Daniel Goode

September 3, 2009

All the Sopranos were Beautiful, Even the Male Soprano

May 16, 2011 12:44:28 AM EDT

All the sopranos were beautiful, even the male soprano—though he was grayer than the blonds and brunettes. Well, beauty is still the currency. But besides, he had an exquisite falsetto and though less used, a nice tenor. His name was Eric Brenner. And he wasn’t the only male soprano of the evening. But, to what end? VOX Contemporary Opera Lab didn’t tell me the answer to that. The opera excerpted was “Blood Rose” by Hannah Lash, a dialogue between Beauty and the Beast. The NY City Opera Orchestra at Le Poisson Rouge was a string quartet plus some stuff, and they swung! That was number two of the evening. What of the final opera excerpted, “Three Weeks” by Yoav Gal (Haifa, Brooklyn), in Hebrew and Latin, about the destruction of the Second Temple. I have no idea why a composer would write for an American audience in Latin and Hebrew, with no subtitles and only a garbled, but friendly explanation of the plot by the composer beforehand: A distancing device that worked like an unwanted charm. The small orchestra made some very beautiful sounds: three (usually) muted trombones, contrabass, piano and some sampled string-like timbres. The audience was multi-generational, cool, and eager. The bar flowed, the noisy fans white-noised. I couldn’t help this thought: while Stephen Sondheim writes real operas that touch, move, and athletically cover the waterfront, here at VOX we are constantly reminded that opera is high art, ART, opera tradition, vocal posturing from perfectly trained, excellent musicians. To what end? I wish I knew. Still, I wasn’t bored. And where do they get their ideas, their plots, these composers and librettists? The most commissioned librettist of series, Royce Vavrek told the audience: “from Wikipedia! ” Maybe I’ll boot that up later tonight. Thumbnail review.

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September 3, 2009

We’ve Been Demoted

We’ve Been Demoted, Part 1
June 16, 2011 2:15:40 PM EDT

The Stone is a cramped, windowless, airless, former storefront on a Lower Eastside corner without public transit nearby, secured for the new music community by composer/entrepreneur, John Zorn. A piano (not always in top order), a polite young man to take your ten dollars, some unidentified jazz greats and others in 60 black and white photos on one wall, a john through the stage area, a committed audience of friends and associates of the artists, and recently: notice of some concerts by the New Yorker, the NYTimes, and, I’ve been told, the Village Voice. The composer or performer does their own publicity with no mailing list from the Stone—though its website has the full schedule. The composer/performer takes the entire gate, which at ten dollars a pop multiplied by the randomness of attendance scarcely helps the composer/performer hire associate musicians, pay cartage, transportation or any of the usual New York costs for what one needs to put on a show.

Ah, remember those romantic former industrial spaces called lofts with their various but always capacious acoustics and interesting visual aspects? Remember how you could set up the seating from floor, cushion, or chair in interesting ways that made the space lively and part of the performance itself? Remember that some lofts were already galleries with an infrastructure suitable for concert use? And a mailing list of significant lovers of the arts? Or just lovers! Remember that one of these spaces was called “the Kitchen” on the second floor at 484 Broome Street, with poetic noises outside of trucks over potholes and over metal plates covering potholes? And with not only an elaborate printed schedule, press releases and printed programs and bios, but also a budget with money for yourself and to hire a reasonable number of other performers? And a recording engineer with a tape for YOU at the end of the run, which might be more than one day. And even sometimes a New York Times reviewer officially slumming; certainly a fabulous reviewer from the Village Voice (no longer such a reviewer, even online).

And the music at the Stone? First rate, which only proves my point: We’ve been demoted. Thumbnail review.

