Positively Mona Lyn Reese / Mark Alburger

Mona Lyn Reese is a neoclassic composer based in San Jose, who has spent much of the past decade in Germany and India. Her husband Thomas Hassing has served as her librettist in several operas. I caught up with Mona at her comfortable home in the north of town on January 13, 2011.

ALBURGER: So, you've only been back from India for a couple of years.

REESE: We got back in July of 2008. And then Tom started working at Global Foundries, where he's the Director of Intellectual Property.

ALBURGER: And meanwhile he writes.

REESE: Yes, he does. He was actually in the last production of The Three Fat Women of Antibes at San Jose State. The part that he played was a supernumerary who only appears at the end, and only in one piece. The director said, "We're having a hard time finding someone to play the part." So I said, "Tom will do it." "Really, do think so?" "Well, he's going to be there anyway, so, why not? He knows the lines!" Then I came to find that Tom had never been in a play in his life, not even as a child. Not even a Nativity play at church; he hadn't even been a shepherd. But he does a lot of acting classes. When I worked with young kids, getting them to write their own operas (at one of the places I've worked in that capacity: The Twin Cities Opera Company), Tom was helping with the writing. He was great; he was playing the mirror game -- he was fantastic! We've been together for 25 years, and I never knew that he had never been on the stage!

ALBURGER: So, how'd he do?

REESE: He was good.

ALBURGER: Good?

REESE: He wasn't great. He was terribly nervous. He was really nervous. Fortunately, for him, the person who was the director is a really good friend. We were friends with Daniel Helfgott and Barbara Turner before we did this project. So Daniel and Tom had to have a little coaching, and their coaching was to go for a long walk, without Barbara and me. And then Tom got a hat that he was supposed to wear.

ALBURGER: Something to help him be in the character.

REESE: To be in the character. And, once he had his hat, which we got him pretty quickly (he was supposed to be a 1930's playboy-prince, with a white hat, and once he had it to make gestures, it was....

ALBURGER: Magic. The Magic Feather.

REESE: A magic thing! He went from stiff and horrible to...

UNISON: Good.

REESE: Yes, not great...

ALBURGER: But good.

REESE: The improvement was marked. And once we got to the performances... he was good.

ALBURGER: So that series of performances was in...

REESE: 2009.

ALBURGER: 2009. What else has been happening?

REESE: Oh, I finished recording Choose Life, with the San Jose Choral Project and San Jose Chamber Orchestra. It's an hour long I-really-don't-know-what-to-call-it. It's for chorus, soloists, and orchestra. There's a Gregorian chant choir and a narrator. When it's performed, everybody dresses up. It's about the Holocaust, and everybody dresses up like people of the time -- some rich, some poor. And it's staged. The people sing from the music, but directors usually have them -- depending on the size of the space -- moving around.

ALBURGER: Kind of like an opera-oratorio.

REESE: Kind of like an opera-oratorio. It was done in 2000 at the Basilica of St. Mary in Minneapolis, which was the organization that commissioned it, a long time ago in the 90's. It's been performed quite a lot. In this recent production, they had dancers for some of it, with modern dancers from Notre Dame, who choreographed a couple of the pieces that were just really moving. So that finally, finally, finally happened, after years of trying to get the money, and get organized, and find somebody that could do it that wasn't going to be in the Czech Republic, or something like that. I don't mind working with European groups along those lines, but I wanted to do this in the United States, if I could. So I finally finished that. We just finished it in October.

ALBURGER: Finished it in terms of the performances?

REESE: Finished recording it at Skywalker Studio.

ALBURGER: Oh, wow.

REESE: Yes, because it's been performed a lot, and everybody does it differently. Now there's going to be a performance of that piece -- I don't if they're doing the whole piece, with all of the choruses -- by a group in New York. So, I've been doing that, and then I've been working on getting the promotions for Three Fat Women ready -- mailing lists...

ALBURGER: And that's going up again?

REESE: Well, excerpts from it, in a similar fashion as with San Francisco Cabaret Opera, at Bluegrass Opera, in Kentucky. The Bluegrass people are going to do six sets of new opera excerpts, and after they see how the pieces go and what the audience response is, they're going to choose two of the operas over the summer. But I've been working on the marking for Three Fat Women, and my daughter, who's also an opera singer, is really good at Excel and Word, and she's making a big mailing list, so I can market it. Because, if nobody knows about it, they why did I bother? Tom and I are also working on a new opera, but we're just in the libretto stages.

ALBURGER: Working title?

REESE: It's an unimportant book called The Glimpses of the Moon.

ALBURGER: The Glimpses of the Moon.

REESE: It's a romantic comedy. I don't like tragedy. I am a happy girl! I am a happy girl, and I don't... see... why... You know, almost every single new piece is this doom and gloom... So depressing. Nixon in China, or that man who was killed by the pirate terrorists, I can't think of the name...

ALBURGER: You mean The Death of Klinghoffer?

REESE: Klinghoffer! Yes, I do! Depressing...

ALBURGER: So that's not your thing?

REESE: Nah, no. So here I am, just telling you about my Holocaust Oratorio!

ALBURGER: Right! Well, so there you go!

REESE: But, you see, that was a commission!

ALBURGER: So, you naturally gravitate towards the happy, but you'll do a sad on spec.

REESE: Sure, but I'll tell you that the commissioners -- the Temple Israel, the Basilica of St. Mary, and the College of St. Benedict -- didn't want a horror story.

ALBURGER: Right. So, they wanted something uplifting.

REESE: A situation in which you would feel good -- or feel cleansed or uplifted -- by the end.

ALBURGER: Catharsis.

REESE: Yes, so that's what we did. And that's why we titled it Choose Life.

ALBURGER: Choose Life.

REESE: It's from Deuteronomy. There's a verse, "Today I will choose life."

ALBURGER: So that, would you say, would be a through-line in your work: the positive?

REESE: Yes.

ALBURGER: And where did this all start? Your background in music -- where did you get the spark?

REESE: Oh, you know, I'll tell you something: I always wanted to be a composer! I just did. I'm so dumb, Mark, that I thought... Listen, this is what I really and truly thought, that, if you wanted to compose music... Or, you know, if you wanted to major in English, you would go to the English Department and they would teach you... In music, they would teach you how to write... music. That's why you went to music school... I mean, of course, obviously, I knew that people wanted to, you know, play better, and so on, and I knew that that was part of it, but I really and truly thought that it was about composition. And, of course, it's true, you do go to music school and learn how to be a composer.

ALBURGER: Yes.

REESE: You do. But that was so much in my brain, that I couldn't imagine why anybody would go to college and major in English who wouldn't want to write stories, or write novels. Because, people that went to art school wanted to paint pictures, right?

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: And sculpt things and, you know, make macrame plant holders, or whatever. And I thought that's what you would do analogously in music. And I was in music school for the first two years or so, and I finally went up to a teacher. I went to the University of Minnesota at Morris, which was a very small school, and my parents lived in that town, and I lived a home. And I went to the head of the theory department, who was also a composer, and I knew that, because we had played his music in the concert band that I was in. And I said, "Dr. Johnson, I want to write music, and when do we take a course in composition?" He just looked at me, because most of the kids wanted to be music teachers. They were in education. They had their music, and that's what they were thinking about doing. My father was a barber. I said to my parents, "I really want to do this." They didn't know what to think. I knew, but I didn't know how to tell anybody, in a way. And, it's my mother's fault, because she always took me to concerts and such in Minneapolis when I was a little girl. She took me to Orchestra Hall when I was six, and I was sitting there, "I wanna do this! This is what I want!"

ALBURGER: What were some of the pieces that made the first impressions on you?

REESE: Oh, Handel. Our town orchestra did Messiah every year, and I remember looking forward to that all year long. I was a really tiny little kid. It was my thing. My father didn't care about that stuff. I had two brothers, and they were little, and didn't want to go. But I can remember going when I was six. Because I was sitting like this, you know? [demonstrates]. When you're six, and you're sitting in the adult chairs at the auditorium?

ALBURGER: Yes! Edith Ann....

REESE: And I didn't fall asleep. My mom took me when I was 12 to see Tosca. The Metropolitan Opera would come to Minneapolis -- they used to; they don't anymore. There was a traveling Metropolitan Opera. They came, and I saw Renata Tebaldi. I've never forgotten. I thought, "I wanna do that!"

ALBURGER: But not "sing that." "Write that."

REESE: Yes, I never wanted to sing it, but I wanted to be in it, somehow.

ALBURGER: You knew you wanted to buy into it in some way.

REESE: Yes. I wanted to be that. I wanted to do that.

ALBURGER: How far away is Minneapolis from your hometown?

REESE: A three-hour drive.

ALBURGER: It was a pilgrimage.

REESE: Kind of. Except that my grandmother -- my mom's mother -- lived there.

ALBURGER: So you had other reasons to go.

REESE: Yes, occasionally we would go just to attend. But usually it wasn't as if we would drive for three hours and see the event and come home..

ALBURGER: You'd stay.

REESE: We'd sleep over, or we'd go the day before. I know my mom's friend, Maxine, and her daughter also enjoyed the concerts. Plus we'd go to nice restaurants, matinees, and attend the Guthrie Theater. My mother really liked drama.

ALBURGER: In general, however, yours was a small-town rural situation.

REESE: Morris, Minnesota, but there's a branch of the University there.

ALBURGER: A small town with culture.

REESE: Yes, lot's of professors hanging around. At the time I lived there, it was quite a vibrant town. Now, I wouldn't say it's a ghost town, there's still lots of manufacturing... And the University is still there -- they've got a great campus -- a very vibrant life. But, previously, there were all of these great stores and restaurants, back in the 50's and 60's. And now, there's nothing.

ALBURGER: So you were born...

REESE: August 24, 1951.

ALBURGER: So the town was vibrant enough then for a good undergraduate education?

REESE: Yes, and then, for graduate school, before which I took some time off doing other things...

ALBURGER: The other things being?....

REESE: I went and I lived in Key West, Florida, for a little while, and just I was a lifeguard. I had done four years of academics in three years of school, and I had still graduated with honors, and I was fried.

ALBURGER: So it was time to do something different.

REESE: And I didn't know where I wanted to go to graduate school, so I went and I lived in Florida for a couple of years.

ALBURGER: Well, being in Minnesota for a certain length of time, it seems like Florida...

REESE: It seemed like it would be a great idea. So I did go there, and then, after that, I went to the University of Kansas, and I got my Masters in Music Composition.

ALBURGER: What were some of your earliest compositions? Were they done at the University, or before in Florida?

REESE: I never wrote anything in Florida. I didn't have a piano. I'll tell you, sometimes you can get really academically tired. And I was academically tired. I played my guitar and I didn't do anything musical except apply to graduate school. I did that.

