Una Furtiva Lagrima from Carlo Vogele on Vimeo.
Showing posts with label classical/concert. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classical/concert. Show all posts
Saturday, December 22, 2012
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Monday, December 12, 2011
Great NYT Essay on New Music Scene: Club Kids Are Storming Music Museums
Read it HERE in the New York Times
December 9, 2011
Club Kids Are Storming Music Museums
By ALLAN KOZINN
WE critics have long argued vehemently that if major musical institutions hope to be regarded as vital, modern institutions, they must keep their listeners (and performers) in touch with the ideas, trendy or otherwise, that excite the composers of their time. But truth be told, we are a little bipolar on that subject. Though we criticize the big organizations for fostering a museum culture, we actually value the museums they have become.
Our attitude toward the classical canon, after all — and this increasingly applies also to older forms of jazz and pop — is that great music transcends time. If the New York Philharmonic did not regularly give us Beethoven, Brahms and symphonies, we would complain that it had abandoned the conservationist aspect of its charter and lament the disappearance of works that had moved people for decades or centuries.
That tension is not easily resolved. Even a model in which orchestras, chamber groups and opera companies present themselves as museums with substantial contemporary wings has almost insurmountable limitations circumscribing the possibility of hearing much new music. Consider that within the last 50 years Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartok, Sibelius and Copland have all moved from the periphery of the orchestral canon to its center, yet Beethoven, Brahms and company have not fallen out of fashion; and Bach, Haydn and Mozart, long ceded to period-instrument bands, are returning to the modern orchestra repertory. All this at a time when the world of young, inventive and often populist composers is exploding.
These young composers may hold the key to classical music’s future, and the future they create might not be what you expect. Increasingly they have come to consider the machinations of the big-ticket musical organizations — and debates about how to get them to accommodate new music — as beside the point.
Instead of waiting for established ensembles to give them a hearing, they have built an alternative musical universe. Its complex ecology and hierarchy of coolness includes webs of composer-performer collaborations, circuits of preferred concert spaces and an expanding number of record labels: among them, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe and Tzadik, all composer run and stylistically freewheeling.
This world is centered in New York, though it has counterparts elsewhere. (Reykjavik, Iceland, seems unusually influential at the moment.) It thrives in concert spaces that make a point of informality. Some, like Le Poisson Rouge and the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village and Galapagos in Brooklyn, are like jazz clubs: you can nurse a drink while listening to a performance, but the atmosphere is quiet and focused. Others are hole-in-the-wall funky: on summer nights at the Stone, in the East Village, performers debate whether to turn on a noisy fan or stifle with their listeners. Lately new-music haunts like the Issue Project Room and Roulette have found larger spaces (both in Brooklyn) and the money to pay for them.
Just as crucial, emerging composers have built an enthusiastic, growing audience that, while mostly young, is expanding across age and demographic lines. Perhaps because the music these composers produce is wildly eclectic, dogma free and more likely to have undercurrents of humor than doctrinaire earnestness, it is attracting older music fans who, it turns out, were seeking composers to champion all along but were left cold by the harshness of the serialists and bored by the repetitiveness of the minimalists, and found too few havens between those extremes.
It would be wrong to suggest that the young composers who have created this burgeoning alternative world have no interest in the big institutions. Nor do they disdain the standard repertory. Most would love to have their works performed by major orchestras, and some get lucky: Anna Clyne and Mason Bates were appointed composers in residence at the Chicago Symphony; Nico Muhly will have a work performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
But they have other models too. They attended conservatories and went through the same rigorous training as their predecessors, but they have not inherited their teachers’ battles. For them serialism and Minimalism are equally useful tools in a gestural language that draws on rock, jazz, hip-hop, world music and every reconfiguration of classical language from medieval times through Romanticism. And though there was a time when classical-music students played little but classical music, these musicians have played it all. Today you can hardly find a composer under 40 who did not play in rock bands as a teenager.
Some still have them, but now they include orchestral instruments and computers alongside electric guitars and basses, drums and electronic keyboards. In all this music the timbres, the textures and, often, the energy are those of rock, but the structures, substance and time scales are rooted in classical music. Electric guitars may simmer or wail, and drums may pound, but this is not the stuff of pop hits. When you listen to the Now Ensemble or the amplified, heavily processed string quartet Ethel or groups led by the composers Missy Mazzoli, Du Yun, Judd Greenstein, Caleb Burhans or Bryce Dessner, you inevitably wonder whether you’re hearing a rock band or a chamber group, and whether it matters.
A polished composer like Jefferson Friedman can have it both ways. Having poured his stylistically wide-ranging thoughts into his string quartets, he happily allowed the electronica group Matmos to remix them, adding beats and other sounds, and cutting and pasting musical lines. Several of these composers have the D.J.-remix-mash-up culture of post-1980s pop in their blood.
This scene was not suddenly created from nothing. If you pick at its fabric, you will find strands stretching back to the late 1960s, when Minimalists and avant-gardists began forming bands and giving loft concerts, and when European art-rock bands like Tangerine Dream, Gong, Faust and Henry Cow began exploring unusual (for rock) meters, harmonies, textures and structures.
You see its origins in the late 1970s, when the Kronos Quartet began its long, iconoclastic run in San Francisco, while in New York, Rhys Chatham began writing serious pieces for electric guitars, and Glenn Branca became better known for his guitar symphonies than for his work with his No Wave rock band, the Theoretical Girls. Its early rumblings inspired a blossoming of lively avant-garde festivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s: among them, the composer-run Bang on a Can and MATA festivals, as well as Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Serious Fun! at Lincoln Center.
This movement — still nameless, though it is sometimes called alt-classical — has really reached critical mass only in the last five years or so. Its economic muscle remains untested: packing a few hundred listeners into a club is one thing, but could that audience fill Avery Fisher Hall night after night? Does it want to? Part of this world’s charm, after all, is its intimacy and informality, and its inexpensive tickets.
Yet when Carnegie Hall has presented concerts aimed at this crowd’s tastes, usually in the small but technologically up-to-date Zankel Hall, the seats have been filled. Seats were also filled when Alarm Will Sound and other groups played at Alice Tully Hall recently and when Adrian Utley, of the British band Portishead, and Will Gregory, of the electronica duo Goldfrapp, performed a new chamber-rock film score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” as part of the White Light Festival last month, in the same hall.
That Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are hoping to tap this market suggests that the mainstream musical world sees its potential. So do the conventional classical ensembles (the Emerson Quartet, Orpheus) and soloists (the pianist Hélène Grimaud, the operatic tenor Joseph Calleja) who have recently migrated to clubs for record-release parties — a practice borrowed from the pop world by way of labels like New Amsterdam — or simply to trawl for a new audience.
The major institutions would no doubt love to tap into this world’s energy, audience and of-the-moment cachet. But to do so they would have to rethink their repertories, ticket prices and performance styles radically, and it seems unlikely that their existing audiences and donors would stand for that.
That said, some organizations have nothing to lose. New York City Opera, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra, all venerable institutions that have fallen on hard times, are experimenting with genre-crossing orchestras and seeking new performance spaces. Whether they survive will tell us a lot about the power of this new approach and what it can mean for classical music generally.
But it may mean nothing for classical music. Perhaps instead of being a shot in the arm, this movement will lead to an epochal splintering in which composers in the new style continue doing what they are doing now: making artistic choices that draw as much on nonclassical influences as on classical ones and writing for ensembles that use computers, amplification, sound processing and non-Western instruments. This world may break away from traditional classical music much the way jazz split from blues in the 1920s; rock blossomed from rhythm and blues, country and soul in the 1950s; and hip-hop arose from within pop in the 1980s.
There is no reason the two worlds could not remain porous. But in that case today’s orchestras would embrace their museum aspect wholeheartedly and become extensions of the period-instrument world, specializing in music written during the 19th and 20th centuries. Composers receiving their training now, and listening to jazz, rock, hip-hop and world music in their spare time, would write for new, amplified or partly electronic ensembles.
It is not a matter of whether this is a good development or a bad one; it is evolution in action. And if nothing else, it should afford a respite of several decades before we read hand-wringing reports about the graying of the Issue Project Room audience.
December 9, 2011
Club Kids Are Storming Music Museums
By ALLAN KOZINN
WE critics have long argued vehemently that if major musical institutions hope to be regarded as vital, modern institutions, they must keep their listeners (and performers) in touch with the ideas, trendy or otherwise, that excite the composers of their time. But truth be told, we are a little bipolar on that subject. Though we criticize the big organizations for fostering a museum culture, we actually value the museums they have become.
Our attitude toward the classical canon, after all — and this increasingly applies also to older forms of jazz and pop — is that great music transcends time. If the New York Philharmonic did not regularly give us Beethoven, Brahms and symphonies, we would complain that it had abandoned the conservationist aspect of its charter and lament the disappearance of works that had moved people for decades or centuries.
That tension is not easily resolved. Even a model in which orchestras, chamber groups and opera companies present themselves as museums with substantial contemporary wings has almost insurmountable limitations circumscribing the possibility of hearing much new music. Consider that within the last 50 years Mahler, Shostakovich, Bartok, Sibelius and Copland have all moved from the periphery of the orchestral canon to its center, yet Beethoven, Brahms and company have not fallen out of fashion; and Bach, Haydn and Mozart, long ceded to period-instrument bands, are returning to the modern orchestra repertory. All this at a time when the world of young, inventive and often populist composers is exploding.
These young composers may hold the key to classical music’s future, and the future they create might not be what you expect. Increasingly they have come to consider the machinations of the big-ticket musical organizations — and debates about how to get them to accommodate new music — as beside the point.
Instead of waiting for established ensembles to give them a hearing, they have built an alternative musical universe. Its complex ecology and hierarchy of coolness includes webs of composer-performer collaborations, circuits of preferred concert spaces and an expanding number of record labels: among them, New Amsterdam, Cantaloupe and Tzadik, all composer run and stylistically freewheeling.
This world is centered in New York, though it has counterparts elsewhere. (Reykjavik, Iceland, seems unusually influential at the moment.) It thrives in concert spaces that make a point of informality. Some, like Le Poisson Rouge and the Cornelia Street Café in Greenwich Village and Galapagos in Brooklyn, are like jazz clubs: you can nurse a drink while listening to a performance, but the atmosphere is quiet and focused. Others are hole-in-the-wall funky: on summer nights at the Stone, in the East Village, performers debate whether to turn on a noisy fan or stifle with their listeners. Lately new-music haunts like the Issue Project Room and Roulette have found larger spaces (both in Brooklyn) and the money to pay for them.
Just as crucial, emerging composers have built an enthusiastic, growing audience that, while mostly young, is expanding across age and demographic lines. Perhaps because the music these composers produce is wildly eclectic, dogma free and more likely to have undercurrents of humor than doctrinaire earnestness, it is attracting older music fans who, it turns out, were seeking composers to champion all along but were left cold by the harshness of the serialists and bored by the repetitiveness of the minimalists, and found too few havens between those extremes.
It would be wrong to suggest that the young composers who have created this burgeoning alternative world have no interest in the big institutions. Nor do they disdain the standard repertory. Most would love to have their works performed by major orchestras, and some get lucky: Anna Clyne and Mason Bates were appointed composers in residence at the Chicago Symphony; Nico Muhly will have a work performed at the Metropolitan Opera.
But they have other models too. They attended conservatories and went through the same rigorous training as their predecessors, but they have not inherited their teachers’ battles. For them serialism and Minimalism are equally useful tools in a gestural language that draws on rock, jazz, hip-hop, world music and every reconfiguration of classical language from medieval times through Romanticism. And though there was a time when classical-music students played little but classical music, these musicians have played it all. Today you can hardly find a composer under 40 who did not play in rock bands as a teenager.
Some still have them, but now they include orchestral instruments and computers alongside electric guitars and basses, drums and electronic keyboards. In all this music the timbres, the textures and, often, the energy are those of rock, but the structures, substance and time scales are rooted in classical music. Electric guitars may simmer or wail, and drums may pound, but this is not the stuff of pop hits. When you listen to the Now Ensemble or the amplified, heavily processed string quartet Ethel or groups led by the composers Missy Mazzoli, Du Yun, Judd Greenstein, Caleb Burhans or Bryce Dessner, you inevitably wonder whether you’re hearing a rock band or a chamber group, and whether it matters.
A polished composer like Jefferson Friedman can have it both ways. Having poured his stylistically wide-ranging thoughts into his string quartets, he happily allowed the electronica group Matmos to remix them, adding beats and other sounds, and cutting and pasting musical lines. Several of these composers have the D.J.-remix-mash-up culture of post-1980s pop in their blood.
This scene was not suddenly created from nothing. If you pick at its fabric, you will find strands stretching back to the late 1960s, when Minimalists and avant-gardists began forming bands and giving loft concerts, and when European art-rock bands like Tangerine Dream, Gong, Faust and Henry Cow began exploring unusual (for rock) meters, harmonies, textures and structures.
You see its origins in the late 1970s, when the Kronos Quartet began its long, iconoclastic run in San Francisco, while in New York, Rhys Chatham began writing serious pieces for electric guitars, and Glenn Branca became better known for his guitar symphonies than for his work with his No Wave rock band, the Theoretical Girls. Its early rumblings inspired a blossoming of lively avant-garde festivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s: among them, the composer-run Bang on a Can and MATA festivals, as well as Next Wave at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Serious Fun! at Lincoln Center.
This movement — still nameless, though it is sometimes called alt-classical — has really reached critical mass only in the last five years or so. Its economic muscle remains untested: packing a few hundred listeners into a club is one thing, but could that audience fill Avery Fisher Hall night after night? Does it want to? Part of this world’s charm, after all, is its intimacy and informality, and its inexpensive tickets.
