Archive for category Links
Darmstadt Overview
Well, I’m back from the Summer Course in Darmstadt, Germany. An absolutely amazing experience, in the sense that I heard live performances of music that I would be highly unlikely to come across in the United States. To give you an idea of what a typical day was like over this two-week period:
1) Wake up, 8:00 AM
2) Proceed to ballroom at Maratim Konferenz-Hotel in Darmstadt to begin daily intake of pork products, nutella, and shitty coffee.
3) Catch the first tram that you can. It’s quite possible that the driver of the tram you’re sprinting for will pull away just as you reach the door. They just don’t give a shit.
4) If you’re in the interpretation class, you’ll either have a studio meeting, rehearsal, or lessons for the morning. Or maybe all of those three.
5) If you, by the grace of God, have the morning off, you could attend a lecture by Bryan Ferneyhough, Hans Thomalla, Chaya Czernowin, or whomever else happened to be speaking their minds that day.
6) Repeat 3, 4, 5 for most of the afternoon.
7) 16:30 (that’s 4:30 pm). Time for lunch! That funny sound that you were hearing for half of the afternoon wasn’t the contrabass practicing next door, it was your stomach.
17:00–at this point of the day, if you haven’t started already, it’s a good time to begin thinking about your first beer of the day. Turns out it goes amazingly well with all the pork you’ve been (and will be) ingesting.
9) 19:30. Typically, the first concert of the night would begin between 6 and 8 pm. Most concerts at Darmstadt last at least 2.5 hours, with the notable exception of the finale concert (more on this later). Somehow, you never felt like it was that long.
Some of the highlights from the evening concerts:
The opening night concert, featuring the entire “Les Espaces Acoustiques” cycle by Gerard Grisey. While this is certainly not my favorite spectral work ever, it’s a rare opportunity to hear the entire cycle performed live, and there are certain elements in the work that you just don’t get listening to a recording. It was damn hot in that place.
Two nights later, the first of TWO concerts by Arditti Quartet. I would say at least three quarters of the works performed were premieres, and some of the better pieces I heard were those by Hannes Kerschbaumer (corpo a corpo), and Luis Aguirre (Ochosi). Also the piece by Ferneyhough was very good, although not a premiere.
The next night, we were shepherded into a few buses where the driver “forgot” to turn on the air conditioning for about half of the trip to Stuttgart. However, we got to see only the second or third staging of Chaya Czernowin’s chamber opera Pnima. Fantastic music, and really great performances by the orchestra and singers–I use the term singers loosely, because there were no words in the work, only phenomes and vowels. However, most people agreed that the staging, while impressive at times, was a little heavy-handed and obvious.
The best concert of the Ferienkurse for me came on the 22nd of July. This concert was shared by Arditti and the JACK quartet from New York. I rode the tram with the cello player of JACK who was very friendly, and we spoke about some of their past and upcoming projects. Let me tell you, this is a group that you will want to catch up on and follow in the coming years. They have an incredible DVD out of the Xenakis string quartets, and I’ve heard great things about their performances of Helmut Lachenmann’s work as well. The best music of this particular evening, however, was performed by Arditti. It included an absolutely incredible new quartet by Italian composer Pierluigi Billone (check this man out!), another fantastic new quartet by Hans Thomalla (some of you may remember the trio I played in my chamber recital), and another good work by Bernhard Gander. @Ty Forquer: you’ll want to check out Billone’s work for spring drum. I am not really sure how to describe Billone’s music, but in terms of reinventing the idiomatic qualities of the instruments and ensembles he writes for, I can’t think of anyone since Lachenmann who has done more. It felt like the earth was moving in a very strange way during this piece. I can’t wait for it to be recorded.
Back to the schedule:
10) 20:45. It’s more than likely that you’re at halftime for the evenings first concert. You know what that means: temporary relief from the weather inside the concert hall, and beer #2 (or 5).
