I'm shortly off to Denmark for the WOMEX conference in Copenhagen.
WQXR has kindly invited me to blog about this year's event, the artists being presented, and one of my absolute favorite topics for bloviating: the fertile and fascinating crosscurrents of (Western) classical music and "world" music. I'll be posting over there starting tomorrow and continuing through Saturday.
Obviously, quite a few of these people rightfully belong in
multiple categories, but for the sake of expediency I’ve narrowed down their
wide-ranging brilliance into a single pigeonhole. (Sorry.)
Suggestions for others to add or corrections? (I am sure I've missed many, including people I know. Ah, memory...)
DM me
@anastasiat , or be super old-fashioned and just leave me a comment below. (I’m also considering adding a “fans”
section. What do you think?) Obviously, there’s a big emphasis on English
speakers and norteamericanos which I hope we can rectify.
Last night, So Percussion gave the debut of their new work Imaginary City at BAM as part of its now (and ironically enough) venerable "Next Wave" festival, now in its 27th season.
I am an unabashed admirer of this quartet, about whom I first wrote in 2005 for Billboard and whom I have profiled since. (At SXSW in 2008, for
example, I did a pre-concert discussion with them for the new music
evening--a first!--that Boosey & Hawkes presented, and for which Gramophone was the media partner.)
This new piece, which was inspired by Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, is an evening-long meditation on urban life. The marketing propaganda (seen in the clip above) says it's "illuminating the beauty of urban life," but I thought it dwells more on urban melancholy and the constant low-grade fever of city life.
The influence of such composers as Cage and Reich are indisputable in such elements as Reich-ian looped voices and Cage's objects put to a new use (desk lamps switching on and off, the sound of thick makers against a whiteboard-a great sound, by the way, when it's so muscularly articulated).
But whereas so much of Cage's work was putting a frame around a moment in time and inviting the audience in to explore it more deeply in all of its chance and deeply textured glory, Imaginary City is more about taking untraditional and traditional instruments and creating painterly and distilled portraits: the buzz of streetlights and the wan glow of headlights somehow suggested by the shimmering aura of a marimba, the metallic jingle of coins evoking the nature of work and money, the clatter of pipes and cans suggesting constant teardown and rebuilding, and (in the case of the video projection by Jennie Treuting) the entirely false urgency of a news zipper racing around the side of a building.
Some of the more theatrical elements of Imaginary City, which was directed by Rinde Eckert, worked beautifully (if kind of glibly). In one part of the piece, one of the percussionists, Adam Sliwinski, reads aloud in complete deadpan from the rules of Monopoly--yes, the board game. It's a very funny stroke of political commentary during our Great Recession: "A Banker who plays in the game must keep their personal funds separate from those of the Bank"; "The Bank never goes broke"; "If the Bank runs out of money, the Banker may issue as much as needed by writing on any ordinary paper."
What doesn't work? Among them, the Kabuki-esque friezes that Eckert puts the quartet in at the beginning of the piece (these guys dance with their instruments as a well-oiled, eight-limbed machine, but their discomfort in striking poses was nearly palpable); and the video projections, which were not nearly as sophisticated or nuanced as the music. Just as there is much in this piece that is sonically precise and yet site-unspecific--So's urban landscape could be any city--there are some irritatingly easy device, as when the musicians move small speakers around the state that hold the spoken voices of people describing their living situations ("I live with two roommates," "I live in the oldest house on the Upper West Side," and--ugh--ending with "I live in the moment.") Then there's the rather sophomoric audience participation bit at the conclusion (see below for more on that).
What works beautifully is the pure joy these virtuosos make in creating sound and in creating intricate and tightly coiled layers of sound that at times even brings to mind Renaissance choral music--if that' s not too odd a comparison--and the very real evocations of urban life they produce in all their multi-layered sonic glory.
Lawson White, a former So player himself, deserves real plaudits for his sound design work on this project--I'd hazard a guess that there were upwards of 100 (maybe more?) individual instruments onstage, with the musicians in constant motion all across the stage's breadth and depth. The sound was perfect.
A last note on the occasional perils of having a critic's seat along the aisle: in the section of the piece titled "I Love You"--which, underscored by the sounds of empty beer bottles rattling together, evokes nothing so much as the thin, drunken pre-dawn professions heard at any bar at last call--I was pulled from the audience as a quasi-soloist to bellow something at the stage. (I don't want to give anything away here.)
Given history, maybe I seemed like a plant, but Josh Quillen, a newer member of the group who plucked me out of darkened-theater obscurity, didn't know me. Maybe the critic's notebook in my lap was actually an unwitting challenge to the wall between critical observer and participant. But then again, I also clap at performances I like, in something of a breach of "traditional" critical protocol--ooh, daring, I know!--so why not jump in?
