Secret Society

Sing along with the common people

Good to see the efforts to turn Manhattan into America's largest gated community are proceeding as planned:

Once upon a time, Manhattan was an island of adult thrills and vices. In the national imagination, it was a place of artists, musicians, socialites, Wall Street bankers -- or of hustlers, runaways, addicts, murderers. But it was not on the radar of the typical white, middle-class couple as a place to raise children.

Now demographers say Manhattan is increasingly a borough of babies, and more and more of them are white and well-off.

The number of children younger than 5 in Manhattan has increased about 30 percent since 2000, said William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. The increase is driven by white toddlers, whose numbers have gone up by 60 percent, according to the 2000 census and the 2006 American Community Survey, he said. For the first time since the 1960s, young white children outnumber their black or Hispanic counterparts in Manhattan, demographers say.

"It's surprising," Frey said. "It's a selective part of the white population, a lifestyle of people who want to have children and can afford to live in the city."

Indeed, according to Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, the median household income for this group of children was $280,000 in 2005.

[…]

Alphabet City in the East Village, which a decade ago was famous for its post-punk scene and its heroin markets, now is rife with hipster preschools for tattooed and pierced rock-and-roll parents, and baby boutiques that sell $112 onesies made by Italian designers.

[…]

"I feel like a wartime profiteer," said Amanda Uhry, the founder of Manhattan Private School Advisors, which charges a $15,000 fee to help parents through admissions -- and whose business has tripled since 2002.

The close is almost too good to be true:

But young Theo Carlston is just happy to play at Citibabes, a SoHo club where parents can use the gym or have a manicure while their children take dance classes or French lessons.

"I'm hiding in my fort!" Theo shouted as his mother discussed the city her family is helping to create.

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.

What is a compound without an element?

RE: the infamous Trance bassline.

What do y'all think of this?

The above is actually not too far off from some of the rhythms in Maria Schneider's Buleria, Solea y Rumba (from Concert in the Garden) -- thanks to Pat for triggering the association.

I also found this new click track to be the most helpful -- cross-stick dotted quarters, hihat eighths (click to listen, right-click or ctrl-click to download).

What's the surprise I was right

Jim Henley is very clever. And right.

My favorite line:

Some libertarians remembered that war involved guns, and lots of them, and figured it must be good. And many feared that if the United States did not go to war, it might make some hippie, somewhere, happy.

Don't listen to them suckas when they say you too irrational

[WARNING: This is a post about irrational time signatures, incomplete tuplets, and the intricacies of music notation software. If your eyes just glazed over, you should probably skip the rest of this.]

Kyle Gann has been busy working out how to notate Henry Cowell-inspired time signatures in Sibelius, like 2/3 and 5/6. Commonly called "irrational time signatures" (even though they aren't, strictly speaking, irrational), these meters have been around for years. People like Ferneyhough use them but they've never quite caught on, even in new music circles.

Everyone's first reaction, upon first encountering a time signature like "2/3" is "What the fuck is a third note? And how the fuck I am supposed to count that?"

"Well," (Cowell's thinking goes), "if a quarter note is 1/4 of a whole note, and a half note is 1/2 of a whole note, then it follows that a third note is 1/3 of a whole note -- in other words, one triplet half note. So, in a time signature of 2/3, a measure is the length of two triplet half notes." Similarly, 5/6 is the length of 5 triplet quarter notes, and so on.

Of course, these time signatures only make sense in the context of a more standard meter. You can't start in 5/6 -- you have to be chugging merrily along in 4/4 or whatever, and then switch gears to go into 5/6 for a measure, and then  go back to a "rational" time signature.

As you might imagine, this is really, really hard to play accurately. Take a look at the examples Kyle Gann posted (from his I'itoi Variations):

Once you understand how to count 2/3 and 7/12, etc., the above no longer totally incomprehensible. But with time shifts coming every bar, and no common underlying pulse, it's still bloody daunting -- at least for a jazzer such as myself who is used to hearing rhythms in relation to a steady pulse.