Yet when Carnegie Hall has presented concerts aimed at this crowd’s tastes, usually in the small but technologically up-to-date Zankel Hall, the seats have been filled. Seats were also filled when Alarm Will Sound and other groups played at Alice Tully Hall recently and when Adrian Utley, of the British band Portishead, and Will Gregory, of the electronica duo Goldfrapp, performed a new chamber-rock film score for Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Passion de Jeanne d’Arc” as part of the White Light Festival last month, in the same hall.
That Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall are hoping to tap this market suggests that the mainstream musical world sees its potential. So do the conventional classical ensembles (the Emerson Quartet, Orpheus) and soloists (the pianist Hélène Grimaud, the operatic tenor Joseph Calleja) who have recently migrated to clubs for record-release parties — a practice borrowed from the pop world by way of labels like New Amsterdam — or simply to trawl for a new audience.
The major institutions would no doubt love to tap into this world’s energy, audience and of-the-moment cachet. But to do so they would have to rethink their repertories, ticket prices and performance styles radically, and it seems unlikely that their existing audiences and donors would stand for that.
That said, some organizations have nothing to lose. New York City Opera, the Brooklyn Philharmonic and the American Composers Orchestra, all venerable institutions that have fallen on hard times, are experimenting with genre-crossing orchestras and seeking new performance spaces. Whether they survive will tell us a lot about the power of this new approach and what it can mean for classical music generally.
But it may mean nothing for classical music. Perhaps instead of being a shot in the arm, this movement will lead to an epochal splintering in which composers in the new style continue doing what they are doing now: making artistic choices that draw as much on nonclassical influences as on classical ones and writing for ensembles that use computers, amplification, sound processing and non-Western instruments. This world may break away from traditional classical music much the way jazz split from blues in the 1920s; rock blossomed from rhythm and blues, country and soul in the 1950s; and hip-hop arose from within pop in the 1980s.
There is no reason the two worlds could not remain porous. But in that case today’s orchestras would embrace their museum aspect wholeheartedly and become extensions of the period-instrument world, specializing in music written during the 19th and 20th centuries. Composers receiving their training now, and listening to jazz, rock, hip-hop and world music in their spare time, would write for new, amplified or partly electronic ensembles.
It is not a matter of whether this is a good development or a bad one; it is evolution in action. And if nothing else, it should afford a respite of several decades before we read hand-wringing reports about the graying of the Issue Project Room audience.
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Jay Swafford on Contemporary Music: Spectralism, Aesthetic Brutalism, and the New Niceness
A Grand Tour of Contemporary Music
All the new noise explained.
By Jan Swafford
Posted Monday, July 11, 2011, at 6:55 AM ET
........
There's nothing new under the sun, and that's as true in the arts as everywhere else. It has been opined that due to modern media that indiscriminately preserve everything, contemporary culture is stuck on an endless round of recycling ideas, fashions, and just about everything else. We can no longer forget history or forge ahead properly in it, because the media keep history in our face all the time. Still, younger artists are often oblivious to the history behind what they do. Around 1999, I went to a program of new semi-improvised electronic "noise music." What it sounded like was Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1960s: squawk, snort, rumble, gleep. I wouldn't be surprised if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. (The Beatles did, however, which is why they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. The main piece they knew was his electronics-and-voice piece Gesang der Jünglinge.)
In music as in all the arts the struggle for the new is eternal, even if at times the "new" is some sort of take on the past, whether fresh or just oblivious. Bartók, to name one, could be so old, so primeval, that he was new. In any case, if you're a serious artist you're not interested in spending your life redoing something somebody else did better than you can. At the same time you also would prefer not to starve, prefer to have people like your stuff and pay you well for it, prefer for people to admire you and want to jump your bones. The tension among these forces is also eternal in the arts.
Through it all you're never entirely immune to the subtle and not so subtle pressures of fashion. The trouble is that these days, much of fashion is also recycled. On college campuses the styles of hair and clothes form a spectrum from about 1955 to the present, with a major contribution from the '60s. In the arts and academe, we have cycles and cycles within cycles, and trends and shibboleths and pendulums.
It can be tricky to separate out the truly new from the second-hand or shallowly trendy. Years ago a Manhattan friend and I went on a gallery tour of SoHo. The first place we went into featured an artist who did strangely juxtaposed triptychs: two colorful abstractions flanking a monochrome view of undulating hills. I thought that was reasonably interesting. Among the next dozen galleries we visited, roughly 10 of them featured strangely juxtaposed triptychs. It turned out to be The Year of the Triptych. In other words, there are vital trends and there are clichés, old and new. In an interview, filmmaker Sofia Coppola describes herself as having a "punk sensibility." That presumably makes her cool and current. As a pop-music movement, punk started in the mid-'70s. How many productions of Mozart operas or Shakespeare plays have we seen lately that are not set in the streets of Harlem, a bar in L.A., a fleabag hotel in the Third World? Updating is the king of theatrical clichés, and it's reigned for decades.
That's the context for a look at contemporary "classical" music, or whatever you want to call it. Here again, history doesn't advance so much as ooze, leaving a sheen behind. I heard my first minimalist piece, Terry Riley's In C, as a student in the '60s. I remember every bit of that moment, including the sensation of my jaw dropping. After years of most new music being of the cabalistic, chinscratching, "interesting" sort, here was a piece that started dringdringdring babblebabblebabble and kept going that way for about 45 minutes. It didn't sound like "classical" music, it didn't sound like pop music, it sounded like a Vermont hillside with a pretty girl and a joint. I thought it was about the coolest thing ever, and today In C still has a nostalgic residue of coolness for me—and for my students. Half a century later, there's still a lot of minimalism going around and around, the media tending to the techno now. There are also postminimalists and, for all I know, post-postminimalists. Nearly a century after Arnold Schoenberg invented the 12-tone method of composing, there are still 12-tone composers lining up their dozen notes and collecting checks from universities. Neoromanticism, named by my teacher Jacob Druckman in the '70s, is still used as a blanket term for pieces that are overtly emotional in some form or other.
To be sure, many artists despise labels, or anyway labels applied by other people. Debussy hated being called "impressionist," and presumably so did the painters he was grouped with. Schoenberg pointed out that "atonal" literally means "without tone" and is therefore absurd for any music. He preferred people to call his music "pantonal," but hardly anybody ever did. Beethoven didn't name the Moonlight Sonata and would have loathed the title. (My music has been called neoromantic and I don't answer to it. Here's a sample, my memorial to 9/11, They That Mourn.)
All that said, I think there are more- and less-accurate labels. It's inevitable that we associate Debussy with his contemporary impressionist painters: Monet painted cathedrals; Debussy wrote a piano piece called The Sunken Cathedral. He also wrote La Mer and Iberia. "Atonal" may be ungrammatical, but it does imply something relevant about a wide swath of music.
So: Noting that in the modern world hot new trends tend to linger on over the decades, what are the newer directions in contemporary music these days, and what shall we call them? I'll nominate three leading trends. The first has a generally agreed upon title that is technical rather than descriptive: spectralism.
What is spectralism? Um, wow, it's …
OK, imagine this....
read the full article, with sound clips and links HERE.
All the new noise explained.
By Jan Swafford
Posted Monday, July 11, 2011, at 6:55 AM ET
........
There's nothing new under the sun, and that's as true in the arts as everywhere else. It has been opined that due to modern media that indiscriminately preserve everything, contemporary culture is stuck on an endless round of recycling ideas, fashions, and just about everything else. We can no longer forget history or forge ahead properly in it, because the media keep history in our face all the time. Still, younger artists are often oblivious to the history behind what they do. Around 1999, I went to a program of new semi-improvised electronic "noise music." What it sounded like was Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1960s: squawk, snort, rumble, gleep. I wouldn't be surprised if that young composer never heard of Stockhausen. (The Beatles did, however, which is why they put Stockhausen on the cover of Sgt. Pepper. The main piece they knew was his electronics-and-voice piece Gesang der Jünglinge.)
In music as in all the arts the struggle for the new is eternal, even if at times the "new" is some sort of take on the past, whether fresh or just oblivious. Bartók, to name one, could be so old, so primeval, that he was new. In any case, if you're a serious artist you're not interested in spending your life redoing something somebody else did better than you can. At the same time you also would prefer not to starve, prefer to have people like your stuff and pay you well for it, prefer for people to admire you and want to jump your bones. The tension among these forces is also eternal in the arts.
Through it all you're never entirely immune to the subtle and not so subtle pressures of fashion. The trouble is that these days, much of fashion is also recycled. On college campuses the styles of hair and clothes form a spectrum from about 1955 to the present, with a major contribution from the '60s. In the arts and academe, we have cycles and cycles within cycles, and trends and shibboleths and pendulums.
It can be tricky to separate out the truly new from the second-hand or shallowly trendy. Years ago a Manhattan friend and I went on a gallery tour of SoHo. The first place we went into featured an artist who did strangely juxtaposed triptychs: two colorful abstractions flanking a monochrome view of undulating hills. I thought that was reasonably interesting. Among the next dozen galleries we visited, roughly 10 of them featured strangely juxtaposed triptychs. It turned out to be The Year of the Triptych. In other words, there are vital trends and there are clichés, old and new. In an interview, filmmaker Sofia Coppola describes herself as having a "punk sensibility." That presumably makes her cool and current. As a pop-music movement, punk started in the mid-'70s. How many productions of Mozart operas or Shakespeare plays have we seen lately that are not set in the streets of Harlem, a bar in L.A., a fleabag hotel in the Third World? Updating is the king of theatrical clichés, and it's reigned for decades.
That's the context for a look at contemporary "classical" music, or whatever you want to call it. Here again, history doesn't advance so much as ooze, leaving a sheen behind. I heard my first minimalist piece, Terry Riley's In C, as a student in the '60s. I remember every bit of that moment, including the sensation of my jaw dropping. After years of most new music being of the cabalistic, chinscratching, "interesting" sort, here was a piece that started dringdringdring babblebabblebabble and kept going that way for about 45 minutes. It didn't sound like "classical" music, it didn't sound like pop music, it sounded like a Vermont hillside with a pretty girl and a joint. I thought it was about the coolest thing ever, and today In C still has a nostalgic residue of coolness for me—and for my students. Half a century later, there's still a lot of minimalism going around and around, the media tending to the techno now. There are also postminimalists and, for all I know, post-postminimalists. Nearly a century after Arnold Schoenberg invented the 12-tone method of composing, there are still 12-tone composers lining up their dozen notes and collecting checks from universities. Neoromanticism, named by my teacher Jacob Druckman in the '70s, is still used as a blanket term for pieces that are overtly emotional in some form or other.
To be sure, many artists despise labels, or anyway labels applied by other people. Debussy hated being called "impressionist," and presumably so did the painters he was grouped with. Schoenberg pointed out that "atonal" literally means "without tone" and is therefore absurd for any music. He preferred people to call his music "pantonal," but hardly anybody ever did. Beethoven didn't name the Moonlight Sonata and would have loathed the title. (My music has been called neoromantic and I don't answer to it. Here's a sample, my memorial to 9/11, They That Mourn.)
All that said, I think there are more- and less-accurate labels. It's inevitable that we associate Debussy with his contemporary impressionist painters: Monet painted cathedrals; Debussy wrote a piano piece called The Sunken Cathedral. He also wrote La Mer and Iberia. "Atonal" may be ungrammatical, but it does imply something relevant about a wide swath of music.
So: Noting that in the modern world hot new trends tend to linger on over the decades, what are the newer directions in contemporary music these days, and what shall we call them? I'll nominate three leading trends. The first has a generally agreed upon title that is technical rather than descriptive: spectralism.
What is spectralism? Um, wow, it's …
OK, imagine this....
read the full article, with sound clips and links HERE.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Boston Symphony's search for a new conductor
SLATE has a nice post on the Boston Symphony Orchestra's search for a new conductor:
The Elusive Maestro
Why the process of finding a new conductor makes music lovers weep.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 12, 2011, at 11:20 AM ET
When the Boston Symphony announced in 2001 that James Levine would be taking over the orchestra in 2004, there was a mighty outpouring of "hmmmm" from the Boston musical public. Levine was good, no question, but he was mainly an opera conductor, churning it out at the Met night after night. And he planned on keeping his job in New York. On the other hand, at least Boston's long musical doldrum under Seiji Ozawa was nearing its end after three decades of music-making more forgettable than otherwise. The stories of Levine and Ozawa form a parable of orchestras and their maestros, a parable about to be rehearsed again.
When Levine finally mounted the podium in Symphony Hall for his debut as music director, Boston discovered that he was so bulbous and physically messed up that he sat hunched over with one cheek planted awkwardly on a stool, only occasionally looked up from the score, and barely moved his arms. Yet from his debut with the epic Mahler Eighth, Levine proceeded to give performances that were not just superb; they were sometimes staggering.
Levine performed more contemporary music than any Boston conductor since Serge Koussevitsky. He got away with it because he was so damn good. And he was old-fashioned good, unsullied by trends—such as the early-music virus that infects conductors with the delusion that faster is always better. His tempos, like every part of his conceptions, were a particular response to a particular score. His Beethoven and Sibelius were as coherent and distinctive as his Schoenberg and Harbison. He was unpretentious and boyishly enthusiastic, known to all as "Jimmy."
Clearly the orchestra understood that with Levine they could show they were one of the greatest bands in the world, and they rose to the opportunity. Unforgettable evenings accumulated: a full-throated and magnificent German Requiem, a ferocious Varèse Amériques, a two-year series pairing Beethoven and Schoenberg. Levine's program note for the Beethoven Missa Solemnis began, "This is the greatest piece ever written! I mean it!" He made us believe it. Before long it dawned on us that the Boston Symphony was entering its most glorious period since the Koussevitzky era–and Levine might be a better conductor than Koussevitzky. You got used to emerging from Symphony Hall with your head buzzing, ecstatic.
Then pffffft.
