Darcy James Argue's Secret Society

The Bad Plus 1 featuring Kurt Rosenwinkel @ Society for Ethical Culture

The guitar-piano-bass-drums quartet is rarer in jazz than you'd expect. There's this classic joint from the Wynton Kelly Trio plus Wes Montgomery, of course. And there's Grant Green with Sonny Clark, although those records sat in the vault for years. There are others, to be sure, but I'm actually having a bit of trouble coming up with more than a handful of classic, swinging jazz albums that use the "guitar quartet with piano" lineup. Perhaps this is because it's so easy for guitarists and pianists to start feeling more like competitors than collaborators, boxed in by each other's harmonic choices. And sonically, absent a horn player or two to give focus to the front line, there's a certain sameness, a lack of contrast in the color palette and the sound envelope. (Everything decays, nothing sustains.)

The advent of rock changed all that. Suddenly, jazz guitar players with open ears found themselves with access to a much broader and more expressive range of possibilities. They could hold notes like a horn player, moan and wail like a singer, sculpt sound like a studio wizard. This sea change seemed to make the guitar-piano-bass-drums bands a much more attractive lineup for jazz musicians. Beginning in the late 1970's you started to see these quartets more frequently and prominently: Pat Metheny with Lyle Mays, John Abercrombie with Richie Beirach, John Scofield with Jim McNeely, and so on.

My generation of jazz musicians and jazz listeners is the first that grew up taking rock-influenced jazz guitar sounds for granted. And our generational favorite guitar player is, without a doubt, Kurt Rosenwinkel. Back in those bygone pre-Napster days (i.e., the mid-1990's), imported bootleg tapes of Rosenwinkel's unreleased studio sessions and live hits circulated faster than designer drugs in an afterhours nightclub. His fluid lines and unabashed heart-on-sleeve romanticism made him the object of near-universal adulation. And Rosenwinkel has always had a clear, sympathetic relationship with piano players like Michael Kanan, Scott Kinsey, Brad Mehldau, Aaron Goldberg -- and, on Heartcore and some of those cherished bootlegs, Ethan Iverson.

When Rosenwinkel and Mark Turner were rewriting the template for melodic, long-form original jazz at Smalls last decade, Ethan was there -- and bassist Reid Anderson, too. So when Ethan and Reid emerged from that scene in a trio with some insane Minneapolis-based drummer that became an unlikely major-label sensation -- just a few years after Kurt's Verve debut was finally issued -- well, it felt like a vindication. To many musicians I know, it felt like our music was finally coming into its own, finally garnering some recognition and support from the jazz mainstream.

(Of course, in retrospect, that seems deeply silly. It wasn't our music. We didn't make it. We just admired the hell out of it from afar, and tried our best to cop what we could. But hey, we were young and idealistic.)

This is basically a long-winded way of saying that Tuesday's JVC Jazz Fest concert featuring Rosenwinkel, Iverson, Anderson and King seemed like a much-anticipated reunion gig -- never mind that Dave King had never previously played with Kurt, and Kurt had never previously played the Bad Plus songbook. And to be honest, the four of them got off to a bit of a rocky start -- after King's opening drum solo, when the quartet launched into "Big Eater" there was a fair bit of internal jockeying going on, made worse by some sputtering distortion in the sound system and the Society for Ethical Culture's boomy acoustics.

Things loosened up considerably during Reid's Chopinesque "Love is the Answer" (from TBP's comparitively little-known debut on Fresh Sound) -- Kurt had room to stretch out a bit more, and Ethan's comping was especially tasty. By the start of the third tune, "Guilty," the sound issues had been mostly sorted. The Bad Plus usually treat "Guilty" as a kind of blues abstraction, and Ethan's spacious, conceptual solo was completely line with that view. Kurt was having none of it. When it came time for him to blow, he led things in an unrepentantly earthy direction.

The two Rosenwinkel originals that came next -- "Turns" and "Use Of Light" -- were transfixingly beautiful, especially the latter's rustic melodicism. Then they forged ahead with a spirited romp through Ornette Coleman's "Song X" -- Ethan's solo began with some refined, quasi-Mozartian turns, an offbeat impulse that paid dividends down the line. The set closed with an extended take on Reid's "Silence Is The Question," which built upwards from the composer's solo intro into a languid rubato melody accompanied by lightly brushed guitar harmonics, and slowly, gradually blossomed like time-lapse footage, until it had become a glorious, ecstatic, breathtaking collective rush. When it was over, everyone in the audience stood up as one.

There's really no following up a moment like that, but the crowd was not about to let the band go without an encore. They obliged us with a time-shifting routine on "Have You Met Miss Jones" -- I got the feeling this is a little something from the heyday of the Smalls scene -- capped with the Morse Code stabbing section from "Physical Cities." (Kurt remembered to turn over the page on his music stand just in time.) Fanservice? Maybe just a touch, but it was all in good fun, and hey, if you can't pull that kind of trick in front of a jazz festival crowd in New York, where can you do it?

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The opening group, which received no advance publicity whatsoever, was the British quintet Empirical, making their New York debut. Very young, very clean-cut, and sharply dressed, they looked and sounded a bit like a throwback to the old "jazz wars" (i.e., Wynton Marsalis and Stanley Crouch and Ken Burns and Jazz at Lincoln Center versus basically everyone else), with extended original tunes that owed a lot to the more conceptual 1960's Blue Note "new thing" records. Their music had many attractive moments but their vibe was a bit discombobulated -- I wanted to hear a more coherent through-line. The players are all incredibly talented musicians who never seemed to quite hit their stride. And the venue's swampy sound did them few favors. It felt a bit like a really solid Master's recital. These guys could benefit from a little more road-seasoning and a healthy injection of "kill your idols" attitude.

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Other views:

Composer Ted Hearne.

Terri G. (Terri's Music Blog)

Nate Chinen (NYT).

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Tickets to this event were provided by management.