11) 21:45. Now you have an important decision to make. Do you go get some food and tame the beast that’s been complaining during the first evening concert? Never have I heard a louder chorus of stomach growling than when I was at these evening concerts. If you do decide to go sit down for some food, your night has begun and you’re done listening to music. Trust me, once that third round of pork and beer enters your skin, you’re not going to feel like getting up.
12) 22:00. In the event that you decided to grab a snack and forego actual dinner, it’s now it’s time for the second concert of the evening, typically of the Atelier Electronik series. These concerts all took place at a local club, 603qm, and featured electro-acoustic music. I had the opportunity to perform on the finale concert of this series, a work by Portuguese composer Joao Pais. One thing I have to say about the festival is that despite some complaints about things being disorganized, they have their shit together when it comes to all things electronic.
13) 24:00-5:00? Beer. And more beer.
14) Go back to #1.
Some other concert highlights:
Chicago’s own ensemble Dal Niente, which gave energetic and precise performances of works by Mark Andre and Hans Thomalla. The group won a stipend award to come back for the next festival, which is a huge deal. Congrats to them!
Fathom String Trio–I unfortunately missed their portion of this concert, which was both good and bad. Bad because I missed their fantastic playing (I heard them perform earlier in the week in a reading session of my friend Jesse Ronneau’s string trio, and then later in the finale concert), but good because then I heard the new-age crap of another group that will go unnamed, which was happily accompanied by ambient garbage truck.
The finale concert. This was the concert to end all concerts. Although I think we would all agree that we like our new music concerts to only last circa one hour, I have to say that most of the time, I didn’t mind the length of the concerts I heard. Most of the music was fairly interesting, although perhaps not always ground breaking. The finale concert, on the other hand, began at 6:15 pm and didn’t finish until after midnight. Granted, there was a malfunction on the one electro-acoustic piece performed, four intermissions which may have gone a little overboard, and the presentation of the Kranichsteiner prizes, but this concert took some serious dedication. Luckily, a lot of the best music came in the last quarter of the concert, featuring works by Enno Poppe, Georges Aperghis (perhaps the most performed composer of this conference), Ferneyhough–awesome performances of Funerailles I and II, plus Cassandra’s Dream Song in between, and other great works by Franz Martin Olbrisch, among others.
Once this concert was over, we went to 603qm for the finale party, where I drank wine out of a glass jar (thanks, Ammie!), more of my beloved Heffe, and I’m not sure what else. Then it was back to the hotel to pack and sleep as much as possible before shipping out the next morning.
I would write more, but finding all these links was tiring. I didn’t even mention the great saxophoning experience I had with Marcus Weiss, but suffice it to say that Marcus is an incredibly gifted and thoughtful musician–as much of a thinker as a performer. Darmstadt is more about the composers and the music, anyway. An inspiring and exhausting few weeks, to say the least…
The demise of the humanities?
http://chronicle.com/article/Its-Time-to-Stop-Mourning-the/65700/
Wandering in the Wilderness Vol. 3: Totalism
I suppose I should begin this blog entry by apologizing for my absence. It has been a while since my last post on the Hand, partially because I was caught up in the academic doldrums of the summer, and partially because I was launching my new video blog, The Brazen Drum. While the video blog is my shiny new toy, I plan to continue blogging here as well because: a) I enjoy writing, and b) I see these two mediums as serving different (yet complimentary and possibly overlapping) purposes.
Well, now that that’s out of the way, let’s go wandering in the wilderness again and explore another topic in new music: Totalism. While sometimes used in political terms as a synonym for totalitarianism, totalism in music refers to a specific branch of post-minimalist music which developed in the 1990s. Indeed, while I was listening to Pearl Jam (Vs. is by far their best album, don’t try to argue with me) and scouring the local Goodwill for the perfect flannel shirt, a group of young composers in New York were developing their own brand of post-minimalist music.
