I Am Sitting In A Room

Cliburn Competition

2009-05-22T08:26:00.005-05:00

The Van Cliburn Competition starts today. Like the previous competition in 2005, they are streaming live video. I'll probably get sucked into watching quite a bit, though there are almost *no* really intriguing programs posted. Oh, there's the occassional rarity from the peripherary of the 19th- or early 20th-c. canon, but my cursory glance didn't notice a sudden uptick in Ligeti etudes (for crying out loud, these should be canonic by now) or anything like that.

In the second round the competitors have to program one of the four pieces in the running for a composition prize, the American Composers Invitational. The composers are Mason Bates, Derek Bermel, Daron Hagen, and John Musto. The partial glance I made through the programs suggests that the Hagen piece will get the most play.

One of the most entertaining things about the last Cliburn was following the blog and its comments. The latter are everything you could expect -- earnest, snarky, penetrating, backstabbing, etc. Conspiracy theories abounded (especially about whether a particular professor had undue influence over the fate of her many affiliated students).

Congrats Steve Reich!

2009-04-29T07:58:00.002-05:00

Along with the rest of the music community, I offer my sincere congratulations to Steve Reich for (finally) receiving a Pulitzer Prize in music. You can hear the entire piece at Carnegie Hall's Commissions Page, played by eighth blackbird. There are no performer credits on the page or in the pop-up window (blech), but click on "See Details" for a piece and the information comes up.

I saw 8bb play the piece over the summer, and though I enjoyed its energy, I got a feeling of general rather than outstanding quality from it. So the argument that the Pulitzer was a lifetime-achievement recognition has some legs in this corner of the blogosphere. Maybe I'll change my mind after a few more listens.

Orchestras

2009-04-22T18:02:00.003-05:00

The Orchestra: "Defiant Cockroach of the Post-Nuclear Cultural Wasteland." Thank you, Matthew Guerreri! (Matthew's blog.)

Take a Friend to the Orchestra month reminds me that I haven't been getting there enough myself in the past two seasons. (To say nothing of not blogging when I have gone*...I'm a crappy blogger.) Recent Cincinnati Symphony-related links: Cincinnati critic Janelle Gelfand contributes a TAFTO article; Conductor Paavo Järvi was sentenced yesterday for operating a vehicle while intoxicated--hate for negative publicity to be the only way to get the symphony in the news. I can imagine all the tut-tutting going on in response to this, but I say if he keeps conducting like he has been while we've been in Cincinnati, let 'im drink all he wants. CSO is world-class, especially when Paavo's conducting. It's one of the things I'll miss most about leaving town.**

* PS - Radu Lupu & Yefim Bronfman were great this season. Bronfman's Brahms 2nd Concerto was huge; I've never heard such a big sound with so many different colors--even more impressive in cavernous Music Hall.

** This blog is Jacksonville-bound in August. What's going on musically there? Don't know yet. Stay tuned.

Nat'l Lefty Day

2008-08-13T20:11:00.004-05:00

August 13 is National Lefthanders Day! Both I and the better half (upgraded to "the wife" as of July 5th) are lefties, so are various family members.

The clerk at our little nearby post office celebrated with cake and made all of her customers sign their credit card slips left handed. The samples she showed us were pretty entertaining.

Thanks to Steve Smith, I now know that Kaija Saariaho is a lefty, too. I like the anecdote Steve has about her troubles writing manuscript scores--they sound familiar. If you haven't read it yet, follow the link on his post to his recent NYTimes profile of Saariaho. I'm still hoping to be in the vicinity of a performance of either opera or La Passion de Simone someday.

The better half shows off her left hand, new rings and her mussels (in Nice!).

Smetana Urquell

2008-05-08T12:54:00.001-05:00

I ♥ Smetana
I ♥ Czech beer

Playlist "80"

2008-05-01T09:30:00.003-05:00

My brain made the connection between two opus 80s in F minor: the Prokofiev Violin Sonata and the Mendelssohn Quartet. Naturally I would collect other 80s into a playlist:

Bach, Cantata 80 "Ein feste Burg"

Prokofiev, Violin Sonata, Op. 80

Mendelssohn, String Quartet, Op. 80

Beethoven, Choral Fantasy, Op. 80

Britten, 2nd Cello Suite, Op. 80

Brahms, Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80

Haydn, Symphony #80 in D minor

Faure, Pelleas & Melisande, Op. 80

Myaskovsky, Divertissement for small orchestra, Op. 80

Sibelius, Sonatina for violin & piano, Op. 80

That will keep me occupied for a while. I was surprised how many familiar pieces cropped up in the Bs.

