Sad Clowns and Blackbirds

Theory: the more complex a piece of art, the longer it takes to penetrate and the longer it takes to fade with repeat experiences. In the history of music, there seems to be a roller-coaster relationship with complexity: things start out simple and get steadily more and more complex until they get so impenetrable that there's a crash: WHEEE! The Baroque was thorny and difficult, and it was to that the Classical was a reaction. The Romantic period period seemed to have a fake crash but was instead redirected into serialism, then total serialism which then spawned a reaction in the hypersimple minimalist style that is decorating so many movie scores these days.

One theory among composers is that writing hypercomplex music means your music (and therefore your soul) will live on forever. They're think they're writing for the future. Unfortunately, there are far too many examples of artists appreciated only well after they died to give this group of misfits hope.

The same theory necessarily applies to live performances, something which I realized watching eighth blackbird's performance of Pierrot Lunaire.

I had been building up to the performance in my mind for several weeks before, listening to the score, explaining the work to my students (music appreciation), and even somehow interviewing 8bb's flutist Tim Munro. I felt ready to take the complexity of the score and make sense of it in a total-brain, dreamlike way.

To me, the music and the text are more than enough to try to make sense of. Already in Schönberg's score, there is tension between foreground and background. Clearly, the "singer" is meant to be the foreground, but the instrumental writing is so dense and ear-catching that I try to fuse the various parts together into some sort of cohesive, symbiotic whole, splitting my conscious attention evenly: 50% singing, 50% instrumental music, and 50% text. That's right, to really absorb the Gestalt requires 150% of conscious thought.

But 8bb doesn't stop there; they add yet another layer of meaning in the choreography of Mark DeChiazza. The movement itself was interesting and eye-catching, but it turned out to be too much so. One could have spent 100% of their attention watching the movement and making sense out of a series of abstract and unrelated relationships.

In talking about the work, DeChiazza seemed overwhelmed by the music, finding it impenetrable. He related stories of burying himself in Expressionist thought and art to try to find a visual language that would correlate to the score. In essence, then, he tried to create a choreography that would be on the same level as the text and music.

This was where he went wrong.

Pierrot Lunaire, for admirers of 20th century music, can stand completely on its own and, even then, merits myriad repeat listenings to penetrate its thick exterior. The goal with the staging, then, should be to make it more immediately accessible to general audiences. While I think DeChiazza succeeded in this to some extent, his success came about through visually distracting the audience from the difficulty of the work rather than highlighting elements in the music or the text.

Less is more.
Musically, 8bb have found a balance with their singer, the incomparable Lucy Shelton. Shelton is a dynamic performer and both demands and merits the audience's full attention. So while she is singing, we don't need a dancer doing twirls in the far background, musicians dramatically sweeping chairs into place, and Pierrot climbing a ladder. We don't need four layers of visuals because we already have four layers of music and an inscrutable text.

Ultimately, it's all about balance. The "volume" of the visuals was too loud for the volume of the music, which could be solved by turning down the visuals (by quieting down the least essential layers: move more slowly or not at all) or turning up the audio. I would do a little of both but making sure that the audio is loud enough to demand attention--though this may go against the birds' time-tested idea of "sound reinforcement" in lieu of "amplification".

information
Adding complexity to complexity creates a work that is both more difficult to penetrate but also one that merits more repeat listenings. The irony is that by adding a visual layer, in an effort to make the work more accessible to some, they made it more complex, therefore less accessible, to others. With repeated experiences, my opinion of the work could change. It was too much information to make sense of in one sitting but will take many, many more before it becomes remotely redundant.

ex nihilo nihil fit

On 12.3.09, I went to a concert by dal niente, one of the many new music ensembles that have sprung up in the last few years--inspired, no doubt, by the success of eighth blackbird and ICE. Of those, dal niente seems to be the most likely to succeed, combining prodigious talent with a clear sense of identity. The demiurge behind the group, composer Kirsten Brøberg (sic), mostly culls musicians from Northwestern and focuses her programming on the traditions stemming from and interweaving around French spectralists and German timbralists. The two facets seem to have grown simultaneously, like calculus, in those two countries and now have flourished into a mostly Scandinavian tradition.