ALBURGER: The Florida stint was?...

REESE: Just a year and a half.

ALBURGER: You had earned an extra year...

REESE: Yes, sort of like that. So then I was looking for a place to go to school, and I liked the composition program at the University of Kansas. I was accepted, I had done well -- my undergraduate marks were good. I studied there with John Pozdro and Edward Mattila -- my two main teachers. One is about a hundred by now.

ALBURGER: Another Elliott Carter. What about those first pieces?

REESE: I'm trying to remember. Pieces from grad school, some of them I still like. I wrote some songs, a piano piece, and some small chamber ensembles...

ALBURGER: Any titles come to mind?

REESE: I'm trying to think... This is terrible... Oh, I know. One song cycle that I wrote was called Love Poems to the Moon. Oh, I wrote a song that I still like -- I still like. And I get in trouble with ASCAP for it, too. It's a poem by Arthur Rimbaud called Le dormeur du val. Which is "The Sleeper in the Valley." It's an anti-war piece that he wrote some time in the 19th Century. It's a very good piece. It's a good piece. People still perform it, and I like it a lot. There's a pop artist from the 50's or 60's, his name was Yves Montand -- this French singer, who recorded a jazz version of music on this same poem. So they keep sending me his checks! I keep saying, "This is not my piece. This is not my piece."

ALBURGER: You never tried to cash one of those checks.

REESE: Well, yes, the checks are written out to me, because...

ALBURGER: They think it's your piece.

REESE: They think it's my piece, because he's a singer. But I didn't write that version. He was the lover of Edith Piaf, or somebody like that...

ALBURGER: Well, you're very honorable. Because, I've got to admit, when I have checks with my name on them from ASCAP, I cash them!

REESE: Well, you know what? It's easy to do, because sometimes there are a bunch of pieces, because I've done lots of arrangements for the Minnesota Orchestra when I lived in Minneapolis, and I might do Prokofiev. Well, I'm not really allowed to do an arrangement of Prokofiev, because he's still under the copyright. But they're only doing, you know, an excerpt for a children's concert; I'm not going to worry about it. But the orchestra could get in big, big, big, trouble if anybody from that publisher found out about it, and so could I. So that money, if it's going to anyone, is going to Prokofiev's heirs. So I just tell them, I did an arrangement of that, and they say, "Fine, fine, fine." We're not talking about a lot of money. This money I got from the anti-war piece was maybe a hundred dollars. It's nothing. Itunes sells an album of it for 99 cents, and somebody buys that song, and I get a check for 35 cents, or something. So there was that piece. And I wrote the big composition called, Three Moods for Piano, or something like that. You write these pieces...

ALBURGER: Do you keep a works list?

REESE: Oh, yes. And around this same time, I did get my first professional composition commission at 24, when I had not yet graduated from Kansas. I just had my thesis and defense to do. I had done my recital. Everything else was done.

ALBURGER: And this was for your Masters? Doctorate? Both.

REESE: I have a master's. I don't have a doctorate. So I worked in the Art Department. I was an art model.

ALBURGER: Ah.

REESE: I tell you that now that my parents are dead. They would be just shocked! They're rolling now, I'm sure! Yes, anyway, I worked in the Art Department, and was a model. I got to know the professors -- a lot of them very well. This one professor knew that I was a music student. The music department had lots and lots and lots of student concerts, usually held in large classrooms. Because, otherwise without recitals, if you don't hear your music and you don't get critiques, what's the point? You can't learn anything until you see what happens. So this teacher had come to hear my piece, just because he knew me from the art department. He liked what I wrote a lot, and he was making this documentary on different folk arts in Kansas -- people that make wavy sheets that go [makes a whirring sound], and have their whole yards full of these things -- all kinds of folk arts. He asked me to write the music for the film, and I was really surprised and pleased. He was able to get the Kansas Woodwind Quintet, from their Symphony Orchestra, to play it, with percussion.

ALBURGER: Woodwind quintet with percussion.

REESE: Yes. Woodwind quintet with percussion. I could have picked anything else, I guess. But at that time I was most comfortable with winds, because I was a flute player. That was easy for me. I knew I wouldn't screw up.

ALBURGER: When did you start playing flute?

REESE: Oh, I was eight. I was terrible.

ALBURGER: What?

REESE: I said "I'm terrible."

ALBURGER: Really?

REESE: I don't like to play. I can't say that's true. I wasn't terrible -- they gave me a degree in music! So, clearly, I wasn't terrible.

ALBURGER: Well, your focus was somewhere else.

REESE: I didn't get a degree in Music Composition as an undergraduate, because they didn't offer a Composition degree.

ALBURGER: Let me guess: They probably had Music Ed and Music Performance. Period

REESE: Yes. That's it, so I got the latter. They didn't have a Composition degree.

ALBURGER: Well, I have a degree that just says, "Music," from Swarthmore College. It's not specific at all.

REESE: Right. And, of course, when I went to the University of Kansas, I have a Master of Music in Theory and Composition. But the other one doesn't say anything. It just says, "Bachelor of Arts," and that's what I have.

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: So, it wasn't my joy. It was fun, I liked it. But I graduated, I got that degree in Flute Performance and I never played again.

ALBURGER: Wow, how about that.

REESE: Yes, I never did. I just wanted to write.

ALBURGER: Well, clearly, you were not great, you were "good."

REESE: I was good when I was 22, and then, if you never play again, you're not good anymore.

ALBURGER: That's true. But it gave you the behind-the-music experience, such that you were particularly comfortable writing for winds.

REESE: Yes. Actually, I can't say I never played again. I did, of course I played again. Oh, I played the double bass, too, when I was an undergraduate. When I lived to Key West, and I said, "I didn't do anything in music," well, that's not true, because the town was going to do, guess what?, my favorite piece, Messiah, and the town orchestra and choir (they were really terrible) didn't have anyone to play the bass. And I said, "Well, I know how to play the bass, but I don't have one." And so I got a bass from the school -- someone let me borrow one. I was not very good, but I was better than nobody.

ALBURGER: Well, yes, sure. Writing for woodwinds and percussion would suggest that you certainly by this time were now attuned to many composers beyond Handel.

REESE: Oh, sure. I was in graduate school.

ALBURGER: Were there 20th-century composers that particularly impacted on your reality?

REESE: You know, I really like Harry Partch.

ALBURGER: How about that? Me, too.

REESE: I love Harry Partch, you know, and he's so out there. And Lou Harrison.

ALBURGER: Those crazy Californians!

REESE: Well, we studied those composers. I went to a small school, but it didn't mean that they had idiots working there. They were good teachers and fine musicians.

ALBURGER: So you were even exposed to such composers as an undergraduate?

REESE: Oh yes, and I liked them. Do you remember those great big computers with punch cards?

ALBURGER: Yes.

REESE: We were doing a unit on computer music, and I had a boyfriend at the time who was taking computer at school -- a math major, computer, engineer, something like that. So we tried to get the computer to generate music for us. We didn't know what we were doing. It wasn't to make the computer play the music but just...

ALBURGER: Compose it.

REESE: And we had as mixed success as many doing this, but we did it. And it was fun.

ALBURGER: And that was as an undergraduate.

REESE: Yes, I suppose was maybe 19. And we had all these punch cards, and we'd get them in a line. And we couldn't have to print out on music paper, it would be numbers, and the numbers would mean certain things.

ALBURGER: And then you'd have to translate them.

REESE: Yes.

ALBURGER: That's a long time ago.

REESE: It's a very long time ago.

ALBURGER: I remember doing related things with spaceships orbiting the moon, with punchcards, and my spaceship "orbiting the moon," went right through the center of the moon.

REESE: Oh, good. Did it crash and burn?

ALBURGER: It must have. Multiple times. I guess that's why I turned away from computers for quite a while, but now I'm back.

REESE: Now you're back.

ALBURGER: Full guns. So, you got this first commission when you were still a graduate student, so that's good.

REESE: Well, yes, but I was done. I was done. I had to do my what-do-you-call-it-they-stand-up-and-ask-you-a-bunch-of-questions...

ALBURGER: The defense of your dissertation, or thesis...

REESE: Yes, that. Oral examination. That's what I hadn't done yet.

ALBURGER: Well, suddenly the world is before you. What happens next?

REESE: After that? I had moved to Minneapolis, because that's where my family was. I stayed with my grandmother for a few weeks, while I found an apartment. I got a job in a music store, signed up to play and sing in choir, just got connected. I got a job teaching theory for people who didn't read music -- for guitar players in rock bands, and so on. There was an alternative school called The West Bank School of Music, and I got a job teaching there.

ALBURGER: So it was basically moving to Minneapolis to seek your fortune.

REESE: Well, I moved to Minneapolis because I could knew I get a job. I certainly wasn't going move back to Morris. There was definitely nothing for me there, because I didn't have a doctor's degree, and I wouldn't be able to get a job at the University.

ALBURGER: Maybe even if you had a doctorate.

REESE: Well, I wouldn't want to live there. I wouldn't want to live there. But I never wanted to be a teacher, either. A lot of people think, "I'd like to be a university professor." I certainly would have done that. I went on one job interview, and I just thought to myself after the interview (because at that time you didn't need to have that Ph.D. -- you just needed to have a master's degree, and they cared more about whether you were good), "Golly, I don't want to do that." So I thought, "OK, fine. Well, I'll think of something. I'll do something." And I just thought, "I'm going to compose music," and I composed music, "That's what I'm going to do, I'm going to compose music." And so that's what I did. I mean, I did all sorts of other crappy jobs, too. And I worked at that music store, and I worked at the West Bank School of Music, and I gave guitar lessons at Golden Valley Lutheran College, and worked at a department store. All those kinds of things that musicians do.

ALBURGER: Sure.

REESE: And I kept getting commissions, and I kept doing that.

ALBURGER: So the commissions kept coming in, that's great.

REESE: They did. Not enough to pay very well...

ALBURGER: But enough to keep you interested.

REESE: Well, and the lessons...

ALBURGER: And like so many people, just kind of putting the career together out of various components.

REESE: Yes, and I did that until the time that Tom and I got married. And Tom makes a boatload of cash, so I don't have to do the icky stuff anymore. Oh, and you know, I did all these arrangements for the Minnesota Orchestra -- tons of them, it seems like there were hundreds of them. Well, it was OK. I actually wrote a piece for these kinderconcerts, in which they use an ensemble of nine musicians, and they put the childen on the stage (we're talking about people who are four and five years old), and the musicians are seated amongst them. The kids are right there. They play a bunch of different pieces, short. A slice of Prokofiev to get the good part -- you know, the theme. Each piece is maybe five pieces long, or two minutes long -- dozens of those. But I wrote one of those pieces, where they have a narrator -- a new piece for that ensemble. That piece is really taking off. Right now, the Atlanta Symphony is playing it.