We’ve Been Demoted, Part 2
June 22, 2011 12:03:28 PM EDT

I don’t blame John [Zorn re: The Stone]. Also, the current curators are certainly well-meaning, and I understand that New World [Records] did some actual promotion, which is what is necessary to get beyond the composer-only-fueled concert. I don’t even feel my usual righteous indignation. More in sorrow. Larry [Polansky] noted the undeniable fact that there is a raft of new music chamber groups out of various schools and conservatories, made up of crack performers, getting big coverage and big bucks relative to us. The nub of it is that we all BECAME new music performers to get our own music out, while also expressing our interest and passion for new music and our composer friends’ work. Now that the virtuosi are taking up new music and are such good practitioners of it, our down-home DIY style is pushed into limbo. But just having done a Sound/Text program upstate twice this weekend with the DownTown Ensemble, I know that SO percussion or ICE or ACE or whatever—they would never do such a weird mixture of things, one of which was erotic verging on porno text by Richard Kostelanetz requiring no standard virtuoso instrumental techniques but rather speaking sensitivities and some clever well-motivated playing, would certainly never be chosen as a repertory number by any of these crack groups. Bill [Hellermann] made that general point. And Anne Tardos’s quirky, odd, non-virtuoso songs for voice and two instruments: they’d never do that either. Nor Jackson Mac Low, nor Daniel Goode’s text, “Misdirection of the Eye” about Wisconsin politics with free imrpov using “On, Wisconsin.” So composer-driven groups are still important counterweights to virtuoso performer driven groups. And we’re still poorly funded. It’s that awful circus virtuosity problem in music culture since forever.

On, Composers, On, Composers, fight fight fight fight fight!. I felt I was attacking my very “base” when I wrote that humble report on the current Stone series. Felt guilty, but it was as plain as the nose on our new music faces—what I noticed. Thumbnail review. [A reply to composer, David Mahler]

We’ve Been Demoted, Part 3
Kamala, Miguel, David – NYC
July 27, 2011 1:58:59 PM EDT

You got a “sweet” if you guessed the Indian actors, the cartoon themes (“I’m showing my age”), or the video games (“I played when I was eight”) in Kamala Sankaram’s absolutely winning suite of pieces premiered at the Stone on the hot night of July 26th. Great playing by her band of two saxes, electric guitar, with her singing and playing accordion; wonderful laptop electronics in each one. Noise, pitch, harmony, vocal brio were in satisfying combinations. Interesting too. Then a new song on “Crest Gel” toothpaste commercial (“showing my age again”—’30’s-something, shouted the guitarist), and a (“nerdy” she called it) chamber song using vowel extraction from a Cage text. And finally an entrancing short ensemble riff on material from “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” spaghetti western. It was new music with connecting narratives to charm a jet-lagged jaundiced New Yorker in a humid room kind of unreachable by public transit. And even with a starred recommendation from Time Out New York, only a small and enthusiastic audience, probably from Kamala’s address book, not TONY. So my point again. Demoted, having to pay the four players from a total gate that couldn’t have been more than $250. Wonderful work, poorly compensated. Our heroic selves repeated. Brava! Bravi!

To while-away the hour plus before the Miguel Frasconi and David First collaborative concert, well, the loud bars in the neighborhood are ubiquitous. Their set at 10 PM for an audience of ten, was absolutely jet-lag proof hypnotic drone music on rubbed glass (Miguel) and laptop electronics (David). The resultant pulse modulations started by matching frequency of the oh thank you, thank you, Loud Fan behind my left ear! Followed-on soon by a harmonizing third below, and so on into deep noggin space. Ann, next to me, with the same jet lag, lapsed in and out of consciousness most happily (our bodies cried out it was 3 AM).

