So it's official: the United States committed war crimes in our use of torture against detainees. Before you discount me as a shrieking, hysterical Communist, please note the source: a stunning, bipartisan report - stunning, if not surprising, to anyone who's been following the developing story as it's unfolded over the last 6 years - from the Senate Armed Services Committee, chaired by Carl Levin and sponsored by John McCain. Here's a quote:
The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of "a few bad apples" acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.
Note the phrase "appearance of their legality"; that's a clincher. Because what is the implication of granting the actions only the "appearance" of legality? It's that the actions were not, in fact, legal, making them crimes. This should be clear on its face, to anyone who reads about, hears about, or views what has taken place in detainee prisons. And, in fact, those crimes were prosecuted, against some of those "bad apples". The finding of this report is that those senior officials are the ones responsible for the actions that have, in some cases, already been criminally prosecuted! I haven't taken a logic class in a long time, but this feels a lot like the transitive property (if a=b and b=c, then a=c), to me. If you sense excitement in my voice, it's only because I get giddy when I imagine a world in which people who commit malicious, evil acts are actually held accountable for them, and can't hide behind their cloaks of power, wealth, and privilege.
Unfortunately, when I click on Google News, I see the following stories: Blagojevich, Treasury Bonds, Caroline Kennedy, Mac OS X release, Tom Cruise, Rafael Furcal, something about colonoscopies, the Iraqi shoe thrower getting 'beaten in custody' (almost what I'm looking for, but not quite), and something about Madoff. Also In The News, apparently, are Rhys Jones, Electoral College, Donovan McNabb, Reggie Theus, Salvation Army, Ken Salazar, Illinois House, Blackburn Rovers, Red Wings, and last but not least, Santa Claus.
Is it too much to ask that a bipartisan report from our government's most powerful branch, detailing the exact course by which high-ranking government officials illegally bended the rule of law to commit inhuman acts against our captives, acts which were not only reprehensible from the standpoint of humanity but which were also harmful to American soldiers and civilians abroad (and ultimately, at home), would merit some coverage? Whatever your personal answer to that rhetorical question, you should at least read the report, which is here, and here are commentaries from Greenwald (noting the absurdity of the contrast between press coverage of the Blagojevich scandal, and this war crime report) and Scott Horton.
But I'm sure that President Obama will clean this all up, right?
Sometimes, as I think I just said, you feel like an idiot for not having owned an album earlier. The Sound of Silver is one of those albums. I mean, yes, I've heard many of these songs before, from my friends and in bars and wherever else, and I knew that it was supposed to be a good album, and I liked the first album (which I also own). But this connects so many dots with so much skill. It reminds me of nothing so much as Remain In Light, transported to 2007 without ignoring or distancing itself from the musical sounds that emerged between the two eras. I'm incredibly impressed.
I should say - despite my profession (composer) and my other related occupations (music producer, record label "executive", ensemble director), or perhaps because of them, I don't get to hear nearly as much music as people usually think I do. Especially not right when it comes out. I hear a lot of live music, because going to shows is part of the job, but people aren't sending me stacks of recordings to comb through (except for NewAm submissions, of course). So I've only heard maybe a handful of records that came out this year, and I'm just catching up to some of 2007's hits. The things that impressed me the most this year are generally things that impressed a lot of other people, because for most of the music world, my sources of information are just like everyone else's. The exceptions, of course, are the indie classical standouts that no one knows about, and which are some of my favorite records of the year. I can't wait until the day - not long off, I'm sure - when more people know about our scene, and the top lists that come out include albums like Other People's Love Songs and Mohair Time Warp. I'm thrilled, of course, to see NOW mentioned as one of Alex's top CDs of 2008, and to see itsnotyouitsme get tapped by Allan Kozinn. But for most of the albums that are less cleanly "classical", it's going to require an extra push to get them into the mainstream. That's what 2009 is for!
Tomorrow morning (Thursday December 4), I'll be interviewed by Susanna Mendlow as part of the Morning Classical program on WKCR, 89.9 FM in New York. You can listen here, or for those of you in New York who don't live at their computers, you can turn on that dial-laden thing in your living room, the one with the red band that moves to the left and right...yeah, that thing. It will catch the magical voices that are floating in the air and bring them into your home or car or place of work. My voice, from about 9:30 until 11:00 tomorrow morning, will be one of them. Whatever your method, if you listen in, you will hear me play some music and discuss it. I'm thinking of playing a more obscure piece of mine, as well as some more (relatively) well-known works. Any requests?