Don't miss the obituary in today's New York Times of Carleen Hutchins, the violin maker who was a true ground breaker. Not only was she a woman in an extremely male-dominated field (even as tiny as that field is), but, at the behest of Henry Brant, she created a whole new group of eight instruments known as the new violin family or the violin octet. (If you recall Yo-Yo Ma's recording of the Bartok Viola Concerto, you've heard one of her instruments.)
(Bonus information for the parents out there: You know Dr. Virginia Apgar of the Apgar Score; did you know that she too was a violin maker?)
I love Twitter. I do. Wholeheartedly, unashamedly, and even though it most assuredly marks me as one of those sorry ancients.
Prime example: Vijay Iyer just sent out a tweet to Seth Colter Wall's blog, directing us to his genius cover of MIA's "Galang" with Marcus Gilmore and Stephen Crump. Go find it, right away. But be sure to read Seth's entry (entitled "Difficult Listening Hour") that precedes the music. Buried in there is a very incisive read on Wordless Music etc. that should give a ton of food for thought to the new (classical) music crowd:
He writes:
"New music movements in both the jazz and classical
worlds suffer from lackluster PR inroads when it comes to the
non-specialized, young creative class. Before a sorta silly Q&A I
conducted with the Fiery Furnaces at my paying gig
(heh), I talked to Matthew Friedberger about this phenomenon. When the
Furnaces played NYC recently, they had Newspeak, an alt-classical act,
open for them. It was clear to me that the proper indie crowd that
showed up for the Furnaces had a hard time determining whether Newspeak
was cool or not. (They are.)
This is because the instrumental exactitude that these kids carry over
from their conservatory training is rather observable on stage. They
don't look at all casual about playing their instruments. They look
totally involved in a way that might be interpreted as
embarrassing, depending on your poseur-related baggage..."
What a day, marking three different passings...of a friend and colleague, of an inspiration, and of a guiding light. All three are great sadnesses, but one came as a tremendous shock.
Robert Hilferty, Michael Steinberg, and Merce Cunningham: may your Memories Be Eternal.
My favorite memories of Robert include traveling through Morocco together; being abroad brought out, in sharp relief, many of his very finest qualities. Among them: an incredible and insatiable enthusiasm, a completely vibrant and open spirit, and an uncanny ability to find the best party at any given moment--even the impromptu ones.
Edited to add: It's a great comfort to see words from other friends in the comments below, and also over at Alex's and David's sites. (The video which David shares, and of course the wonderful way he describes it, is a perfect encapsulation of what I was so awkwardly trying to say.)
Niagara-on-the-Lake,
Ontario, June 24, 2009…Canadian soprano Measha Brueggergosman
underwent emergency open-heart surgery on Wednesday, June 10, 2009.
After
experiencing acute pressure in her throat, Ms. Brueggergosman was rushed by
ambulance to a Toronto hospital where she was diagnosed with high blood
pressure and hypertension and subsequently released. The following day she
reported to her family doctor with continued pains in her chest. Her doctor
sent her immediately back to the hospital.
Further
tests revealed she had a dissection in her aorta and doctors immediately
performed open-heart surgery to repair it. Currently, Ms. Brueggergosman is
recovering well and is resting under doctor’s orders.
As
a result, Ms. Brueggergosman was forced to cancel her three appearances with
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, as well as performances as Bess in Gershwin's Porgy
and Bess with Maestro Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Styriarte Festival in
Graz, Austria.
Ms.
Brueggergosman is expected to enjoy a full recovery and will return to performing
on August 9, 2009 at the Shaw Festival’s presentation of An Enchanted
Evening.
Very sad news today: one of the titans of Hindustani classical music, Ustad Ali Akbar Khan, passed away yesterday at age 88. Information about Khansahib's memorial service and burial is available at the website of his wonderful school, the Ali Akbar Khan College of Music.
If you'd like to learn a bit more about this giant, there's a little introduction to his life and music that I wrote for National Geographic Music, which includes some recommendations for further listening.
It seems very weird and off, somehow, to be writing about the arts of the Muslim world (or anything else, for that matter) instead of what is going on Iran right this minute.
Here are some of the sources I'm currently following, and I'd be grateful if anyone would like to point out some more that are worth seeking out:
A long list of Twitter users, including @mousavi1388, @iran09, @persiankiwi, @StopAhmadi, and @IranRiggedElect
Over at National Geographic's music site (where I also write), Derek Beres has a nice interview with the qawwal, where he admits that his last such intercultural project, with such noted flamenco artists Miguel Poveda and Duquende, was actually an easier fit for him than tonight's gospel/qawwali bill with Craig Adams & the Voices of New Orleans. See what you think.
