Serialism Invades Vancouver; No Casualties Reported

Last night we went to a excellent concert by members of the Vancouver Symphony.   The highlight was a performance of Stockhausen's landmark work from the 1950's, "Kontra-punkte".   This was a truly serial piece; pitch, dynamics, timbre etc. all being organized.   But the results were refreshing and exciting to hear.    Serialism has become the bogeyman of 20th century music, typified as music created by composers indifferent to their audience, and rejected by audiences in return.   But how would anyone know it these days, since the music is so rarely played?   I salute the courage of Tovey and his players in presenting this piece.   Did I mention that the concert, on a Sunday night, was sold out?  What we heard was representative of the generation of composers, especially German, that after World War II felt compelled to completely reinvent music from the ground up.   That their reinventions did not take hold scarcely matters; what we heard was music of a kind of extreme beauty, chiseled and precise.  (Stockhausen would proceed to spend the next few decades trying to reinvent music with every new piece.) The extremely difficult piano part was performed with great skill by the fearless Corey Hamm, and the performance was superb.   The rest of the program was equally interesting, including a piece by the great Morton Feldman, and Kurt Weill's Threepenny Opera Suite, which we heard recently performed by the Turning Point Ensemble.   The Orpheum Annex has quite a dry acoustic, enabling every single detail of Weill's fascinating orchestration to come through clearly.  
My only problem with the concert was with the spoken introductions.  Tovey's introduction to the Weill was mostly incoherent.   Riddled with his trademark dry humor, he didn't really tell us much about the music.  He brought up the fact of Stockhausen's piece representing one side of the "great divide" in 20th century music, without mentioning what Weill might have to do with the other side, if that is what he meant.  He also invoked Liza Minnelli, but without ever mentioning Brecht.   Perhaps the talks are just about warming up the audience and making the laugh a bit; in that case, musical information is superfluous.

Where Are You, Merce?, or Will the Thumping Ever Stop?

Last night we went to a performance by Ballet BC.  Ballet BC, is arguably, the best performing arts group in Vancouver.  Under the astute leadership of Emily Molnar, they have a stellar record of commissioning new work from choreographers from all over the world, and a corps of young and very talented dancers.  They seem to be on a sustainable path after a brush with bankruptcy, and have the young and excited audiences that other organizations dream of.
The recent show, though, got me thinking about dance and music.  As a composer who has worked with many dance companies over the years (including Ballet BC), I have a very biased way of experiencing dance.   I see it through the music, and the most significant thing for me is the relationship between the music and the dance.   In that way, I am quasi autistic; where others see a dance being about human emotions, I hear/see rhythms, patterns, lines, colors, and structure.  (Which is not to say that I am not moved by dance.) My two favorite choreographer/composer collaborations are Balanchine/Stravinsky and Cunningham/Cage; the two are certainly polar opposites in their approach to the connection between music and dance.   With Balanchine/Stravinsky, the music and the choreography are mutually intertwined; with Cunningham/Cage the two are completely independent.  (Often the Cunningham dancers would not hear the music until the first performance of the piece.)  This may seem paradoxical, but the complete independence of the music and dance in this case allows each to exist in a kind of clarity which is exciting.

When composers first began to synchronize music to film dramas in the early days of sound film, the paradigm was established by the composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone With the Wind, etc.)   Steiner said that the audience should be able to close their eyes, and by listening to the music, understand everything that was happening on the unseen screen.  In other words, the music should tell the same story as the visuals, and this became the standard Hollywood practice.  As the art of film music developed, some filmmakers and composers realized the aesthetic fallacy of this practice.  Hans Eisler wrote a long screed against the practice, and Jean Cocteau famously took the score he had commissioned for a film, and put the parts of the music in scenes different than that which they had been written.  Godard notoriously chopped up music into small fragments and scattered them around his films, and Alain Resnais often referred to music as a plastic element in his film compositions.  It was not there to illustrate anything.

