Music vs. Theater

Just back from NYC where I saw 16 performances in 10 days, the entire Prototype Festival of new opera, co presented by HERE Art Center and Beth Morrison Projects, and large chunks of the Under the Radar festival at the Public Theater.

That’s a lot of theater. And much of it was fantastic. When asked which productions have left the most pronounced impression, I quickly respond with Nature Theater of Oklahoma’s Life and Times, Parts 1-4, and Elevator Repair Service‘s Arguendo as a close second. Both works deal with a similar approach to text, taking natural speech and transforming it through a theatrical process.

Elevator Repair Service, best known for their monumental Gatz, which consists of a theatrical reading of the entire text of The Great Gatsby, turns to the Supreme Court. They take the literal transcriptions of the oral arguments of a 1991 case regarding the constitutionality of a state ban on nude dancing and distribute the text between three performers, two of them taking on the roles of each of the justices, and one of them taking the role of both attorneys arguing the case. The delivery is slightly heightened, the “errs”, “aahs”, throat clearings and coughs are slightly more deliberate and exaggerated than they would be in natural speech. The demeanor of the individual judges are clearly delineated, it’s was delightful to watch Susie Sokol switch from the prim Sandra Day O’Conner to the scrappy Ruth Bader Ginsberg, and Scalia’s bullying intellect is well rendered, but such details are likely to be noticed only by folks who pay close attention to the supreme court. Similarly, it’s unclear how well most audience members would follow the legal aspects of the arguments, with a fairly complex web of citations to previous cases. In an adapted text, an author would likely streamline and provide expository context for each citation, but no such leeway is given and as a result, large chunks of the text descend into legal babble. This is in no way a criticism, it is simply a byproduct of the process, and part of the charm of the performance.

Countering the babble are the surreal and often very funny scenarios the justices regularly hypothesize to test the extreme boundaries of the arguments, as well as the naughtiness of the subject at hand juxtaposed against the formality of the proceedings. In addition there is a large projection of a microfiche filled with citations and legal text that is manipulated by the participants to highlight the area of the law that they’re currently discussing. The piece works itself into a frenzy of absurdity as papers are strewn over the floor, justices push themselves across the room on their wheeled chairs, and the attorney shouts their final arguments regarding nudity, expression, and the first amendment.

The piece is still considered “in progress”, although it felt in fine shape to me. Granted, as something of a supreme court fan and law junkie, I’ma pretty ideal audience member. The oral arguments of the supreme court are inherently theater, although of a very different sort than what is usually presented at the Public. Arguments are less about a working out of the legal issues at hand and more about justices signaling to the other justices what legal issues are occupying their minds, preparing for the deliberations that will happen behind closed doors. But for the public, the oral arguments and the final decisions are often the only insights into the court’s thinking. In transforming this text into a live performance, Elevator Repair Service has provided a vital and entertaining exploration of the issue of expression and censorship as well as the workings of the supreme court.

It’s been a big week for massive sweeping ambitious works of art. I read Cloud Atlas in preparation for the release of the movie (book is great, movie less so), saw Jake Heggie’s Moby-Dick at the SF Opera, watched Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and capped the week off with four and a half hours of Einstein on the Beach while the San Francisco Giants were winning the world series (I managed to wait until the opera finished before checking the score. Game delayed on account of Glass).

Moby-Dick was a rather satisfying piece of conventional drama. Heggie’s score is appealing and easy to appreciate on a first listening. The use of computer generated imagery projected on the stage created massive sense of scale, although the combined effect of the tuneful score and projections made the opening sequence feel like the opening credits of a movie more than an opera. At the time it was exhilarating, but upon reflection, there’s something a little unsettling about an opera dressed up like movie. It’s like your mom showing up with her midriff exposed, navel freshly pierced, looking to hang out with your friends. The projections were most effective when they were creating the environment that the performers inhabited, particularly the small whaling dinghies.