ALBURGER: And that piece is called?

REESE: The Mitten. I'm sure you've read that story. It's about a little boy who goes to gather firewood and he's in some cold country -- Sweden or Norway or the Ukraine, or some place like that -- and he drops his mitten in the snow. In comes a little mouse, and she pops in there to get warm, and pretty soon a frog and an owl and a whole bunch of animals, until finally there's a bear. And they're all squished together in the mitten, and the last animal that comes is a little cricket. And she jumps in the mitten and it explodes. It just pops.

ALBURGER: I think I've come across that.

REESE: I'm sure you have, because it's a very popular story, and it's a folk tale type. I love that piece, it turned out really well. I was in my 30's when I wrote that, so it was real professional picece. It was a real piece... does that make sense?

ALBURGER: Sure. So, how much have you written on The Mitten?

REESE: Ten minutes.

ALBURGER: That's a pretty substantial piece for a children's concert, with short attention spans.

REESE: But it's a story, it's like Peter and the Wolf.

ALBURGER: Stories help.

REESE: It's one of the pieces that I'm transferring to Finale and Sibelius after using other programs.

ALBURGER: Do you notate by hand, or directly into the computer?

REESE: A little of both. When I'm thinking, I write by hand.

ALBURGER: You approach that by pencil and paper?

REESE: Yes. I do a lot of singing when I compose. I'm not a terribly wonderful pianist, I play.

ALBURGER: By now thought, you're probably better at piano than flute.

REESE: No, I don't know about that. But I sing it all, and get the notes that I want, and I write it down and work on that, then after a bit, if I want to massage or sequence it, I'll put it into the computer.

ALBURGER: A lot of people still do that. Erling Wold, who's much more high-tech than I have, does something similar. But my handwriting is so bad, the moment I got a music-writing program in 1993, I never looked back. As a consequence, I have virtually no sketches anymore.

REESE: I have sketches, and most people that I talk to do. But you write very differently than I do; yours is a real different approach.

ALBURGER: Yes. So there you are in Minneapolis, and you're putting together a career, and where does Tom come in?

REESE: I was married once before. I moved to Minneapolis, I met my husband Frank, and we got married in 1979. In 1982, we had our daughter. And then after some time, I can't exactly remember when, we split up. That happens to people.

ALBURGER: Yes, what was his profession.

REESE: He was a violinmaker. I met him in church. I did, because I was singing in this wonderful choir. It was an auditioned group, and he was in it. His family was from Minneapolis. So I met him, not because we were both particularly religious, but just because we were in that.

ALBURGER: But you do have a religious background. Just growing up in the upper midwest might suggest Lutheranism?

REESE: Lutheran, that's what I was. I did become an Episcopalian later on, just because I thought Lutheranism was... boring. I'm not religious at all. I'm not religious at all. It was awhile ago, and I never felt particularly religious. But I liked going to church. Especially I like liturgical thing. I like the music. If there isn't any music, I'm not interested.

ALBURGER: And the Episcopalians are probably going to give you more of a run for your money.

REESE: Well, actually, you know, the one I went to was pretty liturgical.

ALBURGER: Yes, Lutherans can be.

REESE: But I was not a church-going individual, apart from the music. And I did a lot of church gigs, you know, because they pay you. They pay you to go to church.

ALBURGER: Right. Why not!

REESE: Why not! I said that one time to my daughter when she was going through a period when she was feeling religious, and I said, "I don't go to church unless somebody pays me." That was like blasphemy! She was really upset! Oh my goodness, she was terribly upset. Then about two years ago -- she's now 29, so she's gotten through a lot of that (I think that she was 19 or 20 when I said that to her) -- she called up, and I asked her if she was singing High Holidays this year. She's an opera singer; she lives in Chicago. And she said, "Ah, it's just more trouble than it's worth." And I said, "What about Christmas?" and she said, "I'm not going to church unless anyone pays me."

ALBURGER: She's come around.

REESE: And then finally she stopped doing High Holidays and Christmas. And she said, "I'll just do a solo spot."

ALBURGER: Your daughter is named...

REESE: Greer Davis.

ALBURGER: And you're still living in Minneapolis at this point. Did things get easier when you were married?

REESE: Not really. No, it was about the same, because Frank was a violinmaker. We weren't rolling in money, but we were fine. And I dated Tom for a terribly long time, and we got married in 1997, and moved out here that same year.

ALBURGER: Divorced in...

REESE: In the late 80's. We separated, and we didn't get the divorce for a while. It might have been 1990, or 89. The big bump up to my career was that I was the Composer-in-Residence at the Minneapolis Opera, starting in 1992.

ALBURGER: Wow, that is a big bump. That's great. You had been working with the Minnesota Orchestra previous to this. Was there a connection made between those two?

REESE: No. Not really. Actually, I got the opera job because of Libby Larsen. Libby Larsen had been asked to do this project with the Twin Cities Opera Guild, which is a less wonderful group than Minnesota Opera, and she didn't have time. And she told them to call me, because she said, "Mona could do that. She'd be really good at that. She'd do it." I haven't seen her in a long time, but we lived kind of close to each other, and we'd have coffee, and stuff like that. So she said, "Ask Mona to do it." And they did, and I did. And I said, "OK, yes, I have time, and it will be great fun, and I'll do it." So I called up the person who was Composer-in-Residence at the Minnesota Opera, and asked him if he would help me in my new position at Twin Cities. His name was Stephen Houtz. He was the main Composer-in-Residence, and they had somebody else that would do some of the gigs, too. Because there were too many school gigs for him to do all of them. The other person that they had, unbeknownst to me, was horrible (not Stephen), and they fired her. And Stephen said, "We've got to get someone else." And Stephen was going to move to a different position at the opera, and they we're going to let him do it, and he said, "I know who you should get." Because I had had that interview with him, and he had come to see one of my gigs. And he said, "That's who you should have." And their Director of Education, or whatever, called me one day, and I practically fell on the floor, because you don't get those jobs. You don't apply for jobs like that, because, otherwise, they'd never get to the end of the applications. But, you know, that's how art business works. You get from this to that, and so on. So that's how I got that job, and I stayed there for a long time. In fact, I was there when Tom and I got married, and we moved to California, and I resigned. And they said, "You can't quit; we don't have anybody." And I said, "Yeah?" This was '97, and I'd been there since '92. And they said, "Just do two, three more gigs for us." And I did two, three more years.

ALBURGER: Wow, so you'd fly back?

REESE: I'd fly back.

ALBURGER: As Composer-in-Residence, did they did ever do any of your pieces?

REESE: No, of course not.

ALBURGER: Isn't that a funny term?

REESE: What you were supposed to do, and what you actually ended up doing were not the same thing.

ALBURGER: Still, it's a wonderful title. And a great experience, I'm sure.

REESE: It was. I did arrangements for them when they used to take pieces on the road, I did Magic Flute. A whole orchestra of however many it is and I reduced orchestrations for 20-30 people. And I gave little talks before the operas. They needed a composer on staff, because you need somebody that can "do things" -- that kind of stuff.

Chronicle of January 2011

January 11

The Knights present the premiere of Yotam Haber's New Ghetto Music. Baryshnikov Arts Center, New York, NY. "During a 2008 residency at the American Academy in Rome, Mr. Haber uncovered a cache of tapes featuring Roman Jewish cantors recorded from the 1940's to the 60's. For New Ghetto Music he drew on the penetrating emotional delivery he heard on the tapes, combining it with modern orchestral techniques and a bracing rawness inspired by tenores vocal traditions from Sardinia. Featured in Mr. Haber’s piece was Christina Courtin, a Knights violinist and an admired indie-pop singer and songwriter, who sang her own lyrics and those of Barbara Ras, a contemporary poet. Ms. Courtin loosed her plaintive, affecting yelp in urgent, incantatory gushes over her frenetic fiddling. Behind her, vivacious, odd-metered dance rhythms paced a kaleidoscopic orchestral roil. The performance, ably conducted by Eric Jacobsen, had its rough spots, but intensity, exuberance and commitment more than compensated. . . . Gracious instrumental versions of two Schubert songs -- Gretchen am Spinnrade, orchestrated by Lev Zhurbin (known as Ljova); and “Des Baches Wiegenlied,” reworked by the violinist Colin Jacobsen (the conductor’s brother) -- preceded Mr. Haber’s work. After it, dance held sway in a pert account of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite and the intoxicating whirl of Ascending Bird, a Persian folk melody arranged by Colin Jacobsen and Siamak Aghaei" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 1/13/11].



Renée Fleming. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "[A] fascinating recital . . . with the elegant German pianist Hartmut Höll, who has been her frequent accompanist since 2001. . . . Fleming took her audience into the artistic circle in Vienna in the early years of the 20th century [in a repertory] that centered on the composer Alexander Zemlinsky. Born in Vienna in 1871, Zemlinsky was championed in the mid-1890s by Brahms. Around the same time he gave lessons in counterpoint to Schoenberg, who was only three years younger. Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde became Schoenberg’s first wife. Focusing on music written in 1907, Ms. Fleming sang a single song by Schoenberg, Jane Grey, and Five Songs by Zemlinsky. Jane Grey sets a poem by Heinrich Ammann about the young noblewoman who was elevated to queen of England for nine days in 1553 before being executed for treason. In this lush, texturally murky music you hear Schoenberg roaming unmoored through new harmonic waters. The vocal line shifts from stretches of elegiac lyricism to bursts of Expressionist anguish, which Ms. Fleming sang with an alluring blend of plush colorings and expressive restraint. Zemlinsky’s Fünf Lieder, settings of five poems by Richard Dehmel, tells a tortured story of an adulterous affair. The year Zemlinsky wrote this work Mathilde began an affair with a painter that nearly wrecked her marriage to Schoenberg. If not quite as daring as Schoenberg’s Jane Grey, the Zemlinsky songs speak a similar musical language. In the piano passages thick, wayward chromatic chords are pierced with twisting inner voices, played here with a rich sound and suppleness by Mr. Höll. . . . To end the first half she performed three songs by Korngold, born in 1897, and another Zemlinsky student. After the Schoenberg and Zemlinsky works, the lush Korngold songs sounded almost like Puccini. . . . Fleming leapt to a work from 2005, Songs From ‘The Book of Hours: Love Poems to God,’ settings of Rilke texts by the jazz pianist and composer Brad Mehldau. As performed here Mr. Mehldau’s harmonic language, dense with wayward chords, seemed like a latter-day riff on Zemlinsky and his circle. Except, that is, for bursts of Ellington energy and some restless Mingus-like bass lines. Mr. Mehldau clearly wrote these songs to showcase Ms. Fleming’s voice. . . . No music suits Ms. Fleming more than Strauss, and she sounded terrific in four Strauss songs that ended the program. Familiar fare came only during the encores, with the Korngold aria Marietta’s Lied and Bernstein’s I Feel Pretty from West Side Story. The audience cheered the Bernstein, though I found it overly theatrical and a little goofy. But I cannot remember hearing a more exquisite performance of Strauss’s Morgen, her final encore" [Anthony Tommasini, 1/12/11].