What does this have to do with dance?  What I would suggest is that many choreographers today have very little sophistication about the aesthetics of music and dance.  While the connections between music and film and music and dance are certainly not functioning in exactly the same way, there is a similarity.  Nowadays music seems to be chosen because it inspires the choreographer, or projects the emotion that they are trying to convey in the dance.  And the same goes for Hollywood.   Or the music is chosen because it is popular, or, in Hollywood's case, the marketing department thinks it will help sell the film (and its soundtrack).    It used to be Philip Glass and Aarvo Part all the time for choreographers.  It seems very few choreographers these days are following Merce Cunningham's innovations.

The paradigm for many dance pieces I have heard lately is to take a piece with a very energetic and repetitive rhythmic pulse, and create movement with a very energetic and rhythmic pulse.  (You could close your eyes and know what's going on on stage.) (This is often "dance music", in the popular genre sense)   For me, it feels like I am watching a workout class.  The virtuosity of the dancers is appealing, but the thing quickly loses its appeal after a certain amount of relentless thumping.  The audience, of course, loves it.  

The other issue I have is with the use of recorded music.  It is hard to quantify, but somehow the relationship with the music and dance enters a different realm when the sound emanates from loudspeakers.   Unfortunately, for a majority of dance companies, like Ballet BC, live music is simply not an affordable option.

On the Ballet BC program, the first piece, a premiere by Cayetano Soto, began superbly with interesting movement counterpointing nicely with music from David Lang's "little match girl passion".  The beautiful austerity of Lang's music worked extremely well against the more vigorous patterns of Soto's choreography.   Things went downhill from there, though.    I also liked the beginning of Gustavo Sansano's work, with the andante from Bach's "Italian Concerto" contrasting with a beautifully idiosyncratic movement by a solo dancer.   But the piece as a whole lost me, owing in part to its being set to mishmash of mediocre recordings of bits from different Bach keyboard works, defying all musical logic.   Here is an instance where a choreographer could have set the piece to a single keyboard work, and even allowed for the use of a live performer.

The last piece on the program thumped me into a state of extreme fatigue.

Marx once said, to a man who had five children, "I like my cigar, too, but I take it out once in a while."   Groucho Marx, that is.



 

Lower East Side Galleries

I went gallery hopping in a different neighborhood. This time, it was the Lower East Side, which I had no idea had become a thriving art district.  It makes Chelsea seem over pretentious.  It is astonishing to me how many galleries there are; I don't know how they all survive.   As always, part of the pleasure is stumbling upon artists you have never heard of.  I was particularly excited by the work of Joanne Greenbaum, who paints large scale colorful abstract paintings that slowly reveal considerable sophistication in line and color.   She uses color boldly, but in a way that gradually makes sense.  It's nice to see painting without rhetoric.  This show was at the Rachel Uffner Gallery on Suffolk Street, in a beautiful space with a large skylight for natural light.  Some examples (the originals are about 9 feet high.):

Another intriguing show was by the Uzbeki artist Stas Volovik, who seemed to be channeling Kandinsky in some fashion.

And there were other shows of some interest, as well.  The whole neighborhood is a typical New York mixture of the old and new, bordering Delancy Street and its housing projects, the increasingly chic Bowery, and Houston Street on the north. Art galleries, Chinatown, Little Italy and some of the grunge of the past all rub shoulders.

The Metropolitan Museum

The Met is probably my favorite place to be in New York.  The old adage that it so big that you have to pick a destination  no longer holds true for me.   Rather, I revel in the opportunity to be able to wander from European medieval painting into Islamic decorative art to Cycladic statues, for example.  To see your notions about art constantly questioned and sometimes overturned is a delight.  One culture might venerate one kind of image, while another has a completely different sense of purpose.   For example, I recently saw a wonderful exhibition of Japanese screen painting of the Edo period.  Landscapes, traditional narratives, and contemplation of nature are often the subjects.

Then I wandered towards the European painting section, and the first thing I see is a room full of portraits of important people.  Why portraits?   (The answer, of course, as always, is that of Willie Sutton.  Because that's where the money was.)  Then you look at the carved statues in the Oceanic art wing.   They can scare you.  Why were they made?

Of course, sometimes I go with a specific destination in mind, but other times I want to be some kind of flâneur, wandering aimlessly and never knowing what I might see next.   And compared to the hordes that overwhelm  MOMA,  the Met is relatively uncrowded.  Especially if you ignore the high traffic areas like the French impressionists, etc.  Recently I have been in the room with the five Vermeer paintings and been the only one there.   And if you go to obscure places like the Lehman wing, there is no one there.