On March 2, the BSO announced that Levine's season was over and, likewise, his seven-year tenure as music director, effective in September but in practice immediately. At age 67, after three years of falling apart from chronic back trouble and other physical problems, with management trying to nudge him toward the exit so the orchestra could get on with its life, one more back collapse finished it. Levine had been profligate with his health for a long time, partly due to his killing schedule between the Met and the BSO. Now his lifestyle caught up with him. The Boston Symphony, having spent the three years of his decline in limbo, now entered some circle of hell where rudderless orchestras drift in despair.
For years to come it's going to be guest conductors, with an occasional Levine appearance if he's up to it. Can guests give good performances? Sure. But guest conductors equal to the BSO are a rare and endangered species. Most of the young maestros have orchestras and crowded schedules of their own. In practice the best guests tend to be semi-retired, like the incomparable long-time visitor Bernard Haitink, or like Sir Colin Davis, Christophe von Dohnányi, and Lorin Maazel. All those men are in their 80s. More importantly, guest conductors can't shape an orchestra week by week, season by season, into an ensemble of some 70 people with a personality, a point of view, an almost clairvoyant communication among players and conductor that can approach the level of a string quartet's.
Meanwhile the conductor search is on. Call it prospecting for the perfect mate or Saturday-night date. He or she doesn't exist, but some people are much, much better than others. There's looks and talent and experience, but there's also chemistry, and those don't always happen together. For an orchestra, there's also the bottom line, which says that you want somebody holding the baton who's as magnetic as possible, to put the butts in the seats. When you make a mistake you have to live with it for years, if not decades. The pitfalls and pratfalls of the search process are illustrated by the case of Seiji Ozawa.
Read the full post HERE.
The Elusive Maestro
Why the process of finding a new conductor makes music lovers weep.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 12, 2011, at 11:20 AM ET
When the Boston Symphony announced in 2001 that James Levine would be taking over the orchestra in 2004, there was a mighty outpouring of "hmmmm" from the Boston musical public. Levine was good, no question, but he was mainly an opera conductor, churning it out at the Met night after night. And he planned on keeping his job in New York. On the other hand, at least Boston's long musical doldrum under Seiji Ozawa was nearing its end after three decades of music-making more forgettable than otherwise. The stories of Levine and Ozawa form a parable of orchestras and their maestros, a parable about to be rehearsed again.
When Levine finally mounted the podium in Symphony Hall for his debut as music director, Boston discovered that he was so bulbous and physically messed up that he sat hunched over with one cheek planted awkwardly on a stool, only occasionally looked up from the score, and barely moved his arms. Yet from his debut with the epic Mahler Eighth, Levine proceeded to give performances that were not just superb; they were sometimes staggering.
Levine performed more contemporary music than any Boston conductor since Serge Koussevitsky. He got away with it because he was so damn good. And he was old-fashioned good, unsullied by trends—such as the early-music virus that infects conductors with the delusion that faster is always better. His tempos, like every part of his conceptions, were a particular response to a particular score. His Beethoven and Sibelius were as coherent and distinctive as his Schoenberg and Harbison. He was unpretentious and boyishly enthusiastic, known to all as "Jimmy."
Clearly the orchestra understood that with Levine they could show they were one of the greatest bands in the world, and they rose to the opportunity. Unforgettable evenings accumulated: a full-throated and magnificent German Requiem, a ferocious Varèse Amériques, a two-year series pairing Beethoven and Schoenberg. Levine's program note for the Beethoven Missa Solemnis began, "This is the greatest piece ever written! I mean it!" He made us believe it. Before long it dawned on us that the Boston Symphony was entering its most glorious period since the Koussevitzky era–and Levine might be a better conductor than Koussevitzky. You got used to emerging from Symphony Hall with your head buzzing, ecstatic.
Then pffffft.
On March 2, the BSO announced that Levine's season was over and, likewise, his seven-year tenure as music director, effective in September but in practice immediately. At age 67, after three years of falling apart from chronic back trouble and other physical problems, with management trying to nudge him toward the exit so the orchestra could get on with its life, one more back collapse finished it. Levine had been profligate with his health for a long time, partly due to his killing schedule between the Met and the BSO. Now his lifestyle caught up with him. The Boston Symphony, having spent the three years of his decline in limbo, now entered some circle of hell where rudderless orchestras drift in despair.
For years to come it's going to be guest conductors, with an occasional Levine appearance if he's up to it. Can guests give good performances? Sure. But guest conductors equal to the BSO are a rare and endangered species. Most of the young maestros have orchestras and crowded schedules of their own. In practice the best guests tend to be semi-retired, like the incomparable long-time visitor Bernard Haitink, or like Sir Colin Davis, Christophe von Dohnányi, and Lorin Maazel. All those men are in their 80s. More importantly, guest conductors can't shape an orchestra week by week, season by season, into an ensemble of some 70 people with a personality, a point of view, an almost clairvoyant communication among players and conductor that can approach the level of a string quartet's.
Meanwhile the conductor search is on. Call it prospecting for the perfect mate or Saturday-night date. He or she doesn't exist, but some people are much, much better than others. There's looks and talent and experience, but there's also chemistry, and those don't always happen together. For an orchestra, there's also the bottom line, which says that you want somebody holding the baton who's as magnetic as possible, to put the butts in the seats. When you make a mistake you have to live with it for years, if not decades. The pitfalls and pratfalls of the search process are illustrated by the case of Seiji Ozawa.
Read the full post HERE.
Friday, March 18, 2011
Monday, March 07, 2011
NYT article on the early music performance movement
Nice NYT article on the early music performance movement in academia.
March 4, 2011
Early Music Is Enjoying Its Moment
By NICHOLAS KENYON
ARTISTIC revolutions rarely happen overnight, and if they do happen quickly, they do not necessarily spread uniformly. In recent decades the early-music movement has provoked a radical shift in performance styles throughout much of the music world. As an eccentric, irrelevant outsider in cultural life, the movement has managed to transform attitudes toward tradition and has wrought major changes in orchestral practice. A movement that started in powerful opposition to modern conventions has become increasingly integrated with mainstream performance.
But New York, an early leader in the movement through the medieval and Renaissance explorations of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in the 1950s and ’60s, more recently lagged behind in crucial ways. Now, during the coming weeks, in a sort of serendipitous festival, the city plays host to some of today’s outstanding early-music ensembles and conductors and puts forward a leading period-instrument ensemble of its own being nurtured at the Juilliard School, Juilliard415.
Can there be any more telling indication that the worlds of period and modern performance are becoming ever more closely reconciled and intertwined than the entry of Juilliard, long a bastion of modern, machine-tooled virtuosity, onto the scene? Juilliard students are learning to perform on gut strings, wooden flutes and valveless horns in what now passes for proper period style.
William Christie, the American harpsichordist and conductor long resident in France, whose dazzling ensemble, Les Arts Florissants (some three decades old), presents music by Rameau at Alice Tully Hall on Friday and Saturday evening, has played a major role in the development of a historical performance program at the Juilliard School, now in its second year.
“We are so excited and so thrilled that we really cannot believe it is happening to us,” Mr. Christie said recently. “Here, after all the years when there was such a negative and unloving reaction to the whole idea of old instruments, we have a terrific commitment from the school and an enthusiasm that’s spreading through the students. I think everyone would say that it has created a real buzz, and the students are fascinated by the idea of what it can bring to their music-making.”
Ara Guzelimian, dean of the Juilliard School, agrees that the injection of energy has been remarkable. “One of the most surprising things about the program is how quickly and easily it has been integrated into the fabric of the school as a whole,” he said. “This year alone we are mounting two fully staged operas with the vocal arts department, and we have a waiting list of modern-instrument students who want to take period-instrument lessons.”
This wide-ranging fascination with the fruits of historical study may, as Mr. Christie surmises, be partly because “the kids see a new opportunity to earn a living.”
“But it goes much deeper than that,” he added. “They are much more sophisticated in their attitude. They show a recognition that this way of performing is now a central part of our musical lives.”
In that sense the early-music revolution, which began on the fringes, can claim to have triumphed. It has also evolved: the very term “early music,” which originally denoted a repertory (pre-Classical, later pre-Romantic) and the instruments appropriate to it, has come to stand more broadly for a performance aesthetic, an approach to music in the context of its time that has been carried into 19th- and even 20th-century repertory.
The movement’s spirit of inquiry and adventure is now completely embedded in our way of making music and thinking about it. With the added perspective of these latest gains, it may be useful to take a fresh look at how this all came about.
For the past generation pioneers of the early-music movement have worked with modern orchestras and have carried their insights into that area. At the beginning this was an occasional specialist event, a toe dipped briefly in the historical water. But the approach has become well established as part of an increasingly diverse musical mainstream. Great conductors are newly fascinated with the products of the historical performance movement.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
March 4, 2011
Early Music Is Enjoying Its Moment
By NICHOLAS KENYON
ARTISTIC revolutions rarely happen overnight, and if they do happen quickly, they do not necessarily spread uniformly. In recent decades the early-music movement has provoked a radical shift in performance styles throughout much of the music world. As an eccentric, irrelevant outsider in cultural life, the movement has managed to transform attitudes toward tradition and has wrought major changes in orchestral practice. A movement that started in powerful opposition to modern conventions has become increasingly integrated with mainstream performance.
But New York, an early leader in the movement through the medieval and Renaissance explorations of Noah Greenberg and the New York Pro Musica Antiqua in the 1950s and ’60s, more recently lagged behind in crucial ways. Now, during the coming weeks, in a sort of serendipitous festival, the city plays host to some of today’s outstanding early-music ensembles and conductors and puts forward a leading period-instrument ensemble of its own being nurtured at the Juilliard School, Juilliard415.
Can there be any more telling indication that the worlds of period and modern performance are becoming ever more closely reconciled and intertwined than the entry of Juilliard, long a bastion of modern, machine-tooled virtuosity, onto the scene? Juilliard students are learning to perform on gut strings, wooden flutes and valveless horns in what now passes for proper period style.
William Christie, the American harpsichordist and conductor long resident in France, whose dazzling ensemble, Les Arts Florissants (some three decades old), presents music by Rameau at Alice Tully Hall on Friday and Saturday evening, has played a major role in the development of a historical performance program at the Juilliard School, now in its second year.
“We are so excited and so thrilled that we really cannot believe it is happening to us,” Mr. Christie said recently. “Here, after all the years when there was such a negative and unloving reaction to the whole idea of old instruments, we have a terrific commitment from the school and an enthusiasm that’s spreading through the students. I think everyone would say that it has created a real buzz, and the students are fascinated by the idea of what it can bring to their music-making.”
Ara Guzelimian, dean of the Juilliard School, agrees that the injection of energy has been remarkable. “One of the most surprising things about the program is how quickly and easily it has been integrated into the fabric of the school as a whole,” he said. “This year alone we are mounting two fully staged operas with the vocal arts department, and we have a waiting list of modern-instrument students who want to take period-instrument lessons.”
This wide-ranging fascination with the fruits of historical study may, as Mr. Christie surmises, be partly because “the kids see a new opportunity to earn a living.”
“But it goes much deeper than that,” he added. “They are much more sophisticated in their attitude. They show a recognition that this way of performing is now a central part of our musical lives.”
In that sense the early-music revolution, which began on the fringes, can claim to have triumphed. It has also evolved: the very term “early music,” which originally denoted a repertory (pre-Classical, later pre-Romantic) and the instruments appropriate to it, has come to stand more broadly for a performance aesthetic, an approach to music in the context of its time that has been carried into 19th- and even 20th-century repertory.
The movement’s spirit of inquiry and adventure is now completely embedded in our way of making music and thinking about it. With the added perspective of these latest gains, it may be useful to take a fresh look at how this all came about.
For the past generation pioneers of the early-music movement have worked with modern orchestras and have carried their insights into that area. At the beginning this was an occasional specialist event, a toe dipped briefly in the historical water. But the approach has become well established as part of an increasingly diverse musical mainstream. Great conductors are newly fascinated with the products of the historical performance movement.
Read the rest of the story HERE.
Thursday, March 03, 2011
Adya & Geisha Do Mozart Aria Europop Style
Cherubino's Aria - Non So Piu Cosa Son Cosa Faccio; From the Opera "Le Nozze di Figaro" (The Marriage of Figaro) by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It's a tribute to the tune itself that it can survive the Europop treatment.
Saturday, October 09, 2010
Another what's wrong with classical music post
This one, with some good sections, is from 3quarksdaliy:
...
The use of classical music in public places is increasingly common: in shopping malls, parking lots, and other places where crowds and loitering can be problems. The TTC is by no means the only transit service to use the technique: in 2005, after classical music was introduced into London’s Underground, there was a significant decrease in robberies, assaults and vandalism. Similar results have been noted from Finland to New Zealand. The idea may be a Canadian innovation: in 1985, a 7-Eleven store in Vancouver pioneered the technique, which was soon adopted elsewhere. Today, about 150 7-Elevens throughout North America play classical music outside their stores.
As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial.
But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. At the Bathurst Street Subway Station, the choice of music conveys a clear message: “Move along quickly and peacefully, people; this is not your cultural space.”
...
Read the full post, with summarized reasons for classical music's unpopularity and some suggestions at the link above.
...
The use of classical music in public places is increasingly common: in shopping malls, parking lots, and other places where crowds and loitering can be problems. The TTC is by no means the only transit service to use the technique: in 2005, after classical music was introduced into London’s Underground, there was a significant decrease in robberies, assaults and vandalism. Similar results have been noted from Finland to New Zealand. The idea may be a Canadian innovation: in 1985, a 7-Eleven store in Vancouver pioneered the technique, which was soon adopted elsewhere. Today, about 150 7-Elevens throughout North America play classical music outside their stores.
As a classical music lover, I’d like to believe that my favourite music has some kind of magical effect on people – that it soothes the savage breast in some unique way. I’d like to think that classical music somehow inspires nobler aspirations in the mind of the purse-snatcher, causing him to abandon his line of work for something more upstanding and socially beneficial.