The libretto streamlines the novel greatly, and the most effective source of drama is the tension between the obsessive Ahab and the more reasonable Starbuck. The secondary arcs involving Queequeg, Greenhorn, and Pip are much less well defined, holding little moral or emotional weight. At times it’s not even clear exactly what happens with those characters (Queequeq’s speedy recovery from his deathbed is unexplained, as is Pip’s somewhat spontaneous insanity). Reading the synopsis helps a bit, but I prefer a piece that can make itself understood without cliff notes. Still, between the visual spectacle and the scenes between Ahab and Starbuck, it’s a fine night at the opera.

Einstein on the Beach is a four and a half hour mega-opera that is anything but conventional, yet, 40 years later, remains deeply affecting. The libretto consists almost entirely of counting (“one two three four”) or solfege (“la si do si la si do si”) with brief, semi-coherent monologues of spoken word layered over the top. The music is monolithic, literally 20-30 minutes is spent oscillating between two or three harmonies with rhythms and accents constantly shifting beneath. In such a context, the introduction of a new harmony is startling. Much of the stage work is structured and formal, clearly delineated, with patterns and gestures that also recur and repeat over 20 or 30 minute chunks. Then there are the “Fields” the astonishing (and crowd pleasing!) ensemble pieces where dancers pirouette in precise patterns, creating arcs and complex geometries across the stage, yet never touching or directly interacting.

It is not a piece to decode or follow or explain. It is a piece to observe, to allow to seep in. Certainly there are recurrences and connections and things to notice. Being familiar with some of the specifics of Einstein’s work, I recognized the train and the space ship from his thought experiments, as well as the more abstract mathematic and geometric ideas that permeated the sets. Amongst the artifice and formality on stage, there were recurring references to the more banal aspects of human existence: the ensemble brushes their teeth, engages in a collective brown bag lunch break, files their nails. How amazing that a human, who eats bagged lunches, who brushes their teeth, who sticks out their tongue, also has the ability to combine the raw stuffs of mathematics into a model of the physical universe that human inhabits. Perhaps Einstein on the Beach is not so much about Einstein as it is an invitation to inhabit the mind of Einstein, to see the world as he might see it, to come to a unique understanding about the complex world emerging from the interactions of many seemingly simple events, meaningless in isolation, but luminous in concert.

Time to put the game face on. It’s about to get real. I’m goin’ big or goin’ home. (Continue with the conspicuously out of place sports phrases at will.)

Very proud to announce that the string quartet I composed in Paris this past summer as part of the EAMA program ”Do A Little Dance” was selected as one of sixteen pieces to compete in the String Quartet Smackdown presented by Golden Hornet Productions on November 3 in Austin, TX.

And what’s a String Quartet Smackdown, you ask? It’s kinda brilliant. Sixteen pieces, each four minutes long, are paired off. The first minute of each piece is performed (by the Tosca Quartet) and the audience votes with their mobile devices to determine which pieces they want to advance. The remaining eight pieces go to the next round, when TWO minutes of the piece are played. Then four pieces get THREE minutes played, and finally two pieces are played in their entirety. The winner gets a valuable cash prize and bragging rights (and hopefully some big ornate trophy thing or maybe even a giant belt).

Looking at the lineup of other pieces, I’m in some pretty formidable company. Ruben Naeff‘s piece was written for the JACK quartet, Simon Fink has done work with eighth blackbird, Steven Snowden will have the home advantage, hailing from Austin himself, but there’s a chance he’ll actually be in Portugal on his Fulbright to work on interactive motion capture systems for large installations, which would even the playing field a bit. But there’s no denying, this is the big leagues. And no matter the outcome, it’s an honor just to share the stage.

If you happen to be in Austin on November 3, please go and support our team. And by ‘our team’ I mean ‘independent new music’.

Jeffrey Parola sounds kinda bummed in his latest blog post. He outlines the all too familiar plight of the contemporary concert music composer (no appreciation, money, and little hope of either). He then earnestly asks: Why do we bother?