Recently I spent a lot of time looking at the Dutch still life paintings from the 17th century, which I usually ignore.  But then you take your time and look carefully, and they start to reveal their secrets.

There's something about being in a non-crowded room and not being in a hurry that puts me a receptive state.

In the next room, a Dutch painting of a cathedral interior, which I had glanced at before.

Then you realize there is a dog peeing in the church.  Was this normal in churches of that time. Or is there a message from the artist?  I have no clue.

I eventually ended up looking at Roman wall paintings.  They are very old!  Beautiful colors and the texture of the aged surfaces is fascinating.

 As I said before, the Met is my favorite place to be in New York.  The sheer diversity of artistic endeavors on display is inspiring, and the respect with which all kinds of art are displayed is equally inspiring.  While other museums do very trendy things to make themselves relevant; the Met simply presents its amazing treasure in an environment which facilitates the true enjoyment of art.  And combine that with a web site which allows access to both high resolution images of the art and information.  Bravo!

Photography In New York

I have always enjoyed going to photography exhibitions.   I saw a number of them recently in New York, with the result that I began to change my thinking about photography.  The first show I went to was the AIPAD show at the Park Avenue Armory.  This show, like the similar art shows that take place at the same venue, is a large event featuring many photography galleries and dealers, some of them familiar New York ones, and others unknown to me.  It was that familiar combination of showing art for its own sake, and selling it.  The emphasis was on selling.   I found very little of interest; almost all of the work was that of the tried and true photographers.   It was also disconcerting that many of the dealers had open bins of photographs that you could riffle through like at a flea market, except that the images were normally priced between $2,000 and $10,000.   At first I thought they were just fake reproductions!   All of which made me think more about the nature of photographs.  When you buy a painting, it is one of a kind (unless it is by Damien Hurst).   When you are buying a photograph, presumably you are buying an image that has been personally produced by the photographer, usually in some limited quantity.  But what strikes me is that, in this day of increasingly sophisticated printing techniques for books, it is increasingly harder to tell the difference between an original print and a high quality book reproduction.   For example, the late Henri Cartier-Bresson was relatively indifferent to the visual quality of his prints; they don't look that different in books.   What matters is the content of the image.   On the other, a carefully produced gelatin silver print can be a truly sensuous object.   Joseph Sudek's prints come to mind.     All of which is to say that often times these days, what you are buying when you buy a photograph is an image for both its content/meaning and for its certification as a genuine object produced in limited quantities.   If I can just as easily cut a Cartier-Bresson photo out of a book and frame it and put it on a wall, why pay many thousands of dollars for an original print, that, for most viewers, from a distance would look the same?  Then you see an absolutely gorgeous print that cold not possibly be reproduced, and in theory, one would understand paying a big chunk of money for it.

I did succumb to the general aura of the market place by buying several very cheap photographs.  They were aerial photographs, taken in WWI, of the front. Mysterious patterns of trenches and bombardments, seen from directly above.  Photographs meant for military use, but possessing a visual poetry of their own.

The other shows I saw resonated with the above.  There was a show of photographs taken by the renowned photojournalist Robert Capa.  The novelty was that they were in color.   Recently printed from his slides, they were mostly produced for magazine commissions.  The photographs showed no particular aesthetic quality; the most interesting were the ones shot in the Soviet Union, where the reds of the Stalinist propaganda were enlightening. (We expect photographs of the Stalinist era to be in grainy black and white.)  We look at them for their content, for what they tell us about people and places and history.  The Morgan Library now has a photography department.  (Mr. Morgan did not collect them, no surprise.)  Their show was something rather silly; a roomful of photographs, with each adjacent photograph sharing an obvious and usually trivial connection to its neighbor.  (This photograph has a hand in it, and wow, the one next to it does too!)  What was more provocative was the juxtaposition of work by renowned photographers with vernacular, found photographs.  I do like vernacular photographs; like the kind where the amateur photographer has somehow managed to visually decapitate his subjects.  But what does this say about the medium?  I have never seen a painting exhibition that does the same thing.   Imagine a show which juxtaposed a Rembrandt portrait, with, say, a portrait painted by an ex American president.
(For a very funny review of Bush's paintings read this in the Guardian.)  It might be interesting, but I can't imagine it ever happening.

