Music Monday: Valverde: Cuatro poemas de Octavio Paz

Vocal music hasn’t made much of an appearance so far in these posts, which may be kind of surprising given that I’m interested in making a career out of composing for voice. In part, that’s simply a result of awkward lengths — standalone songs are too short to make a whole post about, while song cycles and operas (the latter being more my stomping ground than the former) clock in at such lengths as to be impractical to adequately cover in a single blog post — but it’s also an issue of familiarity. I’m not a singer, so I don’t deal with this music on a day-to-day basis, and presentations of the repertoire often center on Romantic-era lieder, which are written in a musical language I find phenomenally uncompelling. Still, there are plenty of great songs out there, and every now and again I stumble on some that I really like.

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Scones of Anxiety

In the middle of the Tisch App Blogging Hiatius, I came down with a bit of a head cold, which meant I spent one weekend doing pretty much nothing but eating, sleeping, and watching TV shows on Netflix. Having recently finished The X-Files, I decided to check out other things Gillian Anderson’s been in, and watched the first episode of The Fall. Without giving too much away, it’s a police procedural where Anderson is working to solve some very unpleasant crimes, and, while she continues to be an incredible actor and the unquestioned standard bearer for sardonic, unimpressed eyerolls, I decided it was just a little too intense to fully appreciate while drowning in phlegm. In a haze of decongestants, I remembered that I’d heard good things about The Great British Bake Off, and found the one season currently available on Netflix in the US. “Perfect”, I thought, “A show about baking. This should be nice and relaxing.”. I could not have been more wrong.

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Music Monday: Still: Seven Traceries

Sometimes called “The Dean of African American Composers”, William Grant Still (1895–1978) is undoubtedly most famous for his first symphony, the Afro-American Symphony from 1930. That’s a great work, and it’s definitely worth getting to know if you’re not familiar with it, but I think relying on it too heavily to give a snapshot of Still’s output runs the risk of pigeonholing him and limiting our conception of his musical breadth. Still himself was adamant about this [College Music Symposium], insisting that he “wrote as [he] chose, using whatever idiom seemed appropriate to the subject at hand” and “did not bow” to the “complete domination” of Jazz any more than he did to the modernist style he encountered when studying with Edgard Varèse.

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The Melting Point of Birds

I have been internally screaming with excitement about tonight’s concert at Walt Disney Hall for just shy of a full calendar year. There’s only one piece on the program: Olivier Messiaen’s sprawling 1974 Des canyons aux étoiles... (From the canyons to the stars...)

Describing a work by Olivier Messiaen as “unusual” or “bizarre” is roughly like describing the Pope as “Catholic”, but even in Messiaen’s odd menagerie, Des canyons is something else. Despite his being French and not particularly nationalistic, Messiaen was commissioned to write the work to commemorate the United States bicentennial, a fact that I’ve never really seen explored or explained. Even tho the genocidal waves of American Manifest Destiny had yet to spread that far west in 1776, Messiaen took his inspiration from the weather-worn landscapes of southern Utah and the birds that are native to the region. (The inclusion of birds is par for the course for Messiaen — it’s much more unusual when his works don’t include transcriptions of their songs.) But, as the title implies, he also looked up, not metaphorically, but literally, to specific stars that are visible in the night sky.

The result is a 90-minute concerto for horn, piano, glockenspiel, and xylorimba that includes movement titles like “Interstellar call” and “The resurrected and the song of the star Aldebaran”. In addition to the solo percussionists, the piece calls for a bevy of ensemble players, covering everything from a wind machine (which gets several extended solos) to the geophone, an instrument of Messiaen’s own invention that calls for a drum filled with thousands of lead pellets to imitate the sound of dry shifting earth. Despite the size of the orchestra, there are numerous points over the course of the work where the music just . . . stops, and silence fills the air. At one point, some of the brass players remove the mouthpieces from their instruments and buzz on them as tho warming up backstage. I am not making any of this up.

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Music Monday: Rimkus: MacLeod Road

Right, so. This is another one of those times when I don’t have a lot to say about either the composer or the genesis of the work I’m featuring. This time, tho, it’s not because the details weren’t recorded and slipped away into the maw of time, it’s because she’s just starting out, and the work in question received it’s première this past November. Sarah Rimkus was born in 1990 in Washington DC, and moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington state in 1998. Somewhere along the way she got interested in music, and earned a Bachelor’s in music composition from the University of Southern California in 2013. From there, she went on to study vocal music at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, where she is currently pursuing a PhD

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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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