Daniel Goode

Letter to an Opera Singer

July 21, 2012 11:30:45 AM EDT

Dear Kamala,

This letter about the 19th Century opera voice, is not about you, since you have at least two voices, if not three (counting your “Balkan voice”), but you and others may be able to help me with my problem.

I just finished listening to the live radio broadcast of the 3rd Act of Janacek’s fabulous “The Makropulos Case” at the Met. It has an almost deadpan libretto about an incredible (and hence impossible) situation, but still, it’s naturalist theater that requires naturalist acting from the singers. That’s a problem of a different kind I’ll leave alone for now. So, without checking, I think there are tenor, baritone, bass baritone singers in key roles. And the soprano heroine, Emilia Marty, sung by Karita Mattila, the great Finnish singer.

First the music: harmonic richness made of classical and folk elements shining through a prism of pungent orchestration. And the cut-cut lyricism: these phrases interrupted but longing for completion. Lyric montage? Yes, something like that. And modulated often with rhythmic ostinati. Or the rhythms take over. Take you over. You get it! Expression-modernism.

So this is captivating. Then an operatic voice chimes in. Mattila was the most acceptable. Her bell-like tones pleasured you so you could forget the operatic grit, which is the part of the territory I abhor. The music is now all but spoiled by those male voices, floppy-vibrato-ing all over the scale. Straining and pushing those tones to “expressive” extremes. Here is where I rebel. We are no longer in the 19th Century, and Janacek and others would be much better served if singers tried something different. First of all: curb that vibrato. Not that it has to disappear. It just has to be put back in its box and used as was originally intended as an ornament similar to the trill—in key moments, but not continuously. Well that’s the beginning. Go back to the straight voice and then start to re-inflect it from a fresh perspective. How would that sound? I don’t know, but I’m sure it would make a better mix with the sound of his orchestra, a sound which is honed to beautiful edges, and not at all like the traditional operatic voice.

Thumbnail review: May 5th, 2012.

Leave a comment

September 3, 2009

Universe Symphony: metaphorical music?

July 26, 2012 4:00:26 PM EDT

Now we’re talking! It used to be called program music. I’m thinking metaphor.

Mahler wisely declined the term of program music for his symphonies. Strauss didn’t. I’m sure Ives didn’t care a fig what one called his programmatically titled orchestral works like “The Housatonic at Stockbridge.” The Universe Symphony could be called the program of Everything. Or nothing in particular. Still it’s a metaphor for Everything (or nothing in particular).

The highly committed Nashville Symphony under Giancarlo Guerrero, on May 12th at Carnegie Hall, performed Larry Austin’s 20-year project of finishing and realizing Ives’s Universe Symphony. This “program” is so all-inclusive as to be a non-program. (Most of my favorite music is in this category.) It can put us all back into the silly arguments between Hanslick (“The Beautiful in Music”) and Wagner and others. I always sided with Hanslick’s, but continued to listen to Wagner with amazement. Or with complete delight to Kleinsinger’s “Tuby the Tuba” and Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”

To me it’s clear that if you need to interpose a program in order to groove on the music, the music has failed. So program music as a genre cannot be taken seriously. But we’ve all taken Ives monumental conceptual symphony work very seriously, in that there are at least two realizations. (Johnny Reinhart’s is the other one I know).

As to other metaphorical music, we listen and respond to the music as music, but take the programmatic titles as handy monikers, epiphenomena if you like, to spice up our memories of the work, or simply to communicate in short-hand about it to others. The “Tragic” Overture (by Brahms). OK, I’ll give it some picture or interpretation. It might color my memory, or help my memory with some particular theme.

But Ives clearly DID mean to represent the infinity and grandeur of the universal processes we call “The Universe.” He worked on it for over forty years. That, and Larry Austin’s twenty years on it show huge commitments.