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September 3, 2009

Janacek’s Cunning Little Vixen at NY Phil Concert, 6/24/11

June 25, 2011 1:26:16 AM EDT

Do you ever long to edit someone’s work to save what is fabulous and make disappear what, well…what stinks? Just read on. But first: a piece of schlock was added to Janacek’s opera by director Douglas Fitch, and—unaccountably—by that very in-choreographer, Karole Armitage: little diaphanous wings pasted onto scampering children, fox tails onto grown singers, archaic titles like “Forester” instead of woodsman or hunter or farmer, or anything of that ilk. Cutsey-poo, sentimental animal stuff that adults think children like. But there was a critical blowback from all this onto the music itself, forcing one to peer into Janacek’s overuse of whole-tone scales and their augmented chords as holding patterns between segments of ravishing, ecstatic music of his late years, with orchestrations to tear you apart with beauty. His pre-Minimalist repeating, sequencing, spiraling patterns of melody, rhythm, chords, counterpoints with their gritty, off-kilter modelings of Czech folk music, oh yes, that’s all in there in the manner of his late string quartets and the blazing Sinfonietta. If only I could have done some on-the-spot excision. That’s a funny composer-fantasy I’ve been having. Or you could try to justify those holding patterns as recitative, or even as Janacek’s functional substitute for sprechstimme. Dream on! You’d have to be him to do the re-stitching of the good parts. And you’d have to go in there again to re-write the prosaic and clunky English translation. It’s an early 1920’s libretto by the composer with some odd feminist moments between the Vixen and the other barnyard animals. Maybe it’s better in Czech. In the last act Janacek has the cunning Vixen shot dead. Well why not? Isn’t the Vixen that other species of female: lower class/gypsy/family-destroyer/composer-temptress? the OTHER!—with that kind of thing, scarcely disguised as a “folk tale” re-written to still be a folk-tale about a femme fatale. For Americans there is also an echo of Bambi—a terrible mash-up to dwell upon. I remember her death as being heartbreaking, musically. And then after that, life just continues on with the usual banalities. But I didn’t stay to re-experience those moments. I left at intermission. Thumbnail review.

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September 3, 2009

Against Clichés about Mahler’s Music

July 2, 2011 4:01:06 PM EDT

Why should we care? Because some of us love the music. Some of us even commit that chauvinist crime of saying: “He’s the greatest Jewish composer” as if there were a contest out there. (He was reviled with anti-semitism in Vienna during his lifetime, especially around his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera). But two of the most progressive conductor’s, Leonard Bernstein and Michael Tilson Thomas (both Jewish), both of whom regarded Mahler as central to their lives, are just full of the usual clichés about him. Oh, like: that those wonderful and suggestive, disintegrating endings to his final works are “about death” or about his death. Well, maybe they are, but HE never said that. The latest slew of these interpretations came in a visually elegant public television program conceived by Tilson Thomas called “Keeping Score.” I won’t list instances here, maybe some other time. Actually the best one-liners came from the first clarinetist, Corey Bell, of the SF Symphony (featured in the film). He spoke about the “skin-of-your-teeth tonalities” in the Scherzo of the 7th Symphony, and of the “corners to hide out in.” Thomas does get off one perceptive analysis: tracing the use of the musical “turn” from Mahler’s first work, “Songs of a Wayfarer” to the final movements of his last two completed works. And the importance of the tone, A, in that early work and then in the climax of the first movement of his 10th Symphony.

A final shot of Thomas at Mahler’s grave in Grinzing, a suburb of Vienna, shows without comment, stones placed in the traditional Jewish manner on top of the Mahler’s gravestone. His remains were not allowed to be buried in the same cemetery as Beethoven and Schubert. “Those who love me will find me” he said. Thumbnail review.

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September 3, 2009

Heretical Musicology

Heretical Musicology, Part 1
July 4, 2011 12:54:17 PM EDT

The omniscient narrator goes inside saxophonist Lester Young, and Duke Ellington, and Billie Holiday, and other great jazz musicians, and tells us their experiences as if they were having them right then. And not only their musical experiences. That’s what happens when you open Geoff Dyer’s 1996 “But Beautiful [A Book About Jazz].” The back cover says it’s to be filed on the “MUSIC” shelf. What can you call it: anti-musicology? Fictional musicology? Keith Jarrett says its the only book about jazz that he recommends to friends. And it draws you in like any wonderful fiction—while you ponder: “did this really happen? did he/she really say or feel this?” I call this the “Lawrence of Arabia syndrome” because I first started asking myself that stupid but unavoidable question after seeing David Lean’s exciting, grandiose film about explorer/writer, T.E. Lawrence. Especially after he was tortured.