Stevie Wonder @ Jones Beach Theater, 18 June 2008

Attention blogdonia: where's the love for Stevie Wonder? He's one of a handful of legitimate contenders for "greatest living musical genius." Vocally and instrumentally, he remains at the very top of his game -- I am dead serious, his voice seems supernaturally ageless, and we are talking about one of the most astoundingly flexible, powerful, evocative voices in the entire history of music. As a pianist and keyboardist, the depth of his groove is unassailable -- anyone who's ever touched a clavinet or an analog synth of any kind is wholly in Stevie's debt. (And we haven't even mentioned his first instrument... )

His band, who kicked off the first hit of their summer tour on Wednesday at the Jones Beach Theater on Long Island, is led by the great Nathan Watts on bass -- Watts has been playing with Stevie for 34 years. He knows how this music is supposed to go. He evidently did an incredible job conveying that knowledge to the band, during 8-10 hour rehearsals every day for the eleven days leading up to the gig, because I'm pretty sure this is the hardest-grooving band I have ever heard in my life. I know the only thing anyone wants to talk about is the Vampire Weekend show in Central Park last weekend, but seriously. Stevie fucking Wonder, y'all. It's not like he plays all the time, either -- last year's tour was his first in a decade. I can't be the only music blogger who thought it was worth taking the LIRR+shuttle bus combo out to Jones Beach.

The full-capacity crowd was as diverse an audience as I've ever seen, twentysomething hipsters cheek-by-jowl with septuagenarian black ladies who've been fans since "Fingertips" first dropped. Everyone in the audience was amazingly good-natured, even after the skies opened up and we all ran for the concourse stairwells, huddling under cover from the torrential downpour and lightning storm that threatened to scuttle the show. But the storm eventually passed and once the stage had been thoroughly wet-vac'd, Stevie took the stage in front of a damp but fervent crowd.

The pair of women next to me sang along (well) to practically every word all night, but their breakaway favorites were two of the extra tracks from Original Musiquarium -- "Ribbon in the Sky" and "Do I Do." (I had no idea those songs had such a dedicated following.)

I didn't take notes on the setlist but the early hits were "My Cherie Amour" and "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," the ballads included "Lately," "Golden Lady," "Overjoyed," "Laugh You Right Out of My Life" (a feature for his daughter, Aisha), and -- unfortunately but probably inevitably -- "I Just Called To Say I Love You," which a radio contest-winner sang alongside Stevie. (Against all odds, she was not awful.) The new material sounded really strong, which makes me cautiously optimistic about the forthcoming album. But the best performances -- the "oh my god kill me now these are the greatest sounds I've ever heard in my life" performances -- were on "Master Blaster," "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing," "Livin' For The City," "Higher Ground," "Sir Duke," "I Wish,"  and the closing jam on "Superstition," especially when Stevie led the ecstatic croud in a chant of "It's time... for America... to be better than it's ever been." (No mystery what he meant.)

Most surprising additions to the setlist: "Spain" (including the introductory gloss on 'Concierto de Aranjuez,' a last-minute addition which keyboardist Victoria Theodore blogs about here -- so great to have the inside story from a member of Stevie's touring band!) and... "Giant Steps"? Yes, Stevie played (and soloed on) "Giant Steps." I did not expect that.

Stevie must have also had something planned with Q-Tip, because at one point he called him up to the stage. But -- dammit -- something must have gone awry, because Tip never materialized. Nice tease there.

I don't know if the set was cut short due to the storm delay, but Stevie played for about two hours and I would have blissfully listened to at least two more. The problem with having such an incredible body of work is that any given concert is only going to scratch the surface, but the only real disappointment was the choice of ballads -- I would have ditched "Ribbon in the Sky," "Lately," and "I Just Called…" in favor of "Knocks Me Off My Feet," "All In Love Is Fair" and "I Believe (When I Fall In Love It Will Be Forever)", and I truly desperately wanted to hear "As," "Big Brother," or "You Haven't Done Nothin'." Maybe next time. Keep touring, Stevie, we need you.

Also, how is it that I did not know about this?

Bang On A Can Marathon 2008

Without the manic intensity of me trying to liveblog every set of a 27-hour concert as it was happening, this year's Bang On A Can Marathon felt a lot more chill. Of course, it was also considerably shorter, clocking in at a mere 12 hours and change. Perhaps inevitably, it was also less diverse, with just four artists representing from outside of "new classical" circles (Karsh Kale, Owen Pallett, Marnie Stern and Dan Deacon). So yeah, evidently nobody from the jazz team made the cut this year. (The 2007 Marathon had sets by Vijay Iyer, Don Byron, and the World Sax Quartet.) However, the out-of-towners included Ireland's Crash Ensemble, Israel's Ensemble Nikel, and my peeps from the Soviet Socialst Republic of Canuckistan, Contact.

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Alarm Will Sound played John Adams's Son of Chamber Symphony (3rd mvt.), Harrison Birtwistle's Carmen Arcadiae Mechanicae Perpetuum, and (much later in the night) Matt Marks's arrangement of The Beatles' (by which we really mean John Lennon's) Revolution #9.

The Adams is actually a reincarnation of a piece originally written for Kronos Quartet, later retrofitted for the Alarmists. It's a brisk amusement-park ride and they pretty much slayed it. It has some 4-on-the-floor bass drum that works infinitely better than that infamous orchestral "techno" section in Thomas Adès's Asyla -- although to be fair, I would probably like piece that a lot more if it was ever played with Alarm-level rhythmic authority.

AWS brought the same precision and intensity to the Birtwistle, a piece that is a very good example of the kind of fractured, disjunct, big-M Modernist aesthetic  I basically cannot hang with. The individual moments here are often really striking -- we occasionally get a little taste of a cool little angular bass line -- but that's all Birtwistle will ever allow us, just a taste. Then he interrupts it with a few seconds of dissonant long tones, and even that quickly splinters off, motivic shards flying off in every direction. The performance was tight and they made a great case for it, but this cocktail of two parts solemnity to one part ADD is not really my drink of choice.

Carmen Arcadiae… actually makes musique concrète's all-time biggest hit, Revolution #9, sound positively linear by comparison. Matt gave a very entertaining introduction to his arrangement, wherein he likened Alarm Will Sound's penchant for creating acoustic reinterpretations of electronic music to Harry Potter fanfic: "Basically, we're giant geeks." So yeah, it's pretty much straight-up fanservice for the small but obsessive subset of Beatles fans who were actually intrigued by the White Album's penultimate, ah, "tune." (A Venn diagram would probably show considerable overlap between that set and the set of people who show up at the Bang On A Can Marathon.) Anyway, this painstaking recreation is wholly absurd and I loved it -- Matt's chart is wildly entertaining and theatrical, with members of the band honking car horns, screaming into mutes,  imitating backwards tape loops, and screaming in each other's faces. ("Hold that line! Block that kick!") Does my fanboyish enjoyment of this arrangement make me a giant hypocrite? Yeah, probably. So what else is new?