In my mind the answer is simple. Creation of music that didn’t exist before HAS to be its own reward, devoid of compensation, recognition, or praise. If that drive for creation for its own sake doesn’t exist, I might humbly suggest that a composer should just stop.

Praise is nice, and earning a living doing something that you love is great, but just because you love something doesn’t mean you can make a living at it. And just because you wrote something doesn’t mean anyone should care. Money and acknowledgement have to be secondary concerns for a composer.

Of course we should try to capitalize on our work. Self-promote, market, try to get people to listen, care, and support . But that’s not WHY you should write. You write because no one else will create the things that you will create. And ideally you will love what you’ve written so much that promotion will be easy and enthusiasm will be contagious. But even if it’s not, you should like what you’ve created so much that even if no one else seems to care, it was worth the effort.

Perhaps that sounds kinda glib and self evident. But there’s a real nugget in there. A composer should think about the music they love and why they love it. They should think about how they feel when they listen to it. Then they should listen to their own music, and if they don’t feel similarly, maybe they’re doing something wrong. After all, if you don’t love listening to your own work passionately, why should anyone else?

And if you DO love listening to your own work, what else do you really need? Perhaps money and adulation will follow, perhaps it won’t. But you’ve made music that you love and that you love to hear. Strive for those things that we associate with success, but don’t let those goals ever be mistaken for the real reason you write music.

(By the way, you should listen Jeffrey’s work. It’s some really lovely stuff. All of it. And then maybe go write some of your own.)

I’ve been doing a lot of composing so far this year. In addition to an encore for the Hilary Hahn competition (which didn’t result in an honorable mention, but did result in a pretty cool piece for violin and piano), I’ve been chugging away on the solo opera that’s been a good four years in the making. I’ve got a solid chunk of 50 minutes of music (i.e. 50 milliWagners) composed, which is about two thirds of the final piece.

I’m going to perform that 50 minute chunk as part of the Solo Sunday performance series at Stage Werx. If you’re in San Francisco next weekend, please come on by.

Last month I participated in A Musical Emergency, which is a loose collective of theater and music folks in SF that turns popular stories or movies into full length musicals. They divide the story up into bite sized chunks and everyone’s responsible for telling their part of the story however they feel. The movie was Empire Strikes Back. And the scene I chose was the scene where Han saves Luke from Hoth. Sung from the perspective of the Tauntaun. I wrote the first half and adapted the second half from A Little Fall Of Rain from Les Miz. It’s… a little sad. I don’t know about you, but that scene kinda traumatized me. I think it shows.

May the 4th Be With You

(Oh, and I took the helmet and chest panel off before sitting at the piano. It’s hard to play in the full costume.)

Edit: I posted a link to a higher quality video. Enjoy.

Today’s blog entry in Deceptive Cadence echos a theme of my Voice Box radio show with Chloe Veltman and the corresponding conversation on Lisa Hirsch’s blog. Specifically, musical taste, both what you love and despise, is often more about self identification, ego, and image than it is about the music at hand. Some of the comments (predictably, this is an NPR blog after all) argue that opera is clearly more worthy since singers dedicate decades of their lives and thousands of dollars to honing their craft. But even that argument buys into it’s own narrative of ‘hard work and dedication’ over the narrative of ‘overcoming a hostile environment through self promotion’ prevalent in rap. (Although I’m veering dangerously close to a cultural relativism war that I’m ill-equipped for.)

I know which I prefer (even though I dislike most opera). But of course I would. And even those who loudly extoll the virtues of both wear their eclecticism on their sleeves. To paraphrase Buckaroo Banzai, No matter what you like, there you are.

In today's very special episode, Pierrot learns that you can "Just Say No" to the moon and STILL be cool.

The Avant Music Festival got a lot of press earlier this week for their part in the John Cage centennial, a sold out marathon concert of his works. While I missed that extravaganza, I was able to swing by for the third concert of this, their third year. The first half was dedicated to Schoenberg’s seminal expressionist work, Pierrot Lunaire, the second to a song cycle by composer Jenny Olivia Johnson.

