Daniel Goode

Composer & Performer

Fabulous, Amazing, Dedicated Performers, and Old Friends

DEAR FRIENDS, yes,

My delightful two-octave toy piano, pulled out of the back of a closet to star in my one-act, autobiographical opera, Irina, along with many other stars of the orchestra, like dramatic soprano, Kamala Sankaram, like wonderful ballet dancer au point, Mayu Oguri, like virtuoso principal violist AND composer, Stephanie Griffin, and like Maestra Extraordinaire, Tara Simoncic, our conductor since 2004.

Not to mention the other fabulous, amazing, dedicated performers, and old friends like Fritz Kraber on flute and with only a little reluctance on wooden piccolo (for only a few bars—thank you Fritz!)

TOMORROW, THURS, MARCH 31st AT THE UKRAINIAN RESTAURANT (great borscht) at 8 PM, 140 Second Av. at 9th St. $20 at the door. We’ve had standing room only at past concerts, so don’t delay. Show up!

And the fabulous ending to all endings: Phil Corner’s Ideal AMEN. He takes the ending of the Berlioz Requiem and ends and ends and ends that fabulous chameleon-like piece.

Oh, and Lev Ljova Zhurbin’s window into our eastern european past, its emotional melodies and thoughts, the slow-fast form of so many of those folk pieces.

I could go on. Violas extraordinary, all those sounds they can do: in Toronto composer, publisher, experimentalist, Gayle Young’s Departures. And Dean Rosenthal’s dedication to “deductive music” pioneered by Tom Johnson, last year’s Flexible Orchestra composer. And still more: Stephanie Griffin’s passionate new piece for SEVEN violas!

It’s the last year of “VIOLAS PLUS.” The Flexible Orchestra flexes into a new sound next year. So get the old sound now while it lasts!

SEE YOU THERE!

YOURS,
Daniel

Flexible Orchestra, March 31st! Save the Date

Daniel Good Event March 2016

DEAR FRIENDS,

Here’s the info. Put it into your book! In addition to the premieres mentioned we have two to add:

Stephanie Griffin, principal violist with the Flexible Orchestra:
Poem from Exile (2015) for seven violas, and:

Lev Ljova Zhurbin:
Pastorale – Bagel for violas and clarinets

Hope to see you all there! Yours, Daniel

Here’s the ad announcement from the Calendar for New Music: (See Above)

Clarinet Quintet: Score

for clarinet in A and string quartet
—in one movement—

Clarinet Quintet – 15:07

Click Score to View in Entirety
Clarinet Quintet.partial score.jpg

A Kind Note From Composer Noah Creshevsky

From: Noah Creshevsky
Date: February 29, 2016 2:14:55 PM EST
To: Daniel Goode
Subject: Your clarinet quintet

Dear Daniel,

That is such a beautiful piece–written on a quite large scale, technically assured, expressive, and–yes, a rare word–inspired!

I had great pleasure hearing it now. Thank you for posting it.

My best to you,
Noah

Mahler’s 8th Symphony at St. John the Divine, February 25, 2016: What was it like?

The “symphony of a thousand.” At the premiere in Munich, 1910 there were apparently 1,0030, counting the conductor, Maestro Mahler. I haven’t counted last night’s forces, swelled by very big choruses, but it might not be a thousand, and of course it often isn’t and it doesn’t need to be. Punkt! Big: yes, very.

I was anxious to have Ann, my wife hear it, and though I didn’t really hear it very well, even though “enhanced” by the big loud speakers a few yards from our seats, still, it communicated a great and fabulous glowing sound.

What was this Jewish composer, who converted to Catholicism before becoming artistic director of the famous Vienna Imperial Court Opera under the Hapsburg emperor, doing in setting, in Part 1 of the symphony, a ninth-century religious hymn, “Come, Creator Spirit” and in Part 2, the final scene of Goethe’s two-part, “Faust” poem? Very god-infested, yes it is!—(and why that from the humanist, cosmopolitan, Goethe? I don’t know.)

Well, Mahler called it an allegory of what cannot be spoken of. A good defense! He was a well-read intellectual, interested in ideas, progressive aesthetically and helpful to, for example, the young composer, Schoenberg who befriended him. That’s a good story.

Back to Ann who, not knowing the music as I do, coming to the event fatigued and ready for bed, was revived and full of enthusiastic appreciation. She said: “A superfluity; staggering, complex; moments when a kind of screaming enters from the side like a blue-note.”

That’s a complex review, probably not what Mahler consciously intended. As Theodore Adorno says in his excellent short book, Mahler, a Musical Physiognomy, “Mahler was a poor yea-sayer.“ So the Eighth Symphony is a kind of anti-phobic answer to a difficulty in his psyche. Fine! It works and the marvelous, doleful, dark shadings, in the beginning of Part 2, and in Part 1 with the verse that begins “Infirma” —“[strengthen] our weak body”—we get the wonderful part of Mahler who can’t say “yes.” And we know that he continued not to say “yes” persuasively in the Ninth Symphony, some of Das Lied Von Der Erde, and the uncompleted Tenth Symphony. We don’t really like false positive-ness! Quite amazing, also, that neither of these three amazing works did he hear in his lifetime.

He was obsessed with death (well documented in marginalia), and in fact, though vigorous and athletic, was struck down by endocarditis at 51, an infection of the heart, now easily treatable with antibiotics. Heart! But there was more to it. He’d lost one of his two daughters to a childhood disease. And he’d also very late in life lost his beloved Almschi to a lover, the architect, Walter Gropius. Lots to cry about. He was bereft, finally, and sick, even while conducting the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera as a European star! At the same time composing his Ninth and Tenth symphonies, mostly in the summer, back home in the Austrian countryside. He was recognizably “modern,” 20th Century even with his rich, opulent, essentially late 19th Century musical language (thank you, Barry Goldensohn, for this accurate adjective: opulent).

So in Mahler-time, he races through a huge amount of material in an hour and a half. It’s efficient, with no lovely dallying as in the “Night Music” of the Seventh Symphony. We get to the last line of text, “the eternal feminine leads us up” sung by the Chorus Mysticus, and that’s it. Terrible pre-feminist politics: masculine is striving, ambitious, heroic; feminine is nurturing, comforting, satisfying. But hey, he sort of lost his loved one. And also, how could he contradict his beloved, German, Goethe (he hated Austrian culture, was a Germanophile)!

At the same time he suffered from the standard anti-Semitism of the time, saying that being Jewish was like going through life with one arm shorter than the other; yet having to identify with the dominant Christian culture which repeatedly hired him to more and more prestigious positions. We are luckier living among the diaspora in New York, not in Budapest and Vienna of his time.

But of the performance at St. John the Divine under its music director and organist, Kent Tritle conducting: what was it like? Well, really not very intelligible to one who knows the music. The cathedral succeeded in muddying the very precise rhythms of the excellent players from the Manhattan School of Music, and making such things as the wonderful bass pizzicati throughout the beginning of Part 2 sound like random dull thuds. A “sound-designer” failure? Probably. And what about the stridently over-amplified, over-vibrato-ed soprano soloists (google the performance for names). It’s a lingering operatic disease from Wagnerian times on: vibrato amplifies the volume of the sound for very well-documented scientific reasons. The justification used to be that the Wagnerian orchestra was always in danger of drowning out the Wagnerian sopranos and tenors. But why now! in a piece of music where Mahler’s superior orchestrational knowledge allows a less strident vocal style? No answer to this persistent question.

And what of Adorno’s disparaging and sarcastic remark about the Eighth Symphony as a “genre chef d’oeuvre?.” (page 138, op. cit.) A genre masterpiece. What’s the genre? Spectacle? Conflation of religion and art? He answers: “To glorify the collective sounding through him as an absolute… That he did not resist, is his offense,” his “false consciousness.” Adorno prefers, and maybe we do too, that part of the composer that looks “questioningly into uncertainty.”

So why given Mahler’s “offense,” and that last night when we couldn’t really hear Mahler in St. John the Divine’s, did we jump to our feet at the end, clapping and cheering with tears in our eyes?

Because we knew he was there! His temporary “Yes” was our temporary Yes.

—Thumbnail Review No. 46

Click Here to Read an Open Response to This Thumbnail  

A Response to a Kind Letter

Hey, Very thoughtful writing, yet again, it would have been a fine night of being surrounded by profound sound, I imagine. Maybe it was the amount of acoustical vibration that got everyone so excited? (Not that there’s any other kind of vibration – but that is a special place to listen.) -g
                                                                          ~composer, Gayle Young, Toronto

I agree. The vibrational thing over-ruled the exact musical thing. Also, I didn’t mention the off-stage trumpets at two points, and the off-stage trombones (which I never located), but were in balconies above the audience. And also making vibrational geschrei was the organ, at key points. The very first sound is a giant Eb major chord from the organ, an instant before you here the first instrumental entries. It switches you instantly into a different mode of listening. I also didn’t say in the essay, but mentioned to Ann that visual grandeur (= the sublime, in some quarters) like a huge cathedral, and auditory grandeur as in a huge orchestra and chorus have different needs: like a really great concert hall in the latter. So I wasn’t exactly a happy camper at St. John’s, but registered it as a moment of the “sublime” in experiential terms, probably for much of the audience. And cheered for that. The great church organist composers (Bach and others) did make both visual and auditory grandeur in the same place. But Mahler symphonies need different acoustics.

Thanks for your comments. Definitely adds to what I felt was going on, but didn’t really have the words for.

