Alexis Alrich Katherine Buono Ken Bullock A.J. Churchill David Cleary Jeff Dunn Phillip George Elliot Harmon Brian Holmes Jeff Kaliss John Lane Arel Lucas Michael McDonagh Chip Michael Tom Moore William Rowland Andrew Shapiro CORRESPONDENTS
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Composer Kamran Ince straddles two worlds both imaginatively (as a child of a bicontinental couple, he was born in Montana, and grew up in Ankara) and literally, with simultaneous faculty appointments in the USA and Turkey. He has had a stream of recent releases on Naxos, including his Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Symphonies, and the Concerto for Orchestra, Turkish Instruments, and Voices. We spoke by Skype on March 22, 2010.
MOORE: Was there music in your family while you were growing up? Were there uncles and aunts who were musical?
INCE: My father loved music, almost too much. When he was twelve, he wanted to go into music, but there is a conservatory system in Turkey, and at age twelve it was already too late for him. He was a very creative guy, and was constantly listening to classical music, and would take me to concerts when I was a little kid, although I would sleep through most of them. My mother had a beautiful voice. She sang with the St. Olaf Choir, but did not continue singing after that. Beyond that, my Turkish grandfather used to play the tambur, a sort of lute with a long body (I am half-Turkish, half-American). While I was in elementary school I played with mandolin a little. My father saw this, and before you know it I was taking the entrance exams to the conservatory. Most kids there don’t have any musical background, so they give a very extensive ear test, and look at your fingers, your mouth, your height, and decide what instrument you will play. They told me that I would play cello. And they were right -- cello was the correct instrument for me. So I started on the cello, and was doing very advanced solfege at the Conservatory. We had a family friend who was one of the foremost composers in Turkey at the time, although he was not really well-known outside the country -- Ilhan Baran. He would come three or four nights a week for dinner at our house, and would give me assignments to write. I would write them, and it ended up being that I would write a little piece for the cello almost every day of the week. I couldn’t go out and play until I had finished that.
MOORE: How old were you at the time?
INCE: I was eleven. As I continued writing, piano began to be important, and so I began to play the piano as well. Four or five years later, it became way too much to have to practice cello, practice piano, write, do harmony and solfege exercises, so at age sixteen or seventeen, while I was studying with another composer, Muammer Sun, he moved to Izmir, and I thought that it would be a good idea to go to Izmir with him. When I did that, I stopped studying cello. It was a move that allowed me to find myself, to realize what it was that I really wanted to do, what my passion was. So I was in Izmir for three years. This was in the late seventies to around 1980. Turkey in general was a closed country until 1980 -- the most modern things that we were hearing were Shostakovich symphonies, Orff’s Carmina Burana -- things like that -- we thought that that was modern music. There was also a nationalist movement in music that went on much longer than in places like Eastern Europe. There was a group called the Turkish Five, including Ahmet Adnan Saygun, who joined Bartok when he came to Turkey to record folk music. The nationalist movement was still dominant, and ultimately I think that they did more damage than good, which is a controversial statement in Turkey. And so you were expected to use Turkish folk elements. I was doing that, but half-heartedly. I was hearing different things, and after I had been in Izmir for a couple of years I decided that it would be really good to go to the U.S., which was a part of me anyway, and was a big melting pot, a place to clear my mind and make a new beginning, get rid of the baggage of nothing but Mozart and Beethoven and all that stuff. I went to Oberlin, which somehow was the only place that my parents knew about. At that time it was still coming out of the mentality of the sixties, in the middle of cornfields, in the middle of nowhere, but with a very intellectual atmosphere. I would get up every morning, before breakfast, and compose for two hours, because I felt that breakfast would take the blood away from my brain, and went wild! I started writing more abstract music, experimenting, doing Elliott-Carteresque things, assigning different characters to different instruments... and during all this one thing that became obvious was my love for contrast. At first, extreme contrasts, coexisting -- when you are feeling one thing, you are able to feel at the same time the very opposite. The differences between Turkey and the United States were much more marked at that time -- they are much less so now. The biculturalness, the bilingualness that I have came out in the music with this affinity for extreme contrasts. Oberlin was a very good place, and the faculty members were not out in the world -- they were more isolated, doing abstract things. It was a great place to be intellectual. In addition to the contrasts, I began to create lines with a twisted modality that is kind of playful but with something weird about it. Then I went to Eastman, and when I got to Eastman, it was wow! A totally different world, totally professional -- New Romanticism was going on. After two years of experimenting, I started working with some minimalist techniques in the background, in the accompaniment, and the contrasts are still there, but start to be smoothed out. The modal lines become more concrete and recognizable. My first big breakthrough was my Concerto for Piano and Orchestra [Naxos 8.572554] from 1984, a romantic piano concerto, but with blocks which mix elements of noise with romantic sections, romantic sections with minimalist background, wild melodies on top - really, really bold. I just recorded it -- I played it and it will come out on Naxos. I will have four Naxos CD's in the next two years. I sent it around, and got a call from the New York Philharmonic. Some people there looking at it thought that it was a really good piece. One of them was David Alan Miller, who said, “would you like to do a New York Youth Symphony commission?” I did that next, which was another breakthrough. I got on the map in New York, with reviews in the New Yorker and elsewhere. I continued working with stylistically different blocks, that want each other and long for each other. In these blocks, any can be an upbeat or a downbeat. You are in one, and you are happy there, but still you want to go to the next one. The next milestone was going to Rome, with the Rome prize, which was actually a very difficult experience for me, with a third culture. Where did this third culture come from? I