But I know better. The hard, cold truth is that classical music in public places is often deliberately intended to make certain kinds of people feel unwelcome. Its use has been described as “musical bug spray,” and as the “weaponization” of classical music. At the Bathurst Street Subway Station, the choice of music conveys a clear message: “Move along quickly and peacefully, people; this is not your cultural space.”
...
Read the full post, with summarized reasons for classical music's unpopularity and some suggestions at the link above.
Tuesday, June 15, 2010
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Composer Jennifer Higdon's Huge Year
Jennifer Higdon's huge year (and really it has only been four months). She's won a Grammy for one classical composition and a Pulitzer for another. She's in high demand, people enjoy her music, and actually want to hear it. As you can tell by the story, there is a little defensive posture about this accessibility. The NYT has a profile:
April 22, 2010
Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
PHILADELPHIA — Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.
“Starting a piece is the worst,” she said, “and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.”
Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.”
Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon’s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. “The Singing Rooms,” for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.
Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon’s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland can be heard in works like “Blue Cathedral,” the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon’s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired “Concerto 4-3.”
Her scores are “very strong rhythmically,” Ms. Alsop said, “with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.” She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.”
“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”
Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter’s living room.
When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.
Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,” said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as “expressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.”
She is “very representative of something that’s happened in American music with composers of her generation,” Mr. Spano said, “a palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.”
Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master’s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo “String Poetic” Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).
But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.
One of Ms. Higdon’s biggest obstacles has been her own success.
.....
Read the entire post HERE.
April 22, 2010
Despite Anxiety and Naysayers, Composer Wins Her Pulitzer
By VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
PHILADELPHIA — Jennifer Higdon wishes there were a 12-step program on how to deal with all the various stages of composing anxiety, she said, laughing, on Sunday in the spacious apartment here that she shares with her partner, Cheryl Lawson.
“Starting a piece is the worst,” she said, “and that can stretch from one day to three weeks of agony. The cats run and hide.”
Despite the angst, Ms. Higdon, 47, comes across as friendly, down to earth and upbeat. And her creative struggles have paid off. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize this month for her Violin Concerto, which she wrote for the young soloist Hilary Hahn. The Pulitzer committee praised the work, which received its premiere in February 2009 with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, as “a deeply engaging piece that combines flowing lyricism with dazzling virtuosity.”
Those are qualities integral to many of Ms. Higdon’s scores. Her large catalog also includes a piano concerto (which was given its premiere in December by Yuja Wang), a saxophone concerto and numerous chamber and orchestral works. “The Singing Rooms,” for chorus, orchestra and solo violin, recently had its premiere with Jennifer Koh as soloist. The San Francisco Opera has commissioned an opera for fall 2013.
Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, has conducted and recorded several of Ms. Higdon’s works, including the lively Percussion Concerto. She described her music as American in its immediacy, vitality and sense of optimism. Echoes of American composers like Aaron Copland can be heard in works like “Blue Cathedral,” the most frequently performed piece in the 2007-8 season of those composed during the past 25 years, according to the League of American Orchestras. Another of Ms. Higdon’s most popular works is the bluegrass-inspired “Concerto 4-3.”
Her scores are “very strong rhythmically,” Ms. Alsop said, “with real scope and shape and architecture. She knows how to bring out the best of the various instrumental colors in the orchestra.” She added that Ms. Higdon’s music is “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.”
“I’m not sure when ‘accessible’ became a dirty word,” Ms. Alsop said. “I’m not of the belief that something has to be inscrutable in order to be great.”
Ms. Higdon got experimental urges out of her system at a young age. Her parents were hippies, she said, and she and her younger brother were fed a steady diet of avant-garde film, art and theater in Atlanta, where her father, Kenny Higdon, worked as a freelance artist for advertising agencies. A huge black-and-white abstract painting by Mr. Higdon hangs in his daughter’s living room.
When Ms. Higdon was 11, the family moved to Seymour, a tiny town in Eastern Tennessee, where she and Ms. Lawson met in high school.
Ms. Higdon, who still speaks with a lilting Southern accent, had almost no exposure to classical music growing up, but taught herself to play the flute at 15 and entered Bowling Green State University at 18 as a flute major. After catching up on theory classes she began composing at 21. She received an artist diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where she now teaches composition, before studying at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I was kind of the black sheep of the family going into classical music,” said Ms. Higdon, laughing, but said her parents were fully supportive of her choice. At Bowling Green she took a conducting class with Robert Spano, now music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. He describes her music as “expressive and beautiful and communicative and fresh and inventive.”
She is “very representative of something that’s happened in American music with composers of her generation,” Mr. Spano said, “a palpable aesthetic shift from the generation before them that I find very powerful.”
Ms. Higdon, who studied with George Crumb at the University of Pennsylvania (where she received master’s and doctoral degrees), does use some experimental touches in her scores. The Violin Concerto (which Ms. Hahn has recorded for a Deutsche Grammophon disc to be released in September) begins with percussionists using knitting needles on crotales, or small cymbals, and glockenspiel. In her piano and string duo “String Poetic” Ms. Higdon makes imaginative use of the strange texture of stopped piano strings (a sound created when the pianist damps the strings inside the instrument with one hand and plays the keys with the other).
But any avant-garde touches are mostly incorporated into traditional structures and sound worlds. In the first movement of the violin concerto, after a spare introduction, the violin soars with propulsive vigor over a rich orchestral fabric, with introverted passages alternating with fiery outbursts. A jaw-dropping cadenza concludes the movement.
One of Ms. Higdon’s biggest obstacles has been her own success.
.....
Read the entire post HERE.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Equal Temperment Tuning; The Wolf at Our Heels
SLATE
The Wolf at Our Heels: The centuries-old struggle to play in tune.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 10:08 AM ET
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the gods.
The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path. Here's a short course on the arcana of tuning. It will take us to the meaning of a celebrated collection of keyboard pieces: J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, humankind's greatest musical riposte to the laughter of the gods.
In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)
OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.
So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad. Professor Duffin is a living representative of a long line of obsessives. Personal and institutional battles have been fought over the issue of tuning, fame won and lost. It was ever thus, wrestling with the gods.
What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament. And now we're halfway to understanding The Well-Tempered Clavier: It has to do with the art and science of keyboard tuning. We'll get to the wellness in a minute.
There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.
By and large, in composing music for meantone keyboards you avoided the wolf, so never, for example, wrote in the key of A flat. In fact, those temperaments left only a few keys that were well-enough in tune to be usable: the keys between two flats and three sharps. Between the 16th and 18th centuries a lot of splendid music was written in meantone tuning, within that range of a dozen major and minor keys. But the inability to write in all 24 possible keys ate at composers' guts. More and more, there was a demand for a tuning system that would render all keys usable—and escape the wolf.
One of those tunings was already known to the ancients: equal temperament. Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: The distance between each interval is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible. So now it's all fixed, yes? The laughter of the gods has been stilled, right? Are you kidding? You fools: The gods never lose.
For centuries, equal temperament didn't catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Even when fretted instruments were invented and lutes and guitars were mostly tuned in equal temperament, they still didn't like it. Most especially, musicians didn't like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of meantone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in meantone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament.
In the late 17th century, tuning geeks came up with a new idea: Let's hair-split all over the keyboard, tweaking this and that in minuscule ways, letting, say, a third be a bit larger in one spot and a bit smaller in another. These kinds of flexible temperaments accomplished several things at once: 1) They made all keys usable; 2) yet they preserved the individual character of keys, because each still had its distinctive collection of intervals; 3) and they tamed the big bad wolf.
Hey, said adherents of this more sophisticated unequal system, this really works well! So they called it well-temperament. One of those adherents was J. S. Bach. He wanted, he said somewhat testily, to write in any damn key he felt like, and he tuned his harpsichord himself to make that possible. When a famous organ tuner who did meantone tuning showed up, Bach would play an A flat major chord on one of his organs with its howling wolf, just to torture the old man.
Bach wrote the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (clavier meaning any kind of keyboard instrument) not only to show off this improved system but to help make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key. Anybody who wanted to play from the WTC was pressured to use well-temperament, because many of the pieces sounded sour in any other tuning. (However, heh-heh, there's no precise record of which well-tempered system Bach used.)
.......
The various kinds of meantone and well-temperament help explain why, in the 18th into 19th centuries, keys had particular emotional associations. Key descriptions of the time sound outlandish, and indeed some were on the loony side, but they were founded on the reality that in unequal temperaments each key had its distinctive color and personality. "Is something gay, brilliant, or martial needed?" wrote one theorist. "Take C, D, E [majors]." Another: "D major … the key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing." All those keys were relatively well in tune on the keyboard. Minor keys were innately less in tune, so darker in sound and import: G minor, for example, is "suited to frenzy, despair, agitation. ... The lament of a noble matron who no longer has her youthful beauty." You want a pretty pastoral piece? You want a relaxing key like F major—the key of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony:
Two of Beethoven's favorite keys tell us a lot about him. The most famous is C minor, described by one writer of the time as "a tragic key … fit to express grand misadventures, deaths of heroes, and grand but mournful, ominous, and lugubrious actions."
.......
On the other hand, in the prevailing unequal temperaments there was still the presence, or at least the ghost, of the old wolf. Thus, croaked one theorist concerning that key, "Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius." Beethoven studied the theorists carefully, then did what he wanted. As for the putrefaction of A flat major: baloney. For Beethoven, that key, with its complex and distinctive coloration, suggested feelings in the direction of nobility, devotion, and resignation, as in the second movement of the Pathètique, again by Andras Schiff:
When composers stretched for more harmonic variety and tension in the first decades of the 19th century, as a practical matter the once-despised equal temperament won out over unequal tunings, which withered away during the century. But as professor Duffin exemplifies in How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, many tuning geeks today still find that temperament loathsome. Actually, Duffin's book is less rabid than its title sounds, amounting to a plea for playing keyboard music through the early 19th century in period tunings, especially in one called "sixth-comma meantone," which Duffin believes is the tuning Bach had in mind for the Well-Tempered Clavier. His reasoning is of Glenn Beckian deviousness. Some claim to find a cabalistic clue to Bach's intended tuning, close to sixth-comma, in the curlicues at the top of his title page for the WTC:
That idea may be nuts, or not. Bach was into puzzles, numerology, and all kinds of musical cabala, so the nuttiest idea of all about his tuning might well be right. It would figure. Listen to Watchorn in the curlicue tuning—or rather a theory about it—in the C# Major Prelude, one of the world's most happy-making pieces. This is another key out of the pale in older temperaments:
How do the travails of keyboard temperament apply to instruments without fixed tuning, like violins, trombones, flugelhorns, and the human voice? They don't apply at all. Most of the time violinists, et al., tune by ear, on the fly, note by note, and chord by chord. That's why a string quartet or an a cappella choir can be better in tune with nature than a guitar or a piano can. As a high-school trombonist playing with a piano for the first time, I found adjusting to keyboard tuning a pain in the neck—without knowing why. String recitalists know that pain intimately. Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.
.........
Read the full article and its accompanying sound file examples HERE.
The Wolf at Our Heels: The centuries-old struggle to play in tune.
By Jan SwaffordPosted Tuesday, April 20, 2010, at 10:08 AM ET
You are about to enter the Twilight Zone. I submit for your consideration an oddly named book lying on an ordinary desk: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by professor Ross W. Duffin. This book was written by a madman. Or is he? You should understand: If Duffin is mad, he's not alone. And the spaces between the lines of his book are filled with the silent laughter of the gods.
The gods are laughing at their little joke on musicians. When it comes to the tuning of instruments, especially keyboards and fretted instruments, nature drops a giant hairball in our path. Here's a short course on the arcana of tuning. It will take us to the meaning of a celebrated collection of keyboard pieces: J. S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, humankind's greatest musical riposte to the laughter of the gods.
In dealing with tuning, there are two main terms to know. One is interval. It means the distance between notes. The basic science of intervals was laid out in ancient Greece, perhaps first by the mathematician Pythagoras. The first notes of the C major scale are C, D, E, F, and G. The note E is the third note up from C, so the interval C-E is a third. The note G is five notes up, so C-G is a fifth. So musical intervals run second, third, fourth, fifth, and so on. (Some intervals can be major, like F to A, or minor, like F to A flat.)
OK? Now, as Pythagoras discovered, intervals are also mathematical ratios. If you take an open guitar string sounding E, stop it with your finger in the middle and pluck, you get E an octave above. The octave ratio, then, is 2:1. If you stop the string in the ratio 3:2, you get a fifth higher than the open string, the note B. The other intervals have progressive ratios; 4:3 is a fourth, and so on.
So far, all very tidy. But this is where things get hilarious. As Pythagoras also realized in mathematical terms, if you start with a C at the bottom of a piano keyboard and tune a series of 12 perfect 3:2 fifths up to the top, you discover that where you expect to have returned to a perfect high C, that C is overshot, intolerably out of tune. In other words, nature's math doesn't add up. A series of perfect intervals doesn't end at a perfect interval from where you started. If you tune three perfect 5:4 major thirds, it should logically add up to an octave, but it doesn't; the result is egregiously flat. It is this innate irreconcilability of pitch that, through the centuries, has driven men mad. Professor Duffin is a living representative of a long line of obsessives. Personal and institutional battles have been fought over the issue of tuning, fame won and lost. It was ever thus, wrestling with the gods.
What all this means in practice is that in tuning keyboards and fretted instruments, you have to screw around with the intervals in order to fit the necessary notes into an octave. In other words, as we say, you have to temper pure intervals, nudge them up or down a hair in some systematic way. Otherwise, you get chaos. So there's the second word you need to remember: The business of adapting tuning to nature's messy math is called temperament. And now we're halfway to understanding The Well-Tempered Clavier: It has to do with the art and science of keyboard tuning. We'll get to the wellness in a minute.