The best show I saw was that of the photographs of Paris by Charles Marville at the Met.
The best of these photos were the ones taken before Hausmann's demolitions; documenting a much older Paris, without its Grand Boulevards.  Marville's photos combine both a documentary interest with a beautiful sense of composition.  They also exhibit an extraordinary technical skill, given the limitations of photographic equipment of that period.  They do resemble the later photographs of Atget, who was also interested in documenting the streetscapes of Paris, but they lack the peculiar poetry of Atget's photos.  I  love the vision of the street beyond the entrance to the courtyard in this one.

There was an adjacent show of photographs of Paris by other photographers; Atget, as always, was my favorite.

So what did I think?  Not easy to say...  Traditional photography is a strange brew of reality, visual composition, technique, and happenstance.  Nowadays it is one aspect of the larger artistic practice of image making, while at the same time part of the domain of the billions of images that are uploaded and shared constantly. A photographer like Marville needed a lot of heavy equipment, patience, and time to create an image; in the present, all we need is our everpresent cell phones to create an image.

Charpentier X 2

Up until a month ago, I had never heard a Charpentier opera.  Now I have heard two.  The first, in Victoria, BC, was a Boston Early Music Festival production of Charpentier's
Orpheus opera.   The singing and instrumental performance were truly superb; every rhythmic nuance came through, and the blending of the voices in Charpentier's frequent ensembles was superb.  The opera itself is more of a pastoral than a real drama, and a little disappointing.   The second opera we heard, "Acteon", though also a kind of pastorale, was more compelling. It was performed by Julliard students, conducted by the renowned William Christie. Again, the rhythmic pacing and instrumental performance were outstanding, but the voices were problematic.  Several of the singers seemed to have very little sense of baroque style and seemed unacquainted with the notion of dynamics.  It was fortissimo and vibrato all the way.   Surprising, given Christie's reputation as a developer of voices.  
I once wrote a ballet score based on the music of Rameau, and fell in love with his unique phrasing and rhythmic style, which is characteristic of the French baroque.  Charpentier, though earlier, has a lot of the same stylistic proclivities.   I much prefer the French style to the more rhythmically square rhythms of other Baroque composers, such as Telemann, for example.

Johns and Gauguin at MOMA

I saw two absolutely wonderful, and complimentary shows at MOMA today.  One was of very recent work by Jasper Johns, and the other of work by Gauguin.   The Johns, two rooms, showed a series of works based on this photo of painter Lucian Freud:

This was the theme; and what you see is two rooms of variations on this theme.  It really works just like a musical theme and variations; we recognize aspects of the theme in each.   Johns is astonishingly creative as he transforms this image through different kinds media.  (In most cases, he mirrors the image.) Here is just one:

Who would have thought in the 1950's that Jasper Johns would become our Grand Old Master in 2014?   Not to mention that his technique and imagination put most contemporary artists to shame; he is definitely out of step with today's ideological art.
(If he were a young artist today, would he be summarily dismissed?  Craft and technique?  How quaint.)

The Gauguin show was equally exciting, though my enthusiasm was somewhat tempered by MOMA's characteristic teeming hordes.   It completely transformed my ideas of Gauguin's work.   We are all familiar with his paintings; they are instantly recognizable.  What this show does is focus on all the other media that he used; woodcuts, relief carving, and even a technique he called oil transfer.  We see him working in exactly the same fashion as Johns; making variations on themes (and there are not many themes).
He does woodcuts, and then prints out many different versions, sometimes adding watercolors or other materials.

Here are a few examples:

 

I still find the overall environment of MOMA extremely unpleasant; too many people, stifling air, overwhelming noise .  In addition, I notice things like the second floor "MOMA books", which was originally established as a bookstore within the museum with the idea of a more comprehensive selection that the gift shop downstairs.  Now the tables that used to have the latest and most interesting new books on art have piles of Van Gogh calendars and knick-knacks.   Appalling!   We need to put the true cultural connoisseurs, Jim Jarmusch's vampires, in charge.

Futurism

We saw the big Futurism show at the Guggenheim.  It was very interesting.   Futurism, of course, is problematic.  Any movement that starts with a manifesto proclaiming love for war and contempt for women (literally), then collaborates with fascists, and ends up in advertising is very suspect.  But sometimes you have to ignore the endless manifestoes and movements and look at what they do.  (Why is it that so many visual artists feel the need to form groups with labels?  It's bad enough that the critics do it.)   The virtue of the Guggenheim's exhibit, for me, is that it follows in a very comprehensive way from the familiar paintings of the pre World War I period all the way up to the death of Marinetti in 1944.   There are a number of artists about whom I knew very little, and a lot of work in different media.  For example, I had no idea that Diaghilev in 1925 had commissioned the futurist artist Balla to create an abstract stage work for a performance of Stravinsky's "Fireworks".  The performance fell apart, apparently due to both technical and union problems.  It was also interesting to think about the early Futurist works in connection some very similar works in the Expressionist and Cubist movements.  And there were these wonderful murals painted by Benedetta (a female artist, so much for manifestoes) for a conference room at the Palermo Post Office.

And the drawings by Antonio Sant'Elia; an architect whose buildings were never built..

The Guggenheim is still problematic at times as a venue for viewing art.  Some of the

 smaller paintings cannot be seen closeup because they are on walls too far away, and

 several paintings were impossible to look at because of reflections from the lighting. 

Strauss

We decided to go hear an all Strauss concert, performed by the Munich Philharmonic, conducted by Gergiev as a last minute replacement.   Gergiev, who eats Wagner operas for breakfast, had flown in that morning from Europe, and would fly back the next morning.  And, despite the last minute change, there were protestors in front of Carnegie Hall, protesting Gergiev's support for Putin's treatment of gay Crimeans, or something like that.  (It's worth googling to find Gergiev's conducting schedule; for most of the later half of April, he is conducting 2 concerts a day, sometimes in different cities.  Don't know how he does it.)

I don't like the music of Richard Strauss; or more precisely, I don't really get it.  The performance of "Also Sprach Zarathustra", didn't do much for me.  The harmony doesn't really appeal to my ears (while Vera rhapsodized over the augmented chords), and I find his phrasing consistently muddled.  And philosophy in music is problematic for me as well; I don't get the narrative.   "Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks", on the other hand, was a delight.  It really is the progenitor of all cartoon music, I think, with its rapid shifts of texture and mood, and virtuosic, kaleidoscopic orchestration.   Even the "tragic" moments have that air of cartoon tragedy, like when Wily Coyote is flattened and then starts up again.   Which makes me think of the other thing that happens when I listen to Strauss; I constantly hear the various tropes that film composers over the years have abused to no end.  I'm talking about you, John Williams.  Not Strauss's fault, though.

Welcome Back to New York

We arrived in New York on a late flight on a Wednesday night.  In a taxi at about 1:30 AM, we got stuck in some sort of traffic jam on the west side.   The next morning, I went out; walking down our street, I immediately got pooped on by a pigeon.   I do love New York!

Update; later in the week, on a Monday evening, we sat outside for a drink.   On Tuesday evening, we emerged from one of our favorite places, the Brandy Library, to discover that it was snowing, hard, and blowing sideways.  In April.

World Class!

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....)

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.

Alain Resnais

I was sad to hear of the death of director Alain Resnais last week.  What can you say about a director who began directing films in the late 1940's, and whose penultimate film, made when he was 90 years old, was entitled (in the English translation) "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet".   It seemed like a good time to catch up on some of the films that I haven't seen, so I have been watching Resnais all week.  Here are a few thoughts...

Resnais's reputation rests primarily on his first two films, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad", films that came out at the time of the first films of Godard, Truffaut, etc.   He made films consistently after those films, but never with quite the same impact.  For me, the films of Resnais are all about narrative and time, and are fascinating all through his career.  His third film, "Muriel", is a fractured, disjunct narrative that takes place in the aftermath of the war of Algerian independence, with an austere and compelling modernist score by Hans Werner Henze.  I prefer it to the first two films.   I recently watched the 1990's fim, "Smoking/No Smoking", which features a complex, branching narrative, adapted from a set of plays by the English playwright Alan Ayckbourn.    The story follows to a conclusion, and then "rewinds" to an earlier moment, and with an "ou bien...", the story follows a different possible outcome. It proceeds to do this many times!   Here is a chart, found on the internet, which illuminates the structure of the film, with the various possible branches of the narrative:

Needless to say, this is not how they teach you to construct a screenplay in Hollywood.
The film has never been released on DVD in North America.  Resnais is also a lover of theatrical artifice; thus the film is made entirely in a studio, and all the parts are played by two actors (but without any fancy film effects).  But ultimately the film is very human, as we ponder the possible fates of all the characters; it almost feels more real to know of all the different permutations of fate.

Another film I saw recently was "Life Is a Bed of Roses" (the English translation of the title).  This film constantly shifts between three narratives; one is about a very rich madman around the time of World War I, who decides to build a some kind temple of happiness, and drugs his willing friends to reprogram their minds.  The second involves a hilarious educator's conference in contemporary times, taking place in the same building, with much discussion about the role of imagination in young children's education by badly misinformed educators.  The third seems to involve some imaginary fairy tale world, with painted on glass sets.    The other striking thing is that characters switch back and forth from talking to singing now and then.   It's not a musical, and the convention of characters bursting into song at song-worthy moments is not observed.   Rather, they just sometimes sing their lines instead of saying them.   Again, not a recipe for audience involvement.   The cast includes the late Cathy Berberian, known for her innovative singing in Luciano Berio's compositions.

The essential element in most of Resnais's films is a narrative paradox of some kind, "Last Year at Marienbad" being the most famous example.   People have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what is going on in that movie; I believe Resnais has somewhere said that it can't be explained.  Sometimes the paradox is overt, and at other times, you only realize the paradox when you think very carefully after you have seen the film.
(The contemporary Korean film director Hong Sang-soo works very much in the same vein; in one of his films we see the same story twice, once from the woman's point of view, and once from the man's.)

Sublime Comedy

While in New York at Christmas we managed to see two sublime Shakespearian comedies (in spite of the law which mandates that only Messiahs and Nutcrackers can be performed between Dec 15 and December 30).   The first was the Globe Theatre's production of "The Twelfth Night", featuring an all male cast, and done with live music of the period and authentic musical instruments.   The play was so well directed and acted that you soon forgot that the women were played by men, except in the case of Viola, of course, who is a man playing a women acting as a man...  When the play was over, I had the sounds of Elizabethan English resonating in my ears; everything else sounded prosaic. Mark Rylance as Olivia was particularly remarkable and convincing as a woman in love; I don't know how he does it.

 

The second sublime Shakespearian experience was the Met's new production of Verdi's Falstaff, conducted by James Levine.  The opera itself is unique; a comedy by Verdi that moves with great speed and agility through the libretto by Boito, adapted from Shakespeare.   It is practically aria-free; to my warped ears it sounded more like the vocal music of Eliot Carter in its mercurial sensibility and intricate ensembles.   The cast was superb, and, needless to say, the Met orchestra under James Levine was continually entrancing.  

Queensboro Bridge

As I have been walking all the East River bridges, it was now time to do the Queensboro Bridge.   Not the most exciting of bridges, really, but worth the trip.  I have ridden over it countless times, and viewed it many times from the Roosevelt Island Tramway, but never walked across it.   I began on the East Side, where traffic going on to the bridge remains supreme.
I saw this:

A Jackson Pollock?   Pigeon poop on the sidewalk...

The bridge itself is not great for walking; on one side of the pedestrian path are the constant fumes and noise of traffic, and on the other side, a high chain link fence which obscures the view.  One thing I did notice, though, was the color; I had always assumed that the bridge was a sooty black; it is actually painted tan and purple.

The bridge is definitely in the Erector Set style. And what appears to be a very orderly structure from a distance becomes very confused and disorderly when viewed at an angle and close up.

Some of the bridge, is held together by some form of duct tape...

Many years ago, we used to live on Roosevelt Island, and we had a view looking out over the big Con Ed plant.   It's still there:

When you get to Queens, the subway line comes up from out of the ground and you get three colors.