January 17

Haven String Quartet and S. Luke's Steel Band. St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, New Haven, CT. "The concert . . . will . . . offer works of hip-hop-inspired classicism and classically inspired rap. vant to them . . . . [T]he Haven String Quartet . . . will perform two pieces on its own: the Lyric Quartet, a three-part suite in the Debussy mode written in 1960 by the African-American composer William Grant Still, and Rosa Parks, part of A Civil Rights Reader, an ongoing project of the Haitian-American violinist and composer Daniel Bernard Roumain. . . . The decision to focus on Mr. Roumain, 40, who seems as comfortable writing string quartets as he was appearing with Lady Gaga on American Idol, is an apt one. Told of Music Haven’s decision to play Parks, he expressed appreciation, noting that the piece was his fifth for string quartet, and a sixth had been commissioned by Community Music Works in Providence, R.I. . . . For a work with credibility in the classical world, Parks -- especially the second movement, Klap Ur Handz, which instructs the musicians to clap and stomp in a kind of call-and-response pattern -- generates unusual enthusiasm among young urban audiences. When the Haven String Quartet previewed the movement at a recent 'performance party,' one of the gatherings at which Music Haven students play for family and friends, the crowd spontaneously clapped along. . . . The mixing of string quartet and steel band cultures is not the only collaboration that will take place at the concert. Netta Hadari, a London-born violinist of Israeli heritage who spent much of his adolescence in South Africa, will bring his experience to the table with Music Haven Rap" [Phillip Lutz, The New York Times, 1/14/11].


January 18

Diotima Quartet. Frick Collection, New York, NY. Also January 19, Austrian Cultural Forum.
"[T]he Diotima offered works from around the edges of the standard repertory. . . . The Frick performance closed with a supercharged, tightly unified account of the Ravel Quartet, but as driven and dazzling as the outer movements were, the reading’s most memorable moments were in the slow movement. The haunting juxtaposition of a dark-hued theme and its tremolando accompaniment was perfectly balanced, and muted passages played with a vibratoless, almost organlike tone were especially affecting. At the Austrian Cultural Forum the quartet put its modernist side on display. The ability to switch gears quickly and fluidly, as it did in the Janacek, served it particularly well here, and that talent was tested immediately in the restlessly assertive String Quartet No. 6 (2010) by the Scottish composer James Dillon. Mr. Dillon’s sound world is variegated and changeable: sudden crescendos evaporate in pianissimo chords; quiet pizzicato passages unfold into sequences of descending slides that evoke whining, at times, and exoticism elsewhere. After the Dillon, Webern’s Five Movements (1909) sounded like an antiquity. It was not that the players underemphasized Webern’s free use of dissonance and spare, often eerie timbres; they reveled in them. But they also made the most of occasional backward glances that, even where they last only a bar or two, offer what in this reading seemed a wistful memory of a vanishing world. Roger Reynolds’s Elliott (2008) opens with an exquisite soliloquy for violin -- given a virtuosic reading by Mr. Zhao (the two violinists alternate in the first chair) -- and expands into a concise but intense meditation that has elements in common with the Dillon score. The quartet closed its program with Thomas Larcher’s spacious, five-movement Madhares (2007), a work it recorded for an ECM compilation of Mr. Larcher’s music, released last year. It is an extraordinary piece: like the Dillon, it is rich in effects, and its language can be abstruse, even terrifying. One section seemed to combine the avian swarm of Hitchcock’s Birds with the violin stabs in Bernard Hermann’s Psycho score. Yet these tense sections often melt into something entirely different -- modal, folksy melodies, refracted through lightly dissonant harmonies, for example, or unabashedly shimmering Romanticism. The score, inspired by the White Mountains of Crete, was both familiar and otherworldly, and left a listener eager to hear it again" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 1/18/11].


January 21

Pianist Jonathan Biss. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "On this snowy winter night he drew an enthusiastic audience and played very well . . . his program [including] Janacek’s Sonata 1.X.1905 [and] a recent work by Bernard Rands . . . The Moravian-born Janacek’s mesmerizing sonata, subtitled 'From the Street,' was written in reaction to a wrenching public event in 1905: a young carpenter was killed during a demonstration to demand an autonomous university where courses were conducted in Czech, not German. Janacek was an early enthusiasm for Mr. Biss, and he gave a rhapsodic account of this elusive work, which alternates spiraling, misty outbursts with staggered phrases of elegiac melodies. Mr. Rands wrote Three Pieces for Piano last year for Mr. Biss, who has been playing them on tour. This was the first New York performance. The pieces were inspired, Mr. Rands notes, by the piano music of Scriabin, Debussy and Ravel. In a way Scriabin’s restless flights, Debussy’s intense tranquillity and Ravel’s dazzling colors are evoked at once. Caprice is all runs and riffs and fitful chords. In the slow middle piece, Aubade, melodic fragments are woven into strings of thick yet lucid chords with hints of Berg, Messiaen and Bill Evans. Arabesque is an exercise in quick repeated notes and skittish spurts. Mr. Biss played this brilliant 13-minute group of pieces with nimble technique and myriad colorings" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 1/23/11].


January 29

Death of Milton [Byron] Babbitt (b. 5/10/16, Philadelphia, PA) at 94. Princeton, NJ. "[He was] an influential composer, theorist and teacher who wrote music that was intensely rational and for many listeners impenetrably abstruse . . . . Babbitt, who had a lively sense of humor despite the reputation for severity that his music fostered, sometimes referred to himself as a maximalist to stress the musical and philosophical distance between his style and the simpler, more direct style of younger contemporaries like Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other Minimalist composers. It was an apt description. Although he dabbled early in his career with theater music, his Composition for Orchestra (1940) ushered in a structurally complex, profoundly organized style that was rooted in Arnold Schoenberg’s serial method. But Mr. Babbitt expanded on Mr. Schoenberg’s approach. In Mr. Schoenberg’s system, a composer begins by arranging the 12 notes of the Western scale in a particular order called a tone row, or series, on which the work is based. Mr. Babbitt was the first to use this serial ordering not only with pitches but also with dynamics, timbre, duration, registration and other elements. His methods became the basis of the 'total serialism' championed in the 1950s by Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono and other European composers. Mr. Babbitt began exploring this path in Three Compositions for Piano (1947) and Composition for Four Instruments (1948), and adhered to it through his entire career. He composed prolifically for chamber ensembles and instrumental soloists and created a substantial and varied catalog of vocal works. He also composed a compact but vital group of orchestral pieces and an enduring series of works for synthesizer, often in combination with voices or acoustic instruments. Mr. Babbitt liked to give his pieces colorful titles, often with puns (The Joy of More Sextets, for example), and said that in selecting titles he tried to avoid both the stale and the obscure. Yet when Mr. Babbitt explained his compositional approach in essays, lectures and program notes, they could be as difficult to understand as his music. In one program note, he spoke of 'models of similar, interval-preserving, registrally uninterpreted pitch-class and metrically durationally uninterpreted time-point aggregate arrays.' He often said in interviews that every note in a contemporary composition should be so thoroughly justified that the alteration of a tone color or a dynamic would ruin the work’s structure. And although colleagues who worked in atonal music objected when their music was described as cerebral or academic, Mr. Babbitt embraced both terms and came to be regarded as the standard-bearer of the ultrarational extreme in American composition. That reputation was based in part on an article published by High Fidelity magazine in February 1958 under the title Who Cares if You Listen? The headline was often cited as evidence of contemporary composers’ disregard for the public’s sensibilities, and Mr. Babbitt objected that it had been added by an editor, without his permission. But whatever his objections, the article did argue that contemporary composition was a business for specialists, on both the composing and listening end of the transaction, and that the general public’s objections were irrelevant. 'Why refuse to recognize the possibility that contemporary music has reached a stage long since attained by other forms of activity?' Mr. Babbitt wrote. 'The time has passed when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields.' Listeners who overlooked Mr. Babbitt’s philosophical abstractions and thorny analyses -- who simply sat back and listened, rather than trying to understand his harmonies and structural processes -- often discovered works of great expressive variety. These range from the intense emotionality of A Solo Requiem (1976) to the shimmering surfaces and eerie pictorialism of Philomel (1964) and the poetic flow of some of the solo piano works, which have the spirit of advanced jazz improvisations. Indeed, in his All Set for Jazz (1957), for winds, brasses and percussion, he achieved a freely improvisatory feeling within an atonal harmonic context. . . . Babbitt . . . grew up in Jackson, Miss. He began studying the violin when he was 4 but soon switched to clarinet and saxophone. Early in his life he was attracted to jazz and theater music. He was making his own arrangements of popular songs at 7, and when he was 13, he won a local songwriting contest. Although the music he went on to write rejected the easily assimilated tonal language of popular music, Mr. Babbitt retained a fondness for theater songs all his life and was said to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the style. 'If you know anybody who knows more popular music of the ’20s or ’30s than I do, I want to know who it is,' he said in an Internet interview with the New Music Box in 2001. 'I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements; we stole their arrangements; we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.' In 1946, Mr. Babbitt tried his hand at a musical, a collaboration with Richard Koch and Richard S. Childs called Fabulous Voyage. The work was not produced, but in 1982 Mr. Babbitt published three of its songs, which showed a firm command of the idiom and considerable charm. But Mr. Babbitt set his course toward serious avant-garde composition in 1932, when he played through the scores of some Schoenberg piano music that an uncle had brought home from Europe. At the time, Mr. Babbitt was a 16-year-old philosophy student at the University of Pennsylvania. The next year he became a composition student of Marion Bauer and Philip James at New York University, and in 1935 he began studying privately with Roger Sessions. In 1938, Sessions invited Mr. Babbitt to join the Princeton composition faculty, and Mr. Babbitt succeeded him as the William Shubael Conant Professor of Music in 1965. Mr. Babbitt was also on the faculty of the Juilliard School, where he began teaching in 1973, as well as at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies; the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood; the new-music academy at Darmstadt, Germany; and the New England Conservatory in Boston. A series of six lectures he gave at the University of Wisconsin was published as Words About Music in 1987. Mr. Babbitt’s articles about music were published as The Collected Essays of Milton Babbitt by Princeton University Press in 2003. His students included Mario Davidovsky and John Eaton, who have followed essentially in Mr. Babbitt’s atonal path (although Mr. Eaton later broke away), and the theater composer Stephen Sondheim. During World War II, Mr. Babbitt taught mathematics at Princeton and undertook secret research in Washington. He also evolved his extended form of serialism during these years. But immediately after the war he pursued a split musical path, exploring his rigorous serial style in his abstract concert works, on one hand, and completing “Fabulous Voyage” and a film score, “Into the Ground” (1949). In the 1950s Mr. Babbitt was hired as a consultant by RCA, which was developing the most sophisticated electronic-music instrument of the time, the Mark II synthesizer. The Mark II became the centerpiece of the new Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959. Mr. Babbitt was one of the center’s first directors, along with Sessions, Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening. Mr. Babbitt’s earliest electronic pieces, Composition for Synthesizer (1961) and Ensembles for Synthesizer (1964), were as intensely organized as his instrumental music had been. Indeed, he saw the synthesizer as a kind of liberation from the physical limitations of living performers. 'The medium provides a kind of full satisfaction for the composer,' he said in a 1969 interview with The New York Times. 'I love going to the studio with my work in my head, realizing it while I am there and walking out with the tape under my arm. I can then send it anywhere in the world, knowing exactly how it will sound.' The early synthesizer pieces have become classics, but Mr. Babbitt quickly moved forward, writing works in which electronic soundtracks accompanied live performers. Particularly striking are the vocal works Vision and Prayer (1961) and Philomel, and Reflections (1975) for piano and tape. He stopped composing music with an electronic component in 1976, when the Columbia-Princeton studio was vandalized, and it was decided that restoring it would be too expensive. Many of Mr. Babbitt’s works have been recorded, and he has always had the loyalty of performers willing to devote the effort required to render his music sensibly. Among his earliest champions were the soprano Bethany Beardslee, for whom he wrote many of his vocal works (A Solo Requiem was written in memory of her husband, Godfrey Winham); the Juilliard String Quartet; the pianists Robert Miller and Robert Helps; the Contemporary Chamber Ensemble; and the Group of Contemporary Music. In the 1970s and 1980s, a generation of young instrumentalists inured to the complexities of contemporary music became eloquent champions of Mr. Babbitt’s music . Among them are the pianists Robert Taub and the guitarist David Starobin, who have commissioned and recorded Mr. Babbitt’s works. Mr. Babbitt’s orchestral music is so exceedingly complex that both the New York Philharmonic, in 1969, and the Philadelphia Orchestra, in 1989, postponed premieres when the available rehearsal time proved insufficient. He did, however, have champions among top-flight conductors, the most notable being James Levine, who in 1967, as a 24-year-old fledgling conductor, led the premiere of Mr. Babbitt’s Correspondences. Mr. Levine later recorded Mr. Babbitt’s music with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and commissioned his Second Piano Concerto for the Met Orchestra and Mr. Taub in 1998. He regularly included Mr. Babbitt’s chamber works on his Met Chamber Ensemble programs, and in 2004 Mr. Babbitt dedicated his Concerti for Orchestra to Mr. Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which commissioned it. Mr. Babbitt received a special Pulitzer citation for his life’s work in 1982, and in 1986 he was awarded a $300,000 MacArthur Fellowship. His earlier awards included the Joseph Bearns Prize from Columbia University, for his Music for the Mass in 1941; the New York Music Critics Circle Awards, for Composition for Four Instruments in 1949 and for Philomel in 1964; and the Creative Arts Award from Brandeis University in 1970. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1965" [Allan Kozinn, 1/29/11].

