Music vs. Theater

Newspeak: Chamber ensemble most likely to steal your new metronome

(Reviewed in this post: eighth blackbird, red fish blue fish, Newspeak, Frederic Rzewski, John Cage, Stefan Weisman, David T Little, Matt Marks, Louis Andriessen)

Does music have the power to express anything? Igor Stravinsky says no. Chinua Achebe says if it doesn’t, it’s poop. Stravinsky says your MOM is poop. Achebe says is that the best you can do? Stravinsky says take THIS! and composes a piece entitled “Mrs. Achebe Smells Like Dog Poop.” Achebe says pretty expressive piece, Mr. Seewhatai Didthere. Stravinsky says D’OH and facepalms exactly 11 times.

OK, I’m paraphrasing a bit, but this is the conversation that eighth blackbird has been engaging in with their recent programs presented as part of the Tune In Festival at the Park Avenue Armory. The former concert, PowerFUL, makes the case for music’s ability to communicate directly and (lest it ends up in Achebe’s pooper scooper of history) politically. The latter, PowerLESS, is an exercise in absolute music, music that expresses nothing other than the music itself.

Looking at the programming choices, one notices immediately that almost all of the pieces in the PowerFUL program involve text, either spoken or sung, and those that don’t, Read the rest of this entry →

Spontaneous co-location

Those of you following my twitter feed know that I’m just returning to SF after a whirlwind trip to NYC. I was lured out there by the Park Avenue Armory‘s Tune-In Festival which was curated by new music super-group eighth blackbird. As previously reported, back in 1989 I was a heartbeat away the presidency (of the Interlochen Arts Academy student council). Fortunately, president Matt Duvall made it through the year unscathed, so not only were my megalomaniacal tendencies kept in check, Read the rest of this entry →

Jake Heggie is kind of a big deal. If his own story were made into an opera, it would be laughed off as contrived and unbelievable (even more so than most opera plots). A working stiff writing copy in the PR department of a national opera gets noticed by the right people and is launched to superstardom (by opera standards) by a series of highly successful commissions. But amazingly this story is true. From his first commission, Dead Man Walking, and to his recent triumph with Moby Dick, Heggie is one of a handful of living composers who actually get to see their operas produced multiple times.

Last night the San Francisco Opera hosted an interactive workshop with Jake Heggie as part of their Adult Education program. The stated goal of the workshop was to explore the evolution of new opera, focusing on the adaptation of existing works. Read the rest of this entry →

I’ve been heard to complain about the lack of experimental theater in the Bay Area, but this week has paid off quite nicely with two pieces that make me feel quite a bit more optimistic about San Francisco’s willingness to take chances with non-narrative theater.

Companion Piece

On Tuesday I saw a very early preview of Z Space’s ‘The Companion Piece’. I believe this was the first public performance of the piece still in development, Read the rest of this entry →

Last month, inspired by a post on Chloe Veltman’s blog Lies Like Truth, I wrote a response addressing the melismatic, overwrought style of singing that seems to have been in vogue since the 1990s. Chloe read my piece and invited me to collaborate on an episode of her radio show VoiceBox dedicated to this subject that will air tonight on KALW. (And available streaming from KALW’s website for the next seven days.)

Preparing for this show forced me to clarify my thinking about the technique. For one thing, I’ve decided that we don’t really have a good label for it. Read the rest of this entry →

The Love for Three Bananas? Reagan in Africa? I give up.

Ah the seventies. Vietnam, Watergate, key parties, and brown corduroy as far as the eye could see. Not a great time for ethics (or fashion) in the United States.

So it should hardly be a surprise to hear about a series of experiments where infant chimpanzees were introduced into homes and raised as children, in a bizarre attempt to see how much of their chimpanzee-ness (ie non-human-ness) was due to their environment and upbringing. Read the rest of this entry →

success = papers not blowing away

My friend Natalie Wilson recently did a remarkable job of setting an enormous goal and meeting it almost to the date. At the beginning of the year she challenged herself to write an entire play (her first) in nine months. Using the extended metaphor of birth (which time and again works uncannily well) she started a blog ‘Birth of a Play(wright)‘ to track her gestation. It’s a testament to her tenacity and determination that she not only finished the play in time, but secured enough funding (and interest) to put up a reading with top notch broadway talent early in November.

And now she’s facing the question that haunts so many early career writers after a big premiere. “What next?” Read the rest of this entry →

No. Not Mel Gibson.

Molly Sheridan’s Mind The Gap blog has gotten particularly geektastic this past week as she hosted a virtual book club. The book in question, Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. This certainly tickled the computer scientist in me, Kelly’s Out Of Control changed the way I thought about computing in the mid 90s.

Kelly has long been on the forefront of technological thought, hanging with Stewart Brand and his buddies back during the Whole Earth Catalog days through the WELL, and these days with the Long Now Foundation. And along the way he co-founded Wired magazine. Despite a long history of underconsumption and a fascination with Amish and other ‘anti-progress’ cultures, Kelly is cautiously pro-technology, believing that progress is inherently good while prescribing a very specific set of guidelines towards adopting technology more responsibly than we tend to. Read the rest of this entry →

I think it started with Whitney Houston. Then Mariah Carey. And then it spread to any R&B singer with a record deal. And then American Idol. And now, just about every YouTube video you see.

It’s melisma. In singing, it’s any discrete changing of pitch while sustaining a single syllable. A common technique in baroque vocal music as well as ancient church practices of all western religions, it has become the hallmark of virtuosity. “Good” singing has become measured in extraneous flourishes, grace notes, and the extending of a phrase well past any reasonable proportion.

So what is there to do? Read the rest of this entry →

Can you spot the MacArthur genius?

John Adams titled his work “My Father Knew Charles Ives” based on a hunch that had his father ever actually met the groundbreaking American composer, their similar dispositions and interests would have made them fast friends. This little anecdote differs from Adams’ in two points.  First, my father, a lifelong athlete and track coach couldn’t be more different than the groudbreaking American modernist Milton Babbitt, one of the most significant American composers of the century.  And second, it actually happened. Read the rest of this entry →