was already dealing with being from two cultures. Living in Rome is great, the food is great, the first four months are great, because you are a sort of tourist -- but living there, it is a museum city. At the same time, I started to go to Turkey a lot, and when I would go to Turkey, go to the archeological sites, and when I was in Istanbul, go to Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque... the effect of all this, of Rome, of looking out at the rooftops, with all these incredible domes, these incredible structures of Christianity, and going to Istanbul, and seeing these incredible structures of Christianity and Islam -- it was slowly doing something in me. The result was that in 1992 I wrote a piece called Domes [Naxos 8.557588] for orchestra. I was searching for something higher, above -- it has these descending lines, that go up and descend again, searching. With this piece a very important spiritual side of me started to be expressed. With that spiritual side I wrote another piece called Arches for chamber ensembles. At the same time these pieces may have contrasting sections within that are extrovert, in-your-face, that recall my earlier works, sections that continue to exist, but alongside the spiritual side. With all of this, I wrote my Symphony No. 2 ("Fall of Constantinople") [Naxos 8.572554], which was commissioned by David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony, who asked for a work with some kind of Turkish subject. I wanted it to be something international as well, so I thought of the fall of Constantinople, which is weird, since it is something that happened five hundred years ago. What it represented to me was what I am, and what Turkey is -- a meeting of the east and the west, and the contrast of the two. In Istanbul you have all these different ethnic groups -- Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Turks -- you name it. In that work for the first time I used some “Turkish effects” that I wrote. I don’t use anything concrete, like a Turkish tune. What I looked into extensively was the Byzantine side of the story, and Byzantine music. In listening to Byzantine music I realized that Ottoman court music was an exact continuation of Byzantine music, something I had not known until then. It was amazing for me. The next thing I wrote was the Symphony No. 3 ("Siege of Vienna") [Naxos 557588]. For the previous symphony, the Turks were victorious, but here it was the West, since the Turks were unable to take Vienna. That offered other musical opportunities. After that I started to incorporate in my works this spiritual side, and an extrovert, percussive side, but I also started to use voices without text as instruments, as well as alternative instruments. I started by using electric guitar and bass guitar, and then went on to use ethnic Turkish instruments in ensembles and in orchestras as well. I use them for what they can do. Looking back, an important work is the Concerto for Orchestra, Turkish Instruments, and Voices [Naxos 572554], which I wrote in 2002. I use the zurna -- double-reed instruments, but so loud that you can’t even hear a bass drum when they are playing. I also used kemancheh, and the ney -- very difficult to play, but beautiful. Two years ago I wrote a piece called Dreamlines, for the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Chamber of Architects in which I am really thinking about Ottoman court music. Another one is Strange Stone [Naxos 9.70011], which was written for Relache in Philadelphia. The latest that is along these lines is a piano quartet called Far Variations, which is being premiered the 31st of this month [March 2010]. There’s a recent piece which is close to the genre of ambient music called Music for a Lost Earth [Naxos 9.70141]. And I am working on an opera right now called Judgment of Midas, also bringing together the elements of East and West. The story is that of the contest between Pan and Apollo. Apollo does high music, the gods’ music; Pan does street music, popular music. Which is better? That is the question of the opera. But of course there is no right answer to that question. I use Turkish instruments, and it is framed by a modern element -- two American tourists go to Turkey -- the woman is a pop diva, and the man is a formalist composer. They hear about an intact mosaic where the Lydian ruins are, and they want to see it, because it depicts this musical contest. They are there, and all of a sudden the girl finds herself in the middle of the contest. It turns out that the tour guide is Midas! The musical contest gives me the opportunity to play with the contrasts between the two kinds of music. Midas likes Pan’s music, but declared by the mountain god Tmolus the music of the gods is really the winner, Midas has a fit, Apollo gets mad and gives him donkey ears. At first he is very embarrassed, but it is an amazing experience with these bigger ears because he is hearing like he has never heard before. He can hear, and we can hear, the electricity in the air, the turning of the earth. At the end, there is no right answer – it is not what you listen to, but how you listen to it. That’s for 2012-2013. The Australians have a big project for the commemoration of the war of Gallipoli, with various composers writing different portions. I will be writing a part of that.
MOORE: Since you mentioned cultural differences, perhaps you could say a little about Turkish culture, and how it differs from American culture.
INCE: It’s not just the culture, but the feel of the country. Turkey is like the old "Wild, Wild, West." It’s kind of wild; it’s tense. I don’t think people are ultimately all that different. Turkey is much more into family and family ties. It’s more chaotic there -- you have a greater contrast in people’s existences, since the distribution of wealth is different. In the urban areas people are Muslims in the same way that Italian are Catholics. It’s a very modern, urban kind of life. If you go to the villages life is much more conservative -- people marry much earlier, they look different, they dress in more traditional clothing. Five times a day you will hear the call to prayer. In the old days, in the United States, you probably heard church bells, which you don’t hear anymore. But there you do hear the call to prayer. It’s a life that’s on the edge, people have less security, people live more for today -- traffic is much more chaotic. There is indigenous music throughout the country. You have the Black Sea, the Balkan, East, which becomes Caucasian, the Southeast, the Aegean, Central Anatolia -- the food from all these places is different. It’s an earthquake zone, so the topography is wild, with mountains and hills. And in the old days, the contrasts were much greater. I was born in America, in Montana, but I went to Turkey when I was seven. When I returned to the USA, when I was 20, I went directly to Los Angeles, and at that time, the differences were so big.
MOORE: Where was your father from?