-Daniel

Daniel @ 80

Birthday Concert #2
February 12th, 2016 at The Cell, 7:30 PM
Chamber and orchestra works by Daniel Goode
with the Momenta Quartet and Moran Katz, clarinet, and the
Flexible Orchestra conducted by David Gilbert
Clarinet Quintet, for clarinet and string quartet (2015)
(premiere)


Clarinet Quintet
– 15:07

••••••

Tunnel Funnel (1988)

Performers
flutes
Karl Kraber
Margaret Lancaster
Pamela Sklar
David Wechsler
trombones
Jen Baker
Mark Broschinsky
Chris McIntyre
Matt Melore
strings
Emilie-Anne Gendron, violin (Momenta)
Karen Kim, violin (Momenta)
Stephanie Griffin, viola (Momenta)
Michael Haas, cello (Momenta)
Jay Elfenbein, contrabass

Chris Nappi, mallet instruments
Marijo Newman, piano
David Gilbert, conductor
Moran Katz, clarinet with the Momenta Quartet in Clarinet Quintet

Daniel Goode Birthday Announcment

Birthday Announcement

Offer to the Vatican: Critical Mass

I would like to offer to the Vatican at no charge, the lyrics to my 2007 musical composition, Critical Mass. Here they are:

CRITICAL MASS, parts I & II                 text by Daniel Goode

I.
A spector is haunting America, a spirit is haunting America, a spirit of secular joy, of peace and community, enough for all, a spirit for us to enjoy.
Non credo in deo, non credo.
Oo-hoo-hoo a-ha-ha oo-hoo-hoo a-ha hoo-hoo-hoo ha-ha-ha hoo-hoo-hoo ha-ha.
Non credo in deo, non credo, non credo.
Oo-hoo-hoo a-ha-ha oo-hoo-hoo a-ha hoo-hoo-hoo ha-ha-ha hoo-hoo-hoo ha-ha.
Non credo, non credo, non credo, non credo.
Hoo ha ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha Hoo ha. Non credo in deo, no, no, no!
“Credo in us.” Thank you, John Cage! Credo in us!
A spector is haunting America. “[A]merica.” Thank-a-you, Lenny Bernstein. A spirit is haunting America, a spirit of secular joy. Joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, joy, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, j, oooo! a spirit of sexual joy, sec, sec, sec, sec, sec, se-cuh-la, se-cuh-la, se-cuh-la, se-cuh-la, oooo!
Non credo in deo, non credo. No, no, no!
A mass for us, a mass for all, for us, for peace and community, planet, our home. Non credo, non credo in deo, non credo, non credo in deo. O, O. Let’s meditate. Open the gate! For all, for us. Thank you, Pauline.* Sing any note, open your throat! Ah… Ah… Ah… Say any thing, then make it sing! Open your throat! Sing any note. Ah……

II.
We believe in We believe in We believe in We—oo-ahh-ee-oo-ahh. Non non non credo-do-do-do-do-do, non credo in deo—ahh-oo-ee-ahh-oo.
We believe in We believe in We believe in We.
The suffering’s real, but death you don’t feel, shed your fears, then your tears, we are here, so are you, dear.
They say they speak in tongues, then why do they support the guns? We’ll show them where we put our tongues: aye-ee, ee-oh, you-ee, oh-aye, oh-wah, oh wah, ya-you, wah-ee.
It’s guns that kill people, not people, not people, it’s guns that kill people plus people plus people, oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo. People plus people plus guns that kill people, it’s people plus people plus bombs that kill people. It’s guns, put them down!—oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo. Thank you, Meredith Monk, oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo.
Now it’s your turn to thank some one, come on! come on! come on! come on! Thank some one! Thank some one!—oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo-ah-oo. Thank some one on any note…
The suffering’s real, but death you don’t feel, shed your fears, then your tears, we are here, so are you, dear.
Endlessness forever is all we can divine. If that’s divine, that’s fine.
We are alone with each other, there is no other. If that’s divine, that’s fine.
Love, then experience, then: make the world a better place to live. That’s where we live and thrive.
There is no proof that any one has ever gone to heaven or hell.
Faith, they say, is proof, but to them we say: oh poof, oh poof! Oh poof, oh poof, poof poof poof poof poof poof poof poof poof poof poof.
Air is divine. In and out, breath! Air is divine, is fine, is fine.
Let in the thought of what is sought. Hm, hm, hm, hm.
Bring on the dance, let in the trance-ce-ce-ce-ce. Bring on the dance, let in the trance-ce-ce-ce-ce. Let in the trance, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce. ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce, ce.

* “Pauline” is composer, Pauline Oliveros who composed Sonic Meditations
c 2005 by Daniel Goode

Hymn from the One Word Opera

I’m offering to the European Union at no cost, my new “Hymn from the One Word Opera” to replace the current European Union hymn, Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. It’s time for an update! So here is the score and a sound file for your enjoyment. I lowered the key in the score for easier singing. I think it’s both beautiful and appropriate. Hope you do too.

All the best,
Daniel

Hymn from the One Word Opera