The concert was expertly performed, highlights being Gareth Davis on clarinets and J.Austin Wulliman on violin. Davis got in touch with his inner Henry Rollins in the middle of a slew of multiphonics and strange articulations during Lindberg's Ablauf. I enjoyed the insanity that the piece portrayed or, in some cases, induced, but I'm not sure I'd willingly sit through another performance of schizophrenic clarinet violently interrupted by bass drums cleverly situated behind the audience in the choir loft. Effective but unnerving.

Wulliman channeled Gidon Kremer in his performance of Kaija Saariaho's Calices, the work being a scaled-down version of her violin concerto Graal Théâtre. Though Saariaho uses extensive notations to produce various timbres, overtones, or noises, Wulliman made it seem as effortless as playing Mozart.

The first piece on the program, Jay Alan Yim's Songs in Memory of a Circle was the most interesting from a composer's perspective. Resembling one of my many unrealized ideas, Yim's piece is a series of pieces able to be played individually or in various simultaneous combinations. Amazingly, the three pieces chosen created a unified whole, a rich tapestry of sound, that actually moved between moments of calm and moments of fluttery activity. The piece was accompanied by a video that was manipulated live. The video was static and ugly compared to the richness in the music, and the manipulation seemed primitive and distracting--something that is not ready for public performance.

The grand finale of the concert was more of an anticlimax. Broberg's Origins received its world premiere. The work was dedicated to Gareth Davis and incorporated him on bass/clarinet in each of the five movements. Each movement involved a different instrumental combination of winds, strings, or mixed ensemble. Compared to the Lindberg work, the piece didn't seem to explore Davis's technical ability to the same extent. Compared to Yim's piece, the textures were less rich and sonorous and so did not hold my attention. It may have been that the work grew out of Broberg's new-found home soil in Minnesota with its deep winters and Scandinavian roots, and my big-city, over-caffeinated ears couldn't shift gears. At the very least, it would have been better situated at the end of the first half; by the end of the concert, our ears had already been worn out and needed something less demanding of our attention.

Overall, though, the ensemble continued to show its mettle and seems durable enough to last for a long while. I look forward to future dal niente concerts, in particular Grisey's Partiels in the Spring.

music nowish

This is going to be necessarily short. I am only giving myself the time it takes to brew a cuppa—in this case coffee, not tea. Tonight was the concert of MusicNOW, the new music program at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The kind of music that it's supposed to be is still in search of a label, but I know one thing it is not: Jazz. Jazz is America's Classical tradition, arising from the folk music into a complex system of structures and form: a musical language. As such, it belongs in the concert hall just as much as so-called Classical music. Not better or worse, it's tradition is merely more recent.

But I had geared myself up for contemporary music and so was disappointed to be presented with Jazz. Not just any Jazz, not daring, contemporary or exciting, this was post-Ellington schmaltz written by an über-talented Brit, Richard Rodney Bennett, with a great deal of craft and nothing to say. It was mind-numbingly uninteresting except, possibly, for the arrangements, which were...um...tight. There were solos, but it was unclear whether they were really improvised or written by the composer.

So I sat fidgety, alternating between listening intently and trying to think of something else. The piece was dripping with sweetness, more of a dessert than appetizer. When it finished, I booed—for the first time in my life. It felt weird and drew nervous glances from my friends, but I was unapologetic: this concert had wasted an hour of my life and I want it back.

The whole experience led me to think that Mark-Anthony Turnage was selfishly presenting one of his heroes, exposing the American audience to someone whom he finds important—but ultimately isn't. Turnage's own piece, Twice Through the Heart, was much more interesting as a study in orchestration and texture. The composer in me got caught up with the variety and flow of colors, so it was only afterward that I realized that the piece is completely disposable, anonymous—“who-cares music.”

Bennett's piece failed the Seinfeld test; that is, I would have rather been watching Seinfeld. Heck, I would have rather been watching Friends. Actually, I wish that it had been Stravinsky's Ebony Concerto. Turnage's piece passed; I enjoyed it but ultimately don't think it's important.