Kyle also posts some excerpts from scores by Bang on a Can composer Michael Gordon's work. As Gann points out, Gordon doesn't use those Cowell-inspired "irrational" time signatures. Instead, he uses incomplete tuplets within conventional meters (like 4/4). This seemed much easier for me to wrap my head around than time signatures like 3/2 and 5/6.

Here's an example of how Gordon uses incomplete tuplets to create the illusion of "irrational" time signatures being superimposed over a regular beat. This is the bassline from Gordon's Trance (originally posted by Gann):

Now that looks like something I can relate to. Kyle disagrees, saying "I can't imagine maintaining a 4/4 beat through the Trance example above." But, at least to my usual way of thinking, the steady underlying pulse is exactly what's needed in such a situation. Even if, in measures 2-4, the only part of the bassline that lines up with the pulse is the downbeat, that still intuitively seems way easier than alternating bars of 2/4 and 2/3 (the notation Kyle prefers).

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Anyway, because I am a giant dork, I wanted to see whether I could recreate the Trance example in Finale (my weapon of choice) in such a way that it would play back accurately. No one seemed to know how to do this. I mean, if all you care about is how it looks on the page, notating the figure is trivial -- but where's the fun in that? I wanted to hear it. This would also allow me to test to see whether it was easier to feel in the original "incomplete tuplet" notation, or when renotated into "irrational" time signatures.

It took some doing but I finally figured out how to get this to work in Finale. The first measure is easy, of course, but as soon as you run into that incomplete triplet in m.2 things get tricky. Finale won't let you enter an incomplete triplet. And it also won't let you enter an "X in the space of Y" triplet where "Y" is a quarter note triplet.

I thought about trying to approximate the duration using sixty-fourth notes -- I mean, 11 sixty-fourth notes is almost the same thing as one quarter note triplet, and it would be really easy to create a tuplet that was "1 quater note in the space of 11 sixty-fourth notes" in Finale. But that was kludgy and awkward, not to mention inaccurate  -- I figured there must be a better solution.

Here's what I eventually worked out  -- for those measures with incomplete tuplets, just make the entire measure a tuplet.

Here, I'll show you what I mean:

First, just enter the notes as non-triplets -- you'll have to turn off "Jump To Next Measure" in Speedy, and Finale will warn you about "too many notes" -- just ignore that for now. When you're done, you'll get this mess:

Next, for measures 2-4, you need to use the Tuplet Tool on the first note of each measure, with these settings: "6 quarters in the space of 4 quarters." This creates a tuplet that spans the entire measure, turning every quarter note in the measure into a quarter note triplet (or, a "sixth note," if you insist). (Epic!) But it also turns all of the eighth notes in the measure into eighth notes triplets. (Brutal!)

But not to worry -- it's actually very easy to turn those triplet eighth notes ("twelfth notes," ugh) back into regular eighth notes, by applying a nested tuplet that lengthens them by the same amount we've already shortened them -- effectively canceling the tuplet.

In this example what we need to do is click on the first eighth note in measures 2, 3, and 4, and apply a "4 eighth notes in the space of 6 eighth notes" tuplet. Here's what we end up with:

I set the tuplet numbers to display ratios and note values for clarity's sake, but you don't have to do that -- in fact, we're going to hide them anyway.

Right-click or control-click on the handle of each tuplet in mm.2-4 and UNcheck "Show." Then create a "3" text expression that matches the tuplet number font (by default, it's Times bold italic 10 pt.), apply as needed, and you are good to go. When you're done, it should look like this:

Looks right, and plays back.

Or, if you want to get really fancy, you can create graphic incomplete triplet brackets instead of all the little 3's. It's a bit tricky (too fussy to explain here) and takes a bit longer, but I actually like this notation better:

So... after all that, how does this sucker sound? And is it even playable by humans?