There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can't be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune. Medieval tunings voted for pure fifths. By the late Renaissance the tuning systems favored better thirds. The latter were various kinds of meantone temperament. In meantone, most of the accumulated fudges were dumped onto two notes, usually G# (aka A flat) and E flat. The shivery effect of those two notes played together in meantone temperaments earned it the name "wolf," which, like its namesake, was regarded with a certain holy fear.
By and large, in composing music for meantone keyboards you avoided the wolf, so never, for example, wrote in the key of A flat. In fact, those temperaments left only a few keys that were well-enough in tune to be usable: the keys between two flats and three sharps. Between the 16th and 18th centuries a lot of splendid music was written in meantone tuning, within that range of a dozen major and minor keys. But the inability to write in all 24 possible keys ate at composers' guts. More and more, there was a demand for a tuning system that would render all keys usable—and escape the wolf.
One of those tunings was already known to the ancients: equal temperament. Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: The distance between each interval is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible. So now it's all fixed, yes? The laughter of the gods has been stilled, right? Are you kidding? You fools: The gods never lose.
For centuries, equal temperament didn't catch on because musicians tended not to like it. Even when fretted instruments were invented and lutes and guitars were mostly tuned in equal temperament, they still didn't like it. Most especially, musicians didn't like the fat major thirds of equal temperament, which are way out of tune with nature. They preferred the sweet thirds of meantone temperaments, with all their limitations. For another thing, in meantone each key had an audible personality, from, say, the almost-pure and upstanding C major, suitable to moods of equanimity and celebration, to shadowy C minor, suitable for doubt and despair. Equal temperament leaves every key with exactly the same personality, which was widely felt to be boring. Musicians still preferred, then, the old varieties of what is generically called unequal temperament.
In the late 17th century, tuning geeks came up with a new idea: Let's hair-split all over the keyboard, tweaking this and that in minuscule ways, letting, say, a third be a bit larger in one spot and a bit smaller in another. These kinds of flexible temperaments accomplished several things at once: 1) They made all keys usable; 2) yet they preserved the individual character of keys, because each still had its distinctive collection of intervals; 3) and they tamed the big bad wolf.
Hey, said adherents of this more sophisticated unequal system, this really works well! So they called it well-temperament. One of those adherents was J. S. Bach. He wanted, he said somewhat testily, to write in any damn key he felt like, and he tuned his harpsichord himself to make that possible. When a famous organ tuner who did meantone tuning showed up, Bach would play an A flat major chord on one of his organs with its howling wolf, just to torture the old man.
Bach wrote the preludes and fugues of The Well-Tempered Clavier (clavier meaning any kind of keyboard instrument) not only to show off this improved system but to help make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key. Anybody who wanted to play from the WTC was pressured to use well-temperament, because many of the pieces sounded sour in any other tuning. (However, heh-heh, there's no precise record of which well-tempered system Bach used.)
.......
The various kinds of meantone and well-temperament help explain why, in the 18th into 19th centuries, keys had particular emotional associations. Key descriptions of the time sound outlandish, and indeed some were on the loony side, but they were founded on the reality that in unequal temperaments each key had its distinctive color and personality. "Is something gay, brilliant, or martial needed?" wrote one theorist. "Take C, D, E [majors]." Another: "D major … the key of triumph, of Hallelujahs, of war-cries, of victory-rejoicing." All those keys were relatively well in tune on the keyboard. Minor keys were innately less in tune, so darker in sound and import: G minor, for example, is "suited to frenzy, despair, agitation. ... The lament of a noble matron who no longer has her youthful beauty." You want a pretty pastoral piece? You want a relaxing key like F major—the key of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony:
Two of Beethoven's favorite keys tell us a lot about him. The most famous is C minor, described by one writer of the time as "a tragic key … fit to express grand misadventures, deaths of heroes, and grand but mournful, ominous, and lugubrious actions."
.......
On the other hand, in the prevailing unequal temperaments there was still the presence, or at least the ghost, of the old wolf. Thus, croaked one theorist concerning that key, "Death, grave, putrefaction, judgment, eternity lie in its radius." Beethoven studied the theorists carefully, then did what he wanted. As for the putrefaction of A flat major: baloney. For Beethoven, that key, with its complex and distinctive coloration, suggested feelings in the direction of nobility, devotion, and resignation, as in the second movement of the Pathètique, again by Andras Schiff:
When composers stretched for more harmonic variety and tension in the first decades of the 19th century, as a practical matter the once-despised equal temperament won out over unequal tunings, which withered away during the century. But as professor Duffin exemplifies in How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony, many tuning geeks today still find that temperament loathsome. Actually, Duffin's book is less rabid than its title sounds, amounting to a plea for playing keyboard music through the early 19th century in period tunings, especially in one called "sixth-comma meantone," which Duffin believes is the tuning Bach had in mind for the Well-Tempered Clavier. His reasoning is of Glenn Beckian deviousness. Some claim to find a cabalistic clue to Bach's intended tuning, close to sixth-comma, in the curlicues at the top of his title page for the WTC:
That idea may be nuts, or not. Bach was into puzzles, numerology, and all kinds of musical cabala, so the nuttiest idea of all about his tuning might well be right. It would figure. Listen to Watchorn in the curlicue tuning—or rather a theory about it—in the C# Major Prelude, one of the world's most happy-making pieces. This is another key out of the pale in older temperaments:
How do the travails of keyboard temperament apply to instruments without fixed tuning, like violins, trombones, flugelhorns, and the human voice? They don't apply at all. Most of the time violinists, et al., tune by ear, on the fly, note by note, and chord by chord. That's why a string quartet or an a cappella choir can be better in tune with nature than a guitar or a piano can. As a high-school trombonist playing with a piano for the first time, I found adjusting to keyboard tuning a pain in the neck—without knowing why. String recitalists know that pain intimately. Meanwhile, an orchestra is made of a bunch of instruments, some of which tune naturally by ear—strings, woodwinds, brass—but also instruments in fixed, equal temperament: harp, marimbas and xylophones, harpsichord and piano, etc. What do orchestras do to harmonize all those conflicting demands? They do the best they can and try not to think about it too much. It can make you crazy.
.........
Read the full article and its accompanying sound file examples HERE.
Wednesday, March 03, 2010
In Search of Lost Sounds (How Modern Pianos Distort Early Creations Like "Moonlight Sonata")
In Search of Lost Sounds: Why you've never really heard the "Moonlight" Sonata.
By Jan Swafford Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2010, at 7:06 AM ET
SLATE
......
In 1976, Michael Frederick, once an East Asian history major and a harpsichord buff, and his musical wife, Patricia, bought an old piano, a British Stodart built around 1830. It needed major restoration, and because Michael had been building harpsichords as a hobby since his college days he decided to work on it himself. Then they bought another 19th-century piano, and another, and so on. You know how it is with obsessions.
At the turn of this century, their five-room house was full of keyboards, the furniture and the Fredericks themselves crammed into the interstices. Finally, their village of Ashburnham, Mass., agreed to lease them the small Victorian brick library next to the town hall to house what was now called the Frederick Historic Piano Collection. They could rent the library for a modest rate, balanced by an equal amount they invested in restoring the building. Today the pianos reside in the library, the only collection of their kind on the continent.
The Frederick Collection has 24 restored pianos, the oldest an unsigned Viennese model from the 1790s of a style Mozart knew, followed by a century's worth of legendary names: Graf, Bösendorfer, Streicher, Pleyel, Blüthner, an 1866 Steinway. The youngest member is an Erard made in Paris in 1928. They're all originals, and Michael Frederick is himself an original. If you need to know about the exigencies of postwar felt production in Europe, he'll catch you up. Felt is a big thing in his life; likewise, leather, wood, wire, and other low-tech hardware. If you e-mail the collection, you get his wife, Pat. Michael doesn't do e-mail or computers, either.
He keeps the pianos in concert-ready shape, and the couple produce a yearly series down the road in Central Church. The 200 seats are usually filled. If you make a reservation to see the collection in the library they'll give you the tour, very much hands-on. Maybe Pat will sing you a Schubert song in her tremulous voice, accompanying herself on a model that Schubert would have known well. Michael might play you Mozart on the 1790s piano, whose action is so delicate that nobody yet has had the courage to play it in public. He is ready to expound at length on any relevant subject you like and more. When I made some observation to the effect of, "the piano was in the middle of its evolution in Beethoven's lifetime," he pointed out with some heat that this wasn't the case. The state of the piano was a variety of national, local, and house traditions moving forward at the same time. During the 19th century, Viennese pianos were noted for their lightness of touch and tone and British pianos for a more robust build, touch, and sound; French pianos lay somewhere between. Within those parameters of local taste, each maker had a distinctive style and a proprietary bag of tricks. For one example, Mozart's favorite maker, Walter, would leave his soundboards outside all winter; the ones that cracked went into the stove.
When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It's said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.
The prime example of what I'm talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret." At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven's time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended.
........
Check out the original post (with sound file examples with side-by-side examples of the pianos) HERE.
By Jan Swafford Posted Tuesday, March 2, 2010, at 7:06 AM ET
SLATE
......
In 1976, Michael Frederick, once an East Asian history major and a harpsichord buff, and his musical wife, Patricia, bought an old piano, a British Stodart built around 1830. It needed major restoration, and because Michael had been building harpsichords as a hobby since his college days he decided to work on it himself. Then they bought another 19th-century piano, and another, and so on. You know how it is with obsessions.
At the turn of this century, their five-room house was full of keyboards, the furniture and the Fredericks themselves crammed into the interstices. Finally, their village of Ashburnham, Mass., agreed to lease them the small Victorian brick library next to the town hall to house what was now called the Frederick Historic Piano Collection. They could rent the library for a modest rate, balanced by an equal amount they invested in restoring the building. Today the pianos reside in the library, the only collection of their kind on the continent.
The Frederick Collection has 24 restored pianos, the oldest an unsigned Viennese model from the 1790s of a style Mozart knew, followed by a century's worth of legendary names: Graf, Bösendorfer, Streicher, Pleyel, Blüthner, an 1866 Steinway. The youngest member is an Erard made in Paris in 1928. They're all originals, and Michael Frederick is himself an original. If you need to know about the exigencies of postwar felt production in Europe, he'll catch you up. Felt is a big thing in his life; likewise, leather, wood, wire, and other low-tech hardware. If you e-mail the collection, you get his wife, Pat. Michael doesn't do e-mail or computers, either.
He keeps the pianos in concert-ready shape, and the couple produce a yearly series down the road in Central Church. The 200 seats are usually filled. If you make a reservation to see the collection in the library they'll give you the tour, very much hands-on. Maybe Pat will sing you a Schubert song in her tremulous voice, accompanying herself on a model that Schubert would have known well. Michael might play you Mozart on the 1790s piano, whose action is so delicate that nobody yet has had the courage to play it in public. He is ready to expound at length on any relevant subject you like and more. When I made some observation to the effect of, "the piano was in the middle of its evolution in Beethoven's lifetime," he pointed out with some heat that this wasn't the case. The state of the piano was a variety of national, local, and house traditions moving forward at the same time. During the 19th century, Viennese pianos were noted for their lightness of touch and tone and British pianos for a more robust build, touch, and sound; French pianos lay somewhere between. Within those parameters of local taste, each maker had a distinctive style and a proprietary bag of tricks. For one example, Mozart's favorite maker, Walter, would leave his soundboards outside all winter; the ones that cracked went into the stove.
When composers wrote for these instruments they sometimes loved them and sometimes chafed at their limitations, but in any case they wrote for those sounds, that touch, those bells and whistles. From old instruments, performers on modern pianos can get important insights into the sound image that Mozart, Schubert, et al., were aiming for. But music from the 18th and 19th centuries doesn't just sound different now than on the original instruments; some of it can't even be played as written on modern pianos. One example is the double-octave glissando in the last movement of Beethoven's "Waldstein" Sonata. With the light action and shallow key dip of a period Viennese piano you can plant your thumb and little finger on the octave and slide to the left, and there it is. Given the much heavier action and deeper key dip of a modern piano, if you tried that today you'd dislocate something. Every pianist has a dodge for that passage. It's said that before the glissando Rudolf Serkin would discreetly spit on his fingers.
The prime example of what I'm talking about is perhaps the most famous piece ever written: Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata. Hector Berlioz called its murmuring, mournful first movement, "one of those poems that human language does not know how to interpret." At the beginning, Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the sustain pedal through the whole first movement, so the strings are never damped. With the pianos of Beethoven's time, on which the sustain of the strings was shorter than today, the effect was subtle, one harmony melting into another. On a modern piano, with its longer sustain, the effect of holding the pedal down would be a tonal traffic jam. Today you have to fake the effect, and it never quite works as intended.
........
Check out the original post (with sound file examples with side-by-side examples of the pianos) HERE.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer (David Cope's Computer)
From Miller-McCune [original has Quicktime files and images]
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?
By: Ryan Blitstein
0:00 / 0:00DownloadRight-click and save as to download.
| February 22, 2010 | 05:00 AM (PDT)
The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles. A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek out from the intellectual rubble. Above, something like 200 sets of wind chimes from around the world hang, ringing oddly congruent melodies.
And in the center, the old University of California, Santa Cruz, emeritus professor reclines in his desk chair, black socks pulled up over his pants cuffs, a thin mustache and thick beard lending him the look of an Amish grandfather. It was here, half a dozen years ago, that Cope put Emmy to sleep. She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not to anthropomorphize her — he speaks of Emmy wistfully, as if she were a deceased child.
Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?
Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.
This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.
With Emily Howell, Cope is, once again, challenging the assumptions of artists and philosophers, exposing revered composers as unknowing plagiarists and opening the door to a world of creative machines good enough to compete with human artists. But even Cope still wonders whether his decades of innovative, thought-provoking research have brought him any closer to his ultimate goal: composing an immortal, life-changing piece of music.