So Dyer stands musicology on its head as was said of Marx about Hegel, and Einstein about Newton. But let’s call his strategy an ‘informed poetics.’ Fine to name it, but to my mind he takes a heroic risk to put his subjective narration up with all the well-known ones already out there. He succeeds, I think because he deals with a probabilistic world of weather, landscape, roads, cities, drugs and their effects—these universals in any historical picture of jazz, and then we hope and trust in him to add the specifics of these real people, and their relations to the events, in an informed and astute way. Whomever thinks he hasn’t done so, speak up, but with the evidence, please!

I see the same impetus as Dyer’s in Ken Russell’s series of films about famous composers, Liszt, Mahler, Delius, etc. And there’s an interesting parallel in Thomas Mann’s “Dr. Faustus” with its “cover” of Schoenberg as Adrian Leverkühn. Here names are changed, but intellectual history is reported and interpreted.

I’m musing a bit… The Dyer technique could be used to flesh out that mysterious “walk in the woods”—as performance artist, Chris Mann calls it—in which Mahler had a four-hour walking psychoanalysis with Freud around the Netherlands city of Leiden. Freud was on vacation, and Mahler with his marriage breaking up, his health going, his world disappearing, went to him obviously in desperation after first canceling several appointments for the session. Some protegés of Freud tried to find out from him decades later what transpired between the two of them, but little seems to be reliably reported. Rather, projection by current writers about the historic meeting is obvious. But it’s not a conscious literary strategy as is Dyer’s. It’s half-way to Dyer, thus inept. We’ll never know what was said. We’ll have to make it up!

Thumbnail review. July 4th.

Heretical Musicology, Part 2

I was quoting Keith Jarrett in Part 1 about Geoff Dyer’s But Beautiful [A book About Jazz], and marveling at how Dyer uses the omniscient narrator to tell what goes on inside the heads of Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and many more.

And now, reeking from the descriptions of the vomit, blood, glass-in-the-mouth life of saxophonist, Art Pepper, a heroin addict, I have to say: The book is something of a death trip. Not to lessen its impact, just to say this in order to balance my head-in-the-clouds omission of the horrors Dyer paints. The long boring road trips Duke and his musicians had to take, the airless hotel rooms. And for many the drugs and more drugs, the crashes, the rehab, the jails. The jazz creators didn’t get their kicks from their urgent urges of playing creatively (which gives our kicks as listeners). Their nirvana came from the absolute pleasure of heroin or some other cocktail of heaven-on-earth.

It was pointed out to me that Geoff Dyer, the travel writer, is interested in the journeys, on all levels, of his jazz heroes. Later in book he drops his invisible narrator role and lectures us a bit on how the nightly stresses of improvisational creativity had a cost to mind and body. The whole period caught fire fast, leaving lots of burn-out and destruction among the artists who made the revolution in jazz happen. And then its over. What happens after is endless re-enactments of that music.

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September 3, 2009

Mavericks?—Still? – Review of a Flyer

February 25, 2012 5:04:40 PM EST

“American Mavericks” series. The usual suspects: Ives, Ruggles, Cage, Feldman, etc. plus whichever young(er) ones can be wedged in between those. So, then who are the un-mavericks? Copland? Or just other American composers not considered important nowadays, like Howard Hanson? I think “mavericks” are the American composers. I’ll be a little snarky and question John Adams as a “maverick.” LIke him or not (I like Shaker Loops), he seems more of a Copland/Hanson mix than a Cage/Ives kind of person.

“Who Changed Music Forever.” Well, not a claim I’d want to make about (again: like ’em or not) Mason Bates, David Del Tredici, Elliot Sharp, Jennifer Higdon, Missy Mazzoli. Martin Bresnick. Granted, maverick is a marketing term, and it’s been around for a long time to rope a bunch of composers together without otherwise branding them. But that was then (decade or so ago)… Ho hum now. And finally, every festival is political in that after the banner of great masters passes, others will be chosen by someone to fill in the ranks behind. The choosers are key to understanding this.

Thumbnail review of the brochure for Michael Tilson Thomas’s “American Mavericks,” March, 2012, New York.

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September 3, 2009

Ashley at Roulette: What’s an opera and why do we care?

