Daniel Goode

Composer & Performer

Category: Uncategorized

September 3, 2009

Folk Bass Amped Up

April 29, 2013 10:14:03 AM EDT

Two Macedonian/roma bands played at Le Poisson Rouge last night, sponsored by the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, and each over emphasized their bass instruments to the detriment of the intricate lovingly played treble lines. The opening band was twice diaspora, first a younger generation, now American, then leaving New York for Pennsylvania. Their synth was their bass, pounding the lower end like a rock band’s guitar section. Their clarinet/saxophone duo strained beautifully against their own bass lines. But I was exhausted on their behalf.

The main event was the brass band, Koçani Orkestar with a solo clarinet/sax, accordionist, male vocalist, and the traditional Balkan tupan/bass-drum. The whole lower end of three euphoniums and tuba were amplified. I’m not sure if the three trumpets were also, but it didn’t matter: the floor shook with amplified tuba.

I noticed this because I’m a long-time amateur folk dancer, and have heard and danced to scores of traditional Balkan folk bands. I was struck last night, as I often am by the way the amplification of non-electronic instruments is used: to theatricalize some aspect of the playing by making it “larger than life.” There are new music groups, too, that do this with acoustic instruments! About this—another time.

The evening opened with a fast-paced workshop led by a well-known New York folk-dance instructor, to teach some circle-dance steps to the audience so they could more authentically dance to the music. He used his forty-five minutes to teach four different dances with some very difficult style added in—more difficult for me, because thinking I was at a bar, I already had my drink in hand while negotiating grape-vine steps and other hops and skips.

What was strangely unanticipated by the dance instructor: this was a Roma or Gypsy brass band, scorchingly hot, with fast-double-triple tongued melodic and accompaniment figures, trance-inducing, totally ecstatic music that roused the audience as I’ve hardly ever seen. Money was pasted to the players’ foreheads, bundles of dollars thrown in the air, spontaneous movement by almost all in the room. Yet hardly any authentic Balkan circle dancing emerged from this appreciative crowd, many of whom I’ve seen for years at folk-dance evenings. Why? Well, the non-Roma folk culture is the source of the circle-dance as I understand it. This was music and dance that transcended those local customs, referencing, but not limited by that repertoire, trying and reaching a more universal idea of ecstasis through music and movement.

And finally the over-amplified bass line was over. How? The audience would not let them go, so the whole band, minus the accordion, left their amplified stage positions, and wandered, as they would at home, among the audience, playing and collecting ever more tips, surrounded by mesmerized, happy people. Now the balance of high and low instruments was perfect, and perfectly memorable.

Thumbnail review. April 28th.

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September 3, 2009

Mahagonny Timely, Packs a Big Bang

April 29, 2013 12:51:54 PM EDT

The Manhattan School of Music just finished a brilliant run of the Kurt Weill-Bertold Brecht, 1927 opera, Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Because largely of a NYTimes review, the last performance was mobbed at the former home of the Juilliard campus in Morningside Heights—a kind of old-fashioned infrastructure, worn, homey, but not technically up to legible super-titles in its Borden auditorium.

The Brecht homilies like “As you make your bed, you must lie in it,” the Weill melodic templates over and over, the needling orchestra textures with saxes in the mix, the big choral outbursts about eating, loving (sex), no help for anybody—all of this adds up to putting a nail in the coffin of neo-liberalism, capitalist triumphalism, and just plain developer-ized mega cities. Coming during our second-biggest depression, it was mythic and moving, sitting there in the audience. I don’t remember feeling this so profoundly when I first saw it in a Met production years ago.

So, the singers and orchestra were all students, and all terrific. We’re so lucky to have these young, almost-professionals in our midst. The problem still is with so much opera, the lumpishness and lack of movement in the bodies of fine singers. Choreographers know so much more about this than opera directors, so it seems: how to make those bodies “talk” whether singing or just “being” on stage. The constant ebb and flow of small ensembles and large panoramas was inelegant, probably part of the complex, many-times revised original by Brecht-Weill. The production needed both small and large movement concepts. Then there’s the matter of our visual culture: quick-cutting from the movies doesn’t work with the staging of real bodies. Sometimes the new tradition of filming operas for one-time presentation in movie theaters does some of what we want from opera. But it doesn’t solve live opera. I’m waiting and hoping.

Thumbnail review. April 29th.

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September 3, 2009

The Cradle Will Rock: Blitzstein’s 1937 “play in music”

July 15, 2013 6:37:28 PM EDT

His tight-fisted, angry, union-loving, anti-capitalist, anti-militarist singspiel had a four-day run at the New York City Center, ending last night. Marvelous music with acid chamber-music textures from the pit orchestra (on stage for this concert performance). Thrillingly seamless transitions between speech and song. The whole ninety minutes, without intermission, flowed like a dream.

Most of us “know” Marc Blitzstein for his translation of the Brecht-Weil “Three-Penny Opera,” still the one most used in English (and I think the best, with lines like “Let’s all go barmy, and join the army…we chop ’em to bits because we like our hamburgers rawwww”)

I had one guilty reservation about the music—guilty because it was so good, why would one complain! As I listened to the lovingly embodied (but not over-used) Kurt Weil harmonic influence, it dawned on me that I was missing the “big numbers” like the “Moon of Alabama” in Weil’s Mahagonny, or all those wonderful songs in “The Three-Penny Opera.” I kept waiting, but the stirring, combative finale (the cradle not only will rock, but COME DOWN!) came and went without that swoon of pleasure and relief-in-song that opera can provide—especially after long swathes of satiric or bitter political rhetoric set elegantly in a through-composed style. My hunch is that Blitzstein’s musical persona is too tightly wound for the expansive lyricism of Kurt Weil, to name only one of many “numbers” opera composers. But moving, exciting music it is, fresh, sassy and as brilliant as you could want. I’m so glad I went to hear it on a hot, humid summer night in New York.

And what of the politics? During the depression, the industrial unions had a physical place in the plants that they no longer have: a strike was a dramatic disturbance of a whole complex community of working and living. No longer true in dematerialized, yes deracinated global capitalism. Where do you go to protest? The internet! If you believe, as I do, that unionization is the only countervailing force to “wild, savage capitalism” (of which Pope John Paul told us to beware)—well nothing has changed since the ’30’s. And that, like it or not, is what Marx would say, and he’d be right. Blitzstein’s target: the evil monster steel-plant owner, “Mr Mister” is harder to find now, harder to organize against, harder to know even what the tools we are to array against today’s Mr. Misters.

And that leaves activist composers scratching our collective heads, while muttering or loudly intoning: “Capitalism, capitalism.” We wonder as we wander out under the stars, what the hell to do!

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