Tag: classical

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

Classical and pop reviews 2, Greg Sandow’s follow-up to his previous post on the topic:

Certainly we’re not immersed in classical music because we want to check whether the latest pianist to come along really knows what to do with Beethoven — whether her tempo in the slow movement of some sonata really is correct or not. And probably we’re not so deeply tied to this art because some work can be called “magnificent,” or because we identify a particular emotion inside some classical piece. We can go to the movies and get emotional. I think we’d say that the rewards we get from classical music go pretty deep. But I’m not sure we could say that reviews of classical concerts normally convey how deep and powerful those rewards can be. Whereas pop reviews pretty accurately convey what we get from pop, which among other things might mean — I think it does mean this, actually — that pop reviewing is easier. My own experience, writing both pop and classical reviews, is that I’ve had to work much harder to say what’s powerful in classical music.

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Fringe just finished up their first season:

The concerts will look something like this: chamber music (classical music played by small groups of musicians) will be the focus of each evening, with performances of some of the most virtuosic music compositions ever written, performed by the best musicians in Atlanta and throughout the country. Unlike the iconic classical music experience of sitting, listening, yawning, and then leaving, each interactive performance will be a swift blend of live music performances, a DJ spinning ambient and electronica, documentary-style videos of the performers and finally, an independent, jury-selected short film.

Atlanta music critic Pierre Ruhe writes:

The most radical shift in all this is how Fringe empowers its audience. People applauded after every movement of a work, no one shushed the occasional whisperer, beer and wine helped take the edge off, and no one gave bathroom visits during the performance a second thought. Also, the music was available for free download the next morning.

In recent decades, when concert rites ossified and the repertoire rarely included music composed after the early 20th century, the performers, by default, held a dominant position. Among other complications, this led to passive audiences who sat quietly, applauded at prescribed times and knew their role as a paying support group for the folks up on stage. This is a bit of a generalization, but I think not so far off the mark.

Fringe’s casual scene means that it is incumbent on the musicians, moment by moment, to earn your rapt attention.

Those ideas came up a lot in my review of the excellent book Highbrow/Lowbrow. Great stuff. Makes me wish I’d heard of Fringe *before* the last concert of the season. Damn. [via alex ross]

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Alex Ross writes about the life and music of John Luther Adams.

Adams is an avid art-viewer, and is particularly keen on the second generation of American abstract painters: Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Joan Mitchell. There are more art books than music books on the shelves of his studio, a neat one-room cabin that faces south, toward the Alaska Range.

Adams says, “I remember thinking, To hell with classical music. I’m going into the art world; I’m going to do installations. But I was really just interested in working with new media. And it doesn’t matter what I think I’m doing. The work has a life of its own, and I’m just along for the ride. Richard Serra talks about the point at which all your influences are assimilated and then your work can come out of the work.”

One of Adams’ experimental works is a room that generates the music based on external happenings.

The mechanism of “The Place” translates raw data into music: information from seismological, meteorological, and geomagnetic stations in various parts of Alaska is fed into a computer and transformed into an intricate, vibrantly colored field of electronic sound.

‚ÄúThe Place‚Äù occupies a small white-walled room on the museum‚Äôs second floor. You sit on a bench before five glass panels, which change color according to the time of day and the season. What you notice first is a dense, organlike sonority, which Adams has named the Day Choir. Its notes follow the contour of the natural harmonic series‚Äîthe rainbow of overtones that emanate from a vibrating string‚Äîand have the brightness of music in a major key. In overcast weather, the harmonies are relatively narrow in range; when the sun comes out, they stretch across four octaves. After the sun goes down, a darker, moodier set of chords, the Night Choir, moves to the forefront. The moon is audible as a narrow sliver of noise. Pulsating patterns in the bass, which Adams calls Earth Drums, are activated by small earthquakes and other seismic events around Alaska. And shimmering sounds in the extreme registers—the Aurora Bells—are tied to the fluctuations in the magnetic field that cause the Northern Lights.

I’d love to check that out.

~ Mark ~ Leave a comment

John Mark Harris arranged a piece for piano by Iannis Xenakis to make it, y’know, playable by a human. You can see and hear the graph for Evryali.
Harris comments:

The title refers to the “Medusa, with head of writing snakes”, as well as “the open sea”. Both allusions have clear meanings upon hearing the piece…

Evryali was composed without regard to the limitations of the human anatomy, as the branching often expands beyond the range of two human hands. In more than one instance, the branching has caused bushed to appear at the extreme right and left of the keyboard, yet there are also bushes in the center of the piano. The performer must obviously edit the score. The graph I made became a tool for determining what I would leave out…

The music that remains, after editing, is anatomically possible. Yet the performer is left with an undertaking that can not be thought of as reasonable. The relentless repetitive motions, wide leaps, and awkward streams of chords directly challenge the pianist’s need for fluid fingers and free arms. The pianist runs the risk of gazing into Medusa and freezing solid. Brute force and physical endurance are not enough to solve the difficulty. Only through the same imagination that one finds the music “possible” can one find the answer to its realization.

As one can never view Medusa directly, without cheating in the manner of Perseus, one can never hear the piece performed exactly as composed. The audience is not granted a true image of Evryali, but must, like Perseus, experience only a reflection of the monstrosity.

Further commentary from Marc Couroux:

Evryali is not virtuosic, nor is it anti-virtuosic. It is highly unlikely that this state could have come about as a result of the composer’s insufficient command of pianistic technique. The gauntlet is so clearly thrown down that the difficulties cannot be anything other than premeditated… The fact that one cannot physically realize the totality of Evryali makes it seem unnecessarily utopian. The task of any performer is to strive, regardless of difficulty, to achieve every detail and to project them into a broader context.

[via phil harnish]

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A couple years ago, Alex Ross rounded up some literature on applause during concerts:

Up until the beginning of the twentieth century, applause between movements and even during movements was the sign of a knowledgeable, appreciative audience, not of an ignorant one. The biographies of major composers are full of happy reports of what would now be seen as wildly inappropriate applause.

Blame for the move to silence eventually falls on the conductors, beginning especially with Leopold Stokowski:

To refrain from applause heightens focus on the personality of the conductor. Silence is the measure of the unbreakable spell that Maestro is supposedly casting on us. A big ovation at the end salutes his mastery of the architecture of the work, or whatever… By the way, I‚Äôve noticed a new trend ‚ÄîThoughtful Celebrity Conductors holding their arms motionless for ten or fifteen seconds after the end of some vast construction by Bruckner or Mahler. ‚ÄúDo not yet applaud!‚Äù those frozen arms say. ‚ÄúDo not profane the moment!‚Äù

He goes on further to touch on the influence of recording technology on the individual & concert listening experience, the rise of classical performance as a high-brow cultural event, and the communal aspect of concert attendance.

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Brian Sacawa on playing unfettered, taking classical music out of the grand halls and into alternative venues. A lot of the talk focuses on music groups reaching new audiences, but like he says, it can be great for the performers, too. It’s liberating.