Otherwise, this area of Queens nondescript; I quickly got on the subway back to Manhattan.

Music of the 1920's

We heard Vancouver's excellent Turning Point Ensemble in a concert the other day of music from 1920's Europe.  There were two highlights from the concert.  The first, the Suite from Kurt Weill's "Threepenny Opera", was familiar, but an absolute joy to hear performed live with such skill and precision.  All Weill's seductive melodies were heard in their very distinctive orchestrations, and the clarity with which Weill makes his subtle disjunct permutations of these tunes is wonderful.   The other highlight was an unfamiliar piece, a concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra by Erwin Schuloff.  The idea of the piece, to begin with, is quirky; such ensemble would normally be considered quite impossible to balance.  But Schuloff makes it work, and the results are always musically intriguing.   One of the movements ends in a chord for string harmonics with contrabassoon, for example.  Equally unfamiliar to me was the early Hindemith Kammermusik No. 1, which was bristling with energy and musical invention.
The concert was marketed under the rubric of forbidden music, i.e. that which the Nazis suppressed.   The case of Schuloff, who died in a concentration camp, is indeed a case where the Nazi suppression succeeded; contemporary music has a hard enough time being heard without any suppression and I think if Schuloff had managed to emigrate and survive, his reputation as a great composer of the 20th century would have ensued.

It was a great concert; a perfect example of innovative and interesting programming.

Midsummer Night's Dream

I went to hear Britten's opera "Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Met.   I have very little aquaintance with the music of Britten, having been in graduate school in music during the period when Britten was not to be mentioned.  I have also composed several scores based on the play, so I had additional incentive to hear it.   The most successful musical versions, though, have been those with mostly incidental music (Purcell and Mendelssohn), and not full settings with the play as libretto.   Unlike Ades' version of the Tempest, Britten uses the original text, with judicious cuts.

I enjoyed the opera, though, for me, Britten still does not speak to me personally.  Like the play, the opera combines contrasting moments of magic, love, and burlesque.  There are some very intriguing moments, especially in the magical parts; but then we get into moments of music-hall farce.  I never get tired, though, of hearing the Met orchestra.  Britten's orchestration is often very delicate, and hearing every detail is a delight.
The production is brightly colorful without being particularly striking in any way.

It's not every day that you see a countertenor (Oberon) in a flashy chartreuse suit:

Textiles and Ligeti

I went to the Metropolitan Museum, both to hear a concert by the ensemble "Alarm Will Sound" and to see art.
The show "Interwoven Globe", an exhibit of textiles from around the world between 1500 and 1800, was both fascinating and a great visual treat.   The fascination for me was in the cross-global pollination of ideas and techniques.   For example, one hanging, "The Abduction of Helen"  (of Troy) was a depiction of an ancient Greek story, created by Chinese artisans for the Portuguese market.   The embroiderers  worked from European visual models, but also incorporated elements from Chinese weaving.  In addition there were painted sections, done by Chinese artists who had been trained in Japan by Jesuits!    Talk about globalism and multiculturalism....
Here it is: click to enlarge (It is about 15 feet wide in the original):

Other examples were equally complex in global connections, adding Iran, Turkey, and Latin America into the mix.

Here is another one, as described on the Met's website:

This tapestry was produced by highly skilled Andean weavers. Its diverse iconography reflects the range of sources and ideas that informed the intellectual framework of colonial Andean society. Along with scenes from the Old Testament, classical Greek mythology, and local daily life, the amorphous central blue shape seems to reinterpret a Chinese symbol. At top left, three horsemen (possibly representing the Magi) wear European-style garments; above their heads is the enigmatic phraseMoussom Nessept. Although the precise meaning is unknown, moussom may relate to the Arabic mawsim, referring to trade winds that are favorable for sailing.

(I have to say the the Met's website is exemplary, with easy access to high resolution images and information.)

After viewing this exhibition and a quick look at the Balthus (which is too creepy for my taste..), I wandered through the Met and had a light dinner in the cafeteria before going to a 7 PM concert.   This was my first time at an evening at the Met, and the atmosphere was very nice; less crowded and noisy than during the day.  And there is something to be said for being able to peruse ancient Egyptian art while waiting for a concert to start.