The “total” in totalism (as noted by Kyle Gann) does not refer to the music itself, but to the intended audience. The driving force behind totalism is pairing an accessible surface (usually through familiar harmonies or rhythmic activity), which the casual listener is able to grasp, with a deeper structural complexity, which reveals itself to the more sophisticated listener. If I may offer a metaphor, consider the ocean. The surface of the ocean, vast and beautiful, is accessible to any viewer. Occasionally, marine life near the surface give glimpses of what is beneath. To the well-equipped, however, there is a depth and complexity which we are only beginning to explore with modern submarines and diving apparatus.
While it’s not an essential trait of the genre, totalist composers often draw on rock and pop music influences. While the surface harmony is often accessible to the casual listener, these pieces are generally more harmonically adventurous than traditional minimalist music.
Now, a few representative examples:
“Sun Dance” from “Custer and Sitting Bull” by Kyle Gann
This excerpt is from Kyle Gann’s musical drama, “Custer and Sitting Bull.” Gann is, among other things, a microtonal composer. In lay terms, this means he uses intervals small than a half step (the smallest on tonal music). This accounts for the “out-of-tune,” disorienting surface harmonies.
Please pardon the self-promotion, but this example, taken from my last recital at MSU, features a piece by totalist composer Joseph Waters. This piece is based on rhythms taken from Cuban Santeria rituals. This piece exhibits and exciting, accessible surface, but is structurally complex in it’s use and development of rhythmic motives. There are often several layers of the same rhythm, played at different tempi.
I wanted to include this piece because Maya Beiser is a bad-ass cellist, and because Michael Gordon is a major player in the totalism scene. Note how the video in the background can represent a metaphor for totalism: a very active surface, but with a complexity that eludes the viewer.
Finally, this beautiful piece by John Luther Adams. The active surface of this piece is provided by the piano and percussion, while the strings and winds play complex, slowly developing harmonies. Many people believe that Adams’ sparse, sprawling textures evoke the barren plains of Alaska where he currently lives and works.
This concludes this foray into the wilderness of totalism. I leave you with a few questions. Which of these pieces did you enjoy? Which did you dislike? Why?
For further reading, checkout this excellent article by Kyle Gann.
Until next time, keep wandering…
Premieres of New Music…right here!
Normally, we don’t advertise individual concerts much here on Guidonian Hand. You, dear reader, could be anywhere when you’re reading this…well, maybe not anywhere. I’d say there are at least…four…no, five different places you could be right now. Anyway, we don’t mention these events because the chances are not good that you’re going to be near enough to stop by. Now, if you are capable of reading this sentence, you are capable of seeing a live performance of new music.
That’s right, tune in here on the blog, or over at UStream.tv for a live webcast of Premieres of New Music by Michigan State composers at 7:30pm EST tonight (Tues., 20 Oct, 2009). No signing up or logging in required either here or at Ustream!
We’d also love your feedback here in the MSU Composition Channel Chat, or on in the comments field on our UStream.tv page
Enjoy!
(NOTE: To watch the webcast, you’ll have to load this page AFTER we’ve started broadcasting. If it’s getting close to showtime, and you don’t see anything, try clicking your browser’s “refresh” button.)
Twistori
Ok, I know I just posted a piece of Twitter-based web art last week. Since I discovered that, though, I’ve come across another one that I like even more. It’s inspired by We Feel Fine, which we showed you a few months ago. Twistori compiles new tweets with the words “I love,” “I hate,” “I think,” “I feel,” “I believe,” and “I wish.” You can select any of those six, and tweets will roll by. The presentation is simple and elegant. My favorite that I’ve seen so far is “I wish I were a llama in a great big llama world!!!” Check out Twistori!
Twyric
Yes, that’s a made up word, but I didn’t make it up. The Christian Mähler at Twyric.com did. Twyric is one of many web art projects that are taking advantage of the rapid pace of the creation of new, personal content on blogs and websites like Twitter, Flickr, Tumblr, and others. Mähler’s program constantly combs through new Twitter posts in search of poems (by looking at hashtags). Then, it looks through the words of the poem, and tries to find tagged images on Flickr that it thinks pair appropriately with the poem. The results are mixed, but I kind of like that the poems and pictures don’t always make a clean connection or that either the poem or the picture (or both) might not be very good. Check it out for yourself: http://twyric.com/. It can also be your screen saver. You can even customize it to look for specific kinds of Twitter poems (like haiku) or Flickr images.
