Bubble music

Spanish violinist-composer Patricia Argüelles spends a week in a glass bubble in a Madrid plaza, giving the public a round-the-clock view of offstage music-making:

http://www.thinkspain.com/news-spain/14020

Review: eighth blackbird

Nov. 7, University of Richmond

It’s not uncommon for composers to create imaginary worlds in sound, but not many go as far as Stephen Hartke in detailing the scenery and inhabitants.

In eighth blackbird’s sampling of three Hartke compositions, listeners were guided through a set of four surrealistic and/or cartoonish episodes in "The Horse with the Lavendar Eye," scenes from Asian musical theater in "Meanwhile," and artifacts of Italy long before the caesars in "Tituli."

"Meanwhile: Incidental Music to Imaginary Puppet Plays," written for eighth blackbird and given its premiere in this concert, imagines a "court orchestra of my own unspecified non-Western tradition, of which I am the master and know all the rules," as the composer puts it. The set of six pieces evokes Indonesian gamelan and comparable ensembles of strings, winds and resonant percussion played in Japan, Vietnam, Burma and Turkey.

For this piece, Hartke invented at least one instrument – a "flexatone gamelan" approximating the sound and tone-bending quality of Javanese gongs – and adapted several others, placing soft mutes on piano strings to mimick the Vietnamese hammered dulcimer, and tuning a viola a half-step flat so that it, in combination with cello and muted piano, produces a mist of low-frequency harmonics. His score employs more than two dozen percussion instruments, from wood blocks and cymbals to water gong and bongos.

"Meanwhile" may be consciously multicultural, but unlike many such undertakings it doesn’t sound self-consciously exotic. Like Debussy in the late-19th century, Hartke translates his fascination with the timbres and sound textures of Asian orchestras into a colorful, intricately nuanced idiom of his own making.

In a post-concert discussion, the ’birds said they hadn’t yet fully settled into Hartke’s imagined Orient – they’d gotten 40 percent here, 70 percent there in producing sounds and tonal combinations, they reckoned; but this first performance never sounded tentative or awkward.

"The Horse with the Lavendar Eye" (1997), scored for violin, clarinet and piano, is a set of instrumental exchanges, manic to maniacal in energy level and spirit, growing out of Hartke’s fascination with "non-sequiturs and the way that sense can suddenly appear out of nonsense." The four pieces are rooted in rhythmic figures and snatches of melody that might sound like asides in a more conventional composition.

In the opening movement, "Music of the Left," inspired by the Imperial court music of ancient China and Japan, the three musicians play with left hands only, with the pianist producing thick bass chords and the violinist plucking on the bridge. In "The Servant of Two Masters," piano frenetically aims to please violin and clarinet like a short-order cook with meal orders piling up. "Waltzing at the Abyss," suggested by a scene in a novel by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis, is deceptively sanguine; while "Cancel My Rhumba Lesson," evoking a frame from one of R. Crumb’s comic books, is a high-stepping chase scene going nowhere in particular. The listener comes out of the piece as if awakening from a night of fascinating but exhausting dreams.

"Tituli" (1999), written for the Hilliard Ensemble, is Hartke’s effort to "create a musical ruin." The piece sets seven texts in Etruscan, Old Latin and Greek found inscribed on various artifacts from archaeological digs in Italy. A violinist and two percussionists accompany five male voices. The more ancient the language, the more austere the music becomes. (Hartke is a onetime singer of early music, and it shows.)

Nicholas Photinos, eighth blackbird’s cellist, conducted violinist Matt Albert, percussionists Matthew Duvall and Kris Keeton and the vocal ensemble of countertenor Jeffrey Riehl, tenors Geoffrey Williams, Olinda Marseglia and Mike Kotrady and baritone Jim Weaver along this tightrope of tonalities and voicings.

Review: Lionheart

Nov. 5, University of Richmond

Lionheart, the a cappella sextet of countertenor Lawrence Lipnik, tenors John Olund and Michael Ryan-Wenger, baritones Jeffrey Johnson and Richard Porterfield and bass Kurt-Owen Richards, sang perhaps its most historically wide-ranging touring program, "Wayfaring Stranger," in its visit to Richmond.

This set of medieval, Renaissance and contemporary pieces is titled after the familiar Anglo-American folk hymn, sung as a unison introit and reprised in shape-note-style and modern harmonizations.

"Wayfaring Stranger" keeps unexpected company: 13th- and 14th-century liturgical and troubadour songs for three and four voices, the polyphony of 16th-century masters Cipriano de Rore ("Calami sonum") and Giovanni Palestrina ("Litaniae de Beata Virgine Maria"), Marc-André Dalbavie’s setting of Ezra Pound ("Chants") and gospel-inflected American pop (Laura Nyro’s "When I Die").

That last one, in this context, could easily sound like bling draped on a madonna – and the arrangement’s segue in and out of the Dies Irae, like a rose window in a double-wide – but the group makes it work by emphasizing the refrain’s spiritual continuity: "And when I die, and when I’m gone, there’ll be one child born in this world to carry on."