By the Numbers

Anthony Tommasini's Top Ten Classical Composers (January 21, 2011, The New York Times)

J.S. Bach
Ludwig van Beethoven
W.A. Mozart
Franz Schubert
Claude Debussy
Igor Stravinsky
Johannes Brahms
Giuseppe Verdi
Richard Wagner
Bela Bartok

21ST-CENTURY MUSIC / February 2011

21ST
CENTURY
MUSIC


February 2011

Volume 18, Number 2


Mikel Rouse / Philip George

Chronicle of December 2010

Recordings


Illustration / Mikel Rouse


Editorial Staff

Mark Alburger
EDITOR-PUBLISHER

Harriet March Page
ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Patti Noel Deuter
ASSISTANT EDITOR

Erling Wold
WEBMASTER

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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Mikel Rouse / Philip George

Mikel Rouse (b. Michael Rouse, 1/26/57, Saint Louis, MI) writes in a post-minimal style that is idiomatically indebted to popular music, utilizing complex rhythmic techniques derived from world music, the avant-garde, and minimalism.

The son of a Missouri state trooper, Rouse grew up in Poplar Bluff, in the state's bootheel region. Early in life, he decided to change the spelling of his first name to "Mikel," more accurately representing the pronunciation.

He graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute and the Conservatory of Music at the University of Missouri at Kansas City. Rouse's band Tirez Tirez relocated to New York City in 1979 and continued performing until 1987.

About this time, he directed the film Roundtable (1979), and, over the years has served likewise for The Glass Bead Game (1982), A Walk in the Woods (1985), Funding (2001), The End Of Cinematics (2002), and Music For Minorities (2004).

Upon moving to New York, Rouse absorbed African rhythmic techniques from A. M. Jones's Studies in African Music, took up other instruction in world music, and studied Schillinger System with Jerome Walman, one of the few "Certified" instructors in America; all of these influences came to inform his music.

In addition to Tirez Tirez he formed a new ensemble, Mikel Rouse Broken Consort, to work out his new rhythmic language in the context of rock-based instrumentation, making him one of the first composers to notate intricate music in such a context. Recordings with the latter ensemble include Jade Tiger (1984), A Walk In The Woods (1985), A Lincoln Portrait (1988), and Soul Menu (1993).

Other albums of the 80's included Etudes (1980), Colorado Suite (1984), Quorum (1984), Set The Timer (1985), Social Responsibility (1987), and Against All Flags (1988).

Rouse's association with Ben Neill and Kyle Gann in the early 1990's led to the recognition of a new rhythmic complexity in minimalist-based music that came to be referred to as totalism.

Frustrated by the lack of institutional support for Downtown music, Rouse made an ambitious bid for composer self-sufficiency, premiering/directing a one-man opera Failing Kansas, based on the same story as Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, in 1995. One of the basic rhythms of the work is a five-beat isorhythm against which either harmony or drum patterns often reinforce a four- or eight- cycle.

Conceived as the first of a trilogy of operas, Failing led to an emerging art form which to composer has characterized as "counterpoetry," involving the use of multiple unpitched voices in counterpoint. Often individual lines performed by separate characters or groups are set to phrases of differing lengths (such as 9 and 10 beats) and characteristically played over a background of 4/4. Other works to employ this technique include Autorequiem (1994) for strings, percussion and voices; and the CD Living Inside Design (1994), a collection of extended spoken songs

In 1996 Rouse premiered and directed the technologically innovative Dennis Cleveland at The Kitchen, starring himself and based on a talk show format, with some of the singers/actors spread out among the audience. With a dense libretto drawn from John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards, the work was hailed by The Village Voice as "the most exciting and innovative new opera since [Philip Glass's] Einstein on the Beach."

Additional performances included The Eclectic Orange Festival in Costa Mesa, CA (1999); the Perth International Arts Festival, Western Australia (2000); the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana-Champaign, Illinois (2001, where the production was redesigned with assistance from the University of Illinois), and Lincoln Center (2002). The Australian Broadcasting Company filmed a documentary of the piece, which aired in 2001.

1999 found Rouse completing Return, a collection of songs built around samples from his 1985 Book One for string quartet. Also that year, the composer completed the music for the multimedia Cameraworld, collaborating with video artist Cliff Baldwin.

The following season, Rouse completed the score and film, tellingly entitled Funding, a full-length feature DVD/film/chamber orchestra piece, as well as conceiving and producing the first commercial CDROM release of prepared piano samples from John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes.

In 2001 the John Cage Trust commissioned Rouse to realize the score for Cage’s radio-play-turned-theatrical-production James Joyce, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie: An Alphabet. Rouse completed the score at Louisiana Tech University during the beginning of a three-year Meet the Composer Residency in Ruston, LA. He also played the part of James Joyce in the international 2001-2002 tour of the work, premiering at the Edinburgh International Festival and including runs at the Dublin Fringe Festival, the Hebbel Theatre (Berlin), the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts (University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign), Cal Performances (Berkele), the Perth International Arts Festival, and the Eclectic Orange Festival in Costa Mesa.

In 2002 he released two CDs, Cameraworld and a remastered Failing Kansas, and one DVD, Funding. Test Tones was completed that year and Music for Minorities the next.



The third opera in his trilogy, The End Of Cinematics premiered in Fall 2005, through collaboration with the Emerging Technologies department of the National Center for Supercomputing Technologies and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois at Urbana.

A new piece commissioned by The Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the John Cage Trust and Betty Freeman premiered at The Joyce Theater, New York, in October 2006. The piece was scored for multiple iPods set to "shuffle" so that each audience member had a different realization of the score. The music for the piece, International Cloud Atlas, was released exclusively on iTunes and was available for download prior to the premiere. In addition to this work, Rouse also released House Of Fans and Love At Twenty.

Works

Etudes (1981), ten songs

Balboa (1981), video opera

Quartet (1981), three violins, double bass

Shield 81 (1982), chamber orchestra suite

Autumn in New York (1982), orchestra

Untitled (1982), electronics

Jade Tiger (1982), five pieces for chamber ensemble (Mikel Rouse Broken Consort)

Glass Bead Game (1983), opera on Herman Hesse novel

Story of the Year (1983), nine songs

Colorado Suite (1984), three pieces for violin and electronics

A Walk in the Woods (1984), seven-piece chamber orchestra suite

Red 20 (1984), orchestra

Quorum (1984), electronic drum sequencer, premiered as Vespers by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

American Nova (1985), orchestra

Set the Timer / Uptight (1986), extended songs

Book One (1986), nine string quartets

Social Responsibility (1987), ten songs

Lincoln Portrait (1987), suite of six pieces for chamber ensemble (Mikel Rouse Broken Consort)

Against All Flags (1988), ten songs

Two Paradoxes Resolved (1989), six-piece piano suite

Hope Chest (1991), chamber quartet

Copperhead (1992), electric quartet

Left in My Life (1993), for voices and electronics

Soul Menu (1993), five pieces for chamber ensemble (Mikel Rouse Broken Consort)

Kiss Him Goodbye (1993), voices and electronics

Living Inside Design (1994), nine songs

Autorequiem (1994), voices and orchestra

Failing Kansas (1995), opera on Truman Capote's In Cold Blood

Dennis Cleveland (1996), opera as television talk show

The End of Cinematics (1997), opera

Return (1999), a collection of songs constructed around samples from Book One (1986), a book of string quartets recorded in 1989

Funding (2001), choral piece and feature film

Cameraworld (2000), digital media project incorporating surround sound, feature length film and video "for home entertainment systems of the future"

Test Tones (2002), song cycle and feature film combined with live interviews from New York to Louisiana

Music for Minorities (2003), 14 songs for voice and guitar with live interactive video.

Love at Twenty (2004), music for the Joe Goode Performance Group

House of Fans (2005), album of songs

International Cloud Atlas (2006), music for iPods for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Gravity Radio (2009), song cycle with live AP news reports and film

Recess (2010), song cycle utilizing orchestrated field recordings (2010)

Corner Loading (Volume 1) (2010), 13 songs for voice and guitar exploring blues techniques through simple metric combinations

Chronicle of December 2010

December 1

The Radio Dept. and Braids Bowery Ballroom, New York, NY. "The Radio Dept. is from Sweden, and it shares -- with bands like Junip, Kings of Convenience and Peter Bjorn and John -- the Scandinavian fondness for restrained, neatly made pop. Most of its set came from a compilation due for release in the United States in January, the precisely titled Passive Aggressive: Singles 2002-2010, released by Labrador. Performing as a three-man band with programmed rhythm tracks, the Radio Dept. harked back to the guitar-and-keyboard grids of New Order and the urbane whispers of Pet Shop Boys. Early in its career the Radio Dept. placed overlays of noise on its songs, but the band soon realized that it could be just as circumspect without the distortion. Onstage the songs proceeded at steady, moderate midtempos, with arrangements that were full-bodied but never overstuffed. Every so often the band allowed itself a dance beat or a major-chord crescendo approaching the lower elevations of U2. Within the decorous, melodic structures, [Johan] Duncanson was revealing longings, wounds and accusations. He derided Sweden’s government in The New Improved Hypocrisy and confessed to private failings in song after song: 'It breaks my heart to say that when I was in pain / I wanted you to feel the same,' he sang. The music was both a sturdy shelter and an invitation, for the sympathetic, to peer inside.
Braids, the Canadian band that opened the concert, doesn’t follow pop guidelines. It builds its long, changeable songs on busy Minimalistic patterns: loops and drones, overlapping guitar and keyboard lines, contrapuntal vocals that can turn into ethereal chorales. And every so often, out of the hypnotic polyphony, came a lead vocal from Raphaelle Standell-Preston (on guitar) or Katie Lee (on keyboard) that zeroed in on something more down-to-earth: 'What do you say to a man who’s got no taste? / Who’s really got no potential?” The songs -- from Braids’ debut album, Native Speaker, due in January -- evolved gradually but never predictably, and held a good part of the audience rapt" [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 12/2/10].


December 5

Bach and Forth, with pianist Stephen Prutsman. Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY. "In his teens and 20's in California he played keyboards in rock bands and piano in jazz clubs. But he had thorough conservatory training and won prizes in major international competitions. He has explored world music, arranging and composing some 40 genre-blending works for the Kronos Quartet. His song cycle Piano Lessons was given its American premiere this season by Dawn Upshaw and Emanuel Ax at Carnegie Hall. . . . Prutsman brought the strands of his interests together in a fascinating recital program . . . . Using Bach as a point of reference, he . . . alternated [J. S. Bach compositions] with music ranging from an elegiac ancient Uzbek folk song to the wildly inventive 1974 song Sound Chaser by the progressive art-rock group Yes, which has become a Prutsman specialty. In the first half the Bach pieces were juxtaposed with Rameau, Beethoven, Wagner . . . , Debussy, and Schoenberg. But in the second half Mr. Prutsman drew even bolder connections, . . . with music by Charlie Parker (Ornithology), the gospel singer and pastor Walter Hawkins, a traditional Rwandan ode and more, all played in his own artful arrangements. . . . [T] he musical connections Mr. Prutsman made were so intriguing, and his playing so earnest and sensitive, that you never doubted the integrity of this musical adventure. . . . That Mr. Prutsman brought a similar approach to everything he played made the musical connections easier to hear. He played throughout with rhythmic freedom, warm colorings and jazzy spontaneity. I prefer Bach (and Schoenberg, for that matter) with more articulate rhythm and clarity. Still, Mr. Prutsman’s performances were honest and elegant. . . . The highlight for me was Mr. Prutsman’s slightly crazed and brilliant arrangement of the episodic, relentless Yes song. He did not speak to the audience about the program. . . . Instead he let the music do the talking. The audience listened with notably rapt attention, then gave Mr. Prutsman a standing ovation. There was no encore. To add anything would have thrown off the balance of Bach and Forth" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 12/6/10].



December 7

For a composer generally described as contemporary classical, Minimalist or avant-garde, Mikel Rouse has recently been getting almost folky. His 2009 album, Gravity Radio, and two he has just released, Recess and Corner Loading, Vol. 1 (all on Exit Music), are collections of verse-and-chorus songs featuring his voice and guitar picking: songs about the state of America, love, aging and uncertainty. Within the songs and connecting them are the patterns and metrical structures Mr. Rouse has always enjoyed. Around them, onstage, were video projections and current news readings when Gravity Radio was presented on Tuesday night at the Harvey Theater at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where it continues through Saturday. Mr. Rouse was accompanied by a string quartet, two female singers and the sounds of shortwave radio static; he played a National steel resonator guitar or an acoustic guitar, singing in a rusty voice. 'When you think the worst is over/You know the worst has just begun,' one song counseled. Between every few songs, a woman read some of the day’s Associated Press reports -- tax legislation, Iran’s nuclear program, Wikileaks, Oprah Winfrey in Australia -- ostensibly to change the context for the songs. The video images were footage by Mr. Rouse that was often blurred or shown at disorienting angles; it presented landscapes, streetscapes and people, brightening or darkening with the volume of the music. The trappings gave a Laurie Anderson overlay to Gravity Radio, suitable for the performance-space circuit where Mr. Rouse has been touring with it. But they barely affected the songs, which didn’t need any theatrical help. Melding the sinewy stoicism of folk tradition with Mr. Rouse’s structural tweaks, they pondered disappointments and diminishing expectations, personal and political, reaching pensive conclusions in succinct choruses: 'The world got away with me,' concluded the last tune. With the steel guitar’s tinny bite, the music hinted at blues and old-time country, while the acoustic guitar moved it into folk-pop. But the string quartet and backup vocals added convolutions: harmonies leaning toward polytonality, staggered vocals that gently concealed the beat. Meanwhile, Mr. Rouse was toying with the rhythms, using odd meters that made the music skip and spring ahead so that it was never quite as cozy as the arrangements might seem. If Mr. Rouse had built his career in a different era, he might be playing these songs to indie-rock fans alongside bands like Dirty Projectors or an earlier Sufjan Stevens. But maybe it’s for the best -- the classical rubric makes for quieter audiences [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 12/8/10].



Rufus Wainwright. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Wearing a black floor-length gown with a matching fur collar and dark eye makeup, he was every inch the tragic diva as he gravely crossed the stage . . . . A prima donna and a sad clown rolled into one, this grand, androgynous mourner embodied the grieving central figure of Mr. Wainwright’s sixth studio album, All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu, released last spring. A cycle of 12 songs that includes his adaptation of Shakespeare sonnets 43, 20, and 10 -- All Days Are Nights is an outpouring of raw self-pity: a kind of musical crying jag, if you will. The Lulu of the title, Mr. Wainwright has said in interviews, refers to the silent-film flapper Louise Brooks, the Alban Berg opera Lulu, and the Dark Lady of Shakespeare’s sonnets. . . . [S]he is the embodiment of Mr. Wainwright’s alter ago, a haughty, high-strung opera star who feels entitled to vent any and every emotion with a feverish intensity. Prima Donna is the title of his first opera, which had its debut in England last year, and which he announced would open at the New York City Opera in 2012. The first half of the evening was an uninterrupted performance of the song cycle illustrated with clips of a long-lashed eye (presumably Mr. Wainwright’s) ringed in black makeup, slowly opening and closing, the area of shadow suggesting a thumbprint. Its music is an ultraromantic pop pastiche of French impressionist composers, from Debussy to Fauré, and consists largely of flowery, continuously modulating arpeggios attached to wandering melodies. Mr. Wainwright sought to sustain an orchestral texture as thick as the piano could produce. Except for the sonnets, the lyrics are a torrent of angst, much of it abstract, that coalesces to some degree around the death in January of Mr. Wainwright’s mother, the great folk singer-songwriter Kate McGarrigle. Two songs address his close relationship with his sister, Martha Wainwright, to whom the album is dedicated, and who appeared after intermission to sing some harmony vocals. Mr. Wainwright’s heavily chromatic music lacks the harmonic refinement and dynamic subtlety of his French role models, but his theatrical presentation strove to make up the difference. His singing, as ever, went in and out of focus. His most problematic vocal area is a middle register that can sound like a coarse, grainy whine when pushed too hard, and a vibrato that wavers uncertainly when he sings softly. If Mr. Wainwright is not careful, he swallows syllables, and the words become unintelligible. His lower register is unexpectedly resonant, and his falsetto sweetly poignant. Increasingly, Mr. Wainwright draws out notes for expressive effect. Generally speaking, his voice leads and the piano follows. Although Mr. Wainwright has one of the most ardent fan bases of any singer-songwriter, the audience response to All Days Are Nights was politely respectful. . . . Stephen Oremus, the musical director for [Wainwright's] 2006 re-creation of Judy Garland’s 1961 Carnegie Hall performance, accompanied . . . on piano as [Wainwright] reprised some of those songs, most successfully Do It Again and The Trolley Song. But the evening’s strongest numbers, in which Mr. Wainwright vigorously accompanied himself, were his own pop songs, the best of which reveal him as a melodic master. . . . Performing them with a robust confidence, Mr. Wainwright was at the top of his game" [Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 12/7/10].




