two takes
Arvo Pärt, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977)
A Far Cry, live, Boston (Jordan Hall), 10/17/08
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
BBC Symphony Orchestra, live, London (Royal Albert Hall), 8/17/10
Vodpod videos no longer available.This goes, and goes, and goes, keeping you afloat, carrying you along,
then stops with stunning suddenness—is any music more lifelike?
John Luther Adams, Inuksuit (excerpt)
New York (Park Avenue Armory), 2/20/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.
More? Here.
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lagniappe
Scored for a flexible ensemble of between nine and ninety-nine percussionists, “Inuksuit” is intended for outdoor performance, and it had its première on a mountainside in Banff, Canada, in 2009. Adams at first resisted the idea of taking the piece indoors, because the interaction with nature was integral to his conception. After inspecting the Armory, though, he grasped its possibilities; the space is more a man-made canyon than a concert hall. He settled on a corps of seventy-six musicians, including five piccolo players. Arrays of drums, gongs, cymbals, bells, and numerous smaller instruments were set up on the main floor of the Drill Hall; atop catwalks on all sides; and in the hallways that connect to smaller rooms at the front of the building. In any rendition of “Inuksuit,” the performers are given four or five pages of music—the notation imitates the shapes of the Inuit markers—which they execute at their own pace. Musicians with portable instruments are instructed to move about freely. Prearranged signals prompt a move from one page to the next. The result is a composition that on the microcosmic level seems spontaneous, even chaotic, but that gathers itself into a grand, almost symphonic structure.
At 4 P.M. on a Sunday, thirteen hundred people assembled in the Drill Hall to hear the piece, variously standing, sitting, or lying on the floor. First came an awakening murmur: one group of performers exhaled through horns and cones; others rubbed stones together and made whistling sounds by whirling tubes. Then one member of the ensemble—Schick, perched above the entrance to the Drill Hall—delivered a call on a conch shell. With that commanding, shofar-like tone, the sound started to swell: tom-toms and bass drums thudded, cymbals and tam-tams crashed, sirens wailed, bells clanged. It was an engulfing, complexly layered noise, one that seemed almost to force the listeners into motion, and the crowd fanned out through the arena.
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It is tricky to write about an event such as this. Because both ensemble and audience were in motion, no two perceptions of the performance were the same, and no definitive record of it can exist. Furthermore, anyone who ventures to declare in a public forum that “Inuksuit” was one of the most rapturous experiences of his listening life—that is how I felt, and I wasn’t the only one—might be suspected of harboring hippie-dippie tendencies. The work is not explicitly political, nor is it the formal expression of an individual sensibility, although John Luther Adams certainly deserved the ecstatic and prolonged ovation that greeted him when he acknowledged the crowd from the center of the Drill Hall. In the end, several young couples seemed to deliver the most incisive commentary when, amid the obliterating tidal wave of sound, they began making out.
—Alex Ross, New Yorker, 3/14/11
*****
Happy Birthday, Suzanne!
As I mentioned on this date last year, the first time my wife Suzanne and I went out together (September 1974, Chicago’s Jazz Showcase), we saw the man who put the sui in sui generis.
Sun Ra, Space Is the Place (1974), excerpt
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
speaking of birthdays
How often do you get to say “Happy 100th Birthday”?
Well, here’s your chance.
As I learned the other day from WKCR-FM’s Phil Schaap, who’s been encouraging folks to send this guy a birthday card (I mailed mine yesterday), the oldest performing jazz musician, trumpeter Lionel Ferbos, who plays at New Orleans’ Palm Court Jazz Cafe, turns 100 on July 17th. Birthday greetings can be mailed (remember mail?) to 5543 Press Dr., New Orleans, LA 70126.
two questions
1. Why would anyone create a piece of music that lasts not one, or two, or three, or four, or five, but six hours?
2. Why don’t more more people?
Morton Feldman, String Quartet No. 2 (1983), excerpts, Flux Quartet
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On June 12th the Flux Quartet performed this piece in Philadelphia, the finale of American Sublime, a festival devoted to Feldman’s late music. The concert, which took place in the sanctuary of Philadelphia Cathedral, began at 2 p.m.; it ended around 8 p.m. The program notes said: “Audience may come and go as they please.”
More? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
this & that
I don’t win stuff. I don’t even enter things—contests, sweepstakes, lotteries—that would give me a shot at winning stuff. Until yesterday, that is.
Yesterday morning, driving home after dropping my son Luke off at work (7 a.m. can be a pretty brutal starting time for a 20-year-old), I was listening, as I often do while driving, to our local public radio station (WBEZ-FM), which, I learned, was in the midst of a fundraising drive. “Pledge,” they said, and “you’ll be entered in drawings for an iPad 2,” which were going to be made throughout the day. The earlier you pledge, they said, with what seemed unassailable logic, the better your chances of winning. I hadn’t sent them any money in a while so, when I got home, I went on-line and pledged. A couple hours later, a friend sent me an email: “Congratulations on your iPad.”
When bad stuff happens, particularly bad stuff that’s unexpected and outside my control (as often seems to be the case), my tendency is to try to let it go. Why invest bad experiences with ill-fitting, after-the-fact meanings? This is different. This experience I’d like to invest with all kinds of after-the-fact-meanings, ill-fitting or not. I’d like to see this as a favorable omen, one that portends all sorts of wonderful stuff—things that, at the moment, I can’t even begin to imagine. Goofy? Yeah, I suppose. But is it any nuttier than any number of other stories we tell ourselves to get us through the day?
Classical music would be better off if folks quit calling it “classical music.”
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Op. 19, Six Little Piano Pieces
Michel Beroff, piano, live
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musical thoughts
My music must be short.
Lean! In two notes, not built, but “expressed.”
And the result is, I hope, without stylized and sterilized drawn-out sentiment.
That is not how man feels; it is impossible to feel only one emotion.
Man has many feelings, thousands at a time, and these feelings add up no more than apples and pears add up. Each goes its own way.
This multicoloured, polymorphic, unlogical nature of our feelings, and their associations, a rush of blood, reactions in our senses, in our nerves; I must have this in my music.
It should be an expression of feeling, as if really were the feeling, full of unconscious connections, not some perception of “conscious logic.”
What would it be like to wake up in the morning, have a cup of coffee, then sit down at the piano and try, again, to open this up, let it breathe, let it sing?
David Holzman, piano/recording session, 7/10/10
Music of Stefan Wolpe, Volume 6 (Bridge Records), 2011
Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972), Four Studies on Basic Rows (Passacaglia)
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I asked him to teach my class of young English student composers—feeling really that he at least would give the students one worthwhile class. He started talking about his Passacaglia, a piano work built of sections each based on a musical interval—minor second, major second, and so on. At once, sitting at the piano, he was caught up in a meditation on how wonderful these primary materials, intervals, were; playing each over and over again on the piano, singing, roaring, humming them, loudly, softly, quickly, slowly, short and detached or drawn out and expressive. All of us forgot time passing, when the class was to finish. As he led us from the smallest one, a minor second, to the largest, a major seventh—which took all afternoon—music was reborn, new light dawned, we all knew we would never again listen to music as we had. Stefan had made each of us experience very directly the living power of these primary elements. From then on indifference was impossible. Such a lesson most of us never had before or since, I imagine.
Music isn’t an escape from the real world.
It is the real world.
Bach, Keyboard Concerto No. 7 in G minor (excerpt)
Glenn Gould, Toronto Symphony Orchestra
*****
Want to hear the whole thing?
Sviatoslav Richter, Padova and Veneto Orchestra
#1
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#2
*****
More Gould? Here.
More Richter? Here. And here. And here.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
There is no greater community of spirit than that between the artist and the listener at home, communing with the music.
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The mental imagery involved with pianistic tactilia is not related to the striking of individual keys but rather to the rites of passage between notes.
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I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.
—Glenn Gould
three takes
Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor (1974)
Excerpt (1st Movement)
‘Play it so that flies drop dead in midair, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom,’ the composer told the players preparing its premiere in 1974.
—Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 5/6/11
Emerson String Quartet, live
Part 1
Part 2
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Borodin String Quartet
Part 1
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Part 2
*****
Taneyev Quartet
(gave the premiere performance [Leningrad, 1974])
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lagniappe
Want to hear the rest?
Emerson String Quartet, live
2nd & 3rd Movements
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4th & 5th Movements
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6th Movement
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I sometimes feel as if I’m making my way, page by page, through a book titled The 10,000 Musical Performances You Must Hear Before You Die. Rarely does a week go by that I’m not astonished, at least once, by something I’ve never heard before. Yesterday it was this tiny gem.*
Sergei Prokofiev, Vision Fugitive No. 18, Con una dolce lentezza
Sviatoslav Richter (1915-1997), piano
*S. Richter, Richter Rediscovered: Carnegie Hall Recital 1960 (RCA Red Seal)
Prickly, probing, zigging and zagging: the same instrument we heard yesterday; a voice that could hardly be more different.
Leroy Jenkins, violinist, violist, composer
March 11, 1932-February 24, 2007
Live, New York (Location One), 10/10/03
Vodpod videos no longer available.
More? Here.
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lagniappe
The violinist and composer Leroy Jenkins, one of the pre-eminent musicians of 1970s free jazz, who worked on and around the lines between jazz and classical music, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 74 and lived in Brooklyn.
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Mr. Jenkins grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He started playing violin around age 7 and performed in recitals at St. Luke Church, one of the city’s biggest Baptist churches, accompanied by a young pianist named Ruth Jones, later known as the singer Dinah Washington. Mr. Jenkins subsequently joined the orchestra and choir at Ebenezer Baptist Church, directed by Dr. O. W. Frederick, who tutored him in the music of black composers like William Grant Still and Will Marion Cook.
At DuSable High School, Mr. Jenkins played alto saxophone under the band director Walter Dyett, a legendary figure in jazz education. He then attended Florida A & M University on a bassoon scholarship, though ultimately he played saxophone and clarinet in the concert band and studied the violin again.
After college, Mr. Jenkins spent four years as a violin teacher in Mobile, Ala. On returning to Chicago in 1964, he joined the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (A.A.C.M.) a cooperative for jazz musicians determined to follow through on the structural advances of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor and others who were widening the jazz tradition. In time, he became one of the most visible members of the organization, which persists today.
With Anthony Braxton, Steve McCall and Leo Smith, he formed the Creative Construction Company; the musicians in the group shifted to Paris, where they and other members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians built their international reputations in 1969 and 1970.
In 1970, Mr. Jenkins returned to the United States, at first living in Ornette Coleman’s loft in SoHo in New York. He formed the Revolutionary Ensemble, a trio with the bassist Sirone and the drummer Jerome Cooper; the group lasted for six years and fused Mr. Jenkins’s classical technique with a flowing, free-form aesthetic.
In the mid-1970s, after years of cooperative projects, he became a bandleader, and also wrote music for classical ensembles. He led the group Sting, which played a kind of splintered jazz-funk, and made a series of his own records for the Italian label Black Saint. He began to work in more explicitly classical situations, often with old Chicago colleagues like the pianist Muhal Richard Abrams. And he wrote music performed by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Kronos Quartet and other ensembles.
Mr. Jenkins’s trajectory eventually led him toward collaborations with choreographers, writers and video artists. They included “The Mother of Three Sons,” a collaboration with Bill T. Jones’s dance company, staged at New York City Operain 1991; “The Negro Burial Ground,” a cantata; “Fresh Faust,” a jazz-hip-hop opera; and “Three Willies,” a multimedia opera. In recent years, Mr. Jenkins went back to smaller music-only projects, including the trio Equal Interest, with the pianist Myra Melford and the saxophonist Joseph Jarman; in 2004, he reunited with the Revolutionary Ensemble.
—Ben Ratliff, New York Times, 2/26/07
What to make of it—a world that includes, each day, countless acts of unspeakable cruelty but also this?
Ernest Bloch, Concerto Grosso No. 2 for string orchestra (1952)
Zuercher Akademie Kammerensemble (Christopher Morris Whiting, conductor)
1st Movement
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2nd Movement
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3rd Movement
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4th Movement
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