[under construction]

 

November 2003: Naming Names

We need a new name for new classical music -- something that speaks to people who don't like mainstream classical concerts. Fine, you don't like orchestras in tails playing Beethoven. But you'll like this! My suggestion: "alternative classical."

"We might wish that music spoke for itself, and that we didn’t need special genre names to identify it.

"But that’s not how the world works...."
 

October 2003: Maverick Subway

About ZanKEL Hall (as we're supposed to pronounce it), the new space at Carnegie Hall, and its notable problem with subway noise. Why don't they commission pieces that would incorporate the sound of the subway -- and even glory in it?

"As I'm writing this, Zankel Hall has just opened. Of course it's Carnegie Hall's new contribution to New York's musical life, their third performing space, a multi-use hall that can be reconfigured to have seats, or no seats, a stage, or no stage—kind of fun, really, especially (I'd guess) if we could see it in action, rearranging itself like some shape-shifting creature in a science fiction film.

"And I guess it's the big topic of conversation in the New York music world this fall…" [except that it isn't, because the Philharmonic and Carnegie Hall called off their merger -- that's the big topic now!]

September 2003: Noise for Whole Ears

Dissonance in Bob Dylan. Or rather a kind of harmony that just doesn't exist in classical music, where what ought to be grating dissonances function instead as texture. Which is a ghastly academic way to put it!

"In 'Girl from the North Country,' the second track on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (his second album), there's an arresting moment. The song's about to end, and Dylan, playing guitar and putting his harmonica to his mouth, squeezes out a high B flat and holds it over two chords it doesn't go with at all. I'd been on a Dylan kick—the result of reading Positively 4th Street, David Hajdu's evocative account of Dylan, Joan Baez, and Richard and Mimi Fariña—and though I'd heard this song before, I'd never noticed this crazy sound."

August 2003: Dog Days Patter

The sound of a fan. And other domestic noises; my second annual tribute to Tom Johnson, who used to write about brooks and summer birds in his column in The Village Voice.

"It's August, the dog days, and I'm going on vacation the day after I write this. Very tempting just to comment more on things my friends and colleagues (not to mention total strangers) have been saying in the forum on my pages here. I confess I go two ways about that. On one hand, I love discussion. On the other, one of the delights of having this column is that I can go down any road I like—ask any writer how often they get paid to do that—and I might not want the roads the people on the forum choose."

July 2003: Fascinating Rhythms

In which I respond to the forum raging all around me (on my page on the NewMusicBox site). The main subjects: Whether new music concerts can save classical music (probably not), and whether there ought to be a split between the mind and dancing (forget it!).

"Wow. That's one response to the outpouring my last column provoked. I had a few e-mails warning me that the discussion abandoned the issue I'd raised, but I'm glad it did. I was talking about something important, maybe, but also pretty limited -- how critics should respond to the crisis in classical music. Whatever sense my call to arms might have made, the crisis itself is far more important, and that's what nearly everyone addressed. So my thanks to the people who liked what I said, and Seth Gordon, I couldn't agree more with your suggestion: "GIVE BAD REVIEWS." That's not the only thing critics ought to do, but without it, everything else is pretty useless. As you more or less said, Seth, who's going to believe a jerk who says that everything's great?"

June 2003: Critics and the Crisis

Classical music is having a crisis. What should critics do? They'd better make it interesting to anyone who might read them -- and if they can't do that, we're all in trouble. (With a gush of comments from readers.)

"Classical music may be in trouble. Details below. But if this is true, what should music critics do about it? This month seemed like a good time to ask this question, because it's the month when the Music Critics Association of North America holds its annual meeting (in San Francisco this year, from June 18 to 21). In my view, they should be asking the question themselves, and in fact might scrap all their other business, because if something isn't done, they—or rather we (since I'm a critic, too)—might all be out of jobs. To say nothing of the harm to music itself."

May 2003: Why Orchestras Don't Play New Music

Critics forever attack orchestras for not playing enough new music. But do they know what the orchestras are up against? Some very practical considerations, unfortunately.

"Well, of course they do play it -- and in fact, from what I've picked up in the orchestra world, they play more of it than some of their marketing directors might like. Some orchestras even play a lot of it…well, a fair amount anyway, especially if you count as "new music" anything written since 1945 (a long time ago, I know, but still just yesterday in the classical music world). And they play even more if you include some difficult -- for the audience, that is -- 20th-century classics. Next season, for instance, when the Philadelphia Orchestra stresses Messiaen at four concerts, that'll count as new music, at least to the Philadelphia audience."

April 2003: An Old Friend

About Tom Johnson, the critic who, back in the '70s, made the whole world aware of "downtown" new music.

"My old friend Tom Johnson is one of the most agreeable, musically potent, and influential people in New York's new music history. He gave a concert here not long ago, and I want to praise it. ** But first some other events…" [and here follow some concert reviews]

March 2003: Oblique Writing

A tribute to Brian Eno's oblique strategies (a deck of cards offering strategies for artists) -- written by drawing cards from the deck at random, and doing what they say.  

"'Take a break.'

"You know you're in trouble when you sit down to write, ask for some advice, and in reply get the three words above. And it's even worse when the subject of your piece is the source of the advice -- which for me, today, is Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies."

February 2003: Big Statements

No summary needed. The beginning says it all:

"Last month, I celebrated the diversity of new music -- or, more exactly, how impossible it is to find a central style, tone, or meaning in what composers do right now. All of us are on our own; it's fun to learn to live with that. ** This month, I want to go to an opposite extreme. Why doesn't new music have a central style or trend, or at least something so new and forceful that we all have to take a stand on it? Why don't composers make big statements any more?"

January 2003: Pieces of the Elephant

Why there's no central style in new music, and why that's a good thing.

"As I was watching Mercy -- Meredith Monk's deeply touching music-theater piece, created in collaboration with Ann Hamilton, and performed at BAM -- I suddenly realized how wrong I'd been about something I'd thought for years. I've loved Meredith's work, but always thought it sat in some off-center new music niche. Pierre Boulez, by contrast, lives and works on Main Street, or so I thought, more or less unconsciously. And that's where anyone lived who wrote for the standard forces of the concert hall."

December 2002: Punch-Drunk Column

I saw Punch-Drunk Love. Wonderful movie, wonderful soundtrack. I had to write about it.

"Some of the best new sounds I've lately heard are on the soundtrack of Punch-Drunk Love, a marvelous, mostly unpredictable romantic comedy directed by P. T. Anderson, who also did Magnolia. This movie, like Magnolia, is almost an art film in pop-film guise, or maybe the reverse, a pop film in art-film disguise. I felt almost enchanted as I watched it. Adam Sandler is an inept single guy with a business that sells, absurdly, gag toilet plungers; Emily Watson is the unsure woman who grabs onto him. As their romance slides toward an ending that looks like it has to be happy (in the best Hollywood style), I began to grouse, thinking everything might be wrapped up too neatly, that the suppressed (or maybe not so suppressed) violence in the lovers would be swept under the nearest, classiest rug. But as Watson spoke the film's final line—words that somehow sound both grounded and totally crosseyed—I saw that Anderson was way ahead of me. He'd thought of everything I groused about, and left his lovers shaking on what just might be the edge of a cliff."

November 2002: A Modest Idea

Why classical radio stations should commission new music -- even if it's the kind of music-lite stuff they all too often play.

"This past summer, I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about dinner music. I’d eaten in a fine country restaurant, where unfortunately there was one annoyance—classical music on the stereo, first some surging 19th-century romantic work, bad for the stomach, and then classical music’s greatest hits, Bolero and the like, bad for the imagination (and distracting precisely because they’re so familiar). ** That got me wondering what music might have been better.…"

October 2002: Honest Voice

A CD arrived with a cello concerto by John Williams (yes, that John Williams), and I took it seriously, as it deserves to be taken. But my reactions still were mixed.

"Something happened as I got ready to write this column -- I thought I got bored with the music I was going to write about. I guess that's an occupational hazard for critics, since we're forced to pay attention to all kinds of things, whether we really care about them or not. In this case, though, I picked the music -- John Williams' Concerto for Cello and Orchestra -- because it really did interest me. So what went wrong?"

September 2002: Animal Instinct

This speaks for itself:

"Warwick, NY: When you read this, it'll be around Labor Day, time for going back to school, for work, for the concert season, and for other urban pursuits. But I'm writing in the country, on an August night, the air thick with the buzz of insects. So I thought I'd say goodbye to summer by writing about the sounds I hear around our country house. They're also balm for any sadness on the anniversary of 9/11."

September 2001: Moving Music

About the wonderful composer Ingram Marshall, who deserves all the praise he can get.

"I was deeply moved when I heard the premiere of Ingram Marshall's Kingdom Come, played by the American Composers Orchestra in 1997, and I wasn't alone. The piece got an ovation. I left the concert with two members of the ACO's board. Both had been as touched as I was; one said he'd been in tears. ** Now Kingdom Come has been recorded by the ACO on a Nonesuch release, and I can hear it again. If anything, I love it even more. Right from the start, it's strongly emotional, with a timpani roll leading into an unhappy minor triad, which rises through the orchestra from the low strings to the flutes and violins. Then all this happens once more, though now it's a different minor triad, entering underneath the first one almost like a shudder. ** But then strong emotion is a constant trait of Ingram's music…"

August 2001: Kitschometer

About new tonal music -- and how near some of it might come (or might not come) to kitsch. (This won ASCAP's Deems Taylor award, given annually to many pieces of classical and pop music writing, picked as the best of the year.)

"I've been listening to a splashy and not very wonderful (though in the end instructive) CD - The Music of Peter Boyer, a collection of orchestral works released this year by Koch. Boyer is an ambitious 31-year-old, who, his press kit says, is 'fast becoming one of the most prominent young American composers.' He has roots in both film scores and symphonic composition, and to get an idea of what makes his work not very wonderful, take a look at some of his titles (and the ideas behind them): Celebration Overture, Titanic, Three Olympians - which is about three familiar Greek gods: Apollo, Aphrodite, and Ares - and finally The Ghosts of Troy, a symphonic poem based on Homer's Iliad, with movements like 'The Rage of Achilles' and 'The Ransom and Burial of Hector.'"

(And by the way -- would publicists please give up that "fast becoming" bullshit? Whenever I read it in a biography or press release, I know instantly that whoever's being described this way doesn't yet amount to much. If Boyer or some allegedly hot baritone or violinist really was "fast becoming" as prominent as their publicity claims, wouldn't we all know it?)

July 2001: Enough Nostalgia?

Glenn Branca's Symphony No. 13 for massed guitars was far more than an exercise in '80s nostalgia when I heard it in a place that later gave me a pang -- right between the two towers of the World Trade Center.

"It was such a New York night. ** There we were, 'we' being an audience of several hundred, in the shadow, the valley, or, better, the notch between the two twin thrusts of the World Trade Center towers. And from the stage in front of us roared the music of Glenn Branca, which I hadn't heard live for many years. This was the premiere of his Symphony No. 13, Hallucination City, for, the program said, 100 electric guitars, though in fact I counted not many more than 70 instruments, and some of them, it turned out, were basses."

June 2001: Don't Look Back

About new operas, and how they're not original enough -- plus a summary of what music schools ought to teach opera composers, about the opera tradition.

"I'm going to talk about the extraordinary program the New York City Opera calls Showcasing American Composers…But before I get to that, I want to talk about the technique of composing operas, something I do myself, and therefore take a lot of interest in. I wanted to start by saying that writing operas is tricky, but that's not quite right, because in some ways, it can be easier to write an opera than an instrumental piece - apart, of course, from the sheer amount of work involved, the endless details, the collaboration with a librettist, and the huge number of things that can go wrong (though sometimes blissfully right) in rehearsal and performance. But in the happy time when you're merely composing the work, its dramatic continuity can suggests musical ideas, so you always have some sense of what's going to come next. I find writing instrumental music harder."

May 2001: Boulez and Us

Boulez might not be as profound as many people think, but his rigor might have something to teach even tonal composers.

"For a long time, I've found Pierre Boulez's music pretty. Not his earliest works, his Sonatine for flute and piano, his hard-edged first two piano sonatas, or his startling, rigid Structures for two pianos (which he himself no longer seems to like). But starting with his 1955 Le marteau sans maître (not that I heard it then!) nearly every Boulez piece I've come across seems elegant and graceful to me—and very pretty."