I went to see Doctor Atomic last night, with Josh and Eve and Josh's mom - and ran into Darcy and his friend Isaac, and Farnoosh and her friend Julie. The opera is one of those works of art that gives you a thousand ways into a discussion; you can talk about the music and the staging and the singers and the direction, or you can talk about the politics, or the poetry, or the various conceptual decisions that were made on the macro or micro levels. I say this because I sometimes forget how fun it is to go to a show, run into people, and just start gabbing with them on a purely "so what do you think?" level. I don't do that as often as you might expect.
So what do I think? My thoughts are scattered right now, but here are a few:
Whatever else I might say about the opera, it's an incredible work, powerful and gripping. The concept is terrific - using the Doctor Faust story, but making the bomb essentially into the devil, works very well, as do the use of the Bhagavad Gita and the other literary allusions, like Baudelaire and Donne. The interior psychological space of the Camp is extremely well articulated (even by the much-maligned sets), and the metaphor of the bomb hanging over the heads of the participants is striking (one woman behind me said, "it's like the Death Star up there"). I appreciate that they really "go for it" in the complexity and richness of the concept.
I wonder, though, if the concept didn't at times overtake and overshadow the flow of the unfolding drama itself. Specifically, there's a lot of characters standing still on the stage, singing poetry over beautiful orchestral textures, but without a sense of musical direction. Time and time again, we are taken out of the narrative space of the opera and placed into the interior psychological space of the characters, through these quasi-arias or interruptions. As I said, it's a conceptually strong maneuver, but difficult to pull off for 3.5 hours. And I don't think that Adams quite succeeds. In general, my critique of his mostly-brilliant score is that there's not quite enough in the way of melodic hooks to ground such a huge work. When they come - in "Am I In Your Light" (sung incredibly by my friend Sasha, who gets a big "Brava" from me and - happily - from many many others in attendance last night!), or even in Oppenheimer's terrifying aria that closes the first half - they are certainly made more remarkable for their infrequency. If Adams wanted to set off those moments by placing them in a sea of floating. ambiguous melodic material, he succeeded, but I think the cost was too high. I think back to last year's Peter Grimes, which never "floated" in that way; what Britten achieves in his orchestral writing, and which Adams does not, is to make his textures have melodic interest embedded in them. I'm thinking of the "sea" gesture that recurs in Grimes - one of the best. things. ever. - and I can't help considering how much that ties together the score. Even Adams' best moments in the Atomic score never reach that level of transcendence, nor do they serve that function. I suppose it's an unfair comparison, except that Adams has written works that I'd put at that highest level, so fair or not, that's where the bar stands.
There's one musical idea that nearly serves this function, but in isolation, it's not quite enough. That's this driving, percussive, brass-heavy texture that occurs at the end of Act I, and again towards the end of the opera, and in smaller versions at various points throughout. When I heard it, I thought, "Harmonielehre!" - which is Adams's orchestral masterpiece from 1984. The end of Harmonielehre is this gigantic buildup with huge brass chords, one of the more memorable orchestral passages I know. It's also incredibly uplifting and positive. In Atomic, the material is similar, but it's given a devastating minor turn that - especially in combination with Oppenheimer's terrifying aria - is well-suited to the material. When that material recurs, it's memorable, to be sure.
There's a lot more I'd like to say about this idea of melody in large-scale structure; it's a topic that I find really important. But I don't have time at the moment. I will say that I didn't find the set to be as problematic as some people did (just as in Grimes, I liked the claustrophobia), but I did think that some of the decisions at the end were made in error. The terror of atomic weapons is strong enough without introducing shock-tactics that felt intended to heighten the drama beyond even where the organic development of the work could take it. Is this necessary when that drama is already so successful, and the stage has been kept so consistent throughout the duration of the play? I would say no, and I hope that future productions keep in mind that they have built something durable over the course of the work's duration, and should not treat it lightly for the sake of turning our stomachs one final time at the end.
I'm curating (on behalf of New Amsterdam Records) a show next Wednesday at Issue Project Room, in Brooklyn (3rd Ave. and 3rd St., in Gowanus), featuring Nadia Sirota and Andrew McKenna Lee, entitled "The NEW New Virtuosity". I posted an essay on the MATA: Interval Blog about this, which is reprinted below.