Read the full article and listen to sound files HERE.
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?
By: Ryan Blitstein
0:00 / 0:00DownloadRight-click and save as to download.
| February 22, 2010 | 05:00 AM (PDT)
The office looks like the aftermath of a surrealistic earthquake, as if David Cope’s brain has spewed out decades of memories all over the carpet, the door, the walls, even the ceiling. Books and papers, music scores and magazines are all strewn about in ragged piles. A semi-functional Apple Power Mac 7500 (discontinued April 1, 1996) sits in the corner, its lemon-lime monitor buzzing. Drawings filled with concepts for a never-constructed musical-radio-space telescope dominate half of one wall. Russian dolls and an exercise bike, not to mention random pieces from homemade board games, peek out from the intellectual rubble. Above, something like 200 sets of wind chimes from around the world hang, ringing oddly congruent melodies.
And in the center, the old University of California, Santa Cruz, emeritus professor reclines in his desk chair, black socks pulled up over his pants cuffs, a thin mustache and thick beard lending him the look of an Amish grandfather. It was here, half a dozen years ago, that Cope put Emmy to sleep. She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not to anthropomorphize her — he speaks of Emmy wistfully, as if she were a deceased child.
Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?
Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.
This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.
With Emily Howell, Cope is, once again, challenging the assumptions of artists and philosophers, exposing revered composers as unknowing plagiarists and opening the door to a world of creative machines good enough to compete with human artists. But even Cope still wonders whether his decades of innovative, thought-provoking research have brought him any closer to his ultimate goal: composing an immortal, life-changing piece of music.
Read the full article and listen to sound files HERE.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Strike in Cleveland Points to Classical Music Woes
NYT
January 19, 2010
Strike in Cleveland Points to Classical Music Woes
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
CLEVELAND — One of the first high-profile labor tussles of 2010 is brewing at the Cleveland Orchestra, and it points to troubled times for the nation’s elite classical musical ensembles amid the Great Recession.
Orchestra members struck on Monday, the first such work stoppage here in 30 years. It was a day off for them anyway, so there was little immediate effect, but the strike forced the cancellation of a two-day teaching and concert trip to Indiana University and threatened a lucrative residency in Miami, both scheduled for this week. The two sides spent much of the day together in talks with a mediator.
In troubles elsewhere, the New York Philharmonic has just reported a record deficit for last year of $4.6 million, with nearly that much of a shortfall expected this season. The Seattle Symphony musicians have authorized a strike if need be.
Many of the nation’s top orchestras have reduced staff positions and administrative salaries in the last year. Orchestras have downsized seasons, canceled tours, programmed smaller works and left jobs open.
Current economic hardships, of course, are partly to blame. But industry experts point out that in the flush years of the 1990s, orchestras went on spending sprees without building up their endowments for a rainy decade. Now the crunch is on. At the same time, the old system of making the majority of ticket money from season-long subscriptions is breaking down. Big recording contracts are long gone.
In Cleveland, the fight revolves around several thousand dollars a year in salary for each player. But implicit is a debate over the worth of exquisitely trained musical artists in our society and how much we are now willing to pay for them.
......
The Cleveland players’ minimum salary now stands at $115,000, seventh in the nation, but most earn more through additional payments; principal players can earn two or three times that amount.
As the musicians see it, losing further ground will make it tougher to attract the absolute best players, and to keep them, threatening the orchestra’s greatness. “Continuity and stability have been the backbone of this orchestra,” said Michael Sachs, the principal trumpeter.
Mr. Hanson, the executive director, dismissed these arguments. “The proposal that we’re making is fair and reasonable and will not cause any artistic impact such as they’re predicting,” he said. Though the orchestra has been toward the bottom of the elite orchestra pay scale for a decade, he added, virtually no member has defected.
Read the full article HERE.
January 19, 2010
Strike in Cleveland Points to Classical Music Woes
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
CLEVELAND — One of the first high-profile labor tussles of 2010 is brewing at the Cleveland Orchestra, and it points to troubled times for the nation’s elite classical musical ensembles amid the Great Recession.
Orchestra members struck on Monday, the first such work stoppage here in 30 years. It was a day off for them anyway, so there was little immediate effect, but the strike forced the cancellation of a two-day teaching and concert trip to Indiana University and threatened a lucrative residency in Miami, both scheduled for this week. The two sides spent much of the day together in talks with a mediator.
In troubles elsewhere, the New York Philharmonic has just reported a record deficit for last year of $4.6 million, with nearly that much of a shortfall expected this season. The Seattle Symphony musicians have authorized a strike if need be.
Many of the nation’s top orchestras have reduced staff positions and administrative salaries in the last year. Orchestras have downsized seasons, canceled tours, programmed smaller works and left jobs open.
Current economic hardships, of course, are partly to blame. But industry experts point out that in the flush years of the 1990s, orchestras went on spending sprees without building up their endowments for a rainy decade. Now the crunch is on. At the same time, the old system of making the majority of ticket money from season-long subscriptions is breaking down. Big recording contracts are long gone.
In Cleveland, the fight revolves around several thousand dollars a year in salary for each player. But implicit is a debate over the worth of exquisitely trained musical artists in our society and how much we are now willing to pay for them.
......
The Cleveland players’ minimum salary now stands at $115,000, seventh in the nation, but most earn more through additional payments; principal players can earn two or three times that amount.
As the musicians see it, losing further ground will make it tougher to attract the absolute best players, and to keep them, threatening the orchestra’s greatness. “Continuity and stability have been the backbone of this orchestra,” said Michael Sachs, the principal trumpeter.
Mr. Hanson, the executive director, dismissed these arguments. “The proposal that we’re making is fair and reasonable and will not cause any artistic impact such as they’re predicting,” he said. Though the orchestra has been toward the bottom of the elite orchestra pay scale for a decade, he added, virtually no member has defected.
Read the full article HERE.
Sunday, September 13, 2009
NYT Review of Trey Anastasio and NY Phil
Love the last two sentences...
NYT
September 14, 2009
Music Review
Classical and Rock, Blended Pleasingly
By STEVE SMITH
If there was a single moment that best illustrated the difference between a routine concert by the New York Philharmonic and the one it presented at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night, that moment came when Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, returned to the stage after intermission. Ms. Staples was greeted with warm applause, as tradition mandates. Just before it faded, a coyotelike howl of approval sounded from a balcony. Ms. Staples gamely acknowledged her admirer with a smile that was surely as incredulous as it was appreciative.
The occasion was a concert with Trey Anastasio, the singer and guitarist for the rock band Phish, benefiting a foundation named for his sister, Kristine Anastasio Manning, an environmentalist and author who died of cancer in April. Mr. Anastasio enjoys a rabidly devoted following among jam-band devotees. But curiosity seekers anticipating a blissed-out legion in henna and hemp would have been disappointed by an uncommonly diverse, entirelywell-behaved throng of listeners, some of whom could be overheard marveling at their first sight of Carnegie Hall.
Playing with an orchestra is nothing new for Mr. Anastasio, who studied composition and arranging in college and has made several recordings with classical players. The most recent, “Time Turns Elastic” (Rubber Jungle), features a 29-minute work of the same name that Mr. Anastasio wrote with Don Hart, a commercial arranger and orchestrator who is also the composer in residence for Orchestra Nashville.
A shortened “Time Turns Elastic” has found a place in Phish’s live sets and appears on the group’s new album, “Joy” (JEMP). Heard in its original form at Carnegie, the piece was both an electric-guitar concerto and a song cycle, its three movements broken into nine sections, in which the languorous eloquence of Mr. Anastasio’s guitar playing alternated with his gentle, plain-spoken singing. (The dreamily impressionistic lyrics were Mr. Anastasio’s as well.)
Mr. Hart’s appealing orchestration touched on cinematic lushness and musical-theater dazzle, with episodes of Disneyesque twinkle and “Classical Gas”-style kitsch. In that context the brief fugue that opened “Splinters of Hail” (the second part of the last movement) felt almost jarring, like a plea to be taken seriously.
No such pleading was necessary: what Mr. Anastasio and Mr. Hart have created is that rarest of rarities, a classical-rock hybrid that might please partisans from both constituencies. Set amid a generous group of popular Phish songs — gentle, string-cushioned ballads like “Brian and Robert” and “Let Me Lie,” as well as the audacious, intricate instrumentals “Guyute Orchestral” and “You Enjoy Myself” — the new piece could hardly have gone wrong.
The orchestra, conducted by Asher Fisch, played brilliantly throughout the evening, with the trombones dipping into deep reserves of raucousness for “You Enjoy Myself.” The concert was liberally punctuated with whoops and cheers; the final ovation for the orchestra before the encore — another Phish song, “If I Could” — was the loudest, wildest response I have ever heard for anything at Carnegie. That so many of the players could remain stone-faced during the tumult is a phenomenon beyond my comprehension.
NYT
September 14, 2009
Music Review
Classical and Rock, Blended Pleasingly
By STEVE SMITH
If there was a single moment that best illustrated the difference between a routine concert by the New York Philharmonic and the one it presented at Carnegie Hall on Saturday night, that moment came when Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, returned to the stage after intermission. Ms. Staples was greeted with warm applause, as tradition mandates. Just before it faded, a coyotelike howl of approval sounded from a balcony. Ms. Staples gamely acknowledged her admirer with a smile that was surely as incredulous as it was appreciative.
The occasion was a concert with Trey Anastasio, the singer and guitarist for the rock band Phish, benefiting a foundation named for his sister, Kristine Anastasio Manning, an environmentalist and author who died of cancer in April. Mr. Anastasio enjoys a rabidly devoted following among jam-band devotees. But curiosity seekers anticipating a blissed-out legion in henna and hemp would have been disappointed by an uncommonly diverse, entirelywell-behaved throng of listeners, some of whom could be overheard marveling at their first sight of Carnegie Hall.
Playing with an orchestra is nothing new for Mr. Anastasio, who studied composition and arranging in college and has made several recordings with classical players. The most recent, “Time Turns Elastic” (Rubber Jungle), features a 29-minute work of the same name that Mr. Anastasio wrote with Don Hart, a commercial arranger and orchestrator who is also the composer in residence for Orchestra Nashville.
A shortened “Time Turns Elastic” has found a place in Phish’s live sets and appears on the group’s new album, “Joy” (JEMP). Heard in its original form at Carnegie, the piece was both an electric-guitar concerto and a song cycle, its three movements broken into nine sections, in which the languorous eloquence of Mr. Anastasio’s guitar playing alternated with his gentle, plain-spoken singing. (The dreamily impressionistic lyrics were Mr. Anastasio’s as well.)
Mr. Hart’s appealing orchestration touched on cinematic lushness and musical-theater dazzle, with episodes of Disneyesque twinkle and “Classical Gas”-style kitsch. In that context the brief fugue that opened “Splinters of Hail” (the second part of the last movement) felt almost jarring, like a plea to be taken seriously.
No such pleading was necessary: what Mr. Anastasio and Mr. Hart have created is that rarest of rarities, a classical-rock hybrid that might please partisans from both constituencies. Set amid a generous group of popular Phish songs — gentle, string-cushioned ballads like “Brian and Robert” and “Let Me Lie,” as well as the audacious, intricate instrumentals “Guyute Orchestral” and “You Enjoy Myself” — the new piece could hardly have gone wrong.
The orchestra, conducted by Asher Fisch, played brilliantly throughout the evening, with the trombones dipping into deep reserves of raucousness for “You Enjoy Myself.” The concert was liberally punctuated with whoops and cheers; the final ovation for the orchestra before the encore — another Phish song, “If I Could” — was the loudest, wildest response I have ever heard for anything at Carnegie. That so many of the players could remain stone-faced during the tumult is a phenomenon beyond my comprehension.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank
NYT
June 1, 2009
Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The shy Palestinian teenager raised her flute and dispatched the courtly melodies and cascading runs of an 18th-century concerto with surprising self-assurance.
Over just three years of study the flute had become a near obsession for Dalia Moukarker, 16. She was practicing so hard — sometimes retreating to a bathroom in her crowded apartment, sometimes skipping meals — that her wrist filled with pain, limiting her to two hours a day. But in a classroom here recently, the discomfort was nowhere to be seen. For she had earned an almost surreal reward: a master class with her hero, Emmanuel Pahud, a major international soloist.
Mr. Pahud circled, studying her intently. Then he took her instrument and sent out stunning roulades of notes to demonstrate. Dalia gaped in wonder and gave a soft laugh of amazement. The flute, she said later, “takes me to another world that is far away from here, a more beautiful world. Because it is not a beautiful place here. It is an ugly place.”
Dalia is one of a new generation of Palestinians who have been swept up in a rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years here in the Palestinian territories, but especially the West Bank. The sounds of trills and arpeggios, Bach minuets and Beethoven sonatas, are rising up amid the economic malaise and restrictions of the Israeli occupation.
But as with many endeavors in this part of the world, the pursuit of classical music is fraught with tensions and obstacles, including a desire not to be seen as working with Israelis.
A small effort to teach violin at a refugee camp in Jenin, north of Ramallah, was banned in March when camp authorities heard that the students had played for Holocaust survivors in Israel, saying the concert “served enemy interests.” A lack of detailed knowledge about the Holocaust is widespread among Palestinians, who view that chapter of history as a catalyst to the creation of Israel and thus a source of their suffering. But the music teacher, Wafaa Younis, an Israeli Arab, scoffed at the complaint. “I don’t think it should be a problem,” she said.
In another incident a music school in Jenin was heavily damaged by arson.
Because of financial hardships, most students rely on donated instruments and a rotating cast of European teachers. Since traditional Palestinian culture frowns on the mingling of the sexes, parents are sometimes reluctant to send their children to music schools, administrators say.
