Don’t Call It That

Over on Medium, Craig Havighurst has a new solution to the perennial question that haunts many a musical conversation: Can we please find a better term for “Classical Music”? Almost every musician I know in that scene has some beef with the term (Alex Ross, in fact, “[hates] it”), but the most well known alternatives — Concert Music, Art Music, Western Art Music — all have issues too, and none of them are really better enough to be gaining much ground. Coming up with something satisfying is a tall task given the ground to cover, from the Medieval chants of Hildegard to the secular explosions of Boulez and everything between and beyond, especially if you’re hoping for something that’s short and pithy to boot.

Havighurst’s proposal? Composed Music.

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Music Monday: Wilson: Expansions III

When asked in a 1991 interview with Bruce Duffie if his music was in some way specifically African-American, Olly Wilson Jr responded that “because [his] experience has been an African-American experience” his music necessarily reflects that, “[b]ut that is a very, very complicated kind of thing” and “there may not be discernible aspects of that music that you say, ‘Aha, that’s clearly from African American tradition.’”. So those seeing his name on a program of African-American composers and hoping for a jazz- or gospel-infused escapade are bound for disappointment.

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Review: For the End of Time

By now, it should be abundantly clear to everyone who knows me that I am hopeless Messiaen trash. So when I stumbled on Rebecca Rischin’s For the End of Time, an account of the composition and première of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps (Quartet for the end of Time), I knew I had to read it. It showed up under the tree for Christmas (thanks Mom and Dad!), I cracked it open eagerly, and . . . it was a very uneven ride.

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Music Monday: Diemer: Santa Barbara Overture

Despite living less than two hours away from the place, I’ve never actually been up to Santa Barbara, which means, at least according to today’s composer, that I am Missing Out. Emma Lou Diemer describes the joyous theme at the start of her Santa Barbara Overture as reflecting what one might feel after “enduring the clogged freeways and smog of Los Angeles”, to which I can only rejoin “Yeah, no, that sounds about right.”. Diemer was born in November 1927 to a very musical family (she had learned piano by the age of five, and family road trips would often involve sing-alongs accompanied by her sister on flute and one of her brothers on trumpet. I can’t decide if this sounds amazing or horrifying.)

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Universally Gay

Earlier this week, a group of contemporary classical music types put out a zine called How to be a Good Ally and Create Safer Spaces in New Music [PDF]. For those of you who are already well versed in issues of social justice, there won’t be anything groundbreaking in it, but it’s still a decent introductory primer, and I highly recommend it to those who are newer to thinking about these issues, especially the sections on affirmative action and cultural appropriation. (Quick! How many concert series can you think of that even approach gender parity or proportional racial representation? I’ll wait.) Given the limited space available in the zine, the authors don’t have room to really go in depth on all of the ground they cover, and today I want to expand on one area that they touch on briefly, specifically how to balance focus on an artist’s marginalized identity against focus on the art they make.

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Fun With Numbers: Spotify Year In Review

So Spotify recently released a nifty little year in review widget, which I find completely irresistible. (No one is shocked.) In addition to a fun nostalgia trip and some hilarious metadata missteps, tho, it does reveal some interesting things about my listening habits, so for my last post of 2015, I want to dig into those a little.

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Music Monday: Moroi: Piano Sonata No. 2

Moroi Saburō (諸井三郎 for those who read kanji) was born just to the north of Tōkyō to a wealthy, industrious family in August of 1903. He was very close to his older brother Kanichi, and looked up to him as something of an inspirational figure. Said brother was reasonably educated in the arts, and gave Moroi his first piano lessons. (Kanichi would also take him to see the pianist Sueko Ogura perform the Beethoven piano sonatas — I haven’t been able to tell if this was his first exposure to said sonatas, but given the influence of Beethoven’s style on Moroi’s work, it seems an occasion well worth mentioning.) Moroi continued to pursue his musical studies — both on piano and in composition — both in high school and college, frequently working from books instead of studying with teachers in person.

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[one] and the Backstage Door

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the Contempo Flux contemporary chamber music class’s final concert of the term out at UCLA. It was a diverse program full of interesting pieces — many of which were new to me — and the level of playing was, on the whole, phenomenal, but there was one piece in particular that stuck in my mind: Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s [one] [YouTube] for piano and percussion inside said piano.

It’s not the sort of piece I would normally be drawn to. Misty and atmospheric, it unfolds slowly and freely, with little sense of melody or rhythmic pulse. If I’d only been listening to a recording of it, I honestly would’ve been kind of bored — it’s just not my jam. But watching it happen in person was a deeply engrossing experience, and one that I’d very much like to have again. In thinking about why, I realized that it was because [one] is very close to being a theatre piece.

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Music Monday: Rehnqvist: Arktis Arktis!

Rarely do pieces with exclamation marks in the title end well. Usually they’re a sign of desperate over-enthusiasm, and presage a pandering piece of peppy schlock, so determined to be relentlessly upbeat that all concerns for musical quality are cast carelessly aside. There are exceptions, but they’re few and far enough between that I approached Rehnqvist’s Arktis Arktis! with some trepidation. Happily, my misgivings were misguided.

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An Introduction to Sonata Theory

If you’re like me and you actually read program notes and CD inserts for fun, you’ve probably run across the phrase “sonata form” (or “sonata-allegro form”) to describe many movements of the works being written about. If you’ve never taken a formal class in music theory (or, more specifically, music theory as relates to high-prestige music being written in Europe from 1750 or so to around the outbreak of World War One), this probably hasn’t been a terribly useful descriptor. Like so many pieces of jargon, “sonata form” is a clean, concise way of describing a rather complicated thing that provides all the information necessary for those in the know and almost no information at all for those who aren’t. Today I’m going to do my best to explain what sonata form is in a way that’s accessible to people with a minimum of broader music theory background.