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Pamela Z played and sang Chalky Crystal Liquid Cave. I love Pamela Z. This time, she did not use her customary BodySynth, but a motion-sensitive theremin-like controller she called a "Swearingen" (named after the gadget's inventor, not Al.) Pamela went second (in between the first two AWS pieces) and, in an uncomfortable echo of last year's Juana Molina fiasco, her performance was delayed by tech gremlins. I dunno if the tsuris caused her to have to abbreviate her set, but whatever the reason, it was too damn short.

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Lisa Moore played Annie Goslfield's Lightning Slingers and Dead Ringers, for piano and keyboard-triggered sampler.

Gosfield explained that "Lightning Slingers" is old-school slang for "telegraph operators," and "dead ringers" refers to how the acoustic piano sounds are sampled and transformed into sounds that recall analog synths, slide guitar, and such like. I liked the moody, resonant middle section, and Lisa Moore is always impressive.

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The Crash Ensemble played Donnacha Dennehy's Grá agus Bás, Terry Riley's Loops for Ancient Giant Nude Hairy Warriors Racing Down the Slopes of Battle (3rd mvt.), and later on, Arnold Dreyblatt's Resonant Relations.

Dennehy is an Irish composer, in case you couldn't tell. He is also the artistic director of the Crash Ensemble. If you are Irish, it must really suck to know that there is basically no aspect of your traditional culture that has not been commodified and kitschified for global export, to the point where now all it takes is a single pennywhistle appoggiatura or a mournful celtic fiddle slide to make people want to stab a shilelagh into their ear canal. This is to say that Dennehy has a tough row to hoe, trying to bring old-style Irish sean nós singing into a new music context, without stumbling into cliché -- and you know what, for the most part, he succeeded. While I did find the piece a wee bit meandering, the closing gesture, with Iarla Ó Lionáird's sweet voice riding atop the ensemble's furiously cascading arpeggios made for an ecstatic release.

Alarm Will Sound conductor Alan Pierson was pulling double duty last night, conducting Crash as well as his own band, but he left the Celts to their own devices for Terry Riley's Loops for Giant Nude Hairy Warriors etc. I enjoyed this drumset-driven, odd-meter aggro romp immensely.

I wanted to enjoy Arnold Dreyblatt's Resonant Relations -- it used an intriguing tuning system and contained some fun, oddball synth-harpsicord ostinatos -- but the music felt very stiff and episodic, without much apparent momentum or direction. I just wasn't feeling it.

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Karsh Kale (tabla) and Raj Maddela (drum kit) played Timeline, which is basically a collection of sick beats, with occasional electronic pads underneath. Their hookup was great and the Hinustani-meets-hiphop beats were, I believe I mentioned, sick, but man cannot live by sick beats alone. I wanted to hear a proper band over top of those grooves.

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Caleb Burhans sang no.

His sweet, ethereal countertenor sang out over a simple looped wash. The phrasing was irregular but flowing and organic, and Caleb's melodic instincts are unerringly sound. The performance had a spontaneous feel to it, so I asked Caleb later if it was improvised. He told me it was transcribed from an improvisation he'd recorded.

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The Hartt Bass Band played Julia Wolfe's Strong Hold.

A Masada-inspired (no, not, Zorn's band... the actual fortification) epic for eight basses. I was struck by the huge range spanned -- lots of harmonics and off- the-fingerboard playing along with the low-end -- and also the almost complete absence of pizzicato playing. One bit felt almost like a concerto grosso, with frantic, piercing solo tremolos interrupted by weighty tutti arrivals. Unfortunately, though, the microphones were also picking up the click track, which was bleeding over from the players' headphones -- being able to hear that faint click throughout robbed the piece of some of its magic. (Next time, use in-ear monitors.)

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Ensemble Nikel played Chaya Czernowin's Sahaf, and later, Sivan Cohen Elias's Riba and Ruben Seroussi's Nikel.

I'm afraid I wasn't really convinced by any of this music. Sahaf came closest -- it had some nice flittering gestures and I liked the spinning ratchets. But Riba, a sax guitar duet, sounded like it was composed by someone who had maybe read about improv in a couple of back issues The Wire without ever having listened to it, and thought it might be fun to try to elaborately notate what he imagined that sort of thing sounded like. Some drunk asshole actually cat-called the group during their performance of Nikel, shouting out a sarcastic "Wooo!" a few moments into the piece. I unequivocally denounce and reject this outrageous and unacceptable behavior -- just not the underlying sentiment. This piece managed to combine pointless meandering with timid bloodlessness, a combination that is guaranteed to be lethal in 100% of cases.

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The Young People's Chorus of New York City sang Michael Gordon's Every Stop On The F Train

The F train is my train, and the text sung by the chorus is literally what it says in the title, from Jamaica-179th Street to Coney Island-Stillwell Avenue. The setting is inventive and charming -- it needs to be, obviously -- if perhaps not quite as memorable as the kids' selection from last year, Meredith Monk's "Three Heavens and Hells." (I still get little snippets of that one creeping into my brain at odd moments.)

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The Bang on a Can All-Stars played selections from Evan Ziporyn's ShadowBang, Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's Convex-Concave-Concord, and a bit later, Lukas Ligeti's Glamour Girl.

Ziporyn's piece gradually developed outward from a spare and hypnotic core into a joyous, swaggering, vaguely Frisellian metametric groove. Some Googling reveals that the recording apparently also involves a Balinese singer/shadow puppeteer... I should really check that out.

Very near the end of Convex-Concave-Concord -- after a spending a good long while suspended in quiet reflection amidst softly fluttertongued clarinet notes, indistinct guitar harmonics, and a spare simple woodblock pattern -- there is a sweet arrival point on what sounds like the work's first proper, you know, chord. Things begin to pick up from there. Moments later brings the appearance of what sounds an awful lot like a IV chord, and you begin to suspect something might be up. Soon, there's no escaping it -- you've been gradually drawn into a hazy, slow-mo blues progression. Okay -- that, I did not see coming. But when it hit, it felt improbably right -- I would love to hear it again so I can pay attention to what kind of hints may or may not have been dropped along the way. Regardless, I think this work can comfortably join Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues in that very, very short list of blues-inspired classical works that do not suck.

Lukas Ligeti -- yes, György's kid -- built Glamour Girl around a slightly skewed Afro-Pop sensibility and his drummer's-eye-view of music. I really enjoyed the conversational guitar lines, the blissed-out 3/4 groove in the middle and the abrupt drumroll ending. These three pieces were probably the closest in spirit and concept to my own compositions.

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Violinist and singer/songwriter Owen Pallett played some of his songs, then the BOAC All-Stars joined him for Twelve Polearms.

There was a nice NYT feature on Owen ("The Return of the One-Man Band") not long ago, in which he expressed his abiding hatred of drummers. ("'Drummers ruin bands,' he said simply, as if the fact were common knowledge.") I think I understand where he is coming from -- his play-sample-loop-and-layer methodology is wholly unforgiving. It's true that lots of people are doing that now -- that was, after all, the hook for the article -- but Owen's approach to sampling is notably risky and complex, with no room for error. He's clearly spent a lot of work developing his own internal clock and does not want a drummer trying to tell him where he thinks the time is. But perhaps as a consequence, Owen's aesthetic does not exactly embrace the concept of "groove" with open arms. Obviously, a lot of people who are very smart about music are wholly besotten with Owen's playing and songwriting. So far, I find myself more in the "admire and respect" camp, but there's no question that he is a hell of a musician, and an excellent choice for a BOAC collaboration.

Anyway, after a short solo set, the All-Starts retook the stage and Owen gave a long, tongue-in-cheek preface to his commissioned work, Twelve Polearms, spinning an elaborate yarn about a "great interdimensional conflict" and the musical culture of  an alien race of one-dimensional beings. The piece seemed to hang from an omnipresent undulating two-note figure that ran like a suspension wire through the work. It ended with the BOAC players laying out while Owen manipulated their sounds via captured loops.

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Electronic artist Bora Yoon played ( ((PHONATION)) ), with live visuals by Luke DuBois.

I missed this. I needed a break, and needed to get some food in me.

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SIGNAL (conducted by Brad Lubman) played Steve Reich's Daniel Variations.

SIGNAL is a new new music supergroup containing members poached from Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, Gutbucket, and NewSpeak, and conducted by Brad Lubman (last seen by me conducting Johnny Greenwood's Popcorn Superhet Receiver at a Wordless Music hit back in January). This is the NYC debut for the group but they are meant to be a going concern. In his intro, Reich emphasized that his music needs an ensemble (i.e., a collection of players who are emotionally invested in both the group and the music they play), not an orchestra (i.e., an ensemble from which "indifferent professionalism" is pretty much the best you can hope for), and talked up SIGNAL as an American counterpoint to the great European new music powerhouses like the Ensemble Modern and the Ensemble Intercontemporain. (There are lots of small new music bands in the US, but few large ones, other than Alarm Will Sound.)

SIGNAL is dominated by younger players because, with a handful of notable exceptions, older generations of classical musicians just flat-out do not get rhythm. They do not believe it is, at minimum, a co-equal element to pitch, and consequently, they just do not spend that much time on rhythm. A singing, fluid rubato line is their comfort zone (which is great for Romantic music, not so much anything else), and  they cannot make the conceptual leap to music that requires a strong, steady pulse. (Often they are disdainful of such music.) They are unable to take personal responsibility for the time. They can't distinguish between playing on top of the beat vs. rushing, or playing behind the beat vs. dragging. They don't get what a profound impact such tiny rhythmic nuances have on the music. They don't know how to lock in with other players. They do not know what a full-body groove feels like. They lack an emotional connection to rhythm.

Everyone in SIGNAL has an undeniable emotional connection to rhythm.

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So Percussion played David Lang's the so called laws of nature

They did this one on the steps at the back (see pics below fold), making the already cavernous Winter Garden sound even more like an aircraft hangar -- Alan Pierson said the walnut planks sounded like crickets. For the second movement, the percussionists moved up a stage to the toms and kick drums. For the third, they moved down to tables where they played on teacups and tuned flowerpots, the sound of which was oddly mesmerizing.

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Marnie Stern played guitar.

At every Bang On A Can Marathon, there is always one artist whose job it is to do everything they can to signal "What the hell am I doing here?" short of actually coming out and saying it. Last year that band was the rap-metal band Dälek. This year, it was scruffy shredhead Marnie Stern, who normally plays and sings with an actual, you know, band. Instead, for the Marathon, she came out alone, set up a wall of squall with her pedals, and only occasionally pierced the veil with some scrabbly double-tapping or a pair of klunky power chords.

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Dan Deacon wrote the electronic parts for Ultimate Reality Part 3. He pressed "play," and then I think he probably left the stage and got his groove on down on the dance floor (and there was a dance floor for Dan's set), but I can't be sure. Kevin Omeara and Jeremy Hyman played the live drum parts.

Kids these days, they love the conservatory-trained Baltimore-based electronic dance guru Dan Deacon. His sound palette is bright and supersaturated with analog warmth. I don't know if he normally uses live drummers, but Omeara and Hyman were both on fire. Jimmy Roe Roche's entertaining video accompaniment mirrored and distorted many of the Governator's greatest cinematic moments. (It struck me that many in the audience were not even born when The Terminator was first released.) Deacon's rapid-fire synth arpeggios sounded a bit like a dance-pop remix of Music in 12 Parts. Good clean fun (with crowd-surfing, even), but seriously, this was way too short -- one 15-minute tune, and that's the whole set? Those kids came down to the Winter Garden at 4 AM to party -- what were they supposed to do now?

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Contact played Allison Cameron's 3rds, 4ths, & 5ths and Brian Eno's Discreet Music (arr. Jerry Pergolesi).

Well, one option for the Deaconites was to stick around for the Toronto-based new music band Contact, and actually, a fair number of them decided to sit tight. (Although some of them appeared to be under the impression that Brian Eno himself would be showing up.) Anyway, Allison Cameron's piece for Contact was a pretty postminimalist ballad, after which they geared down even further into Eno's gauzy dreamscape. I really enjoyed Suzanne Bocanegra's simple but effective video, which involved a hand stacking olive-colored pieces of cardboard. The arrangement didn't quite draw me in the way the All-Stars' version of Airport Music did last year, but it did make for a pleasant bit of sunrise-music. (I think Stimmung was supposed to be the sunrise piece but the Marathon was running a bit late.)