And politics are never far away. Some Palestinian teachers couch the instruction in propaganda, calling it a means of “resisting the occupation.” Across the border in Israel, which has a mother lode of classical music talent, there is little awareness that Palestinians are pursuing the same artistic tradition. That is perhaps no surprise in a conflict where mutual ignorance is prodigious.
“We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives,” said Noam Ben-Zeev, a music critic for the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz.
Despite the opposition of some, many Palestinians see the study of Western classical music — part of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank — as a source of hope, a way to connect to the outer world from a hemmed-in and controlled existence, particularly at a time when hope for a Palestinian state seems ever more distant.
“Deep inside, it’s to demonstrate we are alive, that we deserve to be alive and have our culture,” said George Diek, a partly self-taught Palestinian oboe teacher in Bethlehem.
The presence of classical music is still tiny among a West Bank population of 2.5 million. But concerts pop up more and more. A Baroque festival took place across the West Bank in December. A piano competition for Palestinians attracted 50 entrants to East Jerusalem in January.
Sounding Jerusalem, a chamber music festival, will take place in the area for the fourth year this month. Music schools are booming and sending students off to study in Europe and the United States. An influx of money from foreign governments, local foundations and the Palestinian Authority has fueled the music revival.
Even in Gaza, pummeled by a 22-day war with Israel that ended in January, Palestinian authorities are trying to reopen a small music school that was heavily damaged.
One of the major players in the nurturing of classical music is the Barenboim-Said Foundation, established by Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born Israeli conductor and pianist, who is a forceful advocate for Palestinian rights, and Edward W. Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, who died in 2003. It opened a center in Ramallah in 2006 to provide lessons here and coaching in nearby towns and villages.
Dalia is one of the foundation’s students. She lives in Beit Jala, a village close to Bethlehem, where she shares a room with a sister, Roudy, 11, a budding clarinetist. She is the eldest of five children in a Christian family. Her father, Sulieman, is a security guard at Bethlehem University, and the family survives on money sent by two of her father’s expatiate brothers.
Posters of the French-Swiss Mr. Pahud are taped to Dalia’s bedroom window, which overlooks Bethlehem and a tumble of white houses. She can also see a wall that is part of the lengthy barrier built by Israel in response to attacks. Hundreds of Israelis were killed in suicide bombings emanating from the area. Dalia said that she felt “in prison” because of travel restrictions. “Every time we look at this wall, we feel suffocated,” she added.
Friends at first made fun of her flute playing, saying music was not a serious endeavor. Some teachers supported her. “But the most important thing was the feeling the music gives me,” she said. “You feel as if you are flying.” She now hopes to gain a foundation scholarship to study in France, she said, and dreams of being a conductor.
At the master class, Mr. Pahud told her to lighten her hold on the flute to release tension. “Gentle fingers, small fingers,” he said. Later, in an interview, he pronounced her a real talent.
Mr. Pahud, 39, was personally invited here by Mr. Barenboim. In addition to its own activities, the Barenboim-Said Foundation also assists a group called Al Kamandjati (the Violinist), founded in October 2002 by Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp and studied viola in France. Having started with 90 students, the program now has 400, Mr. Aburedwan said. Among its students is Sondos Samarn, 12. Her teacher, Benjamin Payen, 28, of France, said she was one of the most talented violin students in Ramallah.
Al Kamandjati’s Jenin branch was the school struck by arson. No one claimed responsibility, and suspicion fell on an array of forces: Islamists (although religious authorities are said to have given their blessing to the school), social conservatives, people jealous of the school’s success, collaborators with Israel.
Classes were immediately moved to the garden, and the small stone school reopened within two weeks. On a day in late April children came bearing ouds, flutes and violins. The smell of smoke lingered despite the whitewashed walls. Iyad Staiti, the director, asked visitors to stay inside, to avoid drawing attention from the school’s enemies. Across town Al Kamandjati is renovating a building that will be a much larger home.
Just how complicated things can become is made obvious by the third classical music presence, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Affiliated with Birzeit University, it began in the mid-1990s and has more than 650 students and a curriculum of theory, ear training, music history and performance, as well as an Arabic music program. It has ambitions to sponsor a Palestine national orchestra. The conservatory is putting up a modern glass-and-concrete building in Bethlehem about twice the size of its quarters there.
Though they share Mr. Said’s name, the conservatory and the Barenboim-Said Foundation no longer work together. A joint youth orchestra fell apart.
Suhail Khoury, the conservatory’s general director, said Barenboim-Said was siphoning off the best musicians for the Arab-Israeli orchestra it sponsors, the West-Eastern Divan. He accused Mr. Barenboim of effectively supporting the Israeli occupation by not using the orchestra to oppose Israeli policies.
“The fact on the ground is that Israel occupies Palestine,” he said. “If one guy’s foot is on the neck of another, you can’t sing together.”
Mr. Barenboim said that the orchestra was “not a political project” and does not endorse the Israeli occupation. Music, Mr. Barenboim said, is the best weapon the Palestinians have “against violence and ugliness.”
“If you go to a violin lesson for an hour,” he added, “in that hour you are not in contact with violence or with the occupation.”
Near Ramallah, hours after teaching Dalia’s master class, Mr. Pahud played a solo concert at a boys’ school. The call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingled with the notes coming from his gleaming golden flute.
Dalia sat in the third row, beside her main teacher, Ilia Karadjov, 40, from Germany. The two bent their heads over the score of each piece. At the end Dalia presented Mr. Pahud with a bouquet.
She said her flute was like a friend she could not live without. But it is borrowed, from an amateur musician in her village. Dalia will give it back when she gets her own and goes off to a university.
“This way,” she said, “I can give an opportunity for someone else.”
June 1, 2009
Minuets, Sonatas and Politics in the West Bank
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
RAMALLAH, West Bank — The shy Palestinian teenager raised her flute and dispatched the courtly melodies and cascading runs of an 18th-century concerto with surprising self-assurance.
Over just three years of study the flute had become a near obsession for Dalia Moukarker, 16. She was practicing so hard — sometimes retreating to a bathroom in her crowded apartment, sometimes skipping meals — that her wrist filled with pain, limiting her to two hours a day. But in a classroom here recently, the discomfort was nowhere to be seen. For she had earned an almost surreal reward: a master class with her hero, Emmanuel Pahud, a major international soloist.
Mr. Pahud circled, studying her intently. Then he took her instrument and sent out stunning roulades of notes to demonstrate. Dalia gaped in wonder and gave a soft laugh of amazement. The flute, she said later, “takes me to another world that is far away from here, a more beautiful world. Because it is not a beautiful place here. It is an ugly place.”
Dalia is one of a new generation of Palestinians who have been swept up in a rising tide of interest in Western classical music in the last several years here in the Palestinian territories, but especially the West Bank. The sounds of trills and arpeggios, Bach minuets and Beethoven sonatas, are rising up amid the economic malaise and restrictions of the Israeli occupation.
But as with many endeavors in this part of the world, the pursuit of classical music is fraught with tensions and obstacles, including a desire not to be seen as working with Israelis.
A small effort to teach violin at a refugee camp in Jenin, north of Ramallah, was banned in March when camp authorities heard that the students had played for Holocaust survivors in Israel, saying the concert “served enemy interests.” A lack of detailed knowledge about the Holocaust is widespread among Palestinians, who view that chapter of history as a catalyst to the creation of Israel and thus a source of their suffering. But the music teacher, Wafaa Younis, an Israeli Arab, scoffed at the complaint. “I don’t think it should be a problem,” she said.
In another incident a music school in Jenin was heavily damaged by arson.
Because of financial hardships, most students rely on donated instruments and a rotating cast of European teachers. Since traditional Palestinian culture frowns on the mingling of the sexes, parents are sometimes reluctant to send their children to music schools, administrators say.
And politics are never far away. Some Palestinian teachers couch the instruction in propaganda, calling it a means of “resisting the occupation.” Across the border in Israel, which has a mother lode of classical music talent, there is little awareness that Palestinians are pursuing the same artistic tradition. That is perhaps no surprise in a conflict where mutual ignorance is prodigious.
“We cannot perceive them as people who have their own cultural lives,” said Noam Ben-Zeev, a music critic for the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz.
Despite the opposition of some, many Palestinians see the study of Western classical music — part of a broader cultural revival in the West Bank — as a source of hope, a way to connect to the outer world from a hemmed-in and controlled existence, particularly at a time when hope for a Palestinian state seems ever more distant.
“Deep inside, it’s to demonstrate we are alive, that we deserve to be alive and have our culture,” said George Diek, a partly self-taught Palestinian oboe teacher in Bethlehem.
The presence of classical music is still tiny among a West Bank population of 2.5 million. But concerts pop up more and more. A Baroque festival took place across the West Bank in December. A piano competition for Palestinians attracted 50 entrants to East Jerusalem in January.
Sounding Jerusalem, a chamber music festival, will take place in the area for the fourth year this month. Music schools are booming and sending students off to study in Europe and the United States. An influx of money from foreign governments, local foundations and the Palestinian Authority has fueled the music revival.
Even in Gaza, pummeled by a 22-day war with Israel that ended in January, Palestinian authorities are trying to reopen a small music school that was heavily damaged.
One of the major players in the nurturing of classical music is the Barenboim-Said Foundation, established by Daniel Barenboim, the Argentine-born Israeli conductor and pianist, who is a forceful advocate for Palestinian rights, and Edward W. Said, the Palestinian-American intellectual, who died in 2003. It opened a center in Ramallah in 2006 to provide lessons here and coaching in nearby towns and villages.
Dalia is one of the foundation’s students. She lives in Beit Jala, a village close to Bethlehem, where she shares a room with a sister, Roudy, 11, a budding clarinetist. She is the eldest of five children in a Christian family. Her father, Sulieman, is a security guard at Bethlehem University, and the family survives on money sent by two of her father’s expatiate brothers.
Posters of the French-Swiss Mr. Pahud are taped to Dalia’s bedroom window, which overlooks Bethlehem and a tumble of white houses. She can also see a wall that is part of the lengthy barrier built by Israel in response to attacks. Hundreds of Israelis were killed in suicide bombings emanating from the area. Dalia said that she felt “in prison” because of travel restrictions. “Every time we look at this wall, we feel suffocated,” she added.
Friends at first made fun of her flute playing, saying music was not a serious endeavor. Some teachers supported her. “But the most important thing was the feeling the music gives me,” she said. “You feel as if you are flying.” She now hopes to gain a foundation scholarship to study in France, she said, and dreams of being a conductor.
At the master class, Mr. Pahud told her to lighten her hold on the flute to release tension. “Gentle fingers, small fingers,” he said. Later, in an interview, he pronounced her a real talent.
Mr. Pahud, 39, was personally invited here by Mr. Barenboim. In addition to its own activities, the Barenboim-Said Foundation also assists a group called Al Kamandjati (the Violinist), founded in October 2002 by Ramzi Aburedwan, a Palestinian who grew up in a refugee camp and studied viola in France. Having started with 90 students, the program now has 400, Mr. Aburedwan said. Among its students is Sondos Samarn, 12. Her teacher, Benjamin Payen, 28, of France, said she was one of the most talented violin students in Ramallah.
Al Kamandjati’s Jenin branch was the school struck by arson. No one claimed responsibility, and suspicion fell on an array of forces: Islamists (although religious authorities are said to have given their blessing to the school), social conservatives, people jealous of the school’s success, collaborators with Israel.
Classes were immediately moved to the garden, and the small stone school reopened within two weeks. On a day in late April children came bearing ouds, flutes and violins. The smell of smoke lingered despite the whitewashed walls. Iyad Staiti, the director, asked visitors to stay inside, to avoid drawing attention from the school’s enemies. Across town Al Kamandjati is renovating a building that will be a much larger home.
Just how complicated things can become is made obvious by the third classical music presence, the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. Affiliated with Birzeit University, it began in the mid-1990s and has more than 650 students and a curriculum of theory, ear training, music history and performance, as well as an Arabic music program. It has ambitions to sponsor a Palestine national orchestra. The conservatory is putting up a modern glass-and-concrete building in Bethlehem about twice the size of its quarters there.
Though they share Mr. Said’s name, the conservatory and the Barenboim-Said Foundation no longer work together. A joint youth orchestra fell apart.
Suhail Khoury, the conservatory’s general director, said Barenboim-Said was siphoning off the best musicians for the Arab-Israeli orchestra it sponsors, the West-Eastern Divan. He accused Mr. Barenboim of effectively supporting the Israeli occupation by not using the orchestra to oppose Israeli policies.
“The fact on the ground is that Israel occupies Palestine,” he said. “If one guy’s foot is on the neck of another, you can’t sing together.”
Mr. Barenboim said that the orchestra was “not a political project” and does not endorse the Israeli occupation. Music, Mr. Barenboim said, is the best weapon the Palestinians have “against violence and ugliness.”
“If you go to a violin lesson for an hour,” he added, “in that hour you are not in contact with violence or with the occupation.”
Near Ramallah, hours after teaching Dalia’s master class, Mr. Pahud played a solo concert at a boys’ school. The call to prayer from a nearby mosque mingled with the notes coming from his gleaming golden flute.
Dalia sat in the third row, beside her main teacher, Ilia Karadjov, 40, from Germany. The two bent their heads over the score of each piece. At the end Dalia presented Mr. Pahud with a bouquet.
She said her flute was like a friend she could not live without. But it is borrowed, from an amateur musician in her village. Dalia will give it back when she gets her own and goes off to a university.
“This way,” she said, “I can give an opportunity for someone else.”
Saturday, April 18, 2009
Friday, April 17, 2009
Music Story from Ohio: At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes
NYT
April 15, 2009
This Land
At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes
By DAN BARRY
NEWARK, Ohio
Two days before their long-awaited trip to New York City, for many of them a foreign place, the members of the Newark High School Sinfonia noisily gather for rehearsal. The cacophony ends when the first of the first violinists, the best violinist, stands to lead others in tuning to an A.