Lionheart lavished tone and feeling on the Dalbavie and Palestrina, the program’s artistic summits; but the singers were just as musically scrupulous and communicative in lighter selections.

The barbershop-quartet staple "Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland," which the group frequently sings as an encore, is a conscious bit of highbrow self-deprecation. For some listeners, though, it must be an unwelcome return to earth from the heights of the Renaissance.

Tipping the chef

Bernard Holland’s Nov. 4 column in The New York Times . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/arts/music/04holl.html?ref=music

. . . revisits the familiar issue of the relationship between composers and audiences. What responsibility does the composer have to speak intelligibly to an audience? What is the listener’s responsibility? Who sets the terms of this transaction?

"In classical music," Holland observes, "the onus of responsibility has been shifted from creator to receptor." In the past century, compositional techniques have advanced more rapidly than the capacity of most listeners to absorb them. If listeners can’t or won’t keep up with new developments, that’s their problem. Creativity shouldn’t be retarded by public incomprehension.

The classic summation of this argument (in music, at least) is Milton Babbitt's (in)famous 1958 article "Who Cares if You Listen?" You can read it here:

http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html

Holland asks, "Do I owe the waiter a good tip, or does he owe me good service?" Babbitt would answer that he’s not a waiter. He’s not even a chef serving paying customers. He’s cooking in his own kitchen, and if the guests at his table don’t like the food they can go home hungry. Babbitt rejects the idea that art-music is a transaction in which the creator is obliged to please the consumer.

Babbitt spent most of his career as an academic, on the faculties of Princeton University and the Juilliard School; he could afford not to care whether the public liked his music. So could Charles Ives, who made a comfortable living as an insurance executive. Read the biographies of trailblazing or contrarian composers, from the Renaissance to the current day, and you’ll find very few who weren’t independently wealthy, or subsidized by a wealthy patron, or employed by an institution, or earning the bulk of their incomes either in nonmusical pursuits or as performing artists (and not just performing their own compositions).

The performer is the key intermediary in the composer-public transaction, certainly in modern times. Audiences generally are induced to listen to unfamiliar or challenging music by proselytizing re-creative performing artists, whose virtuosity and cachet sell the tickets.

If Yo-Yo Ma hadn’t organized his Silk Road Project, how many listeners would pay to hear music from Central Asia? If Esa-Pekka Salonen, Neeme Järvi and Osmo Vänskä weren’t leading conductors, what music from the Baltic states, other than Sibelius, would be heard outside Eastern Europe? Would Chinese composers be heard as widely in the West if there weren’t so many performers of Chinese descent in Western classical music? (Imagine works by Zhou Long or Bright Sheng being played in Richmond absent the Shanghai Quartet.)

More historically distant art-music is no less dependent on the advocacy of performers. Where would Hummel be today without Stephen Hough, or Alkan without Marc-André Hamelin, or Charpentier without William Christie, or Zelenka without Heinz Holliger? Would Washington National Opera patrons have paid big bucks to hear Gomes’ "Il guarany" or Giordano’s "Fedora" without Plácido Domingo in the starring roles?

The more arcane or challenging the music, the more dependent it is on re-creative advocates – or, to put it another way, the more the composer enjoys creative freedom via celebrity endorsement.

When a contemporary composer gets a piece played by the Kronos Quartet or Ethel or eighth blackbird, most of the audience shows up not for the composition but for the performers. They are the waiters getting patrons in the door and earning tips. The composer is the chef getting a split of the proceeds, whether or not the diners find the dish tasty or digestible.

ADDENDUM: Check out this ongoing conversation at NewMusicBox about how composers make money (or don't):

http://www.newmusicbox.org/chatter/chatter.nmbx?id=5317

Review: eighth blackbird

Nov. 2, art6, Richmond

Most cities are divided by perceptual boundaries, which inhabitants on either side are disinclined to cross. In Richmond, one of the most durable is the Beltline, a rail line and commuter highway separating older central districts from more upscale neighborhoods to the west. Central-city gentrification has blurred the line, but it remains a sturdy cultural barrier. It has separated eighth blackbird, the contemporary music sextet now in its third year of residency on the West End campus of the University of Richmond, from much of its natural local constituency.

Last night, eighth blackbird crossed the line, performing at the art6 gallery, one of the venues for the downtown First Fridays Art Walk, which has become Richmond’s most popular showcase for contemporary visual art and alternative music – and one of the prime occasions to see and be seen for the city’s young, hip and artsy.

The YH&A's responded enthusiastically, at times uproariously, to the ’birds. These musicians know how to play to a downtown crowd – that’s what they do in many of their tour engagements – and their repertory is unmistakably on the alt-side of the generational divide: upbeat, physical, quirky, whimsical, spicily sauced brain food.