INCE: He grew up in Ankara, the capital, which is organized. Istanbul is wild, wild, wild -- like New York, with more wild. I go there, and half of my time is spent figuring when I can go to avoid the traffic. Because what happened to the Ottoman Empire, and how it ended, there was a big denial of the cultures of the East. I grew up with this, and of course it was very artificial. It wasn’t right. Even today there is a type of music in Turkey called arabesk, which is influenced by Arabic music, and all the intellectuals put it down. Five million people love this stuff, and there are some incredible effects in it. There is a lot of dogmatic thinking in Turkey: this is one of the biggest differences. “It has to be this way, it has to be that way. You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” It’s changing a lot, but I grew up with that big time when I was in Turkey. In the U.S., you can listen to what you want to, do what you want to do, become a member of the Communist Party -- whatever. In Turkey, there are sides, and very strong sides. All the feelings are very strong. I can’t say of any music that it is bad -- there may be two or three measures that are incredible, but this sort of categorization does not only belong to culture in Turkey, but can be found in everything -- politics, religion -- with the division between secular and more religious people. Life in America is more unified, more peaceful, more comfortable. I was talking with a friend recently about the differences between Turkey and Greece. In some ways they are very similar, but Greece is very quiet, doesn’t have much population, whereas Turkey has this amazing chaotic energy. You can realize the wildest ideas in Turkey, but the simplest things are very difficult to do. For instance, Istanbul Technical University commissioned me to write a piece for their 225th anniversary. I was talking to the president of the university about musical education in Turkey, and said, yes, there is graduate education in music in Turkey, but only on paper, nothing of real quality. And she said, “well, what would have to be done?” And I explained. And a month later she came to me and said “Would you like to do this?” “What do you mean?” “Establish a school.” “Six years from now?” “No, next year.” My American friends said it’s crazy, it’s impossible, you can’t do it. But she said, no, if we wait five years, we will simply wait five years, and do it then. And that’s how everything is done. And we did it. It was successful, we have huge private donations... you can’t do something like that in the United States. And in Turkey you can have a soccer team commissioning a symphony. That doesn’t happen here in the U.S.A.. On the other hand, to pay your overdue telephone bill -- that’s very difficult.
MOORE: Is there a particular style of Turkish folk music that particularly appeals to you?
INCE: No, it’s really the essence of them all. For instance, three years ago the Netherlands Wind Ensemble came to Turkey with the Queen for a state visit, and I had worked with them before. They asked for an arrangement of a Turkish folk tune. I found a website with tens of thousands of folk songs from all the parts of Turkey, and I thought that most creative ones came from central Anatolia, but I also liked the music from the Black Sea, and the Balkans, and what the Gypsies (who are called Romans in Turkey) do. The slow dance from the Aegean, in 9/4... I like them all. I arranged something that was more Balkan, actually. I love all of that, plus the court music, which in Turkey is simply called classical music, with a history of composers since the 17th and 18th Centuries. One of the important ones is Dede Effendi [Hammamizade İsmail Dede Efendi (1778-1846)]. I have been listening to a lot of his music, because there may be a project where we will play a piece of his for a traditional group, I will write a piece for orchestra and the traditional group, and we will go back and forth.
MOORE: It sounds like from what you are describing that the wealth of musical possibilities would be far larger in Turkey than in the United States.
INCE: I don’t know... What is very rich in the United States is current popular music, and you also have folk traditions, and jazz. Turkey and its mixtures, and the United States, with its mixtures -- there are some similarities there. Turkey is now becoming very popular with Americans -- I don’t know whether that has to do with the similarities.
MOORE: A question about style: you studied at Oberlin, and then at Eastman. Perhaps you were in a good place as someone from where the environment was one of conservative nationalism to go to someplace where the language was that of the New Romanticism.
INCE: Yes, perhaps in a way. What was going on in Turkey was nowhere close to New Romanticism.
MOORE: But also nowhere close to total serialism.
INCE: I doodled with all of that at Oberlin, experimenting, going really wild. Oberlin was a great place to go, and after that Eastman was a very good place to go. And going to Rome brought me closer to Turkey. The places that I have been worked very well for my development.
MOORE: You have also been fortunate to have been able to write frequently for large ensembles, in contrast to many contemporary composers whose work is usually heard with chamber ensembles.
INCE: Absolutely. I am at home being an orchestral composer, a chamber or large ensemble composer. I am pleased to have had these opportunities.
Richard Strauss, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Ludwig van Beethoven. Not exactly headliners to light my new-music fire, as we settled down to potential sonambulance for the opening of the Marin Symphony at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. But, then again, in their respective days, these guys did not make their money by putting their audiences to sleep. And on October 3 -- anywhere from roughly 60 to 180 years after said composers' respective deaths -- conductor Alasdair Neal, piano soloist Joyce Yang, and the gang proved that dead men can still dance, in a persuasive and mostly-professional program that stirred hearts and heads.
"Dead Can Dance" was not inappropriate for Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Introduction and 24 Variations), since Rachmaninoff partly based his arguably-most-wonderful-of-his compositions not only on the Faustian virtuoso violinist Niccolo but also the notorious Thomas of Celano "Dies Irae" ("Day of Wrath") medieval sequence. Keyboardist Yang put her all into this fiery and voluptuous music, highlighting the notion that, contrary to even the composer's (and certainly his critics') perception, this is not particularly unprogressive music. While solidly rooted in the romantic tradition, there is no way this can really be perceived as a merely 19th-century (rather than 20th) endeavor -- in a heightened, self-concious neoromanticism that is over-the-top lush, surreal, skeletal, and even jazzy through its various incarnations. Pianist, director, and orchestra made the most of every moment.
And Strauss. Again, a self-aware, coyly manipulative con where the composer seems at once hip and square. Strauss's anachronistic waltzes are, as in Maurice Ravel, too good to be true, and archly erotic. The Marin Symphony shined in sumptuous strings and holistic horn playing that healed what ailed ye.
OK, so that was a little much. But so is the music.