PS - if you don't know it, the Prokofiev is a very good thing.

Pictures? Why not?

2007-08-20T19:37:00.000-05:00

My orchid just finished blooming for the first time in 2 years. I wish it would bloom more regularly, but then it probably wishes it were fertilized once in a while.

Sometime a couple years back I searched in vain for pictures of Royal Poinciana trees. They grow all over Miami and bloom beautifully, but this is the first time in a long while that I got home during the blooming season. This one's on the University of Miami campus. To get the idea of full bloom, image the orange-red blooms covering the whole canopy like a blanket.

Also on campus, ibises! Which makes sense--the school's mascot is an ibis. Quoth the UM website: "Folklore maintains that the Ibis, a symbol of knowledge found in the Everglades and Egypt, is the last sign of wildlife to take shelter before a hurricane and the first to reappear after the storm."

One more...The hippest looking beer I know is Brother Thelonious Belgian Abbey Ale. The better half just ran across a web reference to it (on Cafe Aman), so at the local liquor emporium we picked up a bottle. Proceeds go to the T. Monk Insitute of Jazz. Drink and support music education? Alright, I will!

On this day (musically)

2007-08-10T08:27:00.000-05:00

Into the world: Praetorius, William Henry Fry, Glazunov, Leo Fender, Giya Kancheli, Ronnie Spector, Ian Anderson, yours truly (in a year ending with a 7), and -- apparently -- The Standing Room. Happy birthday, TSR!
non-musical bonus: the Smithsonian Institution, Angie Harmon

Out of the world: Michael Haydn, Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Conlon Nancarrow (10 years ago).
non-musical bonus: the city of Nineveh, Rin Tin Tin

Other: oddly enough, on the same date 481 years apart, Magellan leaves port in Seville to circumnavigate the globe (1509), and the NASA space probe named for him lands on Venus to begin imaging its surface. Cool.

Thanks to wikipedia & Composers Datebook for the mix of interesting and worthless information.

Spiderpig

2007-07-26T20:53:00.000-05:00

It's possible that there's nothing I will enjoy more in The Simpsons Movie than this bit with Homer and the Spiderpig. In fact, few things this year may amuse me more (that do not originate with the better half, of course). I'm refraining from saying "tickled pink"--not only would it be a bad pun, but none of my local readers would really believe it. The better half's had to listen to me sing "spider pig, spider pig, does whatever a spider pig does" all week long.

UPDATE: The infection spreads to SF! with dividends here! M. C— of The Standing Room is hooked & has found the entire clip--with a line of song that's not from the trailers. I won't spoil it for you (oh, it's good...), but I did switch clips below. Thanks M. C—, hope you're not still singing this and driving OMC nutty over the next week.

Now that I think about, I also enjoy the bit during Pat Nixon's tour in Act 2 of Nixon in China with the "pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig pig" patter. In the production here Pat scratched a couple of fake pigs on the ear whereupon said fake pigs jittered up and down excitedly--very endearing.

Nixon

2007-07-16T19:15:00.000-05:00

Mixed reviews from this weekend's performances of John Adams's Nixon in China at the Cincinnati Opera (a local premiere). Among friends, profs, and acquaintances there was a fairly wide variety from "not really blown away" to excited with one or two caveats. I think I'm alone at the most satisifed end of the scale, so much so that I went both nights.

~~The~~ One local paper of record* didn't care for the production (the same one done in Chicago last year) but thought the orchestra played fantastically--which was not the case on the night that was reviewed. Both nights, Kristjan Järvi (brother of Paavo, son of Neeme) was completely up to the task of conducting, but it wasn't til that second performance that the orchestra gelled.

Robert Orth as Nixon & Chen-Ye Yuan as Chou En-Lai were the only two holdovers from the Chicago production. Orth is great as Nixon, acting convincingly with his body, speech, and singing. This is the first American opera I've ever seen live, and it's nice to be conversant in the language being sung, to recognize from the gut instead of academically when the composer and performer understand and deliver the nuances--of inflection, rhythm, expression--of their characters. That as much as anything makes a powerful argument for staging more American operas.

Speaking of staging...it's generally OK for 3/4 of the show, with TV monitors aglow throughout showing loops of (apparently recently declassified) film from Nixon's visit. But the last scenes still don't come off; is there an effective way to stage this?