I think we need to draw a line between Gebrauchsmusik and concert music. Concert music demands and merits your entire undivided attention, whereas Gebrachsmusik serves its function and should be judged on how well it does that. The first piece on the program should have been playing some sort of role—it could very well have been a 60s film score—but did not merit the concert treatment.

Thank you for reading. I'm off to finish my piece for this years AIDS Quilt Songbook Concert on December 1. I hope to get the score to the performers tomorrow.

taking it to the streets

Surreptitiously, the University of Chicago organized a concert featuring Dawn Upshaw, accompanied by an ensemble comprised mostly of hometown heroes 8th blackbird, singing music of Osvaldo Golijov. With such a star-studded performance, you'd expect a sell-out crow, but somehow the word was slow in getting around, so although the concert was full, it wasn't packed--the audience being mostly comprised of aging Hyde Park intellectuals and U of C music students.

The focus of the evening was Golijov's Ayre, an impassioned journey through the folk songs of Pre-Columbian 15th-century Spain. The composer mentions Berio's Folk Songs as one influence, and his own background formed another. Golijov grew up as the only Jewish kid in predominantly Christian Agentina in a household that he has described as "Eastern European." After spending time in Israel, he earned his PhD at UPenn, studying with George Crumb.

His range and depth of influences clearly come across in his music. In fact, it sometimes seems as though the quasi-program in Ayre and other pieces is almost just a pretext to write the music that resonates most deeply with him. Doing so, and by referencing Berio, Golijov garners the approval of academia and gives him license to explore the sounds in the gutters and the streets of the real world.

The result is an otherworldly tapestry, less of a blend, more of a juxtaposition of the religious traditions peacefully coexisting in the times before the much-parodied but still horrendous Spanish Inquisition. Each of the 11 songs is based on an actual folk song; says Golijov: "with a little bend, a melody goes from Jewish to Arab to Christian." This challenges Ms. Upshaw to embody a panoply of characters of different traditions and classes, each with their own vocal style, which she does with great passion and conviction. Her performance brings a theatricality to the work that merges with the intensity of the music, giving the whole a greater emotional impact.

The intensity is the result of confident, chamber-style playing, in which each performer knows his or her role and when their "character" comes to the fore. This is common in eighth blackbird performances; they know the music and each other so well that they start to function more like a rock band than an ensemble. It's a process that requires more rehearsal and more commitment but ends up speaking to a wider audience, one that is used to musicians being more than just musicians, one used to watching performers or, to the extreme, mere entertainers. Classical musicians generally hate to think about presentation, but Eighth blackbird seems comfortable borrowing and incorporating performative, sometimes entertaining elements to augment their musical performances--but never at expense of the music.

To me, as a composer, the most interesting aspect to the work was the instrumentation. The work called for Pierrot ensemble augmented by horn, accordion, guitar, harp, bass, percussion, and laptop. The bulk of the ensemble are members of Chicago-based eighth blackbird who are known for their subtle theatricalization of contemporary music. (They also won a Grammy last year.) In this performance, there was little need for this enhancement except for a few moments in which a particular player became the musical focus for a brief moment: tasteful and appropriate per usual.

The laptop was a bit of a surprise. At the beginning of the work, it added a nearly imperceptible deep background layer, but as the work progressed, it's presence became more and more noticeable--eventually triggering prerecorded percussion loops and samples. It was almost as if Golijov felt that the audience needed to be warmed up to the idea, which, for most of the crowd, was probably true. Although it seemed a bit timid, it ended up taking the focus only when appropriate and then relinquishing it back to Ms. Upshaw. For composers, it's an interesting example to study and learn from; for audiences, it's a good time to get used to the presence of technology in the concert hall.

The experience, as a whole, was highly effective: a soul-stirring, from-the-gut performance from Ms. Upshaw; a tight, rock-star backing band; and a composition that is academically viable, well-crafted, and yet inspired by the music of the People. Golijov does not write music from an Ivory Tower and, in the post-concert conversation, urged the composers at the U of C to do similarly.