And what can be said of Beethoven? The Sympony No. 5 is a defining cliche of classical music, its place on the cusp of romanticism unquestioned. But what is old now was new then in so many ways, and Neal captured some of that excitement, where an exposition must be repeated, a trombone must be wailed, and a piccolo must piercing over the top of the texture. This was early 19th-century head-banging music, and even the old (but living) guys in this current audience responded with their own rhythmic shakings of the arms and tapping of the toes.
Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler. Music Makes a City. "[An] enlightening documentary about how Louisville, Kentucky, became a locus for contemporary music in the mid-20th century. In striking synchronicity, a mayor, a conductor and a robust postwar generation of composers intersected to make the city a hub for visionary composition. Louisville had been battered by a flood and the Depression when Robert Whitney, a young Chicago conductor, arrived in 1937 to build what became theLouisville Orchestra. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honor- ing the traditional repertory. Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honoring the traditional repertory.Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. Aesthetic trends -- the battle between Neo-Classicists and the atonalists, for example -- are addressed, but the music is given ample room to speak for itself, in lyrical landscape mon- tages. Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred. The personalities here are as noteworthy as the soundtrack. Whitney was a tireless leader. The charismatic Farnsley, an intellectual with a populist style, after a term as a congressman (where he helped create the National Endowment for the Arts and was a proud signer of the Voting Rights Act), retired from politics to host an overnight classical-music radio program in Louisville" [Andy Webster, The New York times, 9/17/10].
Ngawang Choephel. Tibet in Song. "Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan musicologist who was imprisoned by the Chinese for more than six years, would have had a compelling film had he simply stuck to his own remarkable story. But his documentary, Tibet in Song, is doubly powerful because he also weaves in the overall history of Tibet’s struggle, a primer on the Chinese government’s campaign to muzzle Tibetan culture and vignettes from other Tibetans who resisted. Mr. Choephel left Tibet with his mother in the years after the Chinese invasion of 1950, growing up in India, where other refugees implanted in him a love of traditional Tibetan songs. He returned to Tibet in the 1990's to try to capture this musical history on tape, but the Chinese had a head start of several decades. 'The first music I heard was Chinese Communist propaganda and Chinese pop songs,' he recalls of his arrival in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. 'It was an unexpected, alien sound and seemed to be following me wherever I went.' He had better luck finding traditional singers in the countryside, but he was only partway into his recording efforts when he was arrested and jailed as a spy in 1995. One of the more touching aspects of this film is his account of his mother’s tireless campaign to have him freed, which finally paid off in 2002. Persistence, it seems, runs in the family" [Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, 9/23/10].
Toru Takemitsu's November Steps performed by Saito Kinen Festival Orchestra, in a program partially conducted by Tatsuya Shimono and Seiji Ozawa. Matsumoto, Japan. "Ozawa, looking thin and frail, moved cautiously across the stage and into position; his main difficulty, it seemed, was stepping onto and off the high podium. But once the music started, Mr. Ozawa threw himself physically into the fray, fiercely swooping and elegantly swaying, with only an occasional seated respite. The festival orchestra -- made up of professionals from around Japan and the world, most first- or second-generation beneficiaries of Saito’s training — reflected Mr. Ozawa’s intensity to a T, in an absolutely gripping and muscular performance, a tribute to both Saito and Mr. Ozawa, and a privilege to hear. The players seemed to be ripping the sound from their instruments to shattering effect. . . . The . . . program [including] . . . is Carnegie bound and gave more than a hint of the wonders to be expected under Mr. Ozawa’s baton" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 9/6/10].
Premiere of Poul Ruders's Dancer in the Dark. Royal Danish Opera, Copenhagen, Denmark. Through September 27. "Widely recognized as Denmark’s leading composer, Poul Ruders established himself as a major force in opera with The Handmaid’s Tale, a harrowing treatment of Margaret Atwood’s futuristic best-seller that received its premiere at the Royal Danish Opera in 2000. This gripping work led Anthony Tommasini, writing in The New York Times in 2001, to observe that Mr. Ruders 'seems to have a Verdian understanding of the genre.' Mr. Ruders’s next opera, Kafka’s Trial, which interspersed scenes from Kafka’s life with a dramatization of his unfinished existential novel The Trial, could only strengthen that impression at its 2005 premiere in the first season of Copenhagen’s new opera house. Expectations were therefore high for Mr. Ruders’s latest opera, Dancer in the Dark, which had its premiere by the Royal Danish Opera on September 5. It thus comes as a major disappointment to report that Dancer in the Dark falls well short of its predecessors. The problems begin with Henrik Engelbrecht’s libretto, which is based on Lars von Trier’s screenplay for his 2000 film of the same title. Given that it takes longer to sing words than to speak them, condensation typically plays a major role in fashioning an opera. But why did the finished product here need to last fewer than 70 minutes, just about half the running time of the film? If there is such a thing as an opera that is too short, this is it. Among the casualties of excessive pruning is the central character of Selma -- a single mother in 1960's America, a Czech immigrant -- who suffers from a congenital eye defect. We never get to know her the way we do in the film, where she is memorably portrayed by the Icelandic singer Bjork as an endearing embodiment of naïve goodness, with thick glasses and a winning smile. Selma toils in a factory to save money for an operation to save her similarly afflicted son, Gene, from the blindness that she herself faces. Matters go tragically wrong when her neighbor and landlord, Bill, pressed for cash, learns of Selma’s nest egg. In a struggle over the money, Bill is shot and killed. Selma is ultimately condemned to death for his murder. In the film, tension builds after Bill sees Selma depositing her latest earnings in the tin box that contains her savings. Because of her feeble sight she doesn’t realize she has been observed. We wait for the heart wrenching moment when Selma discovers her loss. But in the opera it is all telescoped into a single scene: As soon as Bill learns of the money, they fight over it. The element of suspense never comes into play. Still, it will not do to criticize an opera simply because it fails to measure up to its source-work