My favorite role in Nixon is Chou En-lai. He gets the most poetically-resonant lines in Nixon, including the last: Outside this room the chill of grace/Lies heavy on the morning grass. I can overlook all the clunky staging of the final scenes knowing that line is coming as world leaders are (literally) stripped down to their core humanity. The live performance has changed at least one (professorial) mind about the third act. Can you credit Chen-Ye Yuan with a large part of that? I do.

What else? Georgia Jarman nailed the fireworks in "I Am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung"; Pat Nixon (Maureen O'Flynn) was affecting...Oh yeah, no fuselage of "The Spirit of '76"--the most iconic image of the original production. That was disappointing, but now that I look at a couple pictures I can see how it overwhelms the scene...but still...

aworks's Nixon posts * Cinti Opera's production page

* From the comments Mary Ellyn Hutton notes that there are 2 dailies operating in Cincinnati, and that the alt-weekly sent out a reviewer, too. I didn't know the Post had a regular critic, and I'm glad to now. Thanks Mary Ellyn, nice to meet you.

Other reviews: Mary Ellyn (via her site MusicinCincinnati.com) * CityBeat

Postscript to Nixon

2007-07-16T19:00:00.000-05:00

The image of Nixon and Mao playing ping-pong comes from a website called--and full of nothing but-- Celebrities Playing Table Tennis. Pliable at On an Overgrown Path put up a photo of Schoenberg. Erich Leinsdorf is kicking up his heels here. The Rita Hayworth shots ain't bad either.

In the comments at Overgrown Path, I linked to one of my favorite composer pictures on the web: a shot of Villa-Lobos shooting billiards, lining up a behind-the-back shot with a cigar in his mouth and his hat pushed back on his head. Follow the thumbnail to where it's housed--KUSF radio's "Classics without Walls" show.

That's right -- two posts in one day! Is the blog on a comeback? Don't bet on it, but we'll see.

Ashes to ashes, eh?

2007-03-08T14:36:00.000-06:00

The end of history is, alas, also the end of the dustbins of history. There are no longer any dustbins for disposing of old ideologies, old regimes, old values. Where are we going to throw Marxism, which actually invented the dustbins of history? (Yet there is some justice here since the very people who invented them have fallen in.) Conclusion: if there are no more dustbins of history, this is because History itself has become a dustbin. It has become its own dustbin, just as the planet itself is becoming its own dustbin.

Jean Baudrillard - 20 June 1926 - 6 March 2007

(heads up via modal minority)

E.L. Doctorow on film

2007-02-25T09:46:00.000-06:00

"That pictograms, whether corporately or privately produced, may eventually unseat linguistic composition as the major communicative act of our culture is a prospect I find only slightly less dire than global warming."

- NYT 15 Mar 1999

Yup, still here

2007-02-06T21:05:00.000-06:00

It's been so long since I looked at my own blog I even forgot about the turkeys. Man, did I get a kick outta them (and still do).

Hiatus resumes...

Poorly Representing

2006-11-26T20:48:00.000-06:00

With all of the hiatuses this blog goes on, it might seem like either a) nothing goes on here in Cincinnati; or b) I don't get out much. While (b) is often true, (a) is not. 2006 has been a pretty decent year for classical concerts in Cincinnati (product-wise, that is; I'm in no position to judge the general health of the various institutions). I've been to some really excellent concerts - with new music well represented on the programs - and I've had to miss out on a ton more. So by way of making up for lost blogs, watch this space for an incomplete list of good stuff that I've attended this year.

Turkey Invasion!!!

2006-11-22T17:39:00.000-06:00

I'm thankful ...

for you, dear reader,

for the writers of the blogosphere,

for tasty fowl,

for the many musics being made in this world,

for the better half,

for lots of other things that need no enumeration here.

May your t-giving equal or surpass ours.

Trees + Sun

2006-10-19T21:36:00.000-05:00

Portland, OR - September '06

Thinking green to stave off Fall in the Midwest...

Favorite Google Searches

2006-10-10T21:19:00.000-05:00

"ives supply belcher" - fed this one into Google tonight looking to see if the old Maine (by way of Massachusetts) tunesmith had been one of Ives's sources.

The search was unfruitful, btw - I'll have to wait til I get into the library to confirm or deny.