(The other two works on the Nashville Symphony evening paled and annoyed: Terry Riley’s “The Palmian Chord Ryddle for six-string electric violin (performed by Tracy Silverman) and orchestra, and Percy Grainger’s “imaginary ballet” music, “The Warriors,”)

What stands out in both Reinhart’s and Austin’s realizations of the Ives, is the opening percussion (plus piccolo) ensemble of 20 independent pulses going for a long time, and sharing a downbeat every eight seconds: “The Life Pulse.” It’s thrilling, and interesting, and does kind of feel like an aspect of infinity, or the vastness of vibration. The dense and dissonant string sound which follows is thick and impenetrable in a succulent sort of way. I don’t have a strong feeling or tactile memory of other parts of the piece, other than a generally positive one.

So the Grainger and Riley pieces were washouts. Terry can write for orchestra, but he doesn’t seem like an orchestral composer. His piece was a diffuse journey about ethnic influences: music about other music. Metaphorical. Grainger’s piece, dedicated to Delius (!) was a bombastic bomb with lots and lots of xylophonists and a big bang at the end. His “Greek heroes,” “Zulus,” “Vikings,” “lovemakers,” “fighting men” claimed not to be program music. Sagging metaphors to me. What’s a well-meaning, politically correct orchestra to do?

Thumbnail review. A review about everything and nothing in particular is a nice place to end or pause in a cycle of twenty-eight pieces.

Leave a comment

September 3, 2009

SONiC Festival: Does “uptown” and “downtown” still exist as a stylistic?

Son!c
July 26th, 2012

SON!C – get it! “Sounds of a new century” (where everyone is under 40). Great
theme: youth, always a winner. October 14-22nd, 2011 with something like 14 concerts and over a hundred composers (all young!). Otto Luening used to say that when he started out, a young composer was someone in his (yes “his”) 50’s. Otto was young in his 70’s). So are we going backwards or forwards, please?

Four young men in black, the Jack (quartet), from Eastman to NY, play best: XenAK (-is). “Did all they played sound like XenAK? —what a CRACK!” “Can’t be XenAK if it’s him we lack.” Alex Mincek’s was my favorite of lack-XenAK. Or was it grey not black wore by the Jack? Too dark to read their names (even in the light I couldn’t find their names, much less their aims). But a friendly, humble virtuosity was on offer, fine! But then, betrayed by the sound engineers: how perverse that only their loudest sounds got amplified. The soft, wispy sul ponticellos and harmonics shifted the aural perspective back to them on stage, then a loud sound, and you were looking, once more, at the loudspeaker to their left. Ouch. Said a musician in the audience to me: “they play so many more notes per… than…[blah, blah, something or other], with not a bit of sweat on them.” Could this be the aesthetic aim of “a new century?”

Some nice choral music followed the Jack. Beautiful performances by the New York Virtuoso Singers conducted by Harold Rosenbaum. In one piece the sopranos and the basses were at the back of the stage, left and right, while the altos and tenors were front center. Nice idea, but why not go further, like Meredith Monk and actually have them change places at different times, even sing while moving.

Douglas Repetto’s robots let down colored three-dimensional looking tubes while several members of Talea, performed a graphic score by Victor Adan. Did the music control the robots? No way to know from the program notes. The final effect was like the drip paintings of abstract colorist, Morris Louis, though less messy.

SONiC Festival: Does “uptown” and “downtown” still exist as a stylistic?

Any large curatorial slice of the total pie is always going to be criticized in some aspect or other. Since I only went to two events, I can’t really be a good outside observer. Alex Ross (who reviewed the festival in the New Yorker) may have, or maybe I was the one who noticed that the choices seemed conservative. As if, even through the eclectic and catholic largeness of the field which obscures the “uptown-downtown” stylistic divide of the past, still the music was very much a front and center stand up and wow-em chamber music. The odd, the spiritually quiet, the non-virtuosic and contemplative kind of music, the contextually different, the political, were all categories I thought were missing. That’s what made me feel that the divide between “uptown” and “downtown” still exists. And EVERYTHING is now amplified (a horrible contemporary performance practice steam-rollered by Bang On A Can—when they did my 15-person Tunnel-Funnel, I insisted on all-acoustic, and darned if it didn’t sound “too soft” because our ears had been pinned back by all the previous amplified chamber music). Thumbnail review.