December 8

Lee Hoiby’s Summer and Smoke (Lanford Wilson, after Tennessee Williams). Manhattan School of Music, New York, NY. "[When the work] had its premiere in 1971, it was criticized by some for its conservative music, awash in the harmonic language of Menotti (Mr. Hoiby’s mentor), Barber and Mahler, and its unabashedly lyrical vocal writing. But the work, with an effective and delicately poetic libretto by the playwright Lanford Wilson, also won deserved praise for doing what an opera is supposed to do: telling the story with sure dramatic pacing and understated expressivity, in music admirable for its directness and melodic grace. These qualities shone through on . . . [in] the first of three performances, with Mr. Hoiby, 84, in attendance. The conductor Steven Osgood drew supple, beautifully restrained playing from the able musicians. Set in 1911 in Glorious Hill, a small Mississippi town, the story unfolds during several momentous months in the lives of two young adults who grew up as neighbors: John Buchanan Jr., a dashing doctor, and Alma Winemiller, the sweet but inhibited daughter of a pious minister. The handsome production, directed by Dona D. Vaughn, using windows and sets that descend into place, imaginatively evoked the neighboring houses: the staid sitting room in the rectory where the Winemillers live and the doctor’s office where young John Buchanan practices with his father. The opera has long been embraced as ideal for student singers, and this excellent cast fit comfortably into its roles. Anna Viemeister, a soprano, sang with warmth and intensity, capturing the uneasy mix of yearning and repression in Alma. Though part of Alma has always loved John, she is intimidated by his breezy confidence, physicality and ease with women. Nickoli Strommer, a baritone, brought a mellow voice and crisp diction to John, the pride of Glorious Hill. John has nursed similar feelings for Alma, whose name in Spanish means 'soul.' But he goes too far one night when he takes Alma to the local casino, drinks too much and tries to rustle her to an upstairs room. Nothing would have happened, he explains months later in the crucial scene of the opera, because 'I’m more afraid of your soul than you are of my body.' In a way, the two young people cross emotional paths. Just as Alma, despairing of her loneliness, finds the courage to open herself to John, he worries that he has been spiraling into reckless behavior with women and drink, and decides to marry the young, nubile Nellie (Audean Farmer, a perky soprano), fresh from a finishing school for ladies. In a devastating final scene, Alma, sitting by a fountain in the park where she and John used to play, goes off dancing at the casino with a lonely traveling salesman, a short but crucial role sung by Brian Wahlstrom. Alma’s parents were winningly portrayed by the baritone Robert E. Mellon as the Rev. Winemiller, and the soprano Claire Coolen as his wife, a hostile, childish and unstable woman whom the townspeople describe as 'eccentric.' María Leticia Hernández as the sensual young Rosa, whom young John almost marries, and Chris Lucier as Roger, Alma’s decent childhood friend, were other standouts" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 12/9/10].


December 9

Steven Isserlis and Jeremy Denk. 92nd Street Y, New York, NY. "[B]ringing to light unfamiliar and worthy works by second-tier Romantics as well as contemporary composers seems to give Mr. Isserlis special delight. That his interests can draw sizable numbers of palpably engaged listeners is a credit to his estimable skills, enlightened advocacy and communicative powers. . . . Isserlis also had a noteworthy partner in Jeremy Denk, a pianist whose broad tastes and personable virtuosity make him a kindred spirit. . . . [Gabriel] Fauré’s Cello Sonata No. 2 . . . closed [the first half of the program]. . . . Denk played three of Gyorgy Ligeti’s études, offering precisely the mix of extravagant technique and potent imagination these dazzling works demand. . . . [in] the jazzily careening Fanfares, the achingly poignant Arc-en-Ciel and the obsessively rumbling Automne à Varsovie. . . . Isserlis . . . [played] four unaccompanied selections from Gyorgy Kurtag’s Signs, Games, and Messages. Each was an economical miracle of portraiture, with the sparest of means yielding characterful results. Banking on his listeners’ trust Mr. Isserlis earned their approval with his precise, heartfelt performances. He elegantly assumed vocal lines in his own arrangement of Ravel’s Deux Mélodies Hébraïques -- the incantatory Kaddisch and the quizzical Énigme Éternelle -- with gracious support from Mr. Denk. . . . An arrestingly inventive four-part evocation of natural and urban vistas, [Lieux Retrouvés, written for him by the English composer Thomas Adès], is full to bursting with raucous, scintillating and zany effects. Mr. Denk joined Mr. Isserlis in a persuasive account, warmly received by the audience" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 12/12/10].


December 11

Rammstein. Madison Square Garden, New York, NY. "Go for the fireballs, stay for the self-mythologizing and angst: That could be the pitch for Rammstein, the German rock band that played its first American show since 2001 . . . at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. During the concert flames shot up from the stage, down from the rafters and sideways from flamethrowers mounted in microphones and on a set of angel wings; fireworks added explosions and showers of sparks. At one point a man ran around the stage in a flaming suit, with an E.M.T. on hand to snuff him out. It was the kind of spectacle that has made Rammstein an arena and festival headliner across Europe. Its members are not modest. 'Lend your ears to a legend,' announced Rammlied, their first song, followed by a guttural shout that the crowd shared: 'Rammstein!' The music shows Rammstein’s origins in the mid-1990s, when bands like KMFDM, from Germany, and Ministry and Nine Inch Nails from the United States had already bonded hard-rock guitars and dance-music synthesizers. The songs run about 60 percent rock, 40 percent electronic, slamming away and pausing occasionally for half-speed interludes of brooding pomp. Rammstein’s lead singer, Till Lindemann, is a bass-baritone who makes his every utterance -- sung, barked, spoken -- portentous enough to match his stage presence; stocky and all muscle, he could be one of Wagner’s Nibelungen. In Rammstein’s early years its songs worked the easy shock effects that were common in industrial rock, singing about impulses of sex, violence and destruction. Rammstein’s international breakthrough song from 1997 -- and a major singalong at Madison Square Garden — was Du Hast (You Have, also a play on 'Du Hasst,' 'You Hate'), a bitter rejection of marriage vows. Rammstein stays grimly foreboding in songs from its most recent album, Liebe Ist für Alle Da (Love Is There for All) (Universal). There were dolls hanging overhead as the band performed Wiener Blut (Viennese Blood), which brings a woman into a castle basement for an ominous tryst: 'Welcome to the darkness,' Mr. Lindemann intoned, as the band started a churning, thrashing guitar attack. But Rammstein doesn’t present itself as a band of simple, cartoonish bad guys. There’s a troubled self-consciousness in songs like Waidmanns Heil (Happy Hunting), which opens with hunting-horn calls and confesses to a creepy bloodlust, and in Benzin (Gasoline), a stomper about fossil-fuel addiction. Amid the visual and musical blasts, Rammstein doesn’t exult in human depravity; it worries. During Engel (Angel), between streaks of flame from his wings, Mr. Lindemann was singing, 'We are afraid and alone' [Jon Pareles, The New York Times, 12/12/10].


December 15

Yukio Tanaka, biwa, and Kifu Mitsuhashi, shakuhachi, in Takemitsu’s November Steps with the Saito Kinen Orchestra. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY.


December 16

JapanNYC: Winds and Strings of Change. Miller Theater, Columbia University, New York, NY." [A]n optimist would have taken heart that a receptive audience assembled for an event meant to honor the composer Toru Takemitsu, a pioneer in bridging Japanese and Western art-music cultures, and to promote Columbia’s recently established Gagaku-Hogaku Classical Japanese Music Curriculum and Performance Program. . . . Yukio Tanaka on biwa . . . and Kifu Mitsuhashi on shakuhachi, I was informed by a New York-based Japanese pianist in the audience, are viewed as national treasures in Japan. Joined here by the Japanese koto player Yoko Nishi and the New York shakuhachi player James Nyoraku Schlefer, they gave masterly performances. Mr. Tanaka punctuated solemnly sung verses with the biwa’s twang, rasp and bite in Dan no Ura, a 1964 song by Kinshi Tsuruta and Yoko Mizuki named for a cataclysmic 12th-century sea battle. . . . Minimalist-style arpeggios animated Tadao Sawai’s Gaku (Bliss), played by Ms. Nishi. Chikurai Gosho (Bamboo Soundings in Five Movements), an evocative, fiercely difficult work by Makoto Moroi, required of Mr. Mitsuhashi broad leaps in register, biting attacks and articulation shifts in midphrase, even midnote. Performing his own Yukyu no Shirabe (Meditation on Eternity), Mr. Tanaka sang a brief verse inspired by Tsunemasa, a 12th-century warrior and biwa player who perished at Dan no Ura, against a litany of desiccated rattles and sitarlike hums. Joined by Mr. Mitsuhashi, Mr. Tanaka ended the concert with Takemitsu’s November Steps, Number Ten, a cadenza from the orchestral work repurposed as a showcase of roiling, abrasive brilliance" [Steve Smith, The New York Times, 12/17/10].


December 17

Simon Rattle conducts Claude Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, in a revival of Jonathan Miller’s 1995 production. Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY. "At the end of this four-hour evening, some of the most ardent participants in the ovation for Mr. Rattle were the musicians in the orchestra pit, who stood and heartily applauded. In perhaps the most impressive performance I have heard Mr. Rattle give, he drew lush and plangent yet clear-textured and purposeful playing from the great Met orchestra. . . . Debussy’s mysterious opera, first performed in Paris in 1902, is an elusive and unconventional music drama. Adapted from the Symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck about the troubled family of an aged king in an imaginary realm, Pelléas et Mélisande is a masterpiece of ambiguity. Some conductors bring out the Wagnerian harmonic textures and dark orchestral colorings of the work. When called for, there was Wagnerian richness and impressionist fluidity in Mr. Rattle’s performance. Yet, in the manner of Pierre Boulez, an acclaimed exponent of this work, Mr. Rattle kept the textures lucid and focused, even when Debussy’s chords were thick with notes. Debussy tucked some piercing dissonances inside these milky harmonies, and Mr. Rattle brought them out through the pinpoint accuracy he elicited from the inspired Met players. For all his intelligence, though, Mr. Rattle is an intensely dramatic musician. I have never heard a Pelléas in which the extremes of the score came through so vividly. You could sense the simmering below the deceptively subdued surface. In the first scene the melancholic middle-aged Prince Golaud, who is lost in a forest, chances upon Mélisande, a weeping young woman full of fears and secrets. Mr. Rattle conducted the parallel orchestra chords that open the opera and the modal themes that slowly unfold with haunting serenity at a daringly slow tempo. In an impulsive act that is neither depicted nor explained, Mélisande marries the older Golaud. Yet, from the time they meet, Pelléas and Mélisande are drawn to each other, a sensual current that runs through this restless score. In Act IV, when they can no longer constrain their illicit attraction and confess their love, Mr. Rattle brought out all of the music’s teeming intensity and fitful shifts. Mélisande is a good role for the lovely [Magdalena] Kozena. The tenderness of her singing could not disguise the inner emotional chaos of this strange young woman: a victim, yes, but also a compulsive liar who remains an enigma to the end. [Stephane] Degout brought a warm, youthful voice and stylistic insight to Pelléas, conveying the character’s tragic path from the uptight younger half-brother of an imperious prince to a hopeless romantic with uncontrollable longing for his brother’s wife. [Gerald] Finley, who triumphed at the Met in the title role of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, was superb as Golaud. While not overpowering, his voice is dark, virile and generous. He is that rare operatic artist who even when singing lyrically, sounds like he is speaking with the directness of a great actor" [Anthony Tommasini, The New York Times, 12/19/10].