18 Musicians and Siren

2006-09-06T16:07:00.000-05:00

The first Wednesday of every month--at noon--Cincinnati tests its ~~air raid~~ tornado warning sirens. Today's test went off while I was listening to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians. The siren snuck in right behind the pulsing clarinets* during Section V (the one based on the Violin Phase pattern). If I hadn't been looking at the score and paying attention at the time it probably would've taken me a while to realize the sound was external.

At that thought my sick little brain started free associating. I pictured a group of blissed out '70s kids sitting around the living room listening to the Reich on vinyl while the Cold War escalated sci-fi style. Unaware of the wailing sirens**, they didn't know what hit 'em when they were vaporized a la War of the Worlds ('50s version) or Repo Man (see photo); there were some obligatory wisps of smoke and a little ash settled on the still-spinning turntable.

Thus is my time spent while waiting for classes to start back up.

* Give a listen to the opening Pulses for an idea of what this sounds like if you're unfamiliar.
** If I were trying to be artful these would be klaxons.

for john

2006-07-31T18:40:00.000-05:00

Counterpoint and dissonance are the cables on which Mozart’s bridges to paradise hang.
- Alex Ross

A beautiful line. Someday I hope I can write half as well.

Now, for john [in Red Stripe commercial form]:
"Boo abusive musicologist.
Hooray beer!"

To the surface

2006-07-28T21:38:00.000-05:00

DO NOT ADJUST YOUR MIND:
IT IS REALITY THAT IS MALFUNCTIONING

- reassuring words from Robert Anton Wilson

Before he was tricky...

2006-05-24T06:02:00.000-05:00

Alex Ross rounds up the reviews coming out of Chicago for Chicago Opera Theater's run of Nixon in China by John Adams. Cincinnati Opera will put on the same production next summer (2007). I am looking forward to it; somehow this will be the first 20th century opera I've ever seen on stage.

Link to photo: Nixon whispers sweet nothings into the ear of a pouty Kissinger.

Miscellany

2006-05-13T09:40:00.000-05:00

For about 15 mins. this morning, I planned a trip to Sante Fe to catch the American premiere of Adès's The Tempest and the premiere of a commission by Magnus Lindberg at the SF Chamber Music Festival. This was before I remembered that I'm still in grad school. Even hitchhiking would cost too much. The first job I get, though, I'm establishing a travel budget for just this kind of thing. Thankfully the blogosphere should produce a variety of reactions.

Esa-Pekka Salonen's piano piece Dichotomie isn't available on a CD, but I recently discovered a performance by Yefim Bronfman that was released as an iTunes bonus track to the Wing on Wing album.

DG Concerts has released a third LA Philharmonic performance of Beethoven and Lutoslawski via iTunes. Unfortunately, you can't just purchase the Lutoslawski Symphony #4. I'm a little miffed by this - do I really want to download Beethoven's 5th and Leonore #2? As yet undecided.

The home team is picking up some good reviews for a new CD of the Concertos for Orchestra by Lutosławski & Bartók with Music Director Paavo Järvi.

Googling "kill bernard holland" doesn't yield much, but change "kill" to "die" and an old thread from Opera-l appears with the subject "Bernard Holland must die." This search was prompted by his latest groaner, reviewing a concert by Mitsuko Uchida.

A Visit from Mr. Noise

2006-05-08T16:08:00.000-05:00

Many thanks to Alex Ross for swinging through the Queen City last weekend. Hope we didn't scare you too much, Alex. And let me know what you think of The Beastmaster so I can pass it along to everyone else who was at dinner Friday. (Oh my, there's a Wikipedia entry for The Beastmaster. Yippee.)

Overheard in my apartment

2006-04-25T22:22:00.000-05:00

"Machaut was such a stud."

- the better half

From the Composer's Mouth

2006-04-18T14:03:00.000-05:00

"There was a time when gods walked the earth, and everyone had to confront what those gods--Stravinsky, Schoenberg--were doing. There are no gods around now, and I think that's really liberating. Philip Glass has his solutions and Boulez and Ligeti have their solutions, and they're not intended to work for others, which makes it a wonderful time to be a composer. That said, because many of my teachers had the beliefs that came from that time, my music is tremendously structured, controlled, and mathematically generated. No one would ever know that, because I don't want them to know; my structures are hidden, but I am the bastard grandchild of a certain tradition in music."