Premiered in 1912, Pierrot Lunaire represents one half of a great fork in the road of 20th century music. If one follows the road labeled Pierrot, one ends up in the expanse of expressionist atonalism and serialism. If one follows the road labeled Le Sacre (premiered just seven months later), one ends up in the world of polytonal neoclassicism. My tastes have always leaned towards the latter path, and while there are many works down the heady Viennese path that I love (more often than not, they’re composed by Berg) much of Schoenberg’s work leaves me cold.

Pierrot is not an exception. It’s a prickly chin-scratcher with a dense poetic text that feels oh so arty that it simply MUST be good for you. There are bits that are genuinely funny (those wacky German expressionists, smoking their bald pates) but most of the time I feel like I’m far too removed from the culture to really understand what’s supposed to be going on.

Wednesday’s performance was a strong one. The ensemble chose to stage the work, with projections, semi-mobile instrumentalists and a dancer performing the role of Pierrot. The multi-media aspect helped distract me from the chilly material and emphasized Schoenberg’s unique handling of the ensemble, with different movements featuring different groupings of instruments. Megan Schubert’s Sprechstimme was beautifully expressive with a ringing soprano head resonance that was, for me, a welcome change from the gruffer, Lotte Lenye-like contralto hues that I seem to associate with the technique.

But the surprise triumph of the evening was Jenny Olivia Johnson’s deeply moving and beautiful meditations on the trials of young adult-hood. Her After School Vespers combines four songs, each focusing on topics such as cutting, binge drinking, and molestation. If Schoenberg’s work was from a culture too foreign to relate to, Johnson’s ran the risk of covering territory too familiar to be taken seriously.

But more often than not, Johnson’s treatments are effective, particularly Cutting with its jarring use of a driving industrial sample, and Dollar Beers (Redondo Beach ’96) with its languorous descending chord progression. The latter two pieces, while also lovely and haunting, exposed a stylistic similarity in the cycle that made one yearn for more variety. The structure for each song seemed repetitive, a soprano intones individual notes in a haze of reverb as the ensemble builds diatonic clusters. Intensity builds slowly, eventually reaching a climax that finds the soprano sustaining fortissimo notes at the upper end of her register, a device that is perhaps best used only once in a song cycle. Still, when the concert was finished, I found myself disappointed that there was no recording of the piece for me to buy at the merch table. These are pieces I am looking forward to hearing again (as opposed to Pierrot, which I only need to hear once a decade, per stipulations of contemporary composer’s collective agreement no. 3324. I’m certified moon-sickness free until 2022.)

To get to Dinkelspiel Auditorium for an 8pm concert on a Wednesday requires leaving San Francisco at 6pm, an hour to get to Palo Alto fighting traffic all the way, and then another 45 minutes to an hour to fight the crowds to get a scarce campus parking space. Things will be different when Stanford Lively Arts moves to their new Bing Concert Hall next year, but last week this two hour pre show experience consisting of two of the least pleasant activities known to modern man might explain the surprising number of empty seats for a world premiere concert featuring the rock stars (literally) of the new music scene.

David Lang‘s The Little Match Girl Passion was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2008 and spawned a co-commission from Carnegie Hall and Stanford Lively Arts, resulting in the night’s other work Death Speaks. The first piece (according to Lang’s pre-show speech, specifically made to allow those poor souls still searching for parking a chance to find their seats) came from Lang’s urge to explore the liturgical history of classical music in a context outside of religion. What would happen if we take the witnessing of Jesus’s suffering and instead witness an ordinary person’s suffering. Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of a street waif freezing to death in plain sight serves as the narrative structure for this experiment.