in certain details. Dancer in the Dark, however, suffers from another problem in the form of missed opportunity. Besides her devotion to Gene, Selma is motivated by a passion for American musical comedies, which Mr. von Trier embodies through song and dance routines that, led by Bjork, arise incongruously yet fascinatingly from the realistic setting. My guess was that those scenes were what attracted Mr. Ruders to the film. Yet he barely taps their potential. I envisioned big, imaginative episodes that would draw on the full potential of the operatic medium to blur the distinction between realism and fantasy and lift Dancer in the Dark above the routine of just another opera that adds music but otherwise rehashes its source. Early on, Selma’s co-workers do discard their black capes to reveal colorful costumes, designed by Maria Gyllenhoff, for one jaunty but brief number. And the popular idiom is also resourcefully used to characterize satirically the prosecutor in Selma’s trial. But when Selma’s big moment comes after she is found guilty, all she has is a rather simple folk-like song, which returns later in a somewhat more rhythmic guise. You wonder why Mr. Ruders even kept Mr. von Trier’s title when in fact so little dancing is involved. Given Mr. Ruders’s unquestioned musical skill, the music is often arresting, much of it in a dissonant, expressionistic yet powerfully post-Romantic style. It registers surely in the conductor Michael Schonwandt’s reading. The growling, sighing motif from instruments playing in the lowest registers ably limns the drama’s grim close. But the opera does nothing to mitigate the incredulity of the film. The fact that Selma’s money must be used either for competent legal counsel or for Gene’s operation is implausible. Any competent young lawyer with half an interest in pro bono work could have saved her from the gallows. The talented director Kasper Holten’s darkly monochromatic production, which is oddly set in a church -- the sets are by Christian Lemmerz -- doesn’t do a lot for the new opera either, smooth-running though it is" [George Loomis, 9/15/10].
Crossing the Line: Ryoji Ikeda. Florence Gould Theater, New York, NY. Approaching the work of Ryoji Ikeda, you risk becoming so mired in the what and the how that you can lose sight of something more pressing: the why. Since the mid-1990's Mr. Ikeda, a Japanese composer and multimedia artist now based in Paris, has fashioned music that explores and exploits aural perception by manipulating sounds at the outermost edges of what many listeners would term agreeable: extreme high and low frequencies; split-second variations in intensity, direction and duration; barely perceptible sounds; assaultive bursts of digital noise. Heard on his records, Mr. Ikeda’s rapid-pace barrage of sonic detritus -- the whine of a fax machine, the peal and hiss of a modem, the telltale glitch of a skipping CD -- can titillate and enchant. Connected with video in datamatics [ver. 2.0], presented by the French Institute Alliance Française and Japan Society at Florence Gould Hall to open the annual Crossing the Line festival . . . Mr. Ikeda’s music became something more: the living pulse of exotic new worlds conjured through an overload of mundane binary data. No element of performance is perceived in the 45-minute work, the latest iteration of a series Mr. Ikeda started in 2006. The experience is more like watching a movie: seated in a darkened theater, you face a video screen as music pumps out of loudspeakers at sometimes extravagant volume. (Earplugs were distributed at the door.) Mr. Ikeda’s presence scarcely seems necessary. The video component, programmed by Shohei Matsukawa, Daisuke Tsunoda, Tomonaga Tokuyama and Norimichi Hirakawa, starts out simply: white blocks of various sizes float up and down a black screen in sync with Mr. Ikeda’s peeps and blurps. Later, black-and-white bands racing at higher speeds yield illusory blobs of ghostly color. When tiny shapes in red and blue suddenly appear, the effect is jolting. In subsequent segments the video and the music grow more complex. Alphanumeric symbols race past like a stock ticker on overdrive. On a three-dimensional planar grid rotating slowly against a black expanse, the positions of stars appear with a resonant ping. Spidery lattices, like chemical models, whirl slowly in what might be a reactive dance. A steady rhythmic pulse, or at least the implication of one, is nearly omnipresent. It’s as if you had swallowed some science-fiction pill that laid bare the arithmetical formulas underlying everyday perception. If that sounds metaphysical, it’s meant to. Through crafty, thoughtful manipulation of the raw binary data and noise that course unnoticed through modern life, Mr. Ikeda and his collaborators evoke a world profoundly moving in its intricacy and elegance. A closing segment crunches art schematics from everything that preceded it with pulsating sounds in a frenetic bombardment of sensations, effecting a final transformation: from the heady to the hedonistic" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 9/12/10].
September 13
Lunchtime Concerts presents Voxare String Quartet in Samuel Barber's String Quartet. Columbia University, New York, NY. "The programs are free, informal and short, lasting from 30 minutes to an hour at most. Only one work is presented, not as a concession to short attention spans but as an invitation to the audience to take a break at lunchtime, settle down and really listen. . . . This season, as Melissa Smey, the director of the Miller Theater, told the audience, the series will focus on “four of the founding fathers” of American music -- Barber, Copland, Ives and Thomson -- offering various works for voice, strings and piano. . . . Columbia was a hotbed of American music in the middle decades of the 20th century, as Ms. Smey told the audience. Among the works that had their first performances at Columbia were Barber’s ballet Medea, with choreography by Martha Graham; Copland’s 12 Poems of Emily Dickinson; Thomson’s opera The Mother of Us All; and Ives’s Unanswered Question. For many concertgoers hearing the 1936 Barber quartet is at once a familiar and an unfamiliar experience. In its version for string orchestra, the second movement, the Adagio, is among the world’s most famous classical works: the music of choice to commemorate tragic national anniversaries. Yet, curiously, the three-movement quartet does not turn up that often. Though essentially tonal, this early Barber score is harmonically inventive and structurally daring. The impassioned first movement is concise and elusive, with an assertive main theme played in unison followed in short order by a contrasting choralelike theme of hazy, unsettled chords. The finale is agitated and inexorable. In its original version, the famous Adagio emerges as intimate, poignant and achingly direct, especially as played here by the Voxare Quartet with such penetrating tone and lucid textures. These four young musicians -- Emily Ondracek-Peterson and Galina Zhdanova, violinists; Erik Peterson, violist; and Adrian Daurov, cellist -- were students at the Juilliard School when they formed the quartet in 2008, and it is rising fast" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/15/10].
