John Harbison (right), and

Oliver Knussen (below).

The details of the programming are still to be announced, but the program on August 16th will include Aaron Copland's Third Symphony.

The prestigious trio of composers directing/programing this years' festival all chaired the composition activities at the TMC at one time or another.

As usual, I look forward to the event. See you there.

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52nd Annual Grammy Awards

2010-01-31T22:15:00.011-05:00

BREAKING NEWS:

Live from LA, Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto edged out George Crumb's The Winds Of Destiny, Avro Pärt's In Principio, Roberto Sierra's Missa Latina 'Pro Pace' and Boston-based composer Yehudi Wyner's fantastic Piano Concerto "Chiavi In Mano" for the 52nd Annual Grammy Award in the BEST Classical Contemporary Composition category.

Lady Gaga (left)

Yehudi Wyner (right)

I watched the big show on TV, but didn't see Yehudi or the other composers in the audience at the Staples Center, or amongst the horde of celebs.

Other notable classical music winners included David Lang's The Little Match Girl Passion, The Emerson String Quartet, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's recording of Ravel's Daphnis Et Chloé (James Levine conducting). That work was on the BSO program this week.

I was disappointed that Ursula Oppens' recording of Elliott Carter's piano music did not win in the category of Best Instrumental Soloist Performance. It's a great CD. Check out my review of Oppens, concert of these works at Boston Conservatory... http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/10/concert-review-carters-complete-piano.html

Kudos to Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, and Pink, who all performed their hit songs with vast amounts of cleavage. Wardrobe malfunctions were miraculously avoided. Singing in tune was optional, especially if autotune software was enabled.

The Grammy is an industry award granted by the Recording Academy. Voting is granted to about 18 thousand dues paying members who are "professionals with creative or technical credits on six commercially released tracks (or their equivalent). These may include vocalists, conductors, arrangers, and other fields directly related to the creative or technical process of producing recordings."

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees!

Link: http://www.grammy.com/

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How to burn $100,000.00

2010-01-31T13:00:00.010-05:00

Imagine a pile of a thousand $100 bills sitting on a table in front of you.Now imagine crumpling them up, and setting fire to the entire stack.

In a nutshell, that's what it's like to be a composer.

Let me explain....

Since 1985 I have "invested" several thousand dollars per year in support of my side-career as a composer. Because none of it would have been tax-deductible, I have not kept detailed records of my expenses, but I know roughly what I've spent.

The annual sound of money being sucked out of my wallet has varied. Some years have hemorrhaged the bank account more than others. But I estimate that over the past quarter century my annual expense is has averaged around $4,000 per year. And that's a rather conservative estimate.

Where did that $100,000.00 go?

The most costly outlay has been related to self-publishing my printed music and postage fees for mailing it. It's been my habit every time I finish a new work to bring it to the copy shop and order bound scores for distribution. While there have been other expenses along the line related to actually paying musicians, paying the associated costs of a vanity concerts or recording sessions, demo CDs, or other career-related expenses (such as application fees for competitions, grants, and awards) - printing and postage have been the primary budget killer.

Generally, a score will cost around $20 to photocopy and professionally bind. Some scores cost more, some cost less. I usually order between 50 and a 100 copies of a score at a time.

Just as expensive as copy costs are the associated postal fees when I mail out a package of music en masse to prospective music ensembles and assorted musicians. These postal fees vary, but rates have risen dramatically over the past years, and rates for international mail have spiked the most.

Together, the self-publishing and postage fees easily average $4 thousand dollars per year. Over a period of 25 years, that amounts to $100,000.00.

I know what your going to ask next... What are the dividends? Where's the return on my investment?

Warren Buffett I am not. I don't need to be reminded that had I wisely invested that $100K over the past two and a half decades, the value of my investment would have grown significantly. Potentially, it could have resulted in a financial nest egg that would have come in handy for retirement, or even paying college tuition for my son. But tell that to an "emerging composer" eager for a performance.

Where did all of that music end up?

That's a good question, and it's still a somewhat of a mystery to me. I suspect that most of my scores ended up in the circular file cabinet, also known as the proverbial recycling bin. That's the same place a lot of my resumes end up too.

But occasionally after followup, I have gotten a hint at where the music actually goes.

Here are a few examples...

When I finished my woodwind quintet, I thought it had a degree of commercial potential (to use an old term by Frank Zappa). My quintet is a pretty accessible piece, and is scored for a rather common combination of instruments. There is a market for that - or so I thought.

After weeks of research on the Internet, I formulated a list of professional and semi-professional woodwind quintet ensembles from across the nation, and even around the globe. I narrowed the list down to 100 ensembles that might be interested in my work. My target list included student groups, faculty groups, as well as brand-name ensembles with a proven track record of performing new works.

I then assembled a woodwind quintet "package" which included a full score, a complete set of parts, a demo CD, biographic information about the composer and how to contact me, as well as a personalized letter. Once assembled, I industriously sent out 100 woodwind quintet packages.

I'm use to swimming up stream, but even I was a little surprised with the total lack of response. You would think that out of 100, there might be a few replies - perhaps an email of acknowledgement. But the response was nada. Follow up letters and email were also unsuccessful.

Another example...

My orchestral piece Tone Poem (2003) was sent to a wide selection of conductors and broad spectrum of orchestras. I included in my package a personalized letter, quotes from prominent composers in support of my work, a demo CD, and clear contact information. Again, this was a rather expensive mailing that involved large score reproduction and high postage costs.

The response? Zip.

And, the materials are never returned. They just disappear into a void of silence.

I usually follow up on my mailings, and conductors seem to be the hardest type of musicians to approach. Here are three examples...

Conductor #1 is a bassist/conductor who directs a select student orchestra at the New England Conservatory. I had sent him my score. When I approached him later after a concert to followup on my mailing, he stated that he never received the package. Per his request, I re-mailed the entire deal again, at an additional cost of about $35.oo. When I followed up after the second mailing, my communications hit a brick wall. He did not respond to written letter, phone messages, or email.