The indie classical scene, in New York and beyond, has a handful of what we might call "values" that underpin it, put there by no one but nevertheless constitutive of the scene's character. One is the value of Community; artists in our scene are genuinely supportive of each other, and interested in and open to new ideas and ways of working. The pinball-like quality of interactions in New York, where different artists collaborate with and feed off of one another, is critical to the open nature of the scene and the broad-minded approach to music-making that is inherent in its participants. Closed-minded people who have no interest in working with others are generally not part of the scene - it's a self-selecting process! Another value is History, the idea that we are connected, as musicians, to the figures that have come before, and that while we may all have different key musicians from the past who we count as our personal heroes, the cumulative force of history and body of historical work is something to be celebrated and studied, in many forms, different for each and every person. Community and History provide the context for all the work that we do, both as composers and as performers, as well as for me, Bill, and Sarah, as the directors of the label.
A third value that underpins our scene, but which is less-frequently discussed, is Virtuosity. New Amsterdam artists do not fit the stereotype of "the virtuoso"; Lang Lang does not appear on our albums, nor are we sending our people into battle for Guitar God supremacy with the Steve Vais of the world - although (as I'll discuss shortly) we have some incredible guitarists and pianists and, yes, violists on our roster. Despite avoiding these obvious categories, there's no doubt that the performers of New Amsterdam Records are virtuosos, in various, often idiosyncratic ways. This Interval concert is, in part, an effort to help to define that term for our community.
I'll begin working toward a definition by talking about the name of the concert: The NEW New Virtuosity. This is, self-evidently, a cumbersome and awkward title. Doesn't New Amsterdam purport to be an organization that has kept up with current approaches to marketing and style, and don't I therefore know that many people will find the name to be at best a mouthful, and at worst a pedantic mess? Yes, and yes! It pains me to think that we would be anything but stylish in our nomenclature. But "virtuosity" is too broad a term for us to claim ownership, and simply using the naked word itself would imply a potential overreach: "this is what virtuosity looks like today" is not my claim. There are many ways to be a virtuoso in 2008; some of those ways apply to our community, and those are the ones we're seeking. I do think that the New Amsterdam version of virtuosity is a new one; certainly, we're not talking about the same kind of virtuosity that is reflected in the works of, say, Paganini and Liszt, or Vivaldi and Frescobaldi, or even Ravel and Prokofiev. There are similarities - virtuosity has always been about surpassing the imagined limits of performance, and this is the thread that binds our artists to those from the past. As I said, History is an always-present concern for us, so those threads are more than welcome; they are celebrated. But this concert is also a reflection of a different approach to the term - a New Virtuosity.
It is History, then, that demands this level of specificity, distinguishing the present approaches from those that came before, while nodding in the direction of those precursors. And History proves to be even more demanding, as it turns out that the name "The New Virtosity" has been used in at least two prior eras, to describe what was happening in those times. The first appearance, the one that birthed the name, was in the 1960s, with the performers who took it upon themselves to learn new ("extended") techniques on their instruments and their voices, and who, in so doing, allowed an entire generation of composers to redefine the musical landscape in their notated pieces. The name came back in the 1980s, surfacing in a much more haphazard fashion, and centered mainly around the Downtown scene that further expanded the sonic palette; this generation largely distinguished itself from the prior one through the use of electronics, but also (quite significantly) in the rise of composer-performers who created their own, idiosyncratic languages for both composition and performance.
This Interval concert, and the New Amsterdam style of Virtuosity more generally, encompasses both of those "New Virtuosity" traditions. Nadia Sirota is a violist who can, quite literally, "play anything"; from a purely technical standpoint, she is one of those rare musicians who sets the standard for possibility in what she can or cannot do. Part of that standard-setting comes from a simple willingness to make the effort, to never reject what is asked before seeing if it can be done, and putting in significant effort to make it so. Nadia is not a composer herself, but she reaches out and challenges her composer friends to broaden the repertoire for her instrument, both in the sense of writing new viola pieces, and in the sense of having those pieces bring something truly new to the table. I'll look forward to reading Nadia's discussion of the pieces themselves in her blog entry, but suffice it to say for now: I believe that Nico, Marcos and I have risen to that challenge. In my case, I have offered Escape to quite a few violists who have eagerly asked to see the score, having heard Nadia's live performances, but no one has yet stepped up to the challenge besides Nadia herself. I say that not to criticize those violists (at all!) but merely to let the anecdote suggest the difficulty of the work.