In the first of two sets, pianist Lisa Kaplan, violinist Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, flutist Tim Munro, clarinetist Michael Maccaferri and percussionist Matthew Duvall played Frederic Rzewski’s "Pocket Symphony" (2000), whose percolating energy and droll expressive touches mask a complex and fine-grained neoclassical discourse, and the movement of "Thirteen Ways" (1987) by Thomas Albert (Matt’s father) that spins variations on the theme of the Beatles’ "Blackbird."

For the late show, played before a larger and younger crowd, Kaplan, Duvall and Albert opened with the Belgian composer-filmmaker Thierry De Mey’s "Musique de Tables" (1987), a choreographed fantasia for percussive sounds hand-clapped and rubbed, patted and thumped on a tabletop (a Costco fold-up, which the ’birds favor for its subtly pebbled surface.)

Next came "The Servant of Two Masters," a frenzied, virtuosic movement for piano, violin and clarinet from Stephen Hartke’s "The Horse with the Lavendar Eye," which the ensemble will play in its entirety on Nov. 7 at the University of Richmond.

The finale was Martin Bresnik’s setting of the wry but deeply moving poem "My 20th Century" by the late Tom Andrews. Andrews’ autobiography of one-liners, which the musicians take turns delivering, unfolds over a telegraphic rhythmic figure garnished with vaguely nostalgic snippets of melody recalling the scores of Aaron Copland or Samuel Barber. (The piece could be heard as a postmodern analog to Barber’s "Knoxville, Summer of 1915.")

Richmond's downtowners audibly relished their taste of eighth blackbird. Now let’s see how many cross the Beltline for seconds.

eighth blackbird performs music of Stephen Hartke at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 7 in Camp Concert Hall of the University of Richmond’s Modlin Arts Center. Tickets: $20. Details: (804) 289-8980, http://modlin.richmond.edu

A ? of character(s)

You can find virtually everything (or everything virtually?) online, but electronic publishing routinely stumbles over little things: accent marks.

In a previous professional incarnation, I made a chronic pest of myself to get accents grave and acute, umlauts, tildes and other alphabetic doodads into print. The effort finally succeeded – but only in print, not online.

I’m often reminded of that struggle when I run across the name of the Cleveland Orchestra’s music director, Franz Welser-Möst. On the Web site of his hometown paper, The Plain Dealer, the name used to appear as “Welser-M?st.” Nowadays, it's “Welser-MÖst.” A link to the paper on the ArtsJournal Web site renders it as “Welser-MÄ–st.” The online version of a review in The Washington Post dodged the bullet with "Welser-Moest," only to be felled by Tchaikovsky's "Path¿tique" Symphony.

Really, now: If a relic from the manual-typewriter age can coax accented characters out of Microsoft Word and post them on Blogspot, the high-tech pros of high-class Web publishers can manage it.

Review: Richmond Symphony

Nov. 1, Toad’s Place, Richmond

Erin Freeman, the Richmond Symphony’s new associate conductor, has inherited the Kicked Back Classics casual concert series from a string of maestros with highly varied inclinations; but she seems well on her way to making it her own.

Garbed in red and black, accessorizing with a demon’s tail, leading a post-Halloween show in Toad’s Place, a downtown nightclub that generally throbs to rock bands, Freeman proved to be both a genially energetic host and a concert programmer who garnishes fun with substance and subtlety.

Her program of musical "creatures" avoided the obvious, or touched on it unpredictably. Yes, we heard the Dies Irae, the medieval chant for the dead, but as set to the "Night Train" bass line in "Dead Elvis," Michael Daugherty’s wildly inventive homage to the King. Bassoonist Jonathan Friedman, costumed as the Vegas-vintage Presley, fronted an ensemble of violin, clarinet, trumpet, trombone, double-bass and percussion, skittering and sliding through quotations from the Elvis songbook and evocations of the Elvis persona.

The symphony’s strings were both vivid and refined in a suite from Bernard Herrmann’s score for the Alfred Hitchcock classic "Psycho" – complete with a strategic scream, provided by none other than Freeman’s mother – and in François Dompierre’s suavely diabolic tango "Les Beautes du Diable."

Beethoven’s "The Creatures of Prometheus" Overture, a movement from Boccherini’s "La Casa del Diavolo," the "Beauty and the Beast" movement from Ravel’s "Mother Goose" Suite, featuring clarinetist Ralph Skiano and contrabassoonist Matthew Harvell, and Rimsky-Kordakov’s "Flight of the Bumblebee" rounded out the program.

Toad’s Place is a surprisingly agreeable symphonic venue, although its acoustic is on the dry side. Quieter orchestral passages face a pretty formidable obstacle in the blowers of its ventilation system.

The program repeats at 5 p.m. Nov. 4 in the Pavilion of the Science Museum of Virginia, 2500 W. Broad St. in Richmond. Tickets: $17. Details: (804) 788-1212, www.richmondsymphony.com