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Toby Twining Music sang Karlheinz Stockhausen's Stimmung. Sonically, it's an incredibly striking piece, constructed almost entirely from overtone singing. (If you've heard Tuvan throat singing, you've heard overtone singing.) It's built from a single, unvarying sonority -- a Bb9 chord, in just intonation (on account of the vocal overtones). It involves "magic names," words and phonemes in multiple languages, and the passing around and transformation of material. You can actually get a pretty good basic sense of the processes that fuel the piece from the work's Wikipedia entry, but if you want the long version, with score excerpts, go here.

Stimmung is a very beautiful and original and transfixing piece of music. The performance was outstanding. (One of the singers was Sylvie Jensen of the M6, a vocal group I have raved about previously, and she was a powerful and charismatic force throughout.) It is also, I feel I should point out, almost 80 minutes long. This was about 20 minutes past the expiration of my patience, at least at that point in the Marathon. Honestly, programming it immediately following the similarly quiet, tranquil, static Brian Eno piece seems a little bit perverse.

I say this only because for the first hour or so, I was completely under the spell of Stockhausen's remarkable work. I didn't want that fugue state to end, but unfortunately, I ran out of gas before the piece did. I stuck it out, of course, but mentally I was spent. I felt like the runner who collapses 400 meters shy of the finish line, and has to drag himself across on his hands and knees.

Maybe I oughta train for these things.

Pictures are below the fold.

OTHER PLACES: Steve Smith in the Times and on his blog.

Bruce Hodges (Monotonous Forest) also went the distance.

Justin Levine (Hey! Student) has a great writeup of the 12 AM - 5:30 AM stretch -- plus video!

Stereogum and Brooklyn Vegan [heart] Dan Deacon. There's YouTube of the first 4:43 of Deacon's set.

Lauren Cartelli (Notes From a Subway Journal) [hearts] Owen Pallett.

Alex Ross is ill, but stuck it out until half-time.

Guest of a Guest does amateur sociology.

Uberthings, via tumblr (which I gather is like Twitter, which I too do not get) "At Bang on a Can. So many people here at 3am. Crazy yngwie style female guitarist rocking out."

(Pics below the fold... )

Is it a "term of art," are we bound by it...

On listening to Henry Threadgill's ZOOID (= Dana Leong, cello; Liberty Ellman, guitar; Stomu Takeishi, acoustic bass guitar; Jose Davilla, tuba, Elliot Humberto Kavee - drums) at the Jazz Gallery last night:

Elusive and elliptical ensemble music woven from interlocking, purposeful, overlapping bursts, full of disorienting back-and-forth volleys and barely concealed tension, it felt a bit like watching an old-school David Mamet play performed at twice the normal speed. After injecting meth.

Todd Sickafoose @ Tea Lounge, 16 May 2008

Todd Sickafoose's writing is just like his playing -- warm-hearted and propulsive, smart and subtle, extroverted and and conversational, patient and unerringly directional. I hear so much music out there right now that falls into one of two equally alienating camps: either it's joyless, torturedly complex, and inward-looking, or it's unremittingly, self-consciously "badass," with no room for the music to breathe or grow. Both are a chore to sit through.

So it was an incredible relief to hear Todd's band last night at the Tea Lounge. Todd's music earns its momentum honestly, as his ideas gradually evolve and adapt to a changing musical environment. Best of all, everyone in the band -- including Society co-conspirators John Ellis (tenor sax) and Alan Ferber (trombone), plus Brian Coogan (keyboards), Mike Gamble (guitar), Jenny Scheinman (violin), and Ben Perowsky (drums) -- seemed precisely attuned to the leader's wavelength.

This is a group that really knows how to ride the crests and shoot the curls, and together they make some of the most exciting new jazz I've heard in a while.

Here's the opening track from Todd's upcoming (June 10) release Tiny Resistors (on Cryptogramophone), a disc I wholeheartedly recommend.

MP3: "Future Flora," Todd Sickafoose (click to listen, right/ctrl-click to download)

(MP3 courtesy Cryptogramophone/DL Media)

More pictures below the fold...

Cut me short

TYFT (Hilmar Jensson, Andrew D'Angelo, Chris Speed, Jim Black)
30 April 2008 @ The Stone

short take: Andrew D'Angelo still kicks ass.

(Also: he is selling t-shirts with a CT scan of his brain on them. I bought one.)

Making Music: Frederic Rzewski (with Stephen Drury and Opus 21)
01 May 2008 @ Zankel Hall

short take: Steve Ben Israel owns "Attica."

Mohair Time Warp with Corey Dargel
8 May 2008 @ Joe's Pub

short takes: Corey's irresistible songs are even subtler than you think. Don't believe William Brittelle when he claims to be out of his fucking mind.

Redhooker, Build, and Oliphant
13 May 2008 @ Lit Lounge

short take: Three new-to-me indie classical bands with three very different approaches (saturated, limpid, refractory) to building textural music.

Black night

The last time I saw eighth blackbird, they were responsible for injecting a little "high-minded severity" into last summer's Bang on a Can Marathon. That was also when I learned they'd commissioned a "combo piece" from Bang on a Can's founders -- Michael Gordon, Julia Wolfe, and the recently Pulitzer'd David Lang. The Blackbirdians have double-billed this with another ambitious commission from Steve Reich, who is effectively the granddaddy of the Bang on a Can approach to classical music -- which is, in a nutshell, "less high-minded severity, more grooves."

This program , collectively called "The Only Moving Thing," was premiered three weeks prior in Richmond, VA, and they've also done it in Ann Arbor, San Fransisco, and Costa Mesa, before bringing the show to NYC for Thursday night's hit at Zankel Hall.

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The Reich piece was a double sextet called (you can probably see this one coming) Double Sextet. It's in the lineage of stuff like Electric Counterpoint and Triple Quartet, wherein one or more live musicians plays against their own prerecorded backing tracks. But most of those works have a uniform palette to them -- Electric Counterpoint is all guitar (Pat Metheny, actually, in the original recording) and  Triple Quartet is for string quartet and their recorded doppelgaengers. But the Blackbirds are a heterogenous flock (flute, clarniet, violin, cello, piano, percussion), which makes Double Sextet a very close cousin to Reich's Eight Lines for mixed double septet (4x violins, 2x each of violas, cellos, flutes, clarinets, and pianos). Readers of this blog are all really smart people so I'm sure it has not eluded your notice that you could easily play Eight Lines in the same manner as Double Sextet, with seven musicians playing live against seven prerecorded tracks. (Also, if you are wondering why a piece called Eight Lines is scored for fourteen musicians, see here.)