Conductor #2 is a famous American pianist/conductor. He directs one of the major orchestras on the West Coast and a fine orchestra in Florida comprised of young professionals. It so happened that my cousin Jennifer, a violist, was a member of his Miami-based orchestra. Through her, I learned that that my initial mailing of my orchestral work never got in his hands. He said he"never received" my package. A second copy of my work was express mailed to my cousin, who this time hand-delivered it to Conductor #2.

The response? Zip.

Conductor #3 is a world-renowned French composer/conductor. He is a new music champion, and one would assume that he has an eye for new and adventurous contemporary works. My package and personal letter to him in France went unacknowledged. In this case I really didn't expect much to happen given his stature as a new music guru. However, when Conductor #3 was in residence at Harvard delivering a public lecture, I took time off from work to meet him and follow up on my mailing. It turned out that he had never received my package.

I stood among a swarm of composers (mostly younger) who approached the conductor with shop-talk and career-related questions after his official talk. A young and rising student composer from New England Conservatory asked, "May I give you a score to look at?" In response, Conductor #3 suggested that she send her music to his work address in Paris (the same address where I had mailed my score a year earlier).

In protest, I interjected a touch of reality into the discussion. I boldly suggested that it was probably not very likely that any scores mailed to that address would ever make it into the hands of the Maestro. Conductor #3 stared at me with of an expression anger in his eyes, yet he didn't dispute my observation. When I angled and explored ways or options where I might be able to present my music to him, it became clear that it was a lost cause. Hell would probably freeze over before I could get my score in front of him for evaluation.

I could go on and on with additional examples, but it doesn't do much to advance my long-term objective. Composers try their best to get performances in a market that is over-saturated, but the current climate does not contain enough dedicated musicians, new music ensembles, orchestras, or venues to get their work performed. Even with an investment of $100,000.00 over 25 years, the odds are against us. I'm not alone either. A lot of other composers are in the same boat.

Perhaps my colleague and fellow classmate said it best. I bumped into him years ago at Tanglewood where he directs the student fellows in the composition program. After handing him a copy of the score to my Piano Quintet (2001), he glanced at it and said something to the effect of, "The old model of mailing your scores around doesn't work anymore. You should consider performing in your own group - like the Philip Glass Ensemble."

Although he spent only five seconds looking at the score, and had already come to some conclusion about what it would sound like. He said, "I get the gist of the style."

So take if from an old timer. After burning a small fortune on distributing my music to a vacuous community of musicians, I can attest that the old model does not work. My colleague is clearly right.

Perhaps web-based score distribution is the way to go. I'm publishing all of my music in PDF format and FTP-ing it up to the Cloud.

But since I like the feel and smell of paper scores, I will probably continue to mail out a few printed scores to highly select musicians and conductors, and hope for the best. But in the end, when you look at the numbers, scattering hard-copy printed music out to the winds pays fewer dividends than investing in lottery tickets.

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National Penguin Awareness Day

2010-01-20T08:00:00.007-05:00

January 20th

Happy National Penguin Awareness Day!

Good luck to all of the Penguins out there.

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Happy Birthday: Robert Ceely

2010-01-17T09:00:00.005-05:00

January 17th, 2010

Boston-based composer Robert Ceely was born 80 years ago today.

Happy Birthday Bob!!

Mr. Ceely reports by telephone today that he just finished a trio for brass instruments, and hopes to have it performed in NYC in June.

He is looking forward to enjoying the cake his wife Jonatha bakes for him twice a year: today on his birthday and on the 4th of July.

For more information about the composer, and to listen to excerpts of his music, visit...

http://composers.com/robert-ceely

and

http://www.ceelymusic.com/

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Happy Birthday: Ezra Sims

2010-01-16T09:00:00.003-05:00

January 16th, 2010.

Boston-based composer Ezra Sims was born 82 years ago today.

Happy Birthday Ezra!!

Staff from the Computer-Repair division of Deconstructing-Jim, Inc. will be spending a good part of Sunday with Mr. Sims, attempting to rebuild his Lenovo IBM ThinkPad computer system. We are hopeful that his data and applications can be recovered, but prayers and well wishes for a successful restore are most welcome.

You can learn more about the composer from his website...

Link: http://www.ezrasims.com/index.htm

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Concert Review: Sonic Voyages I

2010-01-16T08:00:00.003-05:00

On January 14th, the Arlington High School Department of Performing Arts presented Sonic Voyages I.

It was a multi-media show with electronic music newly composed by students from Mr. John DiTomaso's popular Music Technology class at the high school.

The program was divided into sections:

Suite I: Music of the Spheres

Suite II: Martin Luther King and Malcom X Tributes

Suite III: Remixes and Diatonic Projects

Grove Laboratory X1 (photo below)

Featuring about 70 student composer-musicians, the music was diverse and original. Some works were more abstract than others (e.g. exploiting the overtone series and/or non-pulsed rhythmic structures). Some pieces were more pop-oriented, had a driving beat, and were realized quite professionally.

AHS Director of Arts provided short introductory remarks, explaining that the world of professional music has shifted toward electronically-generated and digitally manipulated sounds. Technology allows musicians to work directly with their chosen sounds, without having to struggle through all of the traditional intermediary steps of music making: score preparation, parts copying, rehearsals, and live performance.

Music today is clearly not your grandfather's music. These young musician-composers take to computers, software, and audio technology like fish to water. It's remarkable how some of the former obstacles of music creation (e.g. years of formal music training) can be circumvented with the aid of user-friendly technology. Today, just about everyone can be a composer. It's no longer an obscure discipline requiring a life-time of toil to acquire the necessary skills.

Throughout the program, two large projection screens displayed images related to the music, and a digital video image mixer enhanced the audience's experience. It felt like the early 70s all over again.

Congrats to all of the young composers (including my son Joseph) featured in the Sonic Voyages I concert!