- David Lang in Theater 30/2 (2000)

Good Times

2006-04-18T13:27:00.000-05:00

Apparently, it's a good time to be in non-pop music in general:

With all of the articles we read these days about the declining popularity of classical music, the fact is that we are living at a time when a new generation of great performers, conductors and composers, like John Adams, Thomas Adès, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Alarm Will Sound, the Arditti Quartet, Bang on a Can, Ian Bostridge, Osvaldo Golijov, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, Gidon Kremer, the Kronos Quartet, Simon Rattle, David Robertson, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Dawn Upshaw and many others, (disclosure: some of these artists have recorded for my company) are participating in the creation of a new and original classical music landscape, one that belongs to its generation, just as the classical world of Bernstein, Horowitz, Karajan and Rubinstein belonged to its generation. It is a thrilling time to be a part of the classical music audience.
- Richard Hurwitz, president of Nonesuch Records [NYT via Alex Ross & TSR]

And then there's the spiffy news about LA Phil distributing concert recordings via iTunes (and in conjunction with Deutsche Grammophon). For a long time I though musicians union concerns would make this kind of thing unlikely at best. Particularly heartening here is the fact that the two recordings currently available were posted within a week of the performances. This is the kind of immediacy that classical music institutions need to capture. The better half and I were excited last summer when the Proms broadcasts were availble on demand for a week after each performance. Another NYT article summarizes classical (orchestral) music for download. (This is a couple weeks old, so you may have already seen this, but I'm running behind in my extracurricular activities these days.)

The Internet is increasing the demand for lightning in a bottle - this should hardly be news. If I read about a premiere or event at an orchestra, I want to be able to hear what I missed. It's only natural. It seems like opera could stand to do more along these lines, too, especially considering the lag time and geographical distance between productions. Dr. Atomic, Lysistrata, Ainadamar, and Adriana Mater may be distant memories of unheard pieces by the time a production comes near or a recording comes out, but I'd consider buying an EP's worth of material from the first or second runs of these new operas to get a chance to hear what they sound like.

But we're getting there, and the wave of optimism (no matter how tenuous) that's going around is refreshing.

Meanwhile, in California...

2006-02-10T15:55:00.000-06:00

In a recent discussion elsewhere, I waxed ecstatic regarding the LA Philharmonic’s programming. They’ve apparently released the 2006/07 season schedule (which I can’t find yet). Sequenza 21 has a summary, and it looks damn good. Once again, LA is doing some of the most exciting orchestra programs in this country, with a serious commitment to new music and cool events like a reprise of the “Tristan Project.” Makes me wish I lived on the left coast. I’m just a poor grad student, but I may have to break the bank next season. It’s hurting me enough to miss out on the current season. (This weekend, Thomas Adès is on the bill. *sigh*)

The Weight of History

2006-02-10T12:41:00.000-06:00

The NYT's review of a show of early Frank Stella gets into some interesting territory related to art historicism:

"Frank Stella 1958" suggests, completely inadvertently, that the obscurity of the [historically significant] Black Paintings may be partly their own fault. They and Mr. Stella's subsequent striped shaped paintings are the most implacable and withholding of his production and, in many ways, the least characteristic of his sensibility. They are handsome works of great historical weight, but they don't seem to have held the artist's interest for very long, so why should they hold ours? All the more reason to examine what came before the Black Paintings, to better fathom what followed them.

Paik

2006-02-04T08:28:00.000-06:00

Nam June Paik, 1932-2006.

The New York Times printed/posted a nice appreciation of Paik, who died Sunday, Jan. 29, in Miami Beach. (There are worse places from which to pass on.)

In the heyday of Fluxus, Paik was one of the crazier avant-garde buggers out there. His "Creep into the vagina of a living whale" is aptly notorious. In reaction to Paik, John Cage reportedly wondered whether he had had any entirely savory influence on the younger genertaion.

Paik got hooked on the technology of television and created a series of works involving TV screens. The more famous involved cellist Charlotte Moorman, often in some state of undress. Below is the classic "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" (1969). Beyond the wackiness, Paik seems to have been clued in to some very significant realizations concerning how television was rewiring our brains and skewing what little sense of the great high/low divide was still left. After skimming the gallery at his studio website, I'm particularly fond of "Video-Buddha" from 1976 (above).

Wednesday Blues

2006-01-11T21:54:00.000-06:00

...No, I'm not back from suspended animation to gripe and moan. I'm here to say a quick congrats to Bryant over at Mysteries Abysmal, who has recently joined the ranks