Here’s one I saw recently:
Wandering in the Wilderness Vol. 2: The Sound of Silence
And the sign said,
“The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence”
- from “The Sound of Silence” by Simon & Garfunkel
In this installment of WitW, I would like to discuss the use of silence as a compositional tool. I don’t mean short, dramatic uses, such as the GP commonly found in classical music, but significant spans of time devoted to silence for compositional reasons. To this end, we will explore three distinct approaches to silence by three different 20th/21st centuryAmerican composers. Any discussion of silence as a compositional device, of course must begin with John Cage’s 4′33″.
4′33″ is the infamous piece of silent music, whose entire score consists of three movements of indeterminate length, each marked “tacet” (the movements are traditionally, but not necessarily, marked off by the performer in some way). For Cage, any sound was music. He is quoted as saying that he would rather listen to the sounds of traffic than to the symphonies of Beethoven (I’m paraphrasing from memory, although I’m pretty sure that’s the essence of it). 4′33”, therefore, is a framing device. It sets a certain boundary, and says, “anything within this boundary is art, pay attention to it.” Consider the following images:
"Fountain" by Marcel Duchamp
Some urinals
Both images are of urinals. The first, however, is found in an art gallery, while the second image is from a public restroom. While both objects are essentially similar, the context, or the framing, of these objects significantly impacts the way we think about these objects. With the first, we may think of questions like “Is this really art?” or “If I pee in this, where would the pee go?” or “Would I get arrested if I tried to pee in it?” or “Why did I let Ty drag me to this modern art museum?” With the second, this is a context in which we (at least those of us who are male) are used to encountering urinals, and little thought is given to them (with the exception of special rules which apply to public urinals). Anyways, back to John Cage. The brilliance of 4′33″ as a framing device is that any sounds that arise during these boundaries are unintentional, the sounds that are normally blocked out or ignored during “normal” performances. It provides a new context for listeners to consider sounds which would normally be dismissed.
While a recording of 4′33″ is not necessary (one only needs a stopwatch to perform the piece in the comforts of one’s own home), I couldn’t resist linking to this performance, which I find particularly compelling.
Another interesting use of silence is found in the music of Morton Feldman. Feldman once said that the most beautiful thing a sound ever does is decay. In his works, the textures are often very sparse, so that you can appreciate the sound in its entirety, decay and all. Feldman’s counterpart in the visual art world is Mark Rothko, who uses simple designs to invite the viewer to appreciate the subtleties of color and texture in the works. For an example of Feldman’s use of silence, check out this recording of “The King of Denmark” for solo percussionist:
In “The king of Denmark,” the sparse textures isolate individual sounds and allow the listener to appreciate their qualities more fully than they might in a more dense musical situation.
The final composer I will discuss in this post is Thomas DeLio. In addition to being an influential composer, DeLio is also one of the foremost scholars in contemporary music, with a special interest in the music of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Iannis Xenakis. The most striking characteristic of DeLio’s music is his use of long periods of silence. In a few of his pieces, the total duration of the silences is greater than the total duration of the musical material. The reason for this is that DeLio approaches silences functionally in a way that is fundamentally different from that of Cage or Feldman. For Cage, silence was a framing device to invite the unintended; for Feldman, it was a blank canvas on which individual sound colors are accented. DeLio’s use, however, is to frustrate the listener’s memory. The natural tendency of listeners is to process sounds by putting them in the context of sounds which proceed and follow them. This is a natural process, and most music relies on this contextualization to create coherent musical ideas. DeLio, however, attempts to isolate musical material by use of silences, so that each sound or gesture can be appreciated individually. The listener hears a gesture, followed by a long span of silence, and by the time the next gesture occurs, the listener has forgotton what the preceding gesture had sounded like. This music can seem strange and even unsettling to the casual listener; such long spans of silence are very uncommon in music, and create a certain amount of tension between the audience and performer. To give you an example of DeLio’s music, here is a performance of this author performing DeLio’s wave/s for solo percussionist:
This concludes my look at three different composers and how they use silence in unique ways. I hope you have found this interesting and that it gives you another point of view as you approach contemporary music. See you next time, when we’ll explore…something. I don’t have a topic picked out, and I am open to suggestions. Peace.