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Report from NY: The Metropolitan

2010-01-15T15:00:00.006-05:00

On Wednesday January 13th, I spent the entire day at the cavernous Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY. It's a big museum and pretty overwhelming, but at least I walked through the entire space of the building.

Here a just three images of works (out of thousands) that I viewed. For some reason, they caught my eye...

The Organ Rehearsal by Henry Lerolle (1848-1929). Lerolle was the brother-in-law of composer Ernest Chausson (1855-1899). The oil painting is enormous, and kind of shows what it's like to be a musician sitting up in the choir loft. Apparently, Lerolle was not all that prolific, but lived quite comfortably on his wealth.

Red Sunset on the Dnieper is by the Russian-Ukrainian painter Arkhip Ivanovich Kuindzhi (1842-1910). This landscape, which was painted between 1905 and 1908, really catches the viewers attention.

The walking stick show above was made by Paul Gauguin (1848-1903). It features a carved female body and a hidden compartment.

Link: http://www.metmuseum.org/

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Report from NY: Juilliard ChamberFest 2010

2010-01-15T14:30:00.005-05:00

In a recession, free concerts are always welcome.

With not much going on Tuesday evening January 12th, I decided to check out ChamberFest 2010. After a hearty meal at Ollies's Noodle Shope & Grille at 1991 Broadway (#32, the Singapore Mai Fun for just $8.50), I found my way around the corner to Juilliard.

Juilliard's new building is behind the renovated Alice Tully Hall. Not having been to Juilliard since the 1970s, I can say that the lobby looks a little different today. First, you enter through a tall glass facade and entrance. Before you are an entire story of stairs/seats that could (and probably do) double as a public performance space. Once up the stairs you come to a ultra-modern lobby...

A crack-team of security guards protect the entrance to the college itself, and I noticed that every student or faculty member that passes through the turnstyle triggers the computerized security system to pop their photo up on the screen. It's all very hi-tech. No full-body scans yet, or dogs to sniff my underware, but I felt pretty safe.

After explaining that I was here for the concert at 8 PM in Paul Hall, the guards let me through to the lobby. Juilliard is the Hard Rock Cafe of classical music. I think I walked past pianist Richard Goode chatting with students near the guards' post.

ChamberFest 2010 is a week-long event featuring a variety chamber music works performed by Juilliard students. In my day, Juilliard did not emphasise chamber music very much. The place was more of a factory for singers, soloists, and orchestral musicians. But to quote from the program notes, "The ChamberFest experience is unique for the devoted chamber musician at Juilliard, and it supports the broad and reflective education necessary for the 21st century artist-citizen."

It's a good mission statement. I agree with it completely, speaking as an 21st artist-citizen myself.

The week-long ChamberFest concert series included a few modern works too. Besides the Ives Trio, concerts featured Messiaen's Quatuor for la fin du temps and the Schoenberg String Trio, Op. 45. Exciting music. The students are all coached by Juilliard's superstar faculty, including new music advocates Curtis Macomber (violin) and Fred Sherry (cello).

The concert I attended had three chamber works: The Chopin Piano Trio in G minor, Op.8; Deux Rhapsodies for oboe, viola, and piano; and Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor, Op. 80. It was all basically new music to me, and I was glad to hear it. The Chopin was performed by Robyn Quinnett (violin), Lila Yang (cello), and Melody Quah (piano). The Loeffler was performed by Max Blair (oboe), Adrienne Hochman (viola), and Yuri Bakker (piano). All of the musicians were well-prepared, and executed the musical score professionally and with confidence.

The standout piece (and performance) of the evening was the Mendelssohn performed by the Azur Quartet (Sharon Park and Francesca Anderegg violins; Molly Carr, viola; and Matt Zalkind, cello). Mendelssohn was a composer at the top of his game when he composed this piece, and these young musicians played it with precision and energy. Cellist Matt Zalkind is only 23 years old.

Although the Juilliard building is completely new, I kept suppressing feelings of dé·jà vu. Paul Hall looked awfully familiar - just like it did in the 1970s. But the Paul Hall of 1972 was in a building across the street. Yet the new Paul Hall had the same light fixtures, arched rows of chairs, reddish upholstery, dark wood paneling, pipe organ, and excessively-dry acoustics. It felt a bit like being on the holodeck of the Starship Enterprise of Star Trek fame. How on earth did they move an entire concert hall to a new building? Not only that, why would anyone want to do that?

Anyway, the music was good, the concert was well attended, and I've stopped asking questions that begin with the word "why."

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Report from NY: The Phil takes on Berg Op 6

2010-01-15T10:37:00.002-05:00

Alban Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra Opus 6 (1923) was on the schedule for the NY Philharmonic's open public rehearsal on Thursday morning January 14th.

I didn't want to miss it, since the Berg piece is not often heard in public, and seeing a complex score put together by an able and skilled conductor working with a world-class orchestra was sure to be a sensation - if not a learning experience.

After paying my $16 and waiting my turn in line to be frisked by NY City policemen, I made my way up into the 70s decorum, cavernous-but-cozy, Avery Fisher Hall. I sat myself down amongst the swarm of grey haired seniors (a cohort of which I proudly consider myself a full-fledged member), and pulled a 35 year-old xeroxed copy of the Berg study score from my overflowing backpack - trying my best not to expose dirty underwear in the process.

As I had expected, the Berg was the first item on the morning's 9:45 AM rehearsal schedule - although the actual concerts would feature this piece last. It is scored for a large orchestra, and it is probably standard protocol and common courtesy not to force all of the musicians to wait around. The other works on the program were for smaller forces, and I was less interested in hearing them anyway. Everyone in the orchestra had to be back on stage dressed in formal concert attire later tonight (which will be the 14,937th concert in the history of the NY Philharmonic).

Berg's piece is not all that long, but it has a ton of notes. Some would say that it is "over-orchestrated" and I'd agree with that assessment. The late Michael Steinberg once described it as “Mahler’s Eleventh” Symphony.