April 26th, 20012

Robert Ashley says in a video on line that Broadway musicals are too musically symmetrical, are only in 4/4 or 3/4, and don’t deal with the rich language of diphthongs found in the English language. He’s being interviewed about his new opera—his term—The Old Man Lives in Concrete, currently at Roulette. But what he said could be about any of his recent music theater works, written for and performed by his trusted band of vocalists: Joan LaBarbara, Jacqueline Humbert, Sam Ashley (yes, it’s his son), and Tom Buckner. Besides the text (he calls it a libretto), the program credits him with composing the “electronic orchestra.” Tom Hamilton composed “Orchestra frames for the four singers,” and did the “Mixing and live electronics.” I’m tip-toeing carefully around these credits, because, in a certain sense, Bob Ashley, hasn’t composed a note, and yet, it’s all because of him. I’m struck primarily that the five monologues (he’s the fifth, “Bob (Observer)” never relate to each other, and unlike in earlier works, similar in style and forces, there are no longer the exquisitely timed choral ensembles of these five musician-actors. I miss those chanted, spoken choruses because they made for the ‘togetherness’ I think of as being an essence of opera. And they were wonders of ensemble performance.

Elaborate, eloquent…but still: talking heads, these monologues. And yet, not talking to each other. Could other monologues by Ashley be substituted without changing the nature of the work? Would “Bob (Observer)” then have to have other observations? When is a libretto a collage? I think in this case. John Cage’s Europera is an in-your-face collage of all things European and operatic. But Ashley has always been different from Cage in my mind. His texts, taken singly, are stories, told in the first person. They seem to be different characters with different energies and texture. But they are not part of one overall story. Some synergy is lost by this, and the whole tended to lose me. Is Bob Ashley now a composer of texts in which the music kind of goes on anyway? He’s made a music machine that spins out his ruminative sentences. That should be a real accomplishment. But:

Suddenly, I wanted something more: the very subtle (or was it my imagined ‘more’?) way that certain pitch inflections of a reciter seemed to appear in the electronic mix accompanying them—spoke to me, but, I thought: why not more of this, it would be beautiful, engaging. One wants to fall in love at the opera. Or at least hear some singing. I felt impatient with the restraint expressed in the music. I wanted a re-write so that these fabulously expressive performers would stand up, go out in front of their desks and stand lights, and then belt out something together…or even not together!

I saw the first half of the show, and wandered out into the rich, damp Spring of seedy, Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, wondering what an opera is and why I care.

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September 3, 2009

Re: Musicworks Coverage of Philip Glass

May 4, 2012 6:41:29 PM EDT

Good to hear from you, Micheline. We should talk some time about what’s happening in New York. Actually, I’m not sure “what’s happening in NY.” I try, but come up with issues, venues, and generations, and of course, economics just as often as a name or a piece of music I like or don’t like. I’ll never forget hearing Phil Glass’s Music in 12 Parts (one or two of them) in his Bleecker St. loft, with the four loud speakers at the four corners, the listeners in a circle next, and the musicians, mostly, but not all amplified, in the center of that circle. Must have been early 70’s. So, everything’s good about that Phil Glass, and really nothing bad at all. It’s just that the brand, Phil Glass or another brand, is what rules new classical music. I have a problem with this! Because of what that means in practice. And the cover of the Musicworks with that familiar brand, in face form, well: is he going to be like Elliott Carter?—every 5 years (Carter’s about 103) it’s time for another round of THE birthday festival. That jumped out at me while I was writing to the circulation department with which I’ve had some lively correspondence now and then. I decided because of that “threat” (the 5-year festival threat), that I would only celebrate my prime number birthdays. Next one’s 79. This does not a brand make!

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to write.
Daniel

Regarding Below

Dear Daniel,

I received your e-mail concerning our choice to cover Philip Glass from our Operation and Circulation Manager, Andrea Warren.

As you know, we endeavour to cover Canadian and international artists at various points in the development of their crafts.
Last issue we made the decision to cover Glass in light of the major remounting of Einstein on the Beach—a seminal piece in 20th-century opera.

We regularly cover U.S. and international artists both known and well known between our covers.