I’m not above shameless self promotion.
(alternative title: Better Know a Contemporary Percussion Artist)
Over the next few weeks, I am going to be releasing videos of my recital onto Youtube, one video at a time, once a week, until I am out of videos. My reasoning is that anytime someone I like posts six or seven new videos, I watch two or three before my ADD kicks in and I am drawn to some gem in the “related videos” window, and soon my whole afternoon has disappeared. This approach hopefully avoids some of that, by only asking the viewers to give me 10 mins. of time per week to check out my videos. I’m not sure if it will work, or how I would even know if it does work, but I think it’s worth a try.
Now, time to catch up those of you in the Guidoverse (Dave – I’m copywriting the word “Guidoverse.” Bam. That just happened.). I actually started this project last week, and intended to post something about it here, but for various reasons, not the least of which being the setting in of summer laziness, I am only now getting to it. I also really wanted to get to it yesterday so I could squeeze “youtubesday” into this post, but an unforeseen personal event (read: impromtu round of frisbee golf) prevented me from doing so. Regardless, I posted my second video today, so there are now two videos for you to check out. With no further ado, Recital video #1!:
Flame Head for percussion and electronics by Joseph Waters
Most of the rhythmic material in Flame Head is derived from Haitian ritual drumming. Like many Afro-Caribbean styles, Haitian drumming often uses ambiguous patterns which can be heard simultaneously in either 6/8 or 3/4 time signatures. The version in this video is for fixed audio on an mp3 track, but another version exists which uses a second performer who triggers samples in real time. I am hoping to perform this version sometime in the near future.
Recital Video #2:
Improvisado for solo marimba by José Luis Maúrtua
This is a piece I comissioned from Dr. Maúrtua with funding from the College of Music and the Graduate School at Michigan State University. This composition is based on Afro-Caribbean and South American dance rhythms. Overall, it is in a large scale ABA form, with the outer movements sharing a similar character and tempo. This form is reflected at a smaller level in the individual movements, which feature an exposition/digression/recapitulation form.
That’s all for now. Stay tuned for new blog posts.
(updated 5/3/09: fixed link to second video)
Recommended Reading: Queer Identity in Popular Music
This is another really cool blog by a really cool person. Lauron Kehrer is a friend of ours who is in the beginning stages of research for what will be her masters thesis in musicology at the Eastman School of Music. She’s sharing her experiences here at Queer Identity in Popular Music. This kind of research is a lengthy process, and it seems that Lauron’s topic is still a bit nebulous. In a way, this is one of the cool things about the blog, though. The focus of the blog isn’t just presenting her research, but following her work itself. Basically, it combines the non-stop action of musicology with the thrill and excitement of reading! Ok, so that doesn’t sound very cool, but Lauron’s blog is. Trust me, you’ll like it.
A worthwhile read for those of us in academia
Hey everyone,
Now that my recital is over, my focus has shifted to passing my classes, but I also hope to do some more blogging, including the second installment of “Wandering in the Wilderness,” and some assorted thoughts on concert attire.
In the meantime, my friend Jason Sprague posted this article on his Twitter, and it has some interesting ideas on academia. His basic premise is that universities perpetuate their research and scholarly activity by encouraging students to pursue graduate degrees which prepare them for jobs which don’t exist. He has some intriguing suggestions, and I’d be curious to hear what the Guidonian Hand community thinks about his ideas. Here’s the link:
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the Links category.