Although I've known the piece from various recordings over the years, this particular piece by Berg has always seemed to me as a bit "messy." It's very hard to hear what's going on inside, since there are so many layers of sound.

How would the new NY Philharmonic music director shape it, bring it to life, and rehearse all of those notes in short order? I'd soon find out.

Maestro Alan Gilbert came out on stage, and got down to business right away. He played through all three movements without stopping or making a comment (although comments were hard to heard from the back of the hall).

After plowing through the piece, which was not 100% ready for prime time, he went back to individual movements and worked on a selection of difficult spots.
Out of the sonic totality, I remember a very distinctive sounding clarinet solo, and I later learned that the NY Phil has been quietly trying out a selection of guest clarinets. The retirement of Stanley Drucker last year created a vacancy that has not yet been filled.

The brass section too has a difficult part, particularly at rehearsal number 150 of the third movement. When Gilbert wanted to rehearse just that section, the brass players asked for a running start. Brass players are like that.

Gilbert is very professional. He conducts with a clear beat. At times he would sing a line back to the musicians to exemplify what he was looking for. What else can you ask for?

In the end I was favorably impressed with the performance, but my initial impression about the over-orchestration of Berg's Opus 6 remains. It my be my aging ears, but the work lacks color. It has great textures, but all of those rich sounds cancel each other out. You can hardly hear some of the secondary lines, and much of the music recedes into the background. Berg revised his piece in 1929, probably with orchestration in mind.

A few minutes into the rehearsal of the Berg, an elderly gentleman sitting close to me began to snore with a vengeance. He was out like a light, and his companions had difficulty getting him to wake. Most others around me seemed ambivalent about the Berg too. Some young international tourists were busy snapping photos on their cameras and checking messages on their iPhones.

After the NY performances (1/14, 1/15 and 1/16), Gilbert and his band will take the Berg on tour to nine cities in Europe. They will give 13 performances over 15 days "hitting" Barcelona, Zaragoza, Madrid, Zurich, Frankfurt, Cologne, Dortmund, London, and Paris along the way. By the end of the tour, the Berg should be fully rehearsed.

Also going long on the European road show will be the piece "EXPO" by the NY Philharmonic Composer-in-Residence: Magnus Lindberg. "EXPO" was premiered in September by the orchestra for their grand opening night. I saw it on a nationally-televised broadcast on PBS, and was favorably impressed with the piece.

After hearing the Berg, I had taken in enough. My ears were full. I didn't stay to hear the Haydn or Schubert, or even John Adams' "The Wound-Dresser."

Besides, I had a bus to catch.

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Report from NY: Continuum performs Mamlok

2010-01-15T09:00:00.018-05:00

Composer Ursula Mamlok will be celebrating her 87th birthday on February 1st, 2010.

On Wednesday evening January 13th, the New York-based new music ensemble Continuum got an early start in what I hope will be a slew of birthday celebrations for the composer. Continuum's celebratory concert of Mamlok's music was held at the Merkin Concert Hall on 67th street in New York. (By the way, this long-standing NY-based new music group named Continuum should not to be confused with the Amsterdam-based new music group going by the name).

The eleven works selected for the concert were drawn from a body of some sixty works to the composers' name. The pieces were written during a time-span of about a half century, although the concert featured three world premieres.

I was thrilled to learn that Contiuum would be presenting a concert dedicated to Mamlok's work while I was visiting New York. I'm glad to report that the concert lived up to - and even exceeded - my already high expectations.

Mamlok has an interesting bio. She was born in Berlin in 1923, and escaped with her family from Nazi Germany at the last moment in 1939, ending up in Ecuador. Looking to further her studies in composition, she eventually obtained a visa to the United States, and in 1940 traveled alone to NYC to study with Maestro George Szell at the Mannes School of Music on scholarship. Her NY years were fruitful, full of musical stimulus and artistic influence. Aside from her work with Szell, she studied with the many of the prominent NY-based composers of the period, including Sessions, Giannini, Wolpe, and Shapey.

Mamlok's String Quartet No. 1 caught the attention of Edgard Varèse, who dialed her up on the telephone after the premiere and praised her work enthusiastically. (Mamlok's elegant String Quartet No. 2 from 1998 was performed on the Continuum concert). Later, Mamlok would mention to her friends that the strong support from Varèse early on in her career gave her a boost in confidence. Varèse, of course, was very prominent and well-respected composer.

Mamlok's works selected for the concert ranged in creation date from her Arabesque for Solo Flute (1960) to Aphorisms II for Clarinet Duo (2009). Aphorisms II is "hot off the press" and I heard anecdotally that the final edits and changes were communicated to the performers just a week or two prior to the premiere. Although we can perceive a stylistic evolution over the decades in her work - ranging from hard-edged pointillism to a more assessable, direct, and warm style - there is also a steadfast and un-compromising persistence omnipresent in the composer's life-long musical expression that binds it all together into a logical, continuous and flowing unity.

What strikes me after hearing all of the eleven works presented on the program is the sensitivity of Mamlok's ear. Every note has its' place, and the domain of musical pitch is one of the creative gardens that she revels to play in. (The subject of gardening is a theme that has nourished her music over the years).

Another interesting trait in Mamlok's work is her utilization of pedal point. Apparent even in the early flute pieces from 1960-61 when she was under the tutelage of Stefan Wolpe, Mamlok learned that all notes are not created equal. By emphasizing certain pitches in certain registers, the composer is able to carve out tonal plateaus for the listener to hang on to and refer to as important reference points.

The pedal-point technique was particularly evident in From My Garden (viola version, 1983). The performer is provided with a stage to dance around the pitch D above middle C, which acts as a tonal center without ever implying a specific tonality or mode. The idea of the piece is to exploit the viola in various ingenious ways to get at and combine the pitch D in the context of a shifting and on-going musical dialogue. In this instance, the composers' game is both skillful and a pleasure to listen to. In the program notes, the composer is quoted as saying, "The slow unfolding of pitches, frequently returning to the initial pitch, may remind the listener of tonality, an effect arrived at by serial procedures."

