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.
A little about me
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Boston. Show all posts
Friday, November 18, 2011
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Force of Nature
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 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.
------------------------
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
Collage New Music
Monday, March 8, 2010
The Bohlen-Pierce scale
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
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
---------------------------
Sunday, March 7, 2010
A Concert of Spectral Music
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 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
-----------------------
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Concert Review: Hirsch-Pinkas Duo
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' 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.
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.
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/
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Tuesday, February 16, 2010
Remembering Roger Sessions
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
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Sunday, February 14, 2010
Passing the torch
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.
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 orchestr
a 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.
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Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto
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 of 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...
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Sunday, February 7, 2010
Concert Review: Musicians of the Old Post Road
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).
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Hypermusic Prologue comes to Boston
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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Sunday, January 17, 2010
Happy Birthday: Robert Ceely
January 17th, 2010
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...
and
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...
and
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Saturday, January 16, 2010
Happy Birthday: Ezra Sims
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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Friday, January 1, 2010
The First, First-Night in Boston
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.
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.
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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