September 14
Sarah Wolfson and Lydia Brown present Samuel Barber's Hermit Songs. Columbia University, New York, NY. "[A] glowing account . . . [of this] cycle written in the early 1950's for Leontyne Price, who recorded the songs with Barber at the piano for RCA. . . . In his Hermit Songs Barber, who loved Gaelic literature and was drawn to the subject of hermitage, choose texts by Irish monks and scholars from the 8th through the 13th centuries, some of them just jottings in the margins of scholarly books. A university reading room was an ideal place to hear the work: both songs like The Crucifixion, a contemplation on the sacrifice of Jesus, and The Monk and His Cat, a charming tribute by a monk to the solitary life he shares with Pangur, his white mouse-hunting cat. Ms. Wolfson sang with luminous sound and impressively focused high notes. A keenly intelligent artist, she projected the words about as clearly as was possible in this small, acoustically resonant room. Ms. Brown played the elaborate piano accompaniments beautifully" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 9/15/10].
[Grant Herreid at Bargemusic]
September 19
There and Then: The Road from Valencia, with the New York Consort of Viols. Bargemusic, New York, NY. "A pair of contemporary works, David Loeb’s intricate neo-Renaissance Fantasia Sobre Nani, Nani (1986), and Paul Ben-Haim’s Puncha, Puncha (1970), a vocal work with a clear Sephardic lineage, gave the program a modern coda" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/20/10].
[Paul Ben-Haim - Spanish Song from Songs without Words]
[Red Light New Music: David Broome plays Charlie Wilmouth]
João Carlos Martins conducts the Filarmônica Bachiana in Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 7, and music of Alberto Ginestera and Ennio Morricone. Avery Fisher Hall, New York, NY. "Speaking from the stage after a concert . . . with the Filarmônica Bachiana, an ensemble he founded in 2004, Mr. Martins, 70, recalled what he termed the worst day of his life, during a stint in the hospital. He found solace, he said, in Ennio Morricone’s music for Cinema Paradiso, which he heard when he turned on the television that day. As an encore, Mr. Martins (performing as pianist) and the orchestra offered excerpts from Cinema Paradiso and the Gabriel’s Oboe theme from Mr. Morricone’s score for The Mission. The second encore, Mateus Araújo’s arrangement of the Brazilian national anthem (composed by Francisco Manuel da Silva), had many in the enthusiastic Portuguese-speaking audience on their feet. . . . Bach strongly influenced several prominent South American composers, including Heitor Villas-Lobos of Brazil and Alberto Ginastera of Argentina. The Brazilian pianist Arthur Moreira Lima was the able soloist in Ginastera’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which blends 12-tone technique, Argentine dance rhythms and other folk and classical idioms. Mr. Lima, also 70 and a childhood friend of Mr. Martins’s, has emerged from a performing hiatus by giving piano recitals in Brazil’s remote interior, using the back of a semitrailer truck as a stage. Sunday’s performance was their first collaboration in North America in 30 years. The . . . program concluded with a vivacious reading of Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 7, one of a series of nine suites in which the composer fuses Brazilian folk, popular and dance idioms with Bach’s contrapuntal and harmonic structures" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 9/20/10].
September 20
Red Light New Music presents Between Classical and New: Variations on a Theme. Symphony Space, New York, NY. When contemporary artists tamper with time-honored masterpieces, those who object usually cite what they consider a reliably horrifying image: drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But as Marcel Duchamp discovered in 1919, sometimes drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa (or a copy of it) is exactly the right thing to do, and it may be that having the right artist paint the right mustache can yield some insight about the lady with the faint smile. The program the enterprising ensemble Red Light New Music played . . . was devoted largely to mustache painting. The group -- part new-music band, part composers’ collective -- dedicated most of the first half to Salvatore Sciarrino’s deftly iconoclastic reworking of four pieces by the Italian Renaissance composer Gesualdo. After intermission the musicians offered a freewheeling version of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in which each movement was reconfigured by one of the composers who runs Red Light. This program was created and performed with a sense of humor. Mr. Sciarrino’s Gesualdo fantasy, Voci Sottovetro (1999), begins with a galliard in which a xylophone and a bass clarinet trace the contours of the courtly dance, and includes an instrumental canzone with speedy melodies darting through a slow, melancholy chord progression. In two madrigals, Tu m’uccidi, o crudele and Moro, lasso, the vocal lines, shaped gracefully here by Sonya Knussen, a mezzo-soprano, are offset by quirkily revised accompaniments that expand on Gesualdo’s penchant for acidic harmony. For the Mozart, the Red Light composers proposed a rule: the piano part would be left intact. As it turned out, all three arrangers bent the hands-off rule, necessarily, it seemed, because radical changes in the orchestral score invariably occasioned alterations in how the solo line was presented. Scott Wollschleger’s version of the opening Allegro -- subtitled The Impossibility of Disappearances: ‘Under Erasure’? -- imposed silences and sudden bursts of sound on Mozart’s score. Christopher Cerrone used heavily manipulated electronics, as well as tremolando string writing, in his tweaking of the Andantino, at times setting the piano line against a heavily processed computer track instead of live strings and woodwinds. Vincent Raikhel’s amusingly revised Rondo used electronics too, though more sparingly: a rhythmic clicking, like the sound of a phonograph needle on a worn 78-r.p.m. disc, was overlaid on the performance, which was otherwise distinguished by idiosyncratic scoring touches. An accordion, played by Nathan Koci (who also played horn in the earlier movements), participated fully in dialogues with the piano and fleetingly made the ensemble sound like an early-20th-century tearoom orchestra, and at times a vibraphone mirrored the piano writing. Yegor Shevtsov, the pianist, brought a suitably Mozartean elegance to his performance. He also played the prominent piano part in a movement from a chamber concerto, a work in progress by Liam Robinson, the fourth Red Light composer-director. And the group’s percussionist, Kevin Sims, held the spotlight in Charlie Wilmoth’s “Red Light,” which opened the program. The ensemble, conducted by Ted Hearne, played the entire program with admirable energy and precision" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/21/10].