Here is the Finale playback of the Trance bassline (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download) -- I added a quarter note click track to help you orient yourself.

And, as promised, I made a version with a different click track -- one that would correspond to the conducting pattern if the figure was notated in mixed 2/4 and 2/3 à la Kyle Gann. Here is the notation:

And here is the Finale playback with the mixed 2/4+2/3 click track. (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download)

Huh. I'll be damned.

I am curious which version everyone else finds easiest to feel.

Finally, for context (because how you feel the bassline obviously depends very much on what everyone else is doing), here's the first two minutes of the Icebreaker recording of Trance:

MP3: "Trance 1" (excerpt). (click to listen/right-click or ctrl click to download) Composed by Michael Gordon, performed by Icebreaker.

UPDATE: I have a followup post which talks about using compound meter (i.e. 12/8) as an alternative to both "irrational" time signatures and incomplete tuplets.

'Twas down in Mississippi not so long ago

By way of contextualizing the anger that underlies Reverend Wright's recent controversial remarks -- anger that many white Americans seem to find unfathomable -- Hilzoy points out that Jeremiah Wright was born in 1941 -- the same year as Emmett Till.

[I trust you all know who Emmett Till is, but in case you need to study up: Wikipedia. Eyes On The Prize segments on Till (YouTube) -- One. Two Three.]

I also second Hizoy's recommendation here:

To see a photo of what remained of [Till's] face -- and photos like this were printed in Jet and circulated around the world -- click here. It's not pleasant to look at, but if you haven't seen it before, you should steel yourself and try.

I had not seen this photo before.

Hilzoy goes on to say:

The murder of Emmett Till was not particularly unusual. Neither was the fact that the killers, though known to their community, were not brought to justice. (The jury deliberated for 67 minutes; one juror said that "they wouldn't have taken so long if they hadn't stopped to drink pop.") What made it unusual was the actions of Till's family: his mother's decision to have an open casket funeral, and his uncle's decision to testify against his killers in court.

Jeremiah Wright was fourteen when Till was killed. Though he did not live in the South, Jim Crow was in full force there until his early twenties. He was twenty one when George Wallace called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was a few days shy of twenty two when a bomb went off in a Birmingham church, killing four young girls who were at Sunday School, about a month shy of twenty three when Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act, and almost twenty four when Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

By the time our country got around to guaranteeing voting rights for blacks, Jeremiah Wright had served his country in the Marine Corps for three years, and in the Navy for two more.

One more date, both because it is itself outrageous and because it is something to bear in mind if you should happen to wonder why someone like Rev. Wright might believe that our government caused HIV: when the Tuskegee Study ended in 1972, Rev. Wright was thirty one years old.

Read the whole thing.

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David Adler comments on Wright, Obama's Philadelphia speech, and the jazz blogosphere's reaction.

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In lighter news (uh, no pun intended, really), the author of the very funny blog Stuff White People Like has apparently scored a $350,000 book deal.

We've got five years, my brain hurts a lot

Happy Birthday, Iraq War! God bless America.

Got to. This America, man.

Senator Obama's speech yesterday in Philadelphia is mandatory viewing:

Transcript

His delivery is almost preternaturally cool. He doesn't dramatize the text with his usual sweeping oratory -- he lets the words carry themselves. It is a major speech in American political history. It is honest and complex and non-pandering and a welcome contrast to all the petty bullshit of day-to-day horserace politics.

It is also a speech that in a better, more just world, a more understanding, more historically conscious world, he should not have had to give. In that better world, the people who were offended by some of Rev. Wright's fiery comments might have paused a moment to reflect about where the reverend's anger is coming from, and think on whether they, too, might be angry if they had experienced what he has experienced. People might also consider why anger, especially African-American anger, is considered so politically radioactive, when it is precisely righteous anger at oppression and injustice that fueled many of the great civil rights activists of the past century.