Mamlok was a reluctant serialist. Like many post-war composers, she was intrigued by the music of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Living in NY in the later 20th century, 12-tone/serial music was the big thing. Yet, she adopted it to her own needs and apparently uses precompositional charts as road maps for her work.

With our current perspective of 20-20 hindsight from the 21st century, we can see that Mamlock's somewhat more intuitive compositional method has stood the test of time. She is at heart a conservative pragmatist, and allows the impulse of her work itself to guide the results. Regarding her own working-methods, she writes, "While I often use the principle of continuous variation as a compositional method, in my longer works I allow some sections to return, preferring rounded forms with large formal divisions to the through-composed forms."

For me, the most impressive work on the program was Confluences dating from 2001. The work was originally commissioned by Continuum and premeired by them at the Sonic Boom Festival at the Knitting Factory in NY. There is interesting dialogue between the instruments, and great contrast and energy within the work and between the movements. The final movement, "Still (as if suspended)" is sparse and Zen-like. It creates a meditative calm that focuses the musician's thoughts and energy on every note. Confluences breaks with tradition by ending with a quiet, slow, and soft movement, but everyone in the audience could hear that the musical idea was just right, and close to perfect.

As a former New Yorker who grew up in the early 1970s very attuned to what was happening in the vibrant Manhattan new music scene, I was aware of Mamlok's work from hearing her pieces performed during that period. I also remember her presence at concerts of that period. She was a fixture of the NY new music scene. However, after moving to Boston in 1973, I did not have the fortune of hearing much of her work other than one recording on the CRI record label.

It is fair to say that Mamlok, who as of late has obtained much deserved attention and recognition, worked quietly and in relative obscurity for much of her career. She has moved back to her native Berlin, where she reportedly is extremely active composing, and lecturing. The music publisher Boosey & Hawkes recognising an opportunity, has recently signed her on. Performances (such as this Mamlok retrospective in NYC) are on the increase. To put it another way... on the cusp of her 87th birthday, composer Ursula Mamlok is a hot ticket. It's great to see a composer finally gain wider recognition, even if it is in his or her late 80's (or '90s or '00s).

Just after the intermission, Cheryl Seltzer - pianist and Continuum co-Director - led a short panel discussion (without an actual physical panel) featuring six friends, musicians, and colleagues of the composer. Mamlok could not attend the concert herself, since Berlin is covered in snow, and international air travel for people in their late 80's traveling alone is, long, uncomfortable, rather cumbersome, and somewhat difficult.

I was glad to see my friend and teacher Marty Boykan as one of the members of the panel. He told a story about how he first became acquainted with Mamlok's music in the mid-1980s when he was a member of the jury for a composer grant committee. The score and recording of Mamlok's submitted piece made a lasting impression on him. Later he wrote her a note, complimenting her for her work while apologizing for the short-sightedness of the committee which (despite his recommendation) had in the end selected other composers for the award. Years later, when Boykan and Mamlok finally met face-to-face, Mary was very surprised by her comment, "I remember your mother." As it turned out, when Boykan was a 12-year old youngster, his mom would take him to the Mannes College of Music to have lessons in 16th century counterpoint with George Szell. While he had his lesson, Ursula Mamlok and Marty's mother would chat outside the door. Mamlok's lesson was just after Marty's. Even though Marty didn't realize it until many decades later, they had shared this early connection.

The performers were superb. Continuum featured Charles Neidich and Ayako Oshima (clarinets), Ulla Suokko (flute), Moran Katz (clarinet), Renée Jolles and Airi Yoshioka (violins), Stephanie Griffin (viola), and Joanne Lin (cello).

As it so happened, seated next to me during the concert was a very close friend of Ursula Mamlok - a woman by the name of Ursula Eastman. Eastman and Mamlok go way back, and she had been in contact by telephone just days before the concert. Eastman brought me up to speed on what Mamlok is up to, since I had not even known that the composer had left New York. Ursula Eastman had worked for the music publisher Schirmer as a publicist.

The Directors of Continuum are Cheryl Seltzer (piano) and Joel Sachs (piano and conductor). 2009/10 is Continuum's 44th season, and I fondly remember their assorted composer retrospective concerts from the early 1970s in NY (such as the one for John Cage). Continuum is one of the long-standing and most distinguished, landmark new music groups. They have a number of CDs out in circulation, and there are plans to record a CD of Mamlok's music. The group is among the oldest of the new music avant-gardists (if that is not a contradiction of terms).

When Continuum came to Boston in 1978, they gave the New England premiere of Milton Babbitt's A Solo Requiem with soprano Bethany Beardslee at NEC's Jordan Hall. As it turned out, I was asked by composer and concert organizer Malcolm Peyton to be Ms. Seltzer's page turner. I still have anxiety attacks about that job, since to my eyes Babbitt's Xeroxed score looked like a swarm of ants at a picnic. The tiny dots on the page were difficult to follow as the complex music whirled by. My job would have been a tad easier if Ms. Saltzer had been less animated. Given the highly-active body language of her performing, her page-turn head nods turned out to be completely indiscernible from all the other involuntary actions and random contortions that Babbitt's music seemed to invoke in her.

More than 30 year later I can report that Ms. Seltzer is still a very animated performer - although not with the same amount of violent display or dance-like expression of the 70s. It's actually a great pleasure to watch her perform live, since she physically embodies the music and seems to thrive on it.

In particular, her facial expressions while performing in the various works of Mamlok caught my eye and attention. For example, it was telling that both she and I would smile at the same spots in Mamlok's music - sections that would coincide with a particularly witty figure or catchy musical idea. You can tell if music is well-performed if it evokes a physical response, either from the audience or the performer.

After the concert, everyone was invited up to the second floor of Merkin for a generous reception - complete with a dry chardonnay and a spread of assorted cheese, fruit, and crackers. I feasted along with the impressive crowd of NY new music intelligentsia. I got to speak with Marty and Susan Boykan, composer Elliott Schwartz (who like me and the Boykans, were visiting NYC from New England). I also met musicians from Continuum, and its' esteemed and inspiring Music Directors Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs.