September 26
Masami Akita, a.k.a. Merzbow. Le Poisson Rouge, New York, NY. "Merzbow . . . spent about 75 minutes onstage . . . generating a constant fusillade of sound: from two laptops, four digital-effects stompboxes and a homemade metallic contraption slung around his neck by a guitar strap. In that time he could have been making a new record -- perhaps even an entire album. Since Merzbow started, about 30 years ago, his discography has become a peach orchard in perpetual summer: the problem is how to take in all of it, or even a very small part of it. Between January 2009 and January of this year, he released 13 new CDs under the title 13 Japanese Birds (They are now available as a boxed set called Ecobag/13 Birds in a Bag + 1). Since then there have been three more. The crazy bumper crop is a working tradition in noise: there’s the Michigan band Wolf Eyes, whose merchandise area at gigs becomes a groaning table of limited-edition CDRs and cassettes, and the Norwegian duo Jazkamer, which has undertaken the process of releasing a new album every month this year. It may or may not add up to fetishism about records per se, but Mr. Akita in particular definitely has feelings about fetishism (Some of his music and his books are inspired by, or directly about, sexual bondage and discipline). It might be more about creating an art that has no need of an overthought frame or conceit. It’s up to the listener to sort it out. “Noise is the unconsciousness of music,” he once said in an interview, and the thing about the unconscious is that it just keeps producing. And you can ignore it if you don’t have the desire to understand it. It would have been hard to ignore . . . [this] show. Mr. Akita, a drummer before his interest in electronics took over, has returned to using live drums in some of his recent music; he plays them himself on 13 Japanese Birds, but at Le Poisson Rouge he used the Hungarian drummer Balazs Pandi, who almost heroically accompanied all the cold, oscillating aggression coming from Mr. Akita’s side of the stage in a high-speed churn tattooed with blast-beats and double-pedaling. In short, it was fabulous: not really improvising, but suggesting the marathoning spirit of high-impact free jazz; not really composition, but held together with the technique and concentration of grindcore drumming. Just barely, through the amazing din and throughout the set, you could hear sounds that weren’t coming from Merzbow: the audience cheering. In one sense, Xiu Xiu, which preceded Merzbow on the evening’s bill, is a completely different animal. It’s a songwriting outfit, the project of the hyper-gifted singer and musician Jamie Stewart, who has definitely heard a few records by the Cure and Joy Division. But Mr. Stewart is on a similarly brave and stoical walk through the dark side: he’s committed to both seducing and burning his listeners. He pushed his voice from careful and confidential to breathy and overwrought, to the trembly verges of fear and excitement, obliquely referring to sex and trauma in his lyrics; the music followed a precise trail of ’80s-sounding electronic rhythm, guitar solos and cymbal crashes. Working with backing tracks and only one other musician, Angela Seo, on keyboards and percussion, Mr. Stewart worked hard to reproduce the density of Xiu Xiu’s albums; as he sweated over the music’s details, he seemed like a man who gets no rest" [Ben Ratliff, The New York Times, 9/27/10].
Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont. Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould. Lorber Films. "The Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who died at 50 in 1982, has been a figure of fascination since he burst onto the classical music scene, with startling virtuosity and an unusual brand of flamboyance, in the 1950s. His interpretations of the piano repertory — the work of Bach in particular -- were fresh and provocative, and his self-presentation was both matinee-idol charismatic and winningly odd. As Gould’s celebrity grew, some of his peculiarities became as famous as his playing. He insisted on sitting in a special low-slung chair, so that his long arms seemed to angle upward to the keyboard. He wore scarves, gloves and overcoats in all kinds of weather. He rambled charmingly in interviews and hummed loudly onstage. In 1964, after a triumphant tour of the Soviet Union and ecstatically received concerts in Europe and North America -- and in the wake of a controversial performance of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto with Leonard Bernstein at Carnegie Hall two years earlier -- Gould stopped performing in public. His belief that the recording studio allowed for greater artistic expression and a deeper exploration of music seemed radical, even outlandish at the time, but proved to be prophetic. And his celebrity did not wane after this withdrawal, though his reputation for eccentricity grew. Nearly 30 years after his death he remains an object of fervent and passionate admiration, especially in Canada. His vocation was the interpretation of other artists’ work, but Gould acquired a reputation for originality unusual among classical musicians. Peter Raymont and Michèle Hozer’s new documentary, “Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould,” advances the claim that its subject was one of the most important artists of the 20th century, and while this idea is more often asserted than argued in the film, the filmmakers nonetheless supply a scrupulous, candid and eye-opening account of his life and times. Though he grew averse to playing the piano onstage, Gould was not shy about giving interviews, and this documentary is suffused with his chatty, witty and brilliant personality. The more difficult aspects of his personality are attested to, always with great affection, by friends, fellow musicians, collaborators and two of the women who shared his life. But the film is careful not to be too critical of its subject or to stray too far into speculation about the inner life that is its ostensible concern. Much recent discussion about Gould has tried to place him not only in the pantheon of classical musicians, but also on the autism spectrum. His name pops up frequently on lists of famous people believed to have Asperger’s syndrome, but Mr. Raymont and Ms. Hozer leave this area