Her name is Tiffany Clay and she is 18, with light brown hair tied in a ponytail and large eyes that always seem at the edge of tears. She has been on her own, more or less, since she was 16, and the violin in her delicate hands was bought for $175 on eBay by her music teacher.
She is a complicated young woman, says that teacher, and a gifted musician. Consistently at or near the very top of her class. Should be going to a top college, on scholarship. Should be, but won’t be, because she feels a need to make money more than music.
Ms. Clay is a child of her age and place, worried about being laid off, uninterested in and maybe even afraid of imagining a life beyond central Ohio. Newark is what she knows: a pleasant, bifurcated city of 45,000, where concerns about unemployment temper the pride in local public art, and where affluence and poverty sit side-by-side in the classroom.
She once explored the idea of going away to college to become a music teacher. But it just didn’t seem practical: spending four years studying the theory of music, which doesn’t interest her, while here in Newark, the school system is constantly adapting to real and threatened cuts.
Music programs always seem among the first to go, she says. No job security in Tchaikovsky.
So she is maintaining high grades, playing in the orchestra, working 35 hours a week as a Sonic Drive-In carhop, paying $345 a month for the small apartment she shares with an unemployed boyfriend — and planning to study nursing for two years at a technical college in Newark.
“Everybody gets sick,” she says, plotting her future.
Right now, though, she and the other students are rehearsing their string instruments for a high school orchestra competition that will take place in Lincoln Center. Soon the chatter of teenagers in a mostly empty school auditorium surrenders to the music of the masters.
“Listen,” says their teacher, Susan Larson, her baton paused in mid-sway. “Listen.”
Ms. Larson, 43, the Newark school system’s music director for the past three years, faces challenges beyond those presented on sheets of music. The city’s voters keep rejecting raises in the tax levy, forcing cuts in school programs, including music. Parents now pay $55 for a child to participate in activities like this orchestra, and $200 to play sports; if next month’s proposed levy is defeated, Ms. Larson doubts that the orchestra, for one, will survive.
When she struggles to pay for repairs to instruments, many of which are long-ago hand-me-downs from another school district, she recalls her 15 years as the music director in Bexley, a more affluent city where her budget was nowhere near as tight. She vividly remembers the Bexley student who celebrated graduation by smashing a $10,000 violin — his spare.
She cried then; it hurts more now.
Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:
Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips — all without a high school diploma.
“Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mindset has not.”
Mayor Bob Diebold, 48, who grew up here, agrees. “You could walk out of school and get a job,” he says. “You can’t do that anymore.”
Actually, you can — only those jobs are more likely to be at McDonald’s and not, say, at the Owens Corning fiberglass plant, for generations a vital part of the Newark economy. Nine years ago the plant employed about 1,500; now, fewer than 700.
Rehearsal ends and the young musicians flee, a few in cars driven by parents. Ms. Clay, though, drives her 1998 Chevy Malibu to wash clothes for her New York trip at the Colonial Coin Laundry, then heads to her home in a weathered apartment complex — the unit, she says, “right next to the Dumpster.”
The apartment contains little more than bed, television and couch, now occupied by her boyfriend, Trevor Scanlon, who dropped out of high school but says he’s working on his graduate-equivalency diploma. Slinking about is their cat, Easy Mac, named after a macaroni and cheese that you microwave.
The short life story Ms. Clay tells is of an adulthood come too soon, of parents splitting up when she was young, of a mother gone to another city, of a father, an electrician, dogged by employment uncertainties. She and her father clashed so often, she says, that she moved out at 16, got a job and tried to figure out life — rent, work, school, some health issues — on her own.
She returned after a year but left again several months later, for good, though she is in touch with her parents, and talks often of wanting to be around in case they ever need her.
While working full time at the Sonic, she has also maintained superior grades, taken several Advanced Placement courses and distanced herself from classmates. She bristles when some of them talk of what they have spent at the Easton Town Center mall — “That’s a month’s rent,” she wants to say — but at the same time she admits to feeling jealous: “I want — that!”
Now wearing a yellow Sonic golf shirt and a Tiffany C. nameplate, Ms. Clay leaves to make $7.35 an hour, plus tips; it will be a long night. “Kids are in school during the week,” she explains. “They leave at 9, and I stay until after 11.”
Soon she is gliding on roller skates beneath neon reds and yellows that grow more garish as dusk descends. Spinning, speeding, stopping with effortless grace, she balances plastic trays of sweet and greasy food with those delicate hands. Her mastery of yet another world, this Sonic world, means she is again employee of the month, entitling her to a month of free meals.
And the lyrics of her night songs are:
“All right, I’ve got your three junior chili cheese wraps, a B.L.T., chicken strip sandwich, extra long Coney and a mozzarella stick. And a kid’s hot dog meal and kid’s hamburger meal, one with a grape slush, the other with a Powerade slush.”
Two mornings later, buses whisk the Newark High School Sinfonia and its entourage to New York: Austin Modesitt, 16, violinist, who has never left Ohio, but whose mother, a factory worker, contributed her tax-refund check; Jessica Kunasek, 17, violinist, whose older siblings chipped in to pay her way; other students, who sold chocolate, washed cars, held a spaghetti dinner — anything to cover the cost of $850 a student.
Now it is Sunday. They have spent three days in a Manhattan wonderland, but the time has come to compete for something called the National Orchestra Cup. They file into the just-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and put on their school-owned tuxedos and gowns.
A few of the invited high schools had to decline; the recession, organizers explain. But others, from Ohio and California, New York and Indiana, have made it, and their instruments, at least in Ms. Larson’s estimation, are of higher quality.
Newark is the last to perform, following a symphony orchestra — with strings, brass, winds, percussion and a harp — from Carmel, Ind., where the median household income is nearly three times that in Newark. The Carmel students seem at home in Lincoln Center; they play exquisitely.
The Newark students take the stage, led by concertmaster Tiffany Clay and trailed by director Susan Larson. First, a toccata by Frescobaldi. Then a cello duet by Vivaldi, sweetly rendered by juniors Bryn Wilkin and Alex Van Atta. Finally, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.
Soon there come sounds just beyond articulation, of sorrow and joy and wonder, summoned from wood and string by the children of Newark, Ohio. And Ms. Clay, at the front of the stage, disappears into the music.
Enchanted by Pachelbel as a child, given free lessons by a teacher who recognized her talent, blessed with the gift of musical sight reading, Ms. Clay has not been as fortunate with other parts of her young life. Her worries are not about prom dresses but about family, and rent, and employment.
Soon, these students will be back in Newark, proud of tying for first runner-up, behind that orchestra from Carmel. And Ms. Clay will be back at the Sonic, spinning her wheels, singing her song of limeades and cheeseburgers, easy on the mayo. After that, nursing, probably.
What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.
April 15, 2009
This Land
At an Age for Music and Dreams, Real Life Intrudes
By DAN BARRY
NEWARK, Ohio
Two days before their long-awaited trip to New York City, for many of them a foreign place, the members of the Newark High School Sinfonia noisily gather for rehearsal. The cacophony ends when the first of the first violinists, the best violinist, stands to lead others in tuning to an A.
Her name is Tiffany Clay and she is 18, with light brown hair tied in a ponytail and large eyes that always seem at the edge of tears. She has been on her own, more or less, since she was 16, and the violin in her delicate hands was bought for $175 on eBay by her music teacher.
She is a complicated young woman, says that teacher, and a gifted musician. Consistently at or near the very top of her class. Should be going to a top college, on scholarship. Should be, but won’t be, because she feels a need to make money more than music.
Ms. Clay is a child of her age and place, worried about being laid off, uninterested in and maybe even afraid of imagining a life beyond central Ohio. Newark is what she knows: a pleasant, bifurcated city of 45,000, where concerns about unemployment temper the pride in local public art, and where affluence and poverty sit side-by-side in the classroom.
She once explored the idea of going away to college to become a music teacher. But it just didn’t seem practical: spending four years studying the theory of music, which doesn’t interest her, while here in Newark, the school system is constantly adapting to real and threatened cuts.
Music programs always seem among the first to go, she says. No job security in Tchaikovsky.
So she is maintaining high grades, playing in the orchestra, working 35 hours a week as a Sonic Drive-In carhop, paying $345 a month for the small apartment she shares with an unemployed boyfriend — and planning to study nursing for two years at a technical college in Newark.
“Everybody gets sick,” she says, plotting her future.
Right now, though, she and the other students are rehearsing their string instruments for a high school orchestra competition that will take place in Lincoln Center. Soon the chatter of teenagers in a mostly empty school auditorium surrenders to the music of the masters.
“Listen,” says their teacher, Susan Larson, her baton paused in mid-sway. “Listen.”
Ms. Larson, 43, the Newark school system’s music director for the past three years, faces challenges beyond those presented on sheets of music. The city’s voters keep rejecting raises in the tax levy, forcing cuts in school programs, including music. Parents now pay $55 for a child to participate in activities like this orchestra, and $200 to play sports; if next month’s proposed levy is defeated, Ms. Larson doubts that the orchestra, for one, will survive.
When she struggles to pay for repairs to instruments, many of which are long-ago hand-me-downs from another school district, she recalls her 15 years as the music director in Bexley, a more affluent city where her budget was nowhere near as tight. She vividly remembers the Bexley student who celebrated graduation by smashing a $10,000 violin — his spare.
She cried then; it hurts more now.
Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:
Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips — all without a high school diploma.
“Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mindset has not.”
Mayor Bob Diebold, 48, who grew up here, agrees. “You could walk out of school and get a job,” he says. “You can’t do that anymore.”
Actually, you can — only those jobs are more likely to be at McDonald’s and not, say, at the Owens Corning fiberglass plant, for generations a vital part of the Newark economy. Nine years ago the plant employed about 1,500; now, fewer than 700.
Rehearsal ends and the young musicians flee, a few in cars driven by parents. Ms. Clay, though, drives her 1998 Chevy Malibu to wash clothes for her New York trip at the Colonial Coin Laundry, then heads to her home in a weathered apartment complex — the unit, she says, “right next to the Dumpster.”
The apartment contains little more than bed, television and couch, now occupied by her boyfriend, Trevor Scanlon, who dropped out of high school but says he’s working on his graduate-equivalency diploma. Slinking about is their cat, Easy Mac, named after a macaroni and cheese that you microwave.
The short life story Ms. Clay tells is of an adulthood come too soon, of parents splitting up when she was young, of a mother gone to another city, of a father, an electrician, dogged by employment uncertainties. She and her father clashed so often, she says, that she moved out at 16, got a job and tried to figure out life — rent, work, school, some health issues — on her own.
She returned after a year but left again several months later, for good, though she is in touch with her parents, and talks often of wanting to be around in case they ever need her.
While working full time at the Sonic, she has also maintained superior grades, taken several Advanced Placement courses and distanced herself from classmates. She bristles when some of them talk of what they have spent at the Easton Town Center mall — “That’s a month’s rent,” she wants to say — but at the same time she admits to feeling jealous: “I want — that!”
Now wearing a yellow Sonic golf shirt and a Tiffany C. nameplate, Ms. Clay leaves to make $7.35 an hour, plus tips; it will be a long night. “Kids are in school during the week,” she explains. “They leave at 9, and I stay until after 11.”
Soon she is gliding on roller skates beneath neon reds and yellows that grow more garish as dusk descends. Spinning, speeding, stopping with effortless grace, she balances plastic trays of sweet and greasy food with those delicate hands. Her mastery of yet another world, this Sonic world, means she is again employee of the month, entitling her to a month of free meals.
And the lyrics of her night songs are:
“All right, I’ve got your three junior chili cheese wraps, a B.L.T., chicken strip sandwich, extra long Coney and a mozzarella stick. And a kid’s hot dog meal and kid’s hamburger meal, one with a grape slush, the other with a Powerade slush.”
Two mornings later, buses whisk the Newark High School Sinfonia and its entourage to New York: Austin Modesitt, 16, violinist, who has never left Ohio, but whose mother, a factory worker, contributed her tax-refund check; Jessica Kunasek, 17, violinist, whose older siblings chipped in to pay her way; other students, who sold chocolate, washed cars, held a spaghetti dinner — anything to cover the cost of $850 a student.
Now it is Sunday. They have spent three days in a Manhattan wonderland, but the time has come to compete for something called the National Orchestra Cup. They file into the just-renovated Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and put on their school-owned tuxedos and gowns.
A few of the invited high schools had to decline; the recession, organizers explain. But others, from Ohio and California, New York and Indiana, have made it, and their instruments, at least in Ms. Larson’s estimation, are of higher quality.
Newark is the last to perform, following a symphony orchestra — with strings, brass, winds, percussion and a harp — from Carmel, Ind., where the median household income is nearly three times that in Newark. The Carmel students seem at home in Lincoln Center; they play exquisitely.
The Newark students take the stage, led by concertmaster Tiffany Clay and trailed by director Susan Larson. First, a toccata by Frescobaldi. Then a cello duet by Vivaldi, sweetly rendered by juniors Bryn Wilkin and Alex Van Atta. Finally, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings.
Soon there come sounds just beyond articulation, of sorrow and joy and wonder, summoned from wood and string by the children of Newark, Ohio. And Ms. Clay, at the front of the stage, disappears into the music.
Enchanted by Pachelbel as a child, given free lessons by a teacher who recognized her talent, blessed with the gift of musical sight reading, Ms. Clay has not been as fortunate with other parts of her young life. Her worries are not about prom dresses but about family, and rent, and employment.
Soon, these students will be back in Newark, proud of tying for first runner-up, behind that orchestra from Carmel. And Ms. Clay will be back at the Sonic, spinning her wheels, singing her song of limeades and cheeseburgers, easy on the mayo. After that, nursing, probably.
What role music will play in her life, she doesn’t know. But for now, at least, she is on a New York stage, wearing a borrowed black gown, playing a borrowed eBay violin, and Tchaikovsky holds her.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