From afar, I spied a familiar face amongst the crowd at the busy reception. It turned out to be the charismatic violinist-extraordinaire Miranda Cuckson, whom I've blogged about in Deconstructing-Jim previously (http://deconstructing-jim.blogspot.com/2008/11/cd-review-martinos-violin-music.html ). While I had never met Miranda in person, I introduced myself and we had a chance to chat. It turns out that she had once premiered a work for violin and clarinet written for her by Ursula Mamlok shortly after the composers' return to Berlin. We shared thoughts about the inspiring concert.

It was good to hear from Joel Sachs that Continuum will be performing on February 19th and 20th at Harvard. It's for the annual Fromm Music Foundation festival, and this year the concerts will feature an array of broadly-international works by Conlon Nancarrow, Oleg Felzer, Betty Olivero, Guo Wenjing, Pablo Ortiz, Chinary Ung, Roberto Sierra, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Benjamin Yusupov, Du Yun, Tony Prabowo, Tania Leon, and Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky. I certainly plan to attend.

Continuum
Celebrating Ursula Mamlok
Wednesday, January 13th, 2010
Merkin Concert Hall at the Kaufman Center
129 West 67th Street
New York, NY

Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Mamlok
http://www.boosey.com/cr/composer/Ursula+Mamlok&ttype=Biography&ttitle=Biography&langid=1
http://www.continuum-ensemble-ny.org/

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Report from NY: Ann Street

2010-01-15T08:52:00.007-05:00

Ann Street, one of lower-Manhattan's oldest byways, first appeared on a map of the city dating back to 1728.

Singers, musicians, and music connoisseurs know Ann Street an early 20th century song by Charles Ives. Ives based his short but catchy piece on lyrics by poet Maurice Morris dating from 1921:

Broadway!

Quaint name Ann street.
Width of same, ten feet.
Barnum's mob Ann street,
Far from ob-solete.
Narrow, yes Ann street,
But business, Both feet.
Nassau crosses Ann Street!
Sun just hits Ann street,
Then it quits Some greet!

Rather short, Ann Street

The poem's mention of circus entrepreneur P.T. Barnum relates to Barnum's "American Museum" which once stood at the corner of Ann Street and Broadway

Perhaps Ives is making light of societies' misguided obsessions. After all, in 1842 Barnum had gotten rich by exhibiting the midget "General Tom Thumb" and other side-show oddities. In the world of show business, how is a composer to stand out when "mob" mentality prevails?

Or maybe Ives is commenting on the circus-like atmosphere of the music business itself, and how short and narrow the streets can be.

Ives was a man of integrity.

Today, people still walk up and down Ann Street mostly oblivious to its' history and what it means.

Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Street_(Manhattan)

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Report from NY: Art imitating Art

2010-01-13T10:00:00.006-05:00

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NY is abuzz with aspiring artists hard at work forging replicas of oil paintings by the great masters.

Portraits by Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) seem to be their subject matter of choice.

Oddly enough, the public seems to marvel in the work of these young artists. Tourists and art connoisseurs alike hover around them in droves - watching their every brush-stroke in sheer amazement. It makes for great performance art.

Not only do the artists imitate art by emulating these great works, but the public (myself included) is inspired to capture the moment with their digital cameras.

The photo on the right is my rendering of a tourist photographing an artist who is making a copy of a painting by Rembrandt.

No flash allowed.

Art imitating Art imitating Art.

The conga line of inspiration and eternal creativity.

Where will it end?

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Avant-garde composer elected President

2010-01-11T08:00:00.001-05:00

Yesterday Dr. Ivo Josipović was elected President of Croatia. He is the 3rd President of Croatia - elected with over 60% of the votes.

He is also an avant-garde composer.

Dr. Josipović graduated with a degree in music composition in 1983 from the Zagreb Music Academy in Croatia where his teacher was Stanko Horvat. To date, he has composed some 50 works for orchestra, voice, soloists, and chamber ensembles. The 53-year old President-elect has been awarded prizes for his musical works in Croatia and at international competitions. Dr. Josipović has served as the head of the Zagreb Music Biennale and has recorded a dozen CDs.

According to his bio on Wikipedia...

"In 1985, he received a first prize from the European Broadcasting Union for his composition "Samba da Camera". In 1999, he was awarded the Porin award for the same composition, followed by the Porin award in 2000 for "Tisuću lotosa" (A Thousand Lotuses). His most successful pieces also include "Igra staklenih perli" (Glass Bead Play) and "Tuba Ludens". These pieces are performed by numerous musicians in Croatia and abroad."

photo of Josipović (on right) with composer Krzysztof Penderecki (b.1933)

Congratulations to Ivo Josipović!

Links:

http://www.composersforum.eu/?p=326

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Going Digital - Redux

2010-01-05T09:00:00.002-05:00

One explanation for the precipitous decline in public participation in the arts (such the number of people who attend concerts) is the introduction of new media - such as the Internet.

Indeed, it may be true that pod-casts, digital downloads, streaming media, and Facebook have all replaced traditional venues of musical and interaction. It's been a while since the typical American family leisurely sat around and listened to Grandma play her favourites on the piano.

As a composer, it seems a little strange to know that there actually are people out there listening to my music (or at least downloading it). I can't see them. They're invisible, and I have only the most vague idea of who they are.

For instance, the report generator for my website indicates a steady increase in traffic over the past two calendar years. Here is a chart of the "number of requests" per month (over 24 months) from January 2008 to December 2009.

Over the past two years the monthly average for pages sent was 300. The average requests handled were 2,302. That's small by most commercial web-standards, but the rate of increase is what interests me. Monthly requests have grown to over 6,000 per month.

Closer analysis indicates that most of the hits are for free downloads of MP3 audio files and musical scores in Adobe PDF format. Of those, most requests originate from outside of the United States.

My music seems to be most popular in China, Germany, England, France, Italy, Greece, and the Netherlands.

It's stunning to see the number of times particular works of mine have been downloaded. It's often a number large enough to fill a sizable concert hall.

I'm not letting any of this get to my head, since I don't necessarily equate "number of requests" with flesh-and-blood people who actually listen. Web-based statistics can be very misleading.

Yet, the numbers indicate that something is going on. I'm just not convinced that it is real, otherwise the phone would be ringing.

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Yasha Bunchuk and his Cossack Choir

2010-01-03T09:00:00.001-05:00

I heard an interesting vocal work the other night on Cable TV (Classic Arts Showcase). The piece was for men's choir.

It was an excerpt from a film made in 1937 with Yasha Bunchuk and his Cossack Choir from Moscow.

Bunchuk (1896-1944) was born in Kharkov. He composed his piece based entirely on (of all things) the word "Massachusetts." It was pretty ingenious.

Additional information about Bunchuk and his choir is hard to come by. I was hoping that YouTube would have this video, but it does not.

There is a short film with Bunchuk from 1936 by Fred Waller titled "Moscow Moods" listed on IMDb (The Internet Movies Database). It was nominated for an Academy Award. Other than that, I can find little information is online about this talented artist.

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The First, First-Night in Boston

2010-01-01T17:00:00.018-05:00

Bostonians just rang in the New Year with their annual celebration known as First Night. It's been a persistent tradition for 34 years, regardless of the ups and down in the economy, post-9/11 concerns about public safety, fears about Y2K, and a host of variable weather conditions.

The First Night concept began here in Boston in 1976. It was the brainchild of a small group of alternative artists and musicians who envisioned that the public would enjoy doing something other than getting inebriated while viewing a million-plus drunk New Yorker's on television as they celebrated the holiday to the beat of bandleader Guy Lombardo. There had to be more to it than the dropping of an illuminated ball in Time’s Square, or a drunken party with silly paper hats.

The new celebration in Boston would embrace the current Zeitgeist and blur the line between performers and the public. It would be avant garde, edgy, and experimental. "People would be encouraged to come in costumes and masks, so that there would be little difference between the observer and the observed." It would also be an opportunity to showcase the work of contemporary artists and musicians working in and around the Boston-metro area. The activities and performances would occur both outside in the open air and be staged within Boston’s churches and public buildings. I even recall store-fronts on Newbury Street being used for performance art.

I wasn't present at the meeting, but it is said that Clara Wainwright - a local artist and community organizer - was the instigator of the event organizing committee. It must have been an electrifying meeting, with a myriad of ideas bouncing off the wall in chaotic fashion. Someone apparently wanted to call the happening the “Boston Common Garden Variety Show.” Ultimately, the title "First Night" emerged as events' central mantra.

I assume that the original cohort of First Night visionaries included Paul and Zeren Earls of Cambridge. They were definitely involved with First Night from the very beginning. In fact, in 1980 Zeren Earls assumed the chief leadership role of the not-for-profit First Night organization. Under her direction for many years, she brought the annual First Night Celebration to new levels of accomplishment and gained national and international recognition in the process. The annual celebration of community and creativity soon attracted a up to a million participates. For an arts organization - that is huge! It became a model of success and was adopted by other cities - large and small (except of course NYC). First Night was exported internationally by Zeren Earls, but today she lives in the Berkshires and freelances as a travel writer.

Her husband, Paul Earls (1934-1998), was known to me. Paul was an electronic music composer who I'd often see amongst the small circle of experimental music enthusiasts and artists I'd hang out with. Paul Earls liked to integrate his music with lasers and experimental visual effects (working closely with Otto Piene). He had a cool gig with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and was on the faculty of the Mass. College of Art (where composer Walter Piston had once studied). I'd often walk past his office, a grey non-discript structure on Mass Ave. I'd wonder about what went on in that building. It was an unusual place for a new music composer to hang out. But, the 1970s were interesting times, and multi-media was the up-and-coming artistic playground.

I recall that Paul Earls came to an open house at the Boston School of Electronic Music (BSEM) on Dartmouth Street (founded and headed by Jim Michmerhuizen). It was in 1973. A member of the BSEM faculty, composer/pianist John Duesenberry, would later perform a work for piano and electronics by Paul Earls. I remember Paul as quiet man. He didn't seem to engage in small-talk or smooching. He had a lot of creative ideas running around in his head.

Paul Earls started off as a rather traditional composer. His early orchestral work "And on the seventh day..." was recorded in 1958 by his teacher Howard Hanson with the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra. I believe that this work, which is under seven minutes, is currently the only commercially available recording of Paul Earls. Earls had obtained advanced degrees from the University of Rochester, and in 1970 won a Guggenheim award.

But in the 1970s, Earls was writing for soloists, organ, chamber ensembles, vocalists, children's choir, and utilizing video projections, analog-synthesized music, inflatable sculpture, and laser projections. A decade later someone would write that Earl's work "recalled the multimedia meanderings of the 1960's, realized with a quintessentially 80's professionalism." He enjoyed collaborative interaction, working with dancers and actors (such as choreographer Beth Soll). His catalogue of work includes five operas.

In 1975 I was fortunate enough to have a piece on a concert program with Paul Earls. It's wasn't a traditional kind of concert. A Boston-based new music ensemble known as the Annex Players presented a 70s happening titled...

Music Interacts:

an afternoon of Musical/Theatrical Games,

Exhibits, and Environments

It was held on April 27th, 1975 throughout the building at the Mass. College of Art (where Paul Earls taught a class). The audience was handed a large yellow floor diagram of the building floor plan upon their entrance and payment of their modest admission fee ($2.50 general, $2.00 for students). The diagram/schedule indicated which pieces would be performed in which room and at what times. The audience was invited to make their own agenda and experience the works at 15-minute intervals in whatever order they preferred. It was a concept and structure that is not unlike what occurs at First Night, albeit on a much larger scale.