And a most successful experiment it is. The piece is exquisitely sung by Paul Hillier’s Theater Of Voices, while accompanying themselves with an assortment of percussion instruments. The pathos and emotional heft of the story is belied by the pristine, almost chilly treatment of the text. The story is told in simple language, witnessing a painful tragedy in a series of matter of fact observations (“So the little girl went on with her little naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold.”) Lang sets this text on a simple, halting, repeating staccato line which is both impassive and somewhat childlike. There is little room for the voice to impose any sort of expression on these lines, which seems to make us, the audience, the true witnesses, respond with that much more intensity, with more outrage. How dare that soprano sing of those red and blue feet without DOING something about it! Interspersed in the narrative were moments of beatific beauty, invocations of mercy and patience and suffering. The piece is moving, devastating, and gorgeous, a monument to a religion of humanity that goes beyond any doctrine.

For the follow up piece, Lang took the bits of text throughout Schubert’s songs where Death is personified and given a voice. He then assembled an all star cast that reads as the who’s who of the new music world:  Bryce Dessner (of The National), Shara Worden (of My Brightest Diamond), Owen Pallett (of Owen Pallett) and Nico Muhly (of everywhere). I wish I could say the new piece was anywhere near as effective a work as the first half. Lang chose to stretch the text over longer vocal lines lines. In the audience talk back session afterwards he explained that he wanted to emphasize the text (and Worden’s voice) more, but the effect of elongating the text was to reduce it to sound and pitch as opposed to words and meaning. And without a narrative to latch onto, the piece washes over without much investment or involvement on a first listen.

Perhaps most disappointing, with the exception of Worden’s voice (and Pallett’s voice in an all too brief section of the final song), the parts could have been played by any instrumentalists familiar with modern performance practices. There was precious little Muhly-ness, Pallett-ness, or Dessner-ness on display, they all seemed subsumed in the common goal of Lang-ness, which may have been quite disappointing to concertgoers enticed by the high profile ensemble. A more cynical person than myself might catch a whiff of stunt casting, a move designed to please marketing departments everywhere. But for more charitable folks (such as myself) this was a genuine mutual admiration society whose sum ended up, in this case at least, much less than the parts.

A couple of weeks ago I recorded an episode of VoiceBox with Chloe Veltman about the worst vocal music ever written. While preparing for the show I did my best to try to analyze the nature of “badness”, perhaps even creating a taxonomy of characteristics that contribute to bad music. The goal was to not simply list bad songs, but to try to get a better understanding of what makes bad bad.

One thing that we found was that it was much easier to judge the merits of popular music. As Chloe pointed out in her blog entry about the show, people are much less comfortable imposing such value judgments on classical music. I think this is for a few reasons. For one thing, aficionados of classical music often harbor notions that their music has more merit than mere “popular” music. At the same time, they feel that their music is rarified and, therefore, under constant threat of marginalization (witness the death of classical music that’s been a constant source of print articles over the past several decades). From this perspective saying that a particular piece of classical music is “bad” exposes you attacks of “you’re just not smart enough to get it” from one end and provides ammunition to those folks who don’t like classical music on the other.

For that reason, most of the show focuses on popular music, which, fortunately, has many examples of bad music. I’ll probably make some enemies with this show. My own subjective tastes leak through. Fans of Bare Naked Ladies and Celine Dion might end up boycotting my site, but I think most of my other examples of bad music will be generally agreed upon.

I’m particularly fond of the last portion of the show where I launch into a spirited case for The Shaggs aptly named “Philosophy of the World” as being a truly amazing album. I will stand by that argument until I die. There is no other album like it. It exists outside of judgment, convention, or taste. It exists outside of reason. It out-Duchamps Duchamp, out-Cages Cage. It is the voice of the very artistic soul of mankind channeled through three adolescent girls by means of sixties guitar rock. I am so glad it exists.

If you don’t like it, you’re just not smart enough to get it.

To hear the entire broadcast until the end of the week (Jan 20, 2012), visit this link to get the KALW local music player, then scroll to the bottom and click on “VoiceBox with Chloe Veltman”