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Music Monday: Coleridge-Taylor: Quintet

On or around his fifth birthday, Coleridge-Taylor began playing the violin, and by the age of 15, he had enrolled in the Royal Conservatory to continue his studies. Two years into a projected three-year program, he switched from violin to composition, working under Charles Villiers Stanford. The older composer was quickly impressed with Coleridge-Taylor’s abilities, declaring him one of his two most brilliant students — no mean praise considering he also taught Frank Bridge, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams!

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Music Monday: Eckhardt-Gramatté: Bassoon Concerto

Christened Sofia Fridman-Kochevskaya, Sophie-Carmen Eckhardt-Gramatté was born in Moscow in 1899 to a rather well-off family (her mother worked as a governess in Leo Tolstoy’s household), but she didn’t live there long. Her family moved to a commune in England, and Eckhardt-Grammaté entered the Paris Conservatoire at the age of eight to study violin and piano. She had already made her public debuts in Berlin and Paris by the age of eleven, frequently playing both instruments on the same concert program. She was already interested in composition, but her teachers at the Conservatoire discouraged her from pursuing that path, presumably because sexism.

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A Year of Mondays

About a year ago (October 6, if you’re counting), I tripped past the 200-follower mark on tumblr, and launched a new series of posts to celebrate. Since most of you reading this are probably regular readers of the blog and have seen my Music Monday posts already, so I won’t go on about the general premise of the series; instead I want to zoom out and take a look at the series as a whole, both in terms of how it’s changed so far and in terms of where I want to take it from here.

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Music Monday: Hakim: Le Tombeau de Olivier Messiaen

Hallowe’en has come and gone, which means that today’s composer just had a birthday: Naji Hakim was born on that date in Beirut, Lebanon in 1955. A professional organist in addition to a composer, he first fell in love with the instrument at the age of five when he attended a Mass at his family’s Catholic church and was transfixed by the sounds he heard. Organ being not the easiest instrument to practice at home, his family insisted he study piano instead, a decision he was not particularly happy with. (When he was twelve, he snuck into his school’s chapel with his brother, broke into the organ room, hit the “tutti” stop, and went to town. The headmaster was . . . unimpressed.) He had non-musical interests as well, studying Engineering at the Ecole Supérieure d’Ingéneurs in Beirut until an outbreak of war in 1975 forced the school to close, at which point he emigrated to Paris to finish his studies.

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To My Rationalist Friends

We need to have a talk.

Over the past two weeks, there have been a number of demonstrations on college campus around this country protesting incidents of racist bias. As is pretty par for the course by now, these protests have generated a whole slew of online articles, which, when posted to Facebook and Twitter, have, in turn, launched some pretty sprawling comment threads. And I’ve seen you posting on some of those comment threads, and honestly, it’s been painful. You’ve come in asking questions that seem to you to be perfectly reasonable, only to be met with replies that seem prickly and unwelcoming, at times almost aggressively uninterested (it seems to you) in calm, rational, intellectual discussion of the issue at hand. Affronted by this brusque rebuff, things often escalate, and lo! a flame war is born.

This isn’t a pattern that’s new to the past two weeks. It’s something I’ve been seeing since, well, pretty much since I first signed up for social media. I am very sure I have been that person more than once in the past.

Today, I’m going to take you at your word. I’m going to assume that you genuinely don’t understand why people (and, let’s be honest, it’s usually “marginalized people on the left”) are so worked up about the latest clash in the college campus culture wars, that you’re asking questions from a place of open-minded naïveté in a good-faith attempt to understand what’s going on. (If that’s not the case, if you feign ignorance just so you can get a rise out of the other side for fun, you are petty and cruel and should feel ashamed. If you deliberately cause pain to other people solely for your own enjoyment, I have nothing more to say to you.) I’m going to try to meet you on your own ground and do my best to answer those honest questions that cause such a fuss. I write this as someone who is sympathetic to the broader rationalist project, who shares its values of free and open inquiry and debate, of logic and carefully constructed argumentation, of searching out the truth, however uncomfortable we may be with what we find. (You might be surprised at how many people on the left share these values, even if they don’t articulate them using the same language. In positioning myself like this, I am not trying to set myself apart as Not Like Those Other People protesting systemic oppression on the left. I am writing this in the hopes that my fluency in the language of rationalist thought will help make the rationalist community — a community that I feel at least loosely affiliated with — more understanding of and dedicated to issues of social justice.)

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Music Monday: Zwilich: Violin Concerto

Zwilich understands the bassoon. Or rather, she understands the bassoonist’s way of life. “I not only don’t know how you play the bassoon, I don’t know why. You get up in the morning, you have to put this thing together. It’s got wood, which is very temperamental. It’s got cork, which is maybe even more temperamental. You’ve got to make the reed. It’s got all kinds of issues.” Painfully accurate.

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The Spigot and the Chute

I have a lot of feelings. I know, I know, this is hardly an earth-shattering revelation. But still, it’s true: Going thru life, I have lots and lots of feelings about the things I experience.

I also write music. And unlike some composers, I explicitly want my music to be emotional, to express feelings and to get people in the audience to feel things in turn.

Are these things related? Do the feelings I have in my day-to-day life translate directly into the art I make?

Well, yes and no.

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