The Annex Players group was run by Lyle Davidson, Lawrence Scripp, and Chris Yavelow. (The group would later be renamed Dinosaur Annex, and assume different management). Davidson was (and still is) a professor at New England Conservatory (I once audited a class in 16th century counterpoint with him). Scripp is a clarinetist and a professor at Harvard's School of Education working with the famed Howard Gardner. Yavelow is an active composer and web-based multimedia designer now living in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. area. He returned to American soil after a significant career as a composer in Europe that spanned for decades.

On the "program" at the Mass. College of Art, Earls had two works: Light Beacon for electronic instruments and audience participation, and The Swan (with harpist Martha Moore and cellist Deborah Thompson). The program also included some mainstream contemporary works by Berio and Penderecki.

My piece, DodeKagon (1975), was performed by clarinetist Larry Scripp (shown in the photo above). It was constructed as a 3-dimensional score in the shape of a 12-sided dodecahedron. The performer gently kicks the music around the floor, and which ever side comes up is the side that gets played. It was hybrid of 12-tone and Aleatoric music, with the formal-structure being determined more or less randomly. Of course, it has a theatrical element as well.

DodeKagon has been performed several times since then. It was my first (and probably last) work as an installation-artist. The 70s have passed. Been there, done that. But it was fun.

I mention this only in passing because the spirit of First Night - at least in its original incarnation - was very similar to this event. You might say the the Annex Players Interactive Multimedia program was a demo, a dry-run, a test kitchen so to speak, or (to use a more contemporary term) an "incubator" for what would later become the much larger city-wide celebration just over seven months later. It's no accident that performance art and new music were the main dish at the very first, First Night festivity on the evening of December 31st, 1975.

Of course Paul Earls became a prominent player in the annual First Night events. I believe I heard Richard Pittman's Boston Musica Viva perform a work of Earl's at the old Hynes Convention Center in the first First Night celebration of 1976. It incorporated green-colored lasers. Later on I know that Paul Earls received a First Night commission to compose a work for "all of the carillons in Boston" titled "Jubilee Ring." It was performed at the Y2K version of First Night.

I've heard that his son is (or was) a bell-ringer (such as myself), and this may have inspired the composer to choose this unusual medium.

I didn't keep in contact with Paul Earls over the years. However, the last big work of his that I heard was his opera about a Colonial Indian uprising entitled "The Death of King Phillip." It's a 50-minute stage work based on the legend of Icarus. It was performed in March of 1976 by the New England Chamber Opera Group (NECOG). [His opera was combined on a double-bill program along with a chamber opera titled "Chocorua" by Robert Selig (1939-1984). "Chocorua" is also based on a Native-American Indian story. Selig was a very talented composer who taught music theory at New England Conservatory. He died at the age of 45, and to my knowledge his music is no longer performed]. That same year Earls' piece "Doppelgänger: Music for Oboes and Laser" was performed by oboist and new music specialist extraordinaire Nora Post.

Paul Earls died suddenly in 1998 at the age of 64 from heart failure at MIT. It seems as if his music is rarely performed today. It's a sad state of affairs for a composer, but pretty representative of what's most likely to occur postmortem - even for those who were once famous.

Today in 2010, looking back at it all now with hindsight, the artistic vision of experimental media artists (and composers) in 1976 was primitive, but in time would ultimately be realized. Technology has clearly become a dominant force of artistic expression of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The laser displays of Paul Earls' experimental works are now part of mainstream special effects that we see every at a planetarium show or rock concert. Jeez, I just got an inexpensive pen-sized laser that runs on triple-A batteries to use as pointer for my classroom teaching. What a toy. And today the sound of electronic music is ubiquitous - even the norm.

But I can't help by feel that commercial interests have co-opted Boston's big New Year's show. In a odd way, First Night is not as interesting as it was in its initial iteration of 1976. It's become much larger and mainstream in its selection of talent. The current activities seem to be selected with populist sentiments in mind. The blurred line between audience and performer is no longer a guiding principal. Today, people purchase their buttons for $18 a pop, and come to be entertained expecting value for their investment. First Night may be a victim of its' own extraordinary success.

Perhaps the truly experimental artists and musicians have gone back underground. I think they may be out there, but lurking somewhere on the Internet just waiting to make their next big move. The forthcoming artistic revolution is incubating.

On an high note, let me leave you with a video clip from Icarus - a Sky Opera by Paul Earls and Otto Piene performed in 1982. Notice the high-tech disco ball and giant inflatable dinosaur.

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2009 Composer Death Toll

2010-01-01T13:36:00.005-05:00

Scanning the Boston Globe this first morning of 2010, I perused the front page article "Recalling the Many We Lost: A lasting impact on history and culture" by Joseph P. Kahn. While sipping my coffee I looked at the small-print list of "other notable deaths" of 2009 on page A12 - which is broken out by category.

After checking to see if my name was on the list, I then studied the 34 names under the music category. To my surprise, not a single "concert music" composer was on the list. Good news, I guess, if you are a composer.

As it turned out, under closer scrutiny the main body of the article did mention the passing of a "quartet of versatile and prolific composers" in 2009. Namely George Perle, Leon Kirchner, Lukas Foss, and George Russell.

For the record, I've blogged about all four of them in Deconstructing-Jim over the past year.

I'd like to add to the official composer death toll list a few additional names of people who left the planet during the past calender year. French film composer Maurice-Alexis Jarre, Russian film composer Isaac (or Isaak) Schwartz, Boston's own Joe Maneri, Nicholas Maw, and Svatopluk Havelka. (I blogged about Joe Maneri).

Other notable deaths I'd like to add to the list include pop-oriented composers Vic Mizzy (composer of the famous Addams Family TV show theme) and Angela Morley. Morley - whose birth name was Wally Stott - was born in England but moved to and lived in Arizona in her later years. She was music director for the "Goon Show" and wrote scores for TV dramas such as "Dallas." Later she made numerous arrangements for the Boston Pops.

May they all R.I.P.

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