Recent profiles include:
Nico Muhly (U.S.)
Clint Conley (U.S.)
STEIM and Michel Waisvisz (The Netherlands)
Tristan Perich (U.S.)
Miquel Azguime and Casa da Musica (Portugal)
Jörg Piringer (Austria)
Nadine Byrne, Mattias Petersson, and Henrik Rylander (Sweden)
Elodie Lauten (U.S.)
Yannis Kyriakides (The Netherlands/Cyprus)
Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (worldwide/internet)

We hope that this puts our recent coverage of Philip Glass in context of what we do.

Sincerely,

Micheline Roi
Editor, Musicworks Magazine

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September 3, 2009

Phenomenological Approach to Elliott Carter’s Music

May 11, 2012 12:39:53 PM EDT

Steven Beck performed the complete solo piano music of Carter this May 5th at the New Spectrum Foundation on 23rd Street, NYC. It was about an hour and a half of very technically demanding music which he played with panache and complete conviction. He was a pleasure.

The music was either soft-ish, loud, or very loud. It was either very fast or slow. You could cut a swatch of it at any time from his continuing career (he’s 103) and it would sort of sound the same—similar. (I’ve thought that of Philip Glass, too, on the other end of the spectrum of style). Punkt. Period. That’s all. Nothing more to say. Nada.

Well, there’s a little more: Most of the music makes an auditory impression of cantus fermi. There is a long, accented series of tones, “elaborated on” by very fast sprinkles of notes in between and around. Both layers are non-tonal. It’s amazing how few gestures he uses, but also, how tedious to hear them over and over again.

I am, admittedly, looking through blurry glasses which can only discern general shapes and qualities. I’m not sure I want to focus in.

It’s catty, but fun to say that Carter’s Little [Liver] Pills must work, because the family invention has given their composer-son a century plus of life and creativity. Thumbnail review.

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September 3, 2009

Why was Roy Harris Plowed Under?

July 2, 2012 6:46:34 PM EDT

Probably because in the post-war years and the stultifying ’50’s that followed, no one wanted to hear even the best Americanist anymore. It was time for the “international school” and all that we now think of as the 12-tone Mafia. But Harris was the best of that large bunch of ’30’s-’50’s American “nationalists.” A lousy way to dismiss them, to call them that… Certainly he’s the only one (besides Ives—but how differently!) who seriously advanced the art of the symphony. Let’s forget Copland, Hansen, Schuman, Bernstein (as symphonist), Berger, early Carter, and just so many more. It’s not that he had no champions. Bernstein did his Third Symphony often, and Koussevitzky commissioned and premiered several symphonies.

But then: a desert. I tried iTunes, to no avail. Now we have a stunning recording (2008) of Harrs’s 5th and 6th symphonies by Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra. Glowing!

Harris has so few proponents in the new music world, that I might be the only one besides Kyle Gann. We had a mini-bonding experience over Harris not long ago. But it’s hard to get through to him now, what with blogging, that noise-medium.

Right off, let’s say Harris is “our Bruckner:” Grandeur, wide-angle scope, a limited palette, recycling of ideas and processes from work to work, abstract, but exciting, catchy tunes that are asymmetrical, but occasionally veer towards folky and spicy without sounding like kitsch. No pandering to unmotivated big climaxes. Fabulous chorale harmonies. Unpredictable phrase structures. Fragments that come from nowhere, that then seem “inevitable.” Sudden endings. And something really special I just noticed during my first listen to the Alsop recording: such thrilling orchestral cross-cutting, using the different choirs to interrupt each other, and yet build to a larger whole. Last time I noticed this phenomenon was in the unfinished latter movements of Mahler’s 10th Symphony. Totally different kind of material, different intent, different poetics. Still, it’s rare in linear, tonal modernism to hear cross-cutting outside of film music or in John Zorn’s cartoon-influenced scores.

And there’s an oblique connection to “process music.” More needs to be said about this. And also about his harmonic language which uses endless variations on the “Justin Morgan progression:” as in C-major to C#-minor. These and other progressions are his substitute for tonic-dominant.

One caveat: he wrote 16 symphonies. I’m not sure what happened after his 7th. I’m not sure I want to know.

Thumbnail review.

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