Matana Roberts writes a letter to White America:

I find it rather depressing that Senator Obama had to make a lengthy and concise speech today, not about the plight of American poverty, the continual decline of American education , our very troubling healthcare system ( though to his credit he did try to tie these issues in to his speech), but he had to use this valuable time to speak in defense of a man that has been defending the rights of black Americans in Chicago for decades. My grandmothers house is about 4 blocks away from the original Trinity Church that Reverend Jeremiah Wright preached at for the last 36 years. My Mother still remembers when he started that church and had a small following of maybe 65 congregants, my uncle and aunt attended that church for a time, and I remember passing by it as a kid. That church now has a congregation of thousands, and I think it's also interesting to note that some of it’s congregants are white Americans just like you. 

[…]

The tradition of black preachers using their sermons to inspire, incite, and encourage slaves and descendants of slaves to look toward a bigger picture of existence in the haven of being a good Christian saved many a soul from the depression of some everyday realties, and I believe many of your white American ancestors from one less race riot. Does that excuse some of Reverend Wright’s opinions? Not completely. But when put into to context that these thoughts came from the son of a Black Baptist preacher, who experienced racism just by the genetic indetermination of being born brown, raised during the Jim crow era, seeing racism as not only a witness participant, but also as an staunch community activist participant in a very segregated politically windy city, I’d say that if anybody had the right to speak on these touchy issues he should be allowed to, without his tactics being defined as that of a “cult leader”.

Read the whole thing.

However, given the sorry state of American discourse on race -- which has been especially stupid during the current presidential campaign, and I fear it will only get worse -- I am glad Sen. Obama gave the speech he did. It is hard to imagine a better one.

Some other reactions from around the jazz musician blogosphere:

Taylor Ho Bynum:

And finally, I rarely venture into politics here, but I have to say, I was impressed, even moved, by Obama’s speech yesterday. To have any politician talk about race in such a nuanced and honest way is incredible, let alone a major presidential candidate. My immediate family happens to be about as wildly diverse as Obama’s: asian, white, black, jewish, you name it; my friends run the gamut from those openly advocating for revolution to those working within the political system. I’ve had loving and complex relationships and discussions with all these friends and relatives similar to what Obama describes with his pastor and his grandmother. It is beyond refreshing to have an intelligent national conversation about this, it is potentially transformative. If only it lasts, and becomes part of our waking reality, rather than than the vague memory of a compelling dream.

Andrew Durkin:

Ezra Klein is right. The power of that Obama speech -- the power of the candidate himself -- is traceable to a characteristic so rarely seen in politics: honesty.

As I listened, I was reminded that, for all of the left-generated criticism of Obama as "not progressive enough" (do you remember how common that was back in the Fall?) -- there is simply no way a Dennis Kucinich or a Ralph Nader (both of whom I admire greatly) could put the issue of race on the table so deftly, respectfully, and forcefully.

Whether you think race is our crucible issue as a nation is up to you, of course. I happen to think it is.

Finally, I note this only because no one else seems to have mentioned it yet -- some may recall Rev. Jeremiah Wright from his appearance on a Wynton Marsalis album. He provides the narration on the track "Premature Autopsies (Sermon)" (click to listen via Rhapsody). The text is by (wait for it...) Stanley Crouch.

On this track, one of the things Rev. Wright says is: "If you give me a fair chance, I will help you better understand the meaning of democracy."

Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it's full of surprises, and you're constantly getting fucked

I am very glad that Christopher Bird is around to explain these things to me. Otherwise, I might be tempted to believe that this movie getting greenlighted was the consequence of someone losing a very expensive bet.

I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.

RIP Arthur C. Clarke.

I'm agile plus I'm worth your while

Jay speak. You listen.

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.

It was so exotic, but just one pogo stick

This story wreaks utter havok with my preconceived whiteboy notions of authenticity and taste:

With a student body that is 71 percent Hispanic and 27 percent black, Public School 59 does not seem an obvious home for a thriving Irish dance troupe. And when Caroline Duggan first arrived from Dublin at age 23 to try her hand as a New York City public school music teacher, it wasn’t. Many of her students had never heard of Ireland. Why, they wanted to know, did she talk funny?

Then, to stave off homesickness, Ms. Duggan hung a “Riverdance” poster in her fifth-floor classroom, and one thing led to another. The children pointed to a long-haired dancer on the poster and asked if it was her. No, she laughed, but I could show you a few steps. The impromptu lesson grew into a wildly popular after-school program and, for the first time last year, a trip to Ireland that still inspires dreamy looks among those lucky enough to go.

[…]

For years, Ana Sotomayor, 47, had tried to teach her son, Angel Perez, 11, the salsa moves she had learned growing up in Puerto Rico. For years, she recalled, he had shrugged her off, saying he didn’t like it and couldn’t do it.

But there Angel was, center stage, hands on his hips and baggy jeans flapping as he began a routine with a short solo.

“Every time I see him in a show I cry, because I’m very proud of him,” Ms. Sotomayor said. “He’s very shy, but then when I see him dance I see another Angel, very secure in what he’s doing. He’s very different.”

Who but the rankest scoundrel, the most heartless bastard, could snark on this? If you've seen Mad Hot Ballroom (or, like, ever set foot in a public school in the Bronx), you know how transformative these kinds of extracurriculars can be. And it's easy to imagine how Ireland might seem exotic and mysterious and appealing to kids who have had the good fortune to not have been mercilessly subjected to all manner of pseudo-Celtic kitsch for all their waking lives. And yeah, I'm sure all that high-stepping and kicking is awfully fun.

But sweet Christ, does it really have to be, you know, Riverdance?

Ach, forget I said that. It is what it is. Erin Go Braugh, aight?

RIP Dennis Irwin

UPDATE: You must read this post from Dennis Irwin's brother Dave, who was at the March 10 benefit concert that sadly became a memorial concert.

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He was just 56 years old. My sincerest condolences to Dennis's family and loved ones. Cancer fucking bites.

Read Ethan's tribute.

[via The Jazz Clinic}

Vanguard Jazz Orchestra
dennisirwin.org
Richard Kamins (Hartford Courant blog)
David Adler (Lerterland)
Ben Ratliff (NYT)
Jeff Tamarkin (Jazz Times)
Doug Ramsey (Rifftides)

Blogger and journalist Spencer Ackerman, who is a friend of Dennis's son Mike.

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.

From the depths of the sea, back to the block

There's a grassroots movement afoot to rename one of Montreal's metro stations after Oscar Peterson -- it's gone from a 5,500-strong Facebook group to a serious national campaign. While I sympathize with those who oppose renaming local landmarks on principle, it's actually pretty fucking shameful that a metro stop was named after Abbé Lionel Groulx in the first place -- dude was a stone cold fascist who wrote books with titles like L'Appel de la race and did his level best to keep Jews fleeing the Holocaust out of Canada. He personifies all of the ugliest racist and antisemitic elements of pur laine Québec nationalism.

I am actually extremely sympathetic to the desire of francophone Québecois to protect their language and culture -- and if you don't believe Québec is a a distinct society, you've never heard two blue-collar francophones get into a public shouting match about the relative merits of various raw-milk cheeses. But regardless of what side of the sovereignty debate you fall on, there's just no denying that Groulx is an entirely reprehensible figure, and when the station was named after him (in 1978 -- it's not like we are talking about the distant past here), it was an affront to Montreal's Jewish and minority communities.

Oscar Peterson grew up in the neighborhood served by the stop (St-Henri), which is home to the Union United Church, the oldest black congregation in Québec. As Michael Citrome, who created the Facebook page says, "There's something sick about the fact that in one of the oldest historically black neighbourhoods in Canada, there's a subway station named after a terrible racist."

The Transit Commission opposes the change, as does the Gazette (Montreal's English newspaper), but their arguments are pretty feeble. The Gazette editorial objects that "the métro station is not named after him; it's named after the street" -- actually, the street was renamed Lionel-Groulx when the station opened. So fine, let's also rename Avenue Lionel-Groulx after Oscar Peterson while we're are at it.

Historian Jarrett Rudy is quoted in the Globe & Mail piece, saying: "Yes, there is a disagreeable underside to the man – the anti-Semitism, the fascist sympathies." (Okay, please stop right there. We all know a "but" is coming, and it won't be pretty.) "But he also had a significance for a huge part of the population. I feel uncomfortable about erasing his impact from Quebec history."

No one thinks we should only name streets and landmarks after perfect people, but you know, I feel pretty comfortable at drawing the line at actual unapologetic fascists. I mean, it's not like we go around naming public spaces after the father of the KKK, right?

Oh, okay... bad example.

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 subtlety and nuance are both more meaningful and more elusive. You recognize that musicians that have developed a highly idiosyncratic and individual technique (i.e., musicians that play "the wrong way") are often playing the right way for them -- their unorthodox approach might actually be perfectly suited to their individual voice as a musician.

At least, I hope you come to realize these things. Not everyone does. When you've devoted a significant portion of your formative years to the single-minded pursuit of virtuosity, it can be dispiriting to learn that better technique doesn't make you a better musician. But you can't actually become a for-real grown-up musician unless you are willing to suck it up and admit to yourself that chops aren't everything. Otherwise, you will continue to live your life believing truly perverse things -- things like "Theolnious Monk wound have sounded better if his technique had been more like Oscar Peterson's" or "Buckethead is a better guitarist than Albert King" or "Charles-Valentin Alkan's music is more meaningful than Erik Satie's."

Because the reality is, a pageant of virtuosity for its own sake is skullfuckingly tedious. For anyone who has a post-adolescent relationship with music, fearsome chops alone don't impress, not even as pure athleticism. To make an impact, the virtuoso also has take genuine risks, and all all that skill has to be in the service of real musical expression.

When John Coltrane first recorded "Giant Steps," that was thrilling because it was new and daring and original. The energy of discovery is all over that recording, and it remains vivdly etched into the tracks even if you weren't born until decades after Coltrane recorded it. But nobody cares how deftly you negotiate "Giant Steps." These days, everyone and their dog can play over "Giant Steps" changes. It doesn't mean anything anymore -- especially not when it's coming from someone who has nothing of his own to say other than, "Look, Ma, I can nail 'Giant Steps'!"

Same goes for Gaspard de la nuit, Rach 3, the Liszt Transcendental Etudes and all the other legendary finger-busters -- nobody cares. Seriously. 

Look, I know this repertoire is fearsomely difficult and you have dedicated your entire life to getting to the point where you can credibly negotiate these works, but in case you hadn't realized (because you were too busy practicing) -- lots of people can and do play the shit out of this stuff. I don't care if you are even more flawless and even more polished than the currently reigning heavyweight champion of polished flawlessness, this stuff is just not impressive anymore. Even if your sole objective as a musician is to blow us away with your l33t skillz, the only way you can actually accomplish that is by doing something we haven't heard done a million times before.

The question of the perception of virtuosity and its relationship to new music was very much on my mind during two recent concerts: an all-Rzewski recital by pianist Lisa Moore last week, and an all-Meredith Monk concert by The M6 earlier tonight. Monk and Rzewski are both members of an increasingly endangered species -- the composer-virtuoso. But they are both the best kind of virtuosos -- in fact, their virtuosity is the only kind that still actually registers as such, because their respective musical languages involve techniques that only the composers themselves and a handful of others in the world have mastered. This also makes it extremely daunting for anyone to attempt a piece by Rzewski or Monk, because the composers themselves are such fearsome and authoritative performers of their own works.

I'll have more to say about those two concerts -- both of which were extraordinary, and virtuosic in non-boring ways -- in a couple of follow-up posts.