Nadia therefore represents, in her own way, a continuation of the earlier, 1960s thread of "New Virtuosity": she is a non-composing performer who broadens the possibilities of her instrument through collaboration with composers. Andrew McKenna Lee, on the other hand, is equally skilled as a guitarist and a composer; in both these capacities, his work is a reflection of his varied and passionate influences, most notably Baroque music and Classic Rock. Andrew's virtuosity comes through as a guitarist in his own music (though his performances of Bach are stunning in their own right) - the pieces he writes are specially and specifically crafted for Andrew, The Instrument, and he makes them feel less like written compositions than like free improvisations that somehow yield works with immaculate form and multi-layered detail across their span. Andrew has developed his own technique on the acoustic and electric guitars, broadening the possibilities of the instruments through composing for them. In that sense, he represents a continuation of the later thread of "New Virtuosity".
In the ways I've discussed, Nadia and Andrew are connected to earlier conceptions of "New Virtuosity", Andrew through writing compositions for himself to play, and Nadia through her close collaborations with peer composers. But this is not the end of the story. Both Nadia and Andrew, and the many other virtuosic performers in the New Amsterdam community and beyond, reflect a genuinely new development in our generation of classically-trained musicians. As with earlier generations, our technical training, as composers and performers, has continued to be heavily weighted toward the music of the past. What has changed, I believe, is the relationship between classical and non-classical musics, and the internalized relationship that performers must have with the wider world of music in our time. Put in another way, Virtuosity in the early 21st century is not only about the expansion of technique in the realm of the Classical, but is also about the ability of performers to negotiate the contemporary sound of a polyglot world, reflected in the compositions of younger composers working today.
To understand this Virtuosity, it's necessary to understand the context for contemporary composition and performance. To pick an example for examination, much has been of the iPod, and specifically, its "Shuffle" feature, wherein one can allow the random impulses of the machine to move, scattershot, around one's musical collection. While cultural critics continue to be fascinated by the boundary-breaking mythology of the Shuffle function, seeing it as a revolutionary Tool of Progress that liberates music from genre, those of us who actually make music in the world recognize that the "liberation" they reference was itself a precursor to the technological innovation, not a result of it. In other words, young people like using Shuffle because they already reject rigid genre distinctions, not the other way around. In the indie classical scene, genre is still a presence, but only in terms of its practical implications - will a piece be amplified? Will it be played in a club, or in a concert hall? What kind of musician is needed to pull off a performance of a given work - do they have to be able to read music, for example? And are these "works", at all, or is the creative process more collaborative, as in a traditional rock band format, among countless others? These are very real questions that imply genre, but the genre distinctions themselves are not the defining and controlling influence that they were in earlier eras.
For younger composers working in this environment, ours is not an era of "influence upon" but, rather, is one of "incorporation into"; the chocolate chips, as it were, have been melted into the cookie batter. Unless we want them to still be chips - in which case, it's a deliberate choice to leave them there! What this implies, for performers working in our community, is that their Virtuosity needs to extend to the realm of musical awareness and understanding. They must be flexible and adaptable enough to understand the "feel" of a given passage that finds its roots in one of any number of other musics - much like a classical piano virtuoso must know what "dolce" means in Chopin, versus what it means in Brahms, and so on. If those distinctions, between composers from a similar era, represent an X axis of interpretive depth, and if the distinctions between different eras of composition - Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and so on - represent the Y axis, then today's Virtuosos must also understand the Z axis, wherein the boundaries across genre and geography are similarly transcended. For Andrew, this process happens seamlessly, as he is a composer who has digested his influences and incorporated them into his own unique and powerful voice. For Nadia, the process of learning new styles and approaches happens through her introduction to new compositional voices; she is like a sponge for styles that are new to her, and has the ability to quickly and seamlessly reproduce those new concepts to which she is introduced. In these ways, Nadia and Andrew represent a New, New Virtuosity, an extension of what has come before, and a reflection of the musical moment in which we live.
My daily pendulum swing continues; after voicing some concerns about Summers, et al, at dinner last night, my friend Ben suggested that I was off base. I must admit that this is a pretty sensible column. I still think that Summers will prove to be too indebted to the lure of a deregulated market, but it sounds like he's quite open to exploring a relatively wide range of options, and has his priorities in order. Since I have no expertise here, nor any power or sway, that's the last I'll write on this topic for a while.
Just in case my post below doesn't express this clearly enough, I am very, very, VERY happy about this week's outcome. Which is obvious, if you've ever met me or read anything I've written, or probably even if you've even just heard my music. I'm simply a forward-thinking person and I'm already on to the next bit.