December 18

Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem performed by the Saito Kinen Orchestra, conducted by Seiji Ozawa. Carnegie Hall, New York, NY. "Here he led the whole 85-minute War Requiem, including the segments incorporating Wilfred Owen’s poetry and scored for chamber orchestra, typically handled by a second conductor. He worked seated much of the time, looking less vigorous than he had earlier in the week despite his obvious frailty, and an intermission was added to help conserve his energy. 'I personally do not care for political pieces,' Mr. Ozawa wrote in program notes, but he was introduced to the War Requiem by a Rostropovich performance in 1979, and he has obviously internalized the work. He conducted from memory, as usual, with complete command and a loving attention to detail and nuance. His current affection for the piece stems in part from its role in his physical recovery, he said in an interview in September. Having led most of the same forces in the work at the Saito Kinen Festival in Matsumoto in 2009, he set about restudying it. 'I had so much time, and I couldn’t do anything else, and music became more and more important,' he said. 'Maybe the piece was a little too heavy, but I felt so happy to study and have time.' The international representation was assured by the very nature of the Saito Kinen Orchestra, which mingles Japanese and Japanese-American performers (especially the string players) with Westerners. The Japanese choruses -- the SKF Matsumoto Choir and Children’s Choir and the Ritsuyukai Choir -- performed superbly, with powerful fortissimos and breathtaking pianissimos, and they articulated the Latin texts admirably. The vocal soloists -- Christine Goerke, a penetrating soprano who sometimes shaded flat; Anthony Dean Griffey, a touchingly communicative tenor; and Matthias Goerne, initially remote but ultimately a hauntingly involved baritone -- were strong and well matched. And the orchestra shone again, with those remarkable strings upholding their lofty standard and the brasses -- after a few early hitches -- improving on their previous performances, in blazing climaxes. With an obvious mix of exhaustion and exhilaration Mr. Ozawa generously shared the clamorous ovation from an audience that seemed to have taken in the work’s -- and the performance’s -- many messages" [James R. Oestreich, The New York Times, 12/19/10].


December 22

Spiral Music: Koto and oud recital by Yumi Kurosawa and Brandon Terzic. Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY. "Kurosawa plays a 21-string koto, a modern version of the instrument developed in 1971 by Minoru Miki, rather than the traditional 13-string instrument. Except for Greening, a robust work by Mr. Miki, and Midare, a soft-spoken, pentatonic piece by the 17th-century composer Kengyo Yatsuhashi, the works Ms. Kurosawa played were her own. She is an inventive, seemingly cosmopolitan composer. Several of her pieces, including Green Point and One Girl’s Story, are built around melodies that vaguely evoke British and American folk songs, and a hint of Debussy wafted briefly through Takeda, a lullaby. In most of her pieces, Ms. Kurosawa presents her themes gracefully and then undertakes intricate, sometimes adventurous variations, drawing on a timbral palette that ranged from warm and rounded to bright and metallic. At times she seemed to push against the extremes of the instrument’s character. You don’t usually think of the koto as a particularly aggressive instrument, for example, but Ms. Kurosawa produced that quality in a passage that involved her scraping the finger plectrums on her right hand against the bass strings to create an abrasive din. Chromatic, harplike swirls, fluid chordal figures and alluring bent notes showed the koto’s more familiar character. In the duets Mr. Terzic began with a thoughtful, meditative oud theme, which Ms. Kurosawa picked up and varied expansively, leaving room for his responses and elaborations. Ms. Kurosawa also contributed a varied percussive underlay to these improvisations, sometimes creating a light-textured patter by tapping her plectrums against the side of the koto, sometimes providing a solid, steady beat by slapping her instrument’s underside. And though the koto and the oud do not sound similar on their own, Mr. Terzic and Ms. Kurosawa matched each other’s tone so closely that in the densest sections of their dialogues, you would not have known which instrument was playing a particular line if you were not watching" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 12/23/10].

Recordings

Jennifer Koh, Violin. Rhapsodic Musings: 21st-Century Works for Solo Violin. "Only four of the seven works on Rhapsodic Musings were actually composed in the 21st century, and that’s if you include the title track, composed by Elliott Carter in 2000. The earliest of Mr. Carter’s Four Lauds, the Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi, dates to 1984, although the others, Statement -- Remembering Aaron (as in Copland) and Fantasy -- Remembering Roger (as in Sessions), were composed in 1999, a stone’s throw from the new century. But a listener can forgive Jennifer Koh the eagerness of her subtitle, given the incandescent readings she offers. The pieces were chosen, she writes in a program note, as part of her 'search for a sense of meaning in the days, months and years following the events of Sept. 11, 2001.' Ms. Koh’s selections are often as much about life as about death. Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Lachen Verlernt (2002) — inspired by the Prayer to Pierrot in Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, in which the speaker begs Pierrot to restore his lost (or unlearned) ability to laugh -- begins wistfully and grows into an intensely emotional score. Its fast chordal bowing suggests not so much regained laughter as the vigor of the search for a hopelessly lost power. Mr. Carter’s Four Lauds, like many of his recent multimovement scores, are disparate works assembled later into sets, though in this case each piece is a tribute to a colleague, and similarities of language and gesture help to bond them. Ms. Koh’s account of the Riconoscenza is particularly striking for its rich tone and its evocative touches of portamento. Her free, expressive vibrato similarly enlivens Pulsar (2005), a fluid fantasy by Augusta Read Thomas. And Ms. Koh makes the eight aphoristic movements of John Zorn’s Goetia (2002) into a magnificently varied, thoroughly unpedantic overview of contemporary violin techniques, in which playfulness and introspection mingle" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times].



Milo: Works by Bridge, Britten, Turnage. Orchid Classics. "A web of musical connections among several generations of teachers, pupils and friends inspired this disc of works by three British composers, vividly interpreted by two other Britons, the cellist Guy Johnston and the pianist Kathryn Stott. Benjamin Britten was often inspired to write for a particular musician, like the tenor Peter Pears. The great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was the beneficiary of Britten’s Sonata in C for cello and piano, given a vigorous performance here. Ms. Stott and Mr. Johnston play with witty panache in the pizzicato-driven second movement and with soulful intensity in the somber third movement, which displays Mr. Johnston’s rich tone to fine effect. Rostropovich described the fifth and final movement as 'irresponsible and tempestuous.' Mr. Johnston’s burnished and varied sound, aptly complemented by Ms. Stott’s sensitive playing, is also lovely in the gentle Spring Song and Mélodie by Frank Bridge, a friend and mentor of Britten’s, who championed his works. Britten described Bridge’s early style, illustrated by these two selections, as 'Brahms happily tempered with Fauré.' Bridge, who shared Britten’s pacifism, was profoundly affected by World War I. His melodic idiom veered toward a grittier aesthetic during the war, revealed in the two-movement Sonata in D minor for cello and piano, composed from 1913 to 1917. A restless cello line soars over the agitated piano part in the opening movement. Mournful musings in the piano at the beginning of the second movement reflect Bridge’s despair over the war. While writing this unjustly neglected sonata, Bridge suffered from insomnia and wandered around London in the early hours of the morning. A gripping performance by Mr. Johnston and Ms. Stott gives full depth to the work’s introspective, angst-ridden and melancholy moods. The disc also includes Sleep On, three lullabies for cello and piano by Mark-Anthony Turnage, who has said that they were influenced by Britten’s Solo Cello Suites Nos. 1 and 2. There is nothing soporific about these vividly textured lullabies, particularly the probing Refrain. Last on the disc is Mr. Turnage’s Milo, a lullaby named after his son. Mr. Johnston, Milo’s godfather, performed the gentle piece at the child’s christening in 2009" [Vivien Schweitzer, The New York Times, 10/29/10].



Rys Chatham. A Crimson Grail. Nonesuch. "[A] mammoth meditation for 200 electric guitars, 16 electric basses and percussion. . . . A Crimson Grail . . . lingers for long, hypnotic stretches on single, disarmingly simple ideas. . . . Chatham, who has been writing for electric-guitar ensembles since the late 1970s, composed A Crimson Grail for an all-night festival at the Sacré-Coeur Basilica in Paris in 2005 and reworked it in 2008, for Lincoln Center Out of Doors. The recording comes from a 2009 performance at Damrosch Park. . . . In this three-movement work’s outer sections, Mr. Chatham expands his guitar army from a small ensemble to a roaring swarm, in which the sound of 200 picks on amplified steel strings creates a tactile, prickly surface. In the opening movement, overtones and shifting balances create an illusion of faint melodies. Mr. Chatham gives listeners more to work with in the finale -- power chords, rhythmic counterpoint and rising scale figures -- and his central slow movement is built of a wave of guitar chords that fade in and out in a hymnlike progression, suggesting a wheezy harmonium. Yet the work’s greatest allure is in passages where melody, harmony and rhythm are virtually absent, when all you hear is the visceral roar of plucked strings" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/29/10].



So Percussion and Matmos. Treasure State. Cantaloupe. "[A] collaboration between the instrumentalist-composers of So Percussion and the electronica group Matmos. [A Crimson Grail and Treasure State both] draw in varying degrees on the notion that sound trumps content as the most crucial element of a composition. This is a time-honored idea in a particular corner of the avant-garde where conventional elements like melody, rhythm, harmonic movement and phrase structure are regarded as less fascinating than timbre, texture, duration, volume and intensity, particularly when these qualities change slowly, if at all. Mr. Chatham’s work and the So-Matmos collaborations are by no means uneventful. . . . [The] Treasure State pieces . . . use timbre so seductively that everything else seems secondary. Together these pieces tell us a lot about how a listener’s inner ear will create a narrative, supplying hints of melody and development even when the music appears intent on avoiding or at least minimizing them. . . . So Percussion and Matmos are ideal collaborators in the sense that each group provides part of the sonic arsenal necessary to create the eight otherworldly vignettes on Treasure State. Minimalist melodic cells, often played on music-boxy combinations of glockenspiel and piano or vibraphone, run through these imaginative pieces, and sometimes



-- in Needles and Cross -- dancelike figures emerge. But the attraction here, and the unifying undercurrent, is the combined group’s constantly shifting, variegated texture. Its instrumentation includes typewriter, amplified cactus, fish toy, animal sounds, splashing water and paper being crinkled, along with guitars, trumpets, So’s percussion instruments and Matmos’s samplers and synthesizers. The works’ thematic cells may catch the ear. But it is the arrangement and imaginative juxtaposition of familiar instrumental timbres with splashing, crinkling and other exotic noises that makes these pieces so irresistible and entrancing" [Allan Kozinn, The New York Times, 10/29/10].