Posts Tagged avant-garde
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…
Better Know a Sequenza (part 3)
In an effort to share the music of Luciano Berio with the world, we here at the Guidonian Hand bring you part two of our fourteen-part series, Better Know a Sequenza.
In this installment: My personal favorite of the cycle, Sequenza VII for oboe, and it’s alternate for soprano saxophone. VII is special for a couple of reasons. First, it is one of the handful of “alternate” sequenzas in the collection. It was originally written for oboe, but do to the nature of oboe literature (and the nature of oboists–ZING!), it’s more frequently performed on soprano saxophone as Sequenza VIIb. Additionally, VII is one of only two sequenzas (along with X for trumpet) that has a second “part.” Berio asks for a drone to sound on any instrument (or voice) throughout the work on the pitch B.
I’ve seen the work performed a few times, and I’ve heard of the drone being produced any number of ways: a digital tuner, a pre-recorded loop of the soloist, a group of other players, and even asking the audience to hum the B. Humming the B sounds cool, but I think I’d get tired of it by the sixth or seventh minute of the piece.
YouTube offers us many complete recordings of some very impressive performances of VIIb, but only a few excerpts of VII. Saxophone friends have told me that they have heard that Berio himself grew to prefer the piece played on soprano saxophone. However, in doing research on the piece, I was not able to corroborate this. Personally, I prefer it on oboe. Here are a few Sequenza VII videos.
First, we bring you the incomparable Alex Klein, principal oboe of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. You can hear the audience humming in this one.
This next video features another excerpt from the beginning section of the work. This time, the drone is being passed around a group of oboists.
Berio’s use of the drone is one of the things that first draws the listener in at the beginning of the piece. The soloist begins with a sharp, short B, and the audience initially hears the drone as an ethereal reverberation. The next half-minute or so is controlled by the soloist playing the same B with different fingerings to get slightly different timbres and tunings, and the drone is thoughtfully provided as a reference point to compare each new sound as it is introduced. Throughout most of the piece (leading up to the climax, near the “golden section”), the range of the oboe is gradually expanding in both directions from that B. The ending of the piece features some instrumental calisthenics and some timbral heroics, thanks to some really cool multiphonics. I like the bright, piercing quality of the oboe multiphonics, but the equally harsh, fuller-sounding multiphonics on the soprano saxophone are nice, too.
In conclusion we bring you a very thoughtful and enthusiastic performance of Sequenza VIIb played by Taimur Sullivan. Also, this one is the whole work, so you get to luxuriate in Berio’s formal design.
Guido, let’s put Sequenza VII up on the Big Board! The fightin’ VIIth!
Virtuoso
I’m taking a jazz history seminar class right now called “The Avant-Garde in Jazz.” Sounds pretty cool, right? For the most part, it is. However, one thing that constantly bugs me is the reactions from some of the less adventurous ears in the class. When established mainstream players like John Coltrane and Miles Davis started playing “out,” they were generally accepted, but when new musicians like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor hit the scene when they had not already made names for themselves as mainstream players, they were rejected. People said, and some of my classmates still say, that they played crazy sounds on their instruments because they couldn’t play straight-ahead bebop.
I disagree. I think Cecil Taylor used the technique that he used because he wanted to make the sounds that he made, not the other way around. So what if Ornette Coleman couldn’t play “Giant Steps” like Coltrane? He wasn’t trying to do that. These are issues that the art world had been wrestling with for decades before this. Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian were painting representational art before they investigated abstract art, but others did not. Jackson Pollack got the same sniggers and raised the same eyebrows as Ornette. The question then arises: What does it mean to be a virtuoso? How do we measure virtuosity?
It’s not being able to play “Giant Steps” or paint a bowl of fruit better than anyone else in town. Virtuosity is having the technical facility to achieve your creative goals. Through technology, it’s becoming easier for people without advanced training to achieve their creative goals, and that is what scares traditional virtuosi so much. “Ornette didn’t pay his dues, man.” Forget the dues, he’d be playing bebop if he had paid his dues. He wants something else.
This definition of virtuosity is not without its problems. If the creative goals define virtuosity, why not set creative goals to what is readily achievable? After all the tears have been shed, the most positive result of the controversy of technique is that when virtuosity is made subjective — that is to say, considered in relation to artistic goals — the art itself becomes the primary subject of discussion. It no longer matters that Cecil Taylor can’t “play the changes,” so what do you think of his music? Virtuoso Bob Ross can paint happy trees all day, and I don’t care. Virtuoso Norman Rockwell can recreate “Leave it to Beaver” in as many permutations as he can think of, and Wynton Marsalis can relive 1940s New Orleans as long as he wants. I’m not moved. I don’t care how you say it, but please say something.
For your consideration, the music of Cecil Taylor:
