I do not want to be told I am "awesome", or to be asked if I am "stoked". This is what happened at a Vancouver International Jazz Festival concert last summer, where there was an opening emcee who did exactly that. Jazz is supposed to be "cool"; this was was high school cheerleading. The occasion was a concert by the wonderful pianist and composer Vijay Iyer; MacArthur award winner and now Harvard professor. I was pleased to hear Iyer perform in Vancouver, but I was not pleased to hear his performance marred but an awesomely bad sound system, painful to the ears. At a certain point, Iyer stopped to complain about the sound, and even asked that it be turned off, all to no avail. The morons were in charge. Given that it was the opening night of the Festival, I suppose excuses could be made. But this is not the way a "world class" jazz festival should be run.
Iyer's music is interesting to my ears; he combines both a very cerebral approach to music with a more visceral, populist streak. I later found out that one of the pieces he performed was a Michael Jackson tune; all I recognized was simplistic harmony; subject to some interesting rhythmic permutations.
My point here is that actual jazz has now approached the status of classical music in the North America. Rather than be simply presented to be appreciated on its own merits for both the curious and the well informed, it needs to be hyped up and broadened in its appeal to reach a larger audience. Hence a jazz festival needs to include large chunks of quasi-pop music to attract audiences, just like the Vancouver Symphony having its pops series. I don't really blame the Vancouver Jazz Festival for that; they have to do what it takes to survive. (The festival used to be supported generously by the DuMaurier tobacco company; when laws made that impossible, the festival lost a lot of its financial support.)
But that does not mean that we need to be treated like children when we go to a concert...
(This is an old post that I never actually posted....)
Wednesday 12 March 2014
Orfeo
No, not the Monteverdi opera, but the new novel by Richard Powers....
I have always enjoyed the novels of Richard Powers (I have read them all), and I was eager to read his latest because it is about a fictional composer in the second half of the 20th century. One of my cardinal rules for films and novels is to never read any books or see any films with composers or artists in them; they always get it wrong. I have to say that Powers pretty much gets it right. (Jean Echenoz's novel "Ravel" is also excellent.) Never have I read any novelist who comes so close to illuminating a possible state of mind of the composer.
Powers' novel is a biographical portrait of a composer who emerges in the 1950's, and in the course of his compositional life encounters many of the aesthetic trends and battles that have influenced the course of late 20th century music. Total serialism, the revolutions of John Cage, minimalism, neo-romanticsm, etc. take their turns in unsettling the mind of the protagonist; who, from his origins as a somewhat naive child prodigy succumbs repeatedly to the demands of each new aesthetic. (The professors of University of Illinois, that "Darmstadt-on-the Prairies", are portrayed as especially brutal.)
As with virtually all of Powers' novels, there are multiple simultaneous strands of narrative. In this case, he alternates between the narrative of composer's present day existence as a wanted biological terrorist and the narrative of his life. There is a third strand, which turns out to be tweets. How does a composer become a wanted biological terrorist? By pursuing a project very similar to that of the Canadian poet Christian Bök, who has spent the last ten years trying to encode a poem into DNA. (Google to find out details..)
Powers has a sentimental side which I don't always appreciate; he is after an apotheosis, which I admire, but which doesn't always resonate with me. His composer's artistic soul resonates most closely with Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time", as I believe Power's must as well. One of the most moving sections of the book is a whole chapter on the origins and performance of the "Quartet...".
One striking feature of the book is a number of very detailed narrative descriptions of specific pieces of music, such as Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" and Reich's "Proverbs" While these descriptions (which go on for a number pages) are both accurate and evocative, I am not really sure what to make of them. Are they meant to recall the music one has already heard, or to give the reader a facsimile of the experience of actually hearing the music? But this problem is endemic to the application of prose to music, in any case.
I don't really know how this novel would resonate with a reader who is not well versed in the history of late 20th century music. Perhaps it would provoke he or she to seek out some of the music described. But, in any case, the book makes for fascinating reading.
I have always enjoyed the novels of Richard Powers (I have read them all), and I was eager to read his latest because it is about a fictional composer in the second half of the 20th century. One of my cardinal rules for films and novels is to never read any books or see any films with composers or artists in them; they always get it wrong. I have to say that Powers pretty much gets it right. (Jean Echenoz's novel "Ravel" is also excellent.) Never have I read any novelist who comes so close to illuminating a possible state of mind of the composer.
Powers' novel is a biographical portrait of a composer who emerges in the 1950's, and in the course of his compositional life encounters many of the aesthetic trends and battles that have influenced the course of late 20th century music. Total serialism, the revolutions of John Cage, minimalism, neo-romanticsm, etc. take their turns in unsettling the mind of the protagonist; who, from his origins as a somewhat naive child prodigy succumbs repeatedly to the demands of each new aesthetic. (The professors of University of Illinois, that "Darmstadt-on-the Prairies", are portrayed as especially brutal.)
As with virtually all of Powers' novels, there are multiple simultaneous strands of narrative. In this case, he alternates between the narrative of composer's present day existence as a wanted biological terrorist and the narrative of his life. There is a third strand, which turns out to be tweets. How does a composer become a wanted biological terrorist? By pursuing a project very similar to that of the Canadian poet Christian Bök, who has spent the last ten years trying to encode a poem into DNA. (Google to find out details..)
Powers has a sentimental side which I don't always appreciate; he is after an apotheosis, which I admire, but which doesn't always resonate with me. His composer's artistic soul resonates most closely with Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time", as I believe Power's must as well. One of the most moving sections of the book is a whole chapter on the origins and performance of the "Quartet...".
One striking feature of the book is a number of very detailed narrative descriptions of specific pieces of music, such as Messaien's "Quartet for the End of Time" and Reich's "Proverbs" While these descriptions (which go on for a number pages) are both accurate and evocative, I am not really sure what to make of them. Are they meant to recall the music one has already heard, or to give the reader a facsimile of the experience of actually hearing the music? But this problem is endemic to the application of prose to music, in any case.
I don't really know how this novel would resonate with a reader who is not well versed in the history of late 20th century music. Perhaps it would provoke he or she to seek out some of the music described. But, in any case, the book makes for fascinating reading.
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