That sobriety shouldn't overshadow the historic importance of this election result, for many many reasons, but I am afraid that the result will overshadow the importance of keeping the fight alive even as good people take over the government. That's all. Digby, as usual, explains it well.
Why does history have to fade into the background so quickly? Like most of my friends and even acquaintances, I would happily live in the late hours of November 4 and into the morning of November 5 for quite a long while. There's nothing that I can add to that sentiment that has not already been said, though there are, of course, personal perspectives that might rise up at a later point. But right now, I'm thinking of something I said in the late summer, when Obama was up in the polls, and it looked like he was really going to do it (before it looked like he wasn't, and then once again like he really, really was). I realized that I was starting to turn my attention to Obama-as-President, and being critical of him from The Left. A presidential candidate is something of an idealized figure; he or she will say things that they don't mean, but which please you, and they'll say plenty of things that you pretend they don't mean, because you imagine that they're just trying to please someone else. Then they get into office, and they start to disappoint you, and that's when the dream fades, and reality sets in. Or, you check yourself, much earlier, and remember that that's how it works. Or, they snap you out of it with their actions, three months before they are even going to be President.
Rahm Emanuel? Really? And now I read, as my more radical-Left friends warned and predicted, that the White House is going to be filled with Clinton Administration people like Emanuel. And his economic leadership meeting included folks like Lawrence Summers, which Dean Baker said "would be a bit like turning to Osama Bin Laden for aid in the war on terrorism." Ha ha ha....eh. Obviously, the fact is that even a repeat of Clinton-era politics would make Obama look like Ralph Nader in comparison to the Bush regime. There's no question that we're going to see improvements in literally every area of government, which is astonishing and also something that I genuinely believe. But that doesn't mean that a wholesale return to playing the losing game of Find The Center is going to be sufficient in dealing with the problems that we face as a country. Blaming credit markets for the failures of capitalism only ensures that you're going to open the door to the next unregulated area, the next bubble, and the next crash. It's going to happen. The dialogue surrounding the role of government in our lives needs to change, and I just don't see people like Summers and Emanuel - who was one of the huge proponents of NAFTA on the Democratic side in Clinton's regime - having anything to do with that change. While I'm glad that Obama is bringing all voices to the table, Rahm Emanuel sitting at the head doesn't make any sense to me, and doesn't bode well for the future.
With all that in mind, I offer the following classic track from Blackalicious. Hey Mr. President - congratulations, oh my god, you did it, now "don't let money change you!"
So I am totally, 100% addicted to these videos, posted by a very wonderful YouTube user named aseagris, who has taken it upon himself/herself to go ahead and catalogue a scene. Aren't these the best people in the world? Don't you get the sense that if everyone just got obsessive about something and really went with it, things would just be, you know, better? Anyway, the obsession in this case is with the late 80s and early 90s local Detroit television program, The New Dance Show, featuring Detroit's finest dancers strutting their stuff in a setting that simply could not exist today, all backed by classic cuts from a classic genre of music. For example:
Some of my friends may, upon hearing this song, may recall instances in our time together wherein I have said the word "bass" in a rhythmic, "sampled" fashion. This is the source song! Of course, Basstronic isn't the only song to use the classic "bass" sample, but I'm pretty damn sure it's the most famous, and it's also the originator of my personal use of the word. Detroit techno is one of those background musics in my life that's never quite gotten enough due (by me). I'm obviously all about hip hop, and house music was my #1 genre for a while, and of course disco and funk and soul have seats at the dais of my musical collection. But the Detroit sound? Or even techno, in general? When I was 18 or so, I got a cheap-o compilation of classic techno, in four volumes, that came out in 1991 and is like a quick walk through some classic 1980s tracks. Later in college, when I was obsessed with dance music, there were some great internet resources that catalogued various histories of various electronic dance musics, and I got incredibly invested in that research for some time. In the end, I gravitated towards the more disco/house side of things, but that soulful, 1980s techno sound is making a comeback in my own music these days and I totally welcome it.