of inquiry unexplored, perhaps not wishing to affix a medical label to their subject’s personality. Instead, that personality is presented on its own terms. Genius Within is a tour de force of archival research and dogged interviewing, and the portrait it presents is remarkably complete. While the playful, cerebral, avant-garde spirit of François Girard’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) might have gone further toward capturing (and mimicking) the essence of Gould’s art, that art is well served in this more conventional documentary. It presents strong evidence that he was not just a gifted instrumentalist but also a hands-on cultural thinker, infusing both his recordings and other projects -- including audio-visual essays like The Idea of North -- with the range and energy of his intellect. His personal life was more chaotic — and also, for many years, a well-guarded secret -- and Genius Within pries into it without undue prurience or sensationalism. Embedded in the center of the film is the story, an Iris Murdoch novel in miniature, of Gould’s affair with Cornelia Foss, the wife of Lukas Foss, the composer and conductor with whom Gould had a mutually admiring friendship as well as a romantic rivalry. Ms. Foss and her two grown children recount the joys and difficulties of living with Gould, and while Gould’s own emotions remain out of reach, the glimpses of his affective life enrich the audience’s sense of who he was. A degree of enigma remains, in spite of Mr. Raymont and Ms. Hozer’s thoroughness. But in the end, art is a mystery that no biography can conquer, in part because every artist’s goal is to transcend the limiting circumstances of individual experience and touch something larger. Which is why a film like this one, expansive though it is, can only feel small in comparison to its subject" [A.O. Scott, The New York Times, 9/9/10]
Owsley Brown III and Jerome Hiler. Music Makes a City. "[An] enlightening documentary about how Louisville, Kentucky, became a locus for contemporary music in the mid-20th century. In striking synchronicity, a mayor, a conductor and a robust postwar generation of composers intersected to make the city a hub for visionary composition. Louisville had been battered by a flood and the Depression when Robert Whitney, a young Chicago conductor, arrived in 1937 to build what became theLouisville Orchestra. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honor- ing the traditional repertory. Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. When it hit financial trouble, Charles Farnsley, the mayor and a be- liever in the Confucian notion that high culture attracts wealth and power, boldly proposed commissioning works from modern composers while honoring the traditional repertory.Their efforts drew local and international acclaim. By 1953, with a major Rockefeller Foun- dation grant, the orchestra was bringing in 46 originals a year, by the likes of Ned Rorem and Elliott Carter (both articulate on camera), and had its own record label, First Edition. At its peak, luminaries like Martha Graham and Shostakovich came to its stage. Aesthetic trends -- the battle between Neo-Classicists and the atonalists, for example -- are addressed, but the music is given ample room to speak for itself, in lyrical landscape mon- tages. Viewers unfamiliar with artists like Lukas Foss and Gunther Schuller will find themselves agreeably challenged. And stirred. The personalities here are as noteworthy as the soundtrack. Whitney was a tireless leader. The charismatic Farnsley, an intellectual with a populist style, after a term as a congressman (where he helped create the National Endowment for the Arts and was a proud signer of the Voting Rights Act), retired from politics to host an overnight classical-music radio program in Louisville" [Andy Webster, The New York times, 9/17/10].
Ngawang Choephel. Tibet in Song. "Ngawang Choephel, a Tibetan musicologist who was imprisoned by the Chinese for more than six years, would have had a compelling film had he simply stuck to his own remarkable story. But his documentary, Tibet in Song, is doubly powerful because he also weaves in the overall history of Tibet’s struggle, a primer on the Chinese government’s campaign to muzzle Tibetan culture and vignettes from other Tibetans who resisted. Mr. Choephel left Tibet with his mother in the years after the Chinese invasion of 1950, growing up in India, where other refugees implanted in him a love of traditional Tibetan songs. He returned to Tibet in the 1990's to try to capture this musical history on tape, but the Chinese had a head start of several decades. 'The first music I heard was Chinese Communist propaganda and Chinese pop songs,' he recalls of his arrival in Lhasa, Tibet’s capital. 'It was an unexpected, alien sound and seemed to be following me wherever I went.' He had better luck finding traditional singers in the countryside, but he was only partway into his recording efforts when he was arrested and jailed as a spy in 1995. One of the more touching aspects of this film is his account of his mother’s tireless campaign to have him freed, which finally paid off in 2002. Persistence, it seems, runs in the family" [Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, 9/23/10].
Mark Alburger (b. 1957, Upper Darby, PA) is an award-winning, eclectic ASCAP composer of postminimal, postpopular, and postcomedic sensibilities. He is Music Director of San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra and San Francisco Cabaret Opera, Editor-Publisher of 21st-Century Music and New Music, and Professor Emeritus in Music Theory and Literature at Diablo Valley College. His principal teachers were Gerald Levinson, Joan Panetti, and James Freeman at Swarthmore College (B.A.); Jules Langert at Dominican University (M.A.); Christopher Yavelow at Claremont University (Ph.D.); and Terry Riley. Dr. Alburger has composed 406 major works over the past 48 years, including chamber music, concertos, oratorios, operas, song cycles, and symphonies. His complete catalogue is being issued on discs from New Music. Alburger's multiple blogs include: markalburger.blogspot.com,
markalburger2022.blogspot.com,
markalburgerworks.blogspot.com, markalburgerevents.blogspot.com, markalburgermusichistory.blogspot.
com, 21st-centurymusic.blogspot.com