The concert, performed by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound, was excellent.  They played a early Thomas Ades piece, "Living Toys", which is almost hyperactive in its rapid juxtaposition of contrasting materials.  It is orchestrated to the hilt.   I also heard a kind of Ivesian quality to the piece, with its jarring quotations and juxtapositions.  Which made even more sense when the next piece on the program was Ives, one of his crazy ragtime pieces for ensemble.   The highlight, though, was the Ligeti "Chamber Concerto" from 1969 or so.   To hear all of Ligeti's inventive sonic textures live was treat.  The concert ended with another Ives ragtime piece, even crazier than the previous one.

Stravinsky, Hindemith, Webern

Which orchestra in New York has played pieces like Webern's "Symphony" and his "Concerto", Stravinsky's "Symphony in Three Movements" and his Huxley "Variations" in the last year, multiple times?
The answer is the New York City Ballet Orchestra, playing live with the choreography of George Balanchine.   In fact, one could say that Balanchine remains the major advocate for twentieth century orchestral music in New York.  
I heard and saw an amazing program at the New York City Ballet as part of their "Black and White" series; which means just music and movement; no sets and simple leotard costumes.  The highlight for me was the piece "Episodes", choreographed, in order, to Webern's "Symphony", "Five Pieces" op. 10, "Concerto" op. 24, and his arrangement of the Bach "Ricercar".   I was incredibly moved to see what Balanchine had done with this music which I love so much;  the choreography was subtle, inventive, and always consistent with the spirit of Webern's music.  It's impossible to describe.  I feel very lucky to be on a planet where I can go with 2,000 other people on a Sunday afternoon and hear these pieces.

The other 3 pieces on the program were exciting as well.  A piece which was new to me was "The Four Temperaments", choreographed to a Hindemith score of the same name for piano and strings.   I had not heard the music before.  (Hindemith wrote many interesting pieces, especially early in his career, but his reputation suffers badly from some of the more pedantic and academic pieces he wrote.  Not to mention those of us who suffered through his "Elementary Training For Musicians")   The music works in an incredibly intricate way with the choreography, the dialogues between the piano and the strings being contrasted with various formations of soloists and groups.

I also love the "Duo Concertante", where Balanchine consistently subverts or expectations by having the dancers stop dancing and go stand around the piano and listen to the music.  And the "Symphony in Three Movements" is always exhilarating.  

Balanchine is an extraordinary artist; he really deserves to be on the same 20th century pedestal with people like Stravinsky and Picasso.

For further information, the New York Times was as excited as I was..


New York Times Review

Voluptuous Microtones

I went to hear a concert of the music of the Austrian composer Georg Haas at Miller Theatre.  It was extraordinary.   I was unfamiliar with his music before this concert, and now I am eager to hear more.   The most distinguishing feature of his music is the use of all kinds of microtones; just intonation, overtone series, quarter tones, you name it.   But all of this is in service of obtaining some absolutely beautiful sonorities;  you really feel like you have landed on some other, different planet where they never were limited to the tempered scale.   His sonic imagination is truly amazing.  But Haas' sensibility is a very traditional one, though; these sonorities are used to build up great masses of sound and climaxes which are almost Wagnerian in expression.   In texture, the music most closely resembles that of Scelsi; sonorites are sustained and juxtaposed, and the language is basically harmonic and timbral.

The major work on the program, "Atthis", a cantata for mezzo and eight instruments, is a moving work in the European art music tradition.  Using texts from Sappho, it is extremely expressive in a very traditional sense.  Usually, microtones sound like out of tune playing to me; but, in this music, it all seems very natural and convincing.  Needless to say, the piece is extremely difficult to perform, especially for the singer.  I thought the performances were fantastic.  Brad Lubman conducted the Ensemble Signal, and the singer was Rachel Calloway.

The first work on the program "tria ex uno",  for small ensemble, starts as a straightforward arrangement of a short fragment from Josquin.  The second short section turns that fragment into something like Webern's arrangement of Bach.  The third, and longest part takes the Josquin into Hass' microtonal world in an entirely convincing and expressive manner.