Eight Lines is one of my favorite lesser-known Reich pieces, and Double Sextet resembles it in more than just instrumentation. The engine underneath the hood of 2x6tet is an intricately interlocking piano-based perpetual motion machine, in this case assisted by mallet percussion. Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duval both have a crisp, consistent sense of pulse and a very sympathetic hookup, propelling the two fast sections that bookend the piece through a virtual minefield of time-signature shifts. The outer movements were satisfying, if a bit familiar: a methodical execution of pattern-based rhythmic processes, unpredictable on a micro level, but following exactly the trajectory you'd expect. However, the middle movement was unexpectedly lyrical, with a beautiful high cello and violin line that sounded like Reich channeling Piazolla. This is a good sound.

The harmonic sequence in each movement is based on some combination of D, F, Ab, and B (and/or their relative minors) -- this use of four equidistant key areas is similar to "Coltrane Changes" (i.e., "Giant Steps" and its offspring), which exploits three equidistant key areas. Reich is a Coltrane nut so I assume that's where he got this idea. This approach to pan-modalism is totally characteristic of Reich's music, but much of Double Sextet has a definite bite to it -- Reich doesn't go so far as to allow chromatic notes from outside the mode to infiltrate, but he does go out of his way emphasize the tensions inherent within each mode. There were a lot more minor second grinds in the sustaining instruments than you usually hear in Reich's music. This is also a good sound.

I did have one minor frustration when listening to the piece, which was that the amplified sound in Zankel was noticeably muddy. Colors that ought to have been bright and sparkling were thin and piercing, and timbres that should have been rich and resonant were dull and characterless. There didn't seem to be enough separation between the recorded tracks and the live playing -- the piano and mallets were clear, but little else was. Some of this may have been due to the live mics picking up bleed from the monitors -- I don't really know enough to say. I do know that I don't envy the Blackbirds' sound tech -- all of Reich's music which involves blending prerecorded parts with live players is extremely difficult to balance correctly, and those pieces tend to sound more satisfying on record than they do live.

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The Bang on a Can "combo piece," singing in the dead of night, opens with a quirky, skittish prologue by David Lang (these broken wings part one), dominated by high-register timbres -- glock, piccolo, accordion, pizz cello at the top of the range, etc. This transitioned into Michael Gordon's the light of the dark, in which the cellist lays down a cascade of buzzsaw glisses and the rest of the ensemble alternately try to swat him with sudden clangs, or ignore him and concentrate on their own folksy melodic lines. It concludes with a great bit of staging (by choreographer Susan Marshall), where Matthew Duvall steals Lisa Kaplan's accordion and gets in her face with it while she tries to focus on the piano part.

eighth blackbird are known for their staging, and the most strikingly theatrical moments came during part two of Lang's these broken wings, a strung-out Handelian passacaille, during which clarinetist Michael Maccaferri was loaded up with metal objects and, with an expression of infinite pathos, began to slowly drop them. And Julia Wolfe's "episode," also called singing in the dead of night, began with some soft, dreamy piano-and-marimba figures, before Kaplan and Duvall abandoned their instruments to lay their heads down on a leaf-covered table with a contact mic strapped to its underside. (In previous performances, the role of "leaves" has been played by "sand" and "barley, quinua, & millet." Presumably the leaves are easier to sweep up, but they also seemed more metaphorically apt.) This bit of business is repeated several times, which some reviewers have complained about, but I saw it as setting the scene for an incredibly tender and unexpected moment when, during a later repetition, Kaplan sleepily reaches out and puts her arm around Duvall.  (You get the sense she's forgiven him for having stolen her accordion earlier).

I thought the best music in singing in the dead of night was David Lang's epilogue (aka these broken wings part three). It opens with a driving, disjuct piano figure that sounds like a pixillated version of the "Tainted Love" chord progression, with slamming pedal bass drum hits, piercing piccolo stabs, and a complex interlocking groove. It made for an exciting close to a well-executed theatrical-musical work. I liked that the balance between the choreography and the musical materials was constantly shifting -- the more active music didn't require much movement to come off, but in the more spacious, atmospheric moments, the onstage action was allowed to take on a more important (and necessary) role. I was also genuinely impressed with how well the Blackbirdians executed the choreography -- everything looked purposeful and motived without seeming contrived or pretentious, and that's no easy feat.

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Tickets to this event were provided by Carnegie Hall. Also, Tim Munro invited me to the post-concert hang, and I went.

Pocket Concertos Year Three - Miller Theatre 27 March 2008

My friend Seth suggested it might be fun to check out what John Zorn has been up to lately, so last night we headed up to the Miller Theatre to catch the premiere of The Prophetic Mysteries of Angels, Witches, and Demons, presented as part of the third and final installment of Miller's "Pocket Concertos" series, wherein composers are commissioned to write something for soloist plus chamber orchestra. Or, you know, whatever.

In Zorn's case the "whatever" was the impressive smörgåsbord of percussion you see above (some of it custom-built by Kenny Wollesen and friends), as performed by Alex Lipowski and William Winant. Half the fun of the piece was waiting to see how and when each "instrument" would be used -- the wash basin, the sandboxes, the squeaky door... Zorn knows very well that if in the first act he has hung a pair of umbrellas from a rack, in the third act they must be used. And so they were, in a spirited face-off between the two percussionists.

Yeah, it was a lot like John Cage performing "Water Walk" on I've Got A Secret (a deliberate homage? Who knows, Zorn scorns program notes). But it was still a hell of a lot of fun, especially with the additional theatricality of having two percussionists going at it, sometimes in strict synchronization, sometimes in opposition to each other.

The drama of an old-school Romantic concerto comes from the epic struggle of a single rugged individualist pitted against Borg-like massed orchestral might. But here, flutist (can't bring myself to type "flautist") Tara Helen O'Connor has an even more difficult challenge -- as the ostensible soloist, she has to compete for attention with a couple of guys spraying seltzer into a glass and cranking the wheel on a homemade wind machine -- when they're not smashing cymbals and thwacking gongs.  She's cast as the exasperated straight man, responding to the general onstage ridiculousness with "serious" melodic lines and incisive phrasing. But she also gets the last, and biggest laugh -- in a piece full of sonic slapstick, the only time the audience really lost it was watching O'Connor trying to wrangle the contrabass flute into playing position. The concerto closes with beautiful, otherwordly tones from this inherently absurd instrument.

My one (minor) quibble with this bit of high-class ha ha was the inclusion of Ikue Mori on laptop. I mean, I get why Zorn included her -- she often supplied the connective tissue between moments, allowing Lipowski and William time to reposition for the next bit of business. But conceptually, it felt like a bit of a cheat. The percussionists were working very hard to generate an array of organic sounds from a all manner of objects, and the effect depends on our being able to see just how they are getting the sounds they are getting. Adding invisibly-generated electronic sounds to the mix drains a bit of magic from the piece.

Then again, Matmos does almost exactly the same thing and I love it. Which leads me to suspect I'm being wildly inconsistent on this. If not downright hypocritical.

The other pocket concertos on the program were from composers previously unfamiliar to me -- Laura Elise Schwendinger and Ichizo Okashiro. Schwedinger's Chiaroscuro Azzurro featured violinist Jennifer Koh. Okashiro's The Starry Night (named after, yes, that "Starry Night") featured pianist Christopher Taylor. Both found a worthy adversary in the chamber orchestra incarnation of ICE, directed by Jayce Ogren. Everyone played their assess off -- ICE is kind of a band-of-Theseus but they always seem to deliver the goods.

I'm afraid I don't have a whole lot to say about these two works, though. Schwendinger's piece was vividly orchestrated -- I am particularly fond of one passage where she elegantly supported Koh with harp, piano, and pizz. strings. But while the opening of each movement was striking and full of promise, I found every time I quickly lost the thread. I heard a succession of well-crafted individual moments, but they didn't really seem to add up to a satisfying musical narrative.

Okashiro's The Starry Night was very static and full of expressionist angst. Unremitting, unshakeable angst, all the way through. It's a two-movement work, and while the second movement is more spacious, it's otherwise extremely similar in mood and vocabulary to the first. Pitch-wise, the piece is at the very margins of "extended tonality" -- it has audible key centers and a few yearning , Wagnerian melodies, but the harmonies are packed tight, with lots of precise, stabby clusters in the piano.

On the one hand, I applaud Okashiro for trying to reclaim Van Gogh's ubiquitous masterwork from the over-familiarity brought on by  being reproduced on millions of coffee mugs, greeting cards, mouse pads, et al. It seems like he's trying to capture in sound the more unsettling aspects of the painting --  and the artist. On the other hand, there are already quite a lot of works from the first half of the 20th century that take a similar approach to depicting both night-time and, well, angst. The concerto was well-crafted and extremely well-played -- Taylor's professorial exactitude at the piano was particularly well-suited to the demands of the part -- but it was also a bit hard to escape the feeling of déja vu.

While this is technically the end of Miller's run of Pocket Concerto concerts, we were told the concept would live on, folded into its excellent, ongoing Composer Portraits series -- presumably this means that living composers featured in the series will be commissioned to write a pocket concerto for their Portrait gig. This is a great idea -- I think the good ol' soloist vs. ensemble bout has a lot of possibilities as-yet unexplored, and I'm looking forward to hearing what comes next.

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Tickets to this event were provided by Miller Theatre.

The M6 sings Meredith Monk @ Symphony Space, 6 March 2008

My concert companion, ACB, has kindly read my mind and already written everything I wanted to say about this exceptional show, a concert of Meredith Monk compositions performed by The M6, a group of ridiculously talented young singers, including Sid Chen of The Standing Room. ACB and I exchanged many astounded "did-you-just-fucking-hear-THAT" glances throughout the show, and shared an intense chat at intermission on the nature of virtuosity (which inspired this post). In this case, the tremendous virtuosity on display actually did hit home, in a thrillingly visceral way, because (A) it was fresh -- the extended vocal techniques Meredith Monk pioneered are still a long way from being tapped out, and (B) it was meaningful -- these songs require virtuosity, but they are not about virtuosity.

I'm no expert on Meredith Monk's music by any means -- I've heard a few things of hers before here and there (including a charming concert at BAMcafé a few years back with Theo Bleckmann and Gary Versace), but her stuff has never hit me as hard as it did last week. Tablet, especially, was fucking primal, an epic in some imagined pre-grammatical language.

Meredith Monk's music requires a significant buy-in from the audience, because if you're not familiar with her style, your first reaction is likely going to be "what in the hell is this -- early minimalism meets Shooby Taylor?" But the M6 singers were so committed to the music and so engaged in their roles that it was impossible not to get drawn into the world they were creating. The songs may not have words, but they do tell stories, and The M6 made these imagined narratives absolutely riveting.

Like ACB says, "I saw more true communication between people tonight than I’ve seen on many an opera/theater stage, where there are actual words in actual languages." I could say much the same thing about many, many jazz singers, who value making pretty sounds over singing the lyrics like you own them. Hell, even originals often come across like professional-but-indifferent covers.

On the way back to the subway, ACB suggested that if The M6 were to expand beyond their current mandate of representing Meredith Monk's music to include other composers, they have the potential to become the Eighth Blackbird of new vocal music. I concur.

Spotlight on Frederic Rzewski with Lisa Moore (piano), 28 Feb 2008

In a lot of ways, Frederic Rzewski is a man out of time. Almost everything about him is anachronistic or contradictory or both -- he's a straight-up virtuoso composer-pianist in the Lisztian tradition, an old-school rugged bohemian whose chosen instrument remains a powerful symbol of class privilege, a distinctively American composer who has lived abroad for over 30 years, a gifted improviser who has recorded with fellow bohemians Steve Lacy and Irene Aebi, a student of arch elitists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions who fell in with the wild boys of the New York School crowd (John Cage, Christian Wolff & co.), went on to write some influential early proto-minimalist works, and who in recent decades has returned to an austere 12-tone pitch vocabulary that would seem at odds with his proletarian politics. Throughout his career, he has freely combined serial, conceptual, minimalist, improvisatory, and collage-based techniques with folk songs and explicit political appeals.

Rzewski's output is so varied and chimerical that some people have accused him of not having a style at all, but I think what unites all his music, from the broadly anthemic to the grimly abstract, is his respect for the listener and his authentic desire to communicate. Babbitt, famously, doesn't care if you listen -- Rzewski, even when he's every bit as serially thorny and complex as Babbitt, wants you to keep up, and is willing to meet you halfway: "it seemed to me there was no reason why the most difficult and complex formal structures could not be expressed in a form which could not be understood by a wide variety of listeners." This sounds like the most obvious thing in the world -- "of course music can and should be expressed in a form that people can actually understand, otherwise what's the fucking point?" -- but for some reason, this is still a controversial idea in some circles.

Rzewski's 70th birthday is coming up soon (April 13), but the occasion is not exactly being marked with the sort of fanfare previously bestowed on Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and John Corigliano. This is kind of instructive -- Rzewski primarily writes for the piano, and is clearly the most important and influential composer of  works for piano of the past 25 years. In the 19th century, if you wrote great piano music you were a titan -- in the 21st century, you're at best a marginal cult figure. So big ups to the Keys to the Future people for giving Fred his due, in a recital featuring Bang on a Can All-Stars vet Lisa Moore.

I recently bitched about how empty and hollow virtuosic displays for their own sake feel to me. Much of Rzewski's music is extraordinarily difficult to play, and the composer himself is capable of some serious pianistic fireworks (which abound on the 7 CD set Rzewksi Plays Rzewski) but even in a technical tour-de-force like the hour-long The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, you never get the sense that the music is about virtuosity. (That is, if the title and form of the work -- a series of variations on a protest song by the Chilean composer Sergio Ortega that became the anthem of the anti-Pinochet resistance -- didn't make the composer's intent clear enough from the outset.) However, the Rzewski works Lisa Moore selected for her Greenwich House gig mostly called for a different kind of virtuosity -- all but the first and last piece on the program relied as much on her ability to sing or deliver spoken text as it did her pianism.

The focus of the recital was De Profundis, a 1992 work for speaking pianist. The title and text are both drawn from Oscar Wilde's famous letter to his young lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, composed while Wilde was languishing in Reading Jail (Wilde's libel suit against his lover's father having proved somewhat... ill-advised). But the performance text includes not just Wilde's prose but gasps, rasps, whistling, and a few judicious honks on a clown's car horn.

The really striking thing about this piece is how incredibly patient it is, how slowly and spaciously it unfolds -- this lends a line of text near the end particular resonance: "And how slowly time goes with those of us who lie in prison I need not tell again." The spoken sections are all sparsely scored, with plenty of room for the words to have their full effect -- Wilde's unadorned prose is powerful enough, and Rzewski doesn't let the music oversaturate it. The spoken sections are stitched together by purely instrumental passages that serve as a kind of commentary on the text we've just heard.

I actually liked Moore's reading of De Profundis a bit better than the composer's -- heresy, I know, but she was less declamatory and her flow was less halting. Her voice seemed to capture an impish spirit, almost but not quite broken down by circumstances, which is closer to how I hear Wilde's voice in my head than Rzewski's more bitter, spiteful rendition. But of course, this is a work that invites a diversity of interpretations, as Rzewski himself says:

[I]t has been performed by a number of pianists, gay, straight, male and female. All of the different interpretations it has received so far have been original, interesting, and different from each other. The music demands a combination of virtuoso technique and a total lack of inhibition on stage, thus virtually guaranteeing that no mediocre or conventional performer will dare go near it.

The other played+spoken piece on the program was a movement -- or "mile," in this case, Mile #42, "The Prodigal Parents" -- from The Road, Rzewksi's recently completed 10-hour "novel" for solo piano plus "theatrics" (here including banging on the closed piano lid and an ironic burst of self-applause). The text, Rzewski's own, called "The Prodigal Parents," is a plea for forgiveness addressed to subsequent generations. To His Coy Mistress is not a narration, but an actual song, a setting of Andrew Marvell's famous paean to getting it on. The music sounded inspired by several of Steve Lacy's poem settings, which are in a similar vein. This was the one piece where I was not sold on Moore's interpretation, which didn't really capture the seductive urgency of the poem.

The concert was bookended by two purely instrumental pieces, both from the late 1970's. Moore opened with Piano Piece No. 4 another Chilean-inspired piece, which begins with creeping high repeated notes that gradually coalesce into chords, and then a low rumble. The haunting folksong melody struggles to be heard amongst the dark ostinatos and high stabbing figures.

A similar process fuels Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, which has the singular distinction of being a blues-inspired piece of classical piano literature that does not suck. Before playing it, Moore treated us to a hilarious recreation of Rzewski's ultra-stiff manner of singing the workers' song the piece is based on. But a huge reason Winnsboro succeeds where so many others have failed is that there is no artificial, stilted "jazzing up" of the material -- the theme is treated almost entirely mechanistically, grinding against looping left-hand figures and churning clusters. Winnsboro was the most impressively virtuosic piece on the program, but all the flash in the world is nothing without the ability to dig in and maintain a relentlessly steady pulse throughout -- and luckily Moore has rhythmic authority to burn. It made for an explosive conclusion to a great recital.

Moore will be appearing again at Greenwich House as one of the eight pianists featured at this year's Keys to the Future Festival, which is coming up soon (March 25-27).  My review of a night from last year's festival is here. Frederic Rzewski will be appearing at Zankel Hall on May 1 alongside Boston pianist Steven Drury (they'll be doing the two-piano version of Winnsboro) and new music ensemble Opus 21.

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Tickets to this event were provided by the presenter.

Fighting vainly the old ennui

Is there anything more boring than virtuosity?

I mean, when you're young and you first make that ill-advised decision to seriously dedicate yourself to your instrument, hearing someone with superhuman technique is thrilling beyond belief. Also daunting and depressing, for sure, but mostly thrilling. And chops envy is often the only thing keeping you going in the practice room, because honestly, why else would you voluntarily spend countless tedious hours drilling scales and patterns and those godawful Hanon and Czerny exercises if you didn't desperately want to be more impressive than your peers? Yeah, yeah, "passion for music," whatever -- we are talking about kids here. And kids whose music-making takes place within the constraints of long-established, adult-approved institutions, at that.

But at a certain point in your musical development, you come to realize that technique is a means to an end, not an end in itself. You become aware that there's no such thing as objectively, universally "good" technique -- you might need one set of skills to excel at one type of music, but other musics present completely different technical challenges. You also realize that music that requires the performer to clear large and obvious technical hurdles is not always better than music that seems easier to play. You learn that the flashiest elements of virtuosity -- like the ability to play very fast with a lot of accuracy -- are not necessarily the most important, and that