Leave a comment

September 3, 2009

Monk Congratulations!

October 14, 2012 11:39:45 PM EDT

Wow, Christian, I was blown away by your Monk interpretation and playing. And Greg’s too. He’s such a creative drummer! It was such a breath of fresh air to hear something that feels musically akin to what Monk does in composition. He’s really the only one I ever want to hear improvising on his tunes.

So you’ve made an intervention. No matter how brilliant the other side-men’s playing is—was—it’s always seemed business as usual compared to Monk’s minimalist use of his own motifs. He couldn’t leave it just to the changes. He does the material.

And I loved your “dry” playing. That also is what I love about Monk doing himself. But your interpretations were also lush in harmonic ideas, and textures. And never gooey.

Also, your medley’s of more than one tune, your intros and outros. Totally convincing and groovy.

I’ve been doing a little “instant criticism,” called Thumb-Nail Reviews. I’d like to add this letter. It just goes to a few people as an email, some of whom you know, like Larry. Hope that’s OK.

Thumbnail review.

Greg Campbell and Christian Asplund, collectively AC/GC will perform all 70 or so compositions by Thelonious Monk to celebrate his 95th birthday on 10 October, joined by special guest performers. Interpretations of these sublime/inscrutable compositions will run the gamut from inside out, familiar to unexpected. At Spectrum, 12 Ludlow Street in Manhattan.

Leave a comment

September 3, 2009

The Rite Resists Dance

Thumbnail Review, March 9th
March 11, 2013 10:45:30 PM EDT

How can the most famous dance score of the 20th Century, The Rite of Spring, resist choreography? It does, easily. I watched a solo pianist, Neil Alexander play his arrangement of the score on an amplified upright piano at the corner of the stage of the Alvin Ailey Theater in New York (thank you Citigroup!) while a dance troupe (Jonathan Riedel Dance Theater) did a lot of things with seven dancers, one, a man with a vicious looking stage knife or alternatively a German cross as pendant. A lot happened.

With all this action going on, my eyes and ears were still glued to the music Sometimes the amplified sound distorted. Mostly it sounded as familiar as a Brahms lullaby. It was just lovely piano music, not spectacle, or dissonant blockbuster. (I remember an L.A Philharmonic performance of it at the Disney auditorium where I was seated behind the stage, almost falling into the brass section as I swooned to their hypnotic choiring.) This was not like that. It was more like delicate Chopin traceries with occasional big bangs. Wonderful bangs, still 100 years later! And the gorgeous achingly beautiful slow dance in Eb-minor-ish: “Spring Rounds.” I could listen to that section over and over again. Maybe I’ll make that happen.

It’s been going around during this 100th anniversary of its premiere, that the booing and hissing in Paris was to Nijinsky’s choreography, not Igor’s music. How would we know? Maybe I need to see a few more dance versions before I proclaim that the score will always resist its dance interpretation—because of the mind-numbing stupidity of a “pagan ritual” with female sacrifice as its coup de grace.

It’s dumb 19th Century imaginary “anthropology,” romantic primitivism put out, I think, to rationalize the great innovative break that Stravinsky made, and foisted on a conservative culture. Perhaps that insufferable pagan ritual context was the reason the Riedel interpretation overlayed it with another story, the program notes told me, from a 13th Century Swedish folktale. Relief! when the dance ended with an embrace instead of a sacrifice. I predict that only a miracle will find a dance that matches the music and satisfies all senses.

Thumbnail review.

Leave a comment

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.

1 Comment

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.

Leave a comment

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!

Leave a comment