Watching all this dancing, with these incredible outfits, brings me back to a sort of forgotten time in music and style: that weird, late-80s and early-90s era in Black culture that's hard to fully describe or encapsulate. Seeing flattops and fades on the guys in the dance videos does, in some way, sum it up, especially when the attire isn't the incredible 80s jumpsuit-and-leather look, but is instead the A Different World/In Living Color vibe that really was the main "African American look" for a good 5 years or so - in all its diversity. Yeah, there was the thug culture that was coming up in that time, and of course it's reductionist to say that anything was "The Look", but I think that anyone who was around then, and was invested in Black culture, knows what I'm talking about. I say this as an outsider, of course, though that's exactly the period when I was sitting at home, age 10, 11, 12, 13 and so on, writing beats on whatever I could find around the house, writing rhymes about my imaginary crew, and making ridiculous but heartfelt recordings of songs like "Feel The Beat", "Posse", and "358" (because, you know, the big crew in my neighborhood at the time was 357 - so, naturally...!).
So maybe that era could be seen as a sort of post-Huxtable period, when Black Culture was totally taking over, but before the co-opting of things by corporate America. That is a huge and messy claim that I don't want to back up right now - I'm just positing it, as an aside! I think I will call this era the "Fly Era" for short, going forward. What's important at this moment is that you watch all those videos. I have to turn off my internet so I can't watch more, since I've got to go grade midterms!
One more (what a ridiculously dope track, that bassline is out of control):
Big concert tonight at LPR. Here's the announcement I sent to the NOW Ensemble list:
Tonight, October 29 at 9:30 PM (9:00 doors), NOW Ensemble and composer/vocalist Corey Dargel will come together for a special New York record release event at Le Poisson Rouge.
NOW Ensemble will join Corey to play special live arrangements of songs from his new album, Other People's Love Songs (out this week on New Amsterdam Records), along with accordionist/vocalist Kamala Sankaram. NOW will also play a set of our own, with music by Patrick Burke (All Together Now), Mark Dancigers (Cloudbank), and Judd Greenstein (Free Speech Zone). You can buy tickets for that event by clicking here.
The show has received critics' picks and highlighted previews in all major New York City publications this week, including the New York Times, New York Magazine, Time Out New York and The New Yorker, which said, "Corey Dargel's ingenious nouveau art songs revel in the teasing triviality of pop but have enough classical discipline to keep them from going too far."
Please join us for this exciting concert, tonight at 9:30 PM!
Le Poisson Rouge is located at 158 Bleecker Street (between Sullivan and Thompson) in Manhattan, 3 blocks from the West 4th St. subway stop (map).
Um, good morning, and what is this, now? Oh, it's the Wall Street Journal publishing a highly disingenuous and misleading article about the trends of the wealth gap in the United States. The article seems to pretend that it's the local trends that matter, rather than the broader trends, which clearly show a linear increase in the wealth gap. it is disingenuous to point out the temporary lessening due to the recession without noting the broader trend in which that lessening is contextualized. It's exactly the same argument as that used by the people who argue against global warming on the basis of "it was hotter last year". Saying that the wealth gap is decreasing supports McCain's position - just look at this paragraph:
"But the debate over rich versus poor ignores the changes likely to result from the financial crisis. If history is any guide, the upheaval already is shrinking inequality and could continue to narrow the wealth gap."
So by that measure, "history" is on the side of McCain's argument, which is against redistributive policies. But in fact, if you look at the broader "history", it supports Obama's position.
Did everyone know about this? What a crazy and fairly awesome thing! Not, as some cynics might suggest, because it affirms either A) the primacy of Western Classical Music, whatever that might mean, or B) the primacy of my own decisions to get mad educated in music, but rather, because C) it shows someone not being ashamed to take the somewhat humbling steps that the rest of us take to get to know what we know, even after that someone has had a life that might seem to render such humbling steps unnecessary or even distasteful. I didn't know that Flea was behind the remarkable Silverlake Conservatory. Thanks to MR for posting that - and everyone should read her blog, it's really really good.
I saw a pretty great show last night - Fred Sherry and Peter Serkin at the Guggenheim Museum, playing works by Charles Wuorinen and L.V. Beethoven. Long-time readers of this space may be spitting out their coffee right now, hearing me suggest praise for Mr. Wuorinen. I apologize for any ruined rugs or stained shirts.
First of all, let me be clear: I still think that this interview is totally crazy, and suggests that Mr. Wuorinen and I exist on different planets, or at least, have totally distinct and possibly opposed views on what constitutes "art" or "music" or "being a functional member of society". For example, there is this line: "Well, the composer's role is to write music. I don't think the composer has any social obligation whatsoever. Those people who have social causes in their minds - let them do whatever they want, whether it's musical or otherwise, to pursue these. I don't, because I'm interested in the work and I don't regard people as members of groups, but as individuals, so it would be very difficult for me to embrace a social cause, although I probably could be persuaded into one or two of them." I am very happy to live in a world in which people can think about things in very different ways. Suffice it to say, though, that I do not share any of that perspective, nor do I even understand what it might mean for an artist not to have a social obligation, given that what we do, as artists, is communicate - the most social of functions.
As for "the music itself", Wuorinen is a composer to whom I've never warmed, at all; his works from the 1970s, one of which was played last night, have a harmonic language that I find very difficult to follow. Given that I'm a composer and a listener whose ear is chiefly attuned to harmony and melody, it's not easy for me to get down with music that avoids easy hierarchization of pitch material. That is: if you use major and minor and other chords as the basis of your harmonic language, you're implying a strong and audible hierarchy between different notes (C is the most important note in a C major scale, or a C major triad, for example). That's the basis of the communicative power of tonal, or tonally-oriented music. I have no doubt that there are complicated relationships and processes at work in the notes that are presented in Wuorinen's music, but my ear can't make sense of them, and after some time, the music is reduced (in the absence of other parseable information) to the simplest audible parameters: fast/slow, dense/sparse, loud/soft. The writing is incredibly skillful, of course, for what it is - he's a brilliant composer, and when I'm able to grab some pseudo-melody it's very rewarding - but I don't find much to actually like there. If any show was going to convince me otherwise, it was last night's; I was there to hear Fred, who's one of New York's finest performers and an incredible champion of new music, and who's had something like 10 or 12 works written for him by Mr. Wuorinen. Serkin, of course, is a legendary new music performer, and to hear the two of them together, performing music that they love and which they are uniquely suited to play, is a rare treat. It also helped that they only played two Wuorinen pieces, giving my ears and brain a chance to get into the music, without the fatigue that comes from merely looking ahead in the program to an additional hour of highly complicated sound structures.
So how was it? Wuorinen and Fred spoke after the first half, and Wuorinen said that the pieces were played exactly as he intended for them to be, which is obviously a huge compliment. I think that any music, played by people who love it and have spent countless hours exploring and learning it, would be rewarding to hear. And this was no exception. There's something greatly satisfying about hearing a performance, at the highest level, of work that you feel keeps you at a distance; even when I was not engaged with the music itself, I was engaged with the performers' engagement. And some of the music did break through, particularly in the first, more recent work, An Orbicle of Jasp, which I would genuinely like to hear again - if played by Fred (or Clarice Jensen, actually - I bet she'd be amazing on this piece). I had been told by Ryan Streber, a big Wuorinen fan, that he'd really gotten "almost Romantic" as he got older, which I thought was kind of a strange thing to say, but this concert definitely suggested as much. The older work - Fast Fantasy (?) - was broader in scope, but less tight in its argument, and less varied in its harmonic approach. Again, that's a death blow for me, but on the other hand, my friend Eugenie (who kindly brought me to the concert) preferred that work, and so there was evidently something for everyone.
Maybe I was just in a good mood, who knows. And, I have to say, when they played Beethoven Opus 102 on the second half, I was reminded of the world-outside-Modernism, a world that includes the many elements of music that Modernist music either excludes or obfuscates. I think of the austere beauty of the Beethoven's second movement, in the end giving way to the unbridled joy of the third movement; if these have a place in Wuorinen's language, I don't know where to find them. And I don't think that's wrong, given that he says, from that same interview, about critics:
"There's no embarrassment about using the most primitive forms of description and in committing every form of that basic fallacy which says, "My reaction to a composition, or any artwork, is a property of that work. So, if I think a piece is ugly - if my response to a piece is 'It is ugly,' then it is, objectively." That's an impossibility, it just is! I thought we had been through that, many, many decades, not to say centuries, ago, but now it's all back. And so, "If I think a piece is sad, then it has the property of sadness." That's asinine!"
Maybe, or maybe not. In the end, it seems like composers such as Wuorinen went too far with this idea, for my taste, conflating the task of composers - to find a personal voice that expresses the universal - with that of audience members and critics, who only have a responsibility (if they have any at all) to be present, and to make their opinions known. For critics, I would hope that those opinions would be both informed, and tempered by a self-awareness that brought forward the difference between objective and subjective qualities. In my own, limited writing (such as this rambling thing in which I'm currently engaged), I try to make that awareness clear. And, returning to that quote above, it's not that I think that everyone should find the same things to be sad, but I do think that there's something incredibly special about a roomful of people being uplifted by the same passage of music, as certainly happened at the end of the Beethoven, and which I do not think happens very often at the ends or otherwise in performances of Mr. Wuorinen's compositions. That having been said, it was a pleasure to hear his work in the best context, and I feel a little wiser for the experience.
Tonight's debate has the feeling of Game 3 of a 7-game series, with one team having obliterated the other in the first two. The series can't be decided tonight, but a victory - here defined as anything but McCain somehow achieving what Nate Silver calls "a resounding victory, the sort that leaves the spin room gasping for air" - will pretty much seal the deal. Of course, as I know all too well, nothing is ever certain.
I am so ready for October, for the cool and cold months ahead, the sweaters and the hoodies and fewer leaves and shorter days. This weekend I'm going up to the Berkshires for a Fall weekend, the first time I've done that in years. I'm going up with two of my best friends, and I think one of them wants to hit up a tag sale or ten, the idea of which brings back the nostalgia full-on. When I was a kid, October weekends in the Berkshires were a regular feature of my life - they're one of the few things I remember from my childhood, the selection pumpkins to bring back to the city, the apple picking and football-watching. What's better than that? I think the days were colder then; I remember occasional snow around Halloween, and certainly some very chilly weather. The pictures I have bear this out - I'm rocking a little knit hat and a down vest with foliage in the background. Those days - October snow - are probably gone until long after anyone reading this has died. Meanwhile, this has been a long, hot, busy summer, with lots of travel and way too many weddings, and I'm ready to get into a steady rhythm. Part of that, I'm starting to understand, is finding times to get away, and I'm glad for this weekend to be one of those.
This is probably the busiest I've ever been. At least two major, important projects in my life are currently sitting on the back burner - not a good place for them. But what's the choice? My days now are split between managing NOW and New Amsterdam, teaching down at Princeton, and pulling together a few composition projects. Left hanging are my larger compositional work - a major project that I'll be premiering this Spring - and my dissertation. Right now, as I write this, I've been listening through the GZA's Beneath the Surface, an incredible tour-de-force of flow, one of the last great efforts put forth by the classic Wu-Tang crew. Wu was the dark matter lying behind hip hop in the 1990s. People talk about the gigantic shadows of Tupac and Biggie, Nas and Jay Z coming up, Common and De La, the Rawkus and Def Jux underground, the rise of the Dirty South led by OutKast and UGK, and of course the utter dominance of Dre on one coast and trashy gangsta rap on the other - all true, but the Wu crew put out so many incredible albums and absolutely revolutionized the entire conceptual framework of both flow and production, sounding like nothing else ever did, or ever would, or ever does now. I bring this up because that's my dissertation topic - figuring out why at least some of these figures were so artistically important, and doing so in a different way than others have asked the question. Rest assured that Wu will get a chapter or so.
My friend just sent me an interesting article from the Wall Street Journal, about how the failure of the Federal government to bail out Lehman led to a panic that precipitated this current, much more substantial and frightening crisis. Actually, the article was interesting not for making that obvious point, but for detailing - in an hour-by-hour fashion - the process by which the panic and subsequent crisis unfolded. It's a good article, but the problem I have with it, and with others like it that I've read, is that it uses an incredibly small window to suggest the efficacy of government policy. "Not bailing out Lehman leads to panic, and therefore we should initiate a bailout for the present crisis, because panic is bad." Well, of course, panic is bad - but this is a climate in which all scenarios are bad. We're choosing between bad roads, but the question should be - and leading economists disagree on the answer to this question, I recognize - looking ahead, what will the impact of various policies be? If we had bailed out Lehman, what would that have done to actually mitigate the inevitable crunch that we're now in as a result of the housing bubble? Forestall it? Delay it for how long? On the one hand, you have the actual result of not bailing out Lehman, which (along with a host of other factors, not the least of which - one might speculate - is the coziness between Paulson, et al, and the people who would directly benefit the most from the bailout) had tangibly bad consequences (initiating a panic), but on the other hand, you only have the speculative problems, the what-might-have-beens, or what-might-come-to-be scenarios that play out from our current decisions.
With that in mind, I'm not sure how I feel about Nouriel Roubini, but he does at least offer some historical context for the present condition. Relevant? Maybe, maybe not. But we can't allow the pain of the recent months to overly guide our policy, which must be focused on the future. Business people are supposed to be good at this - except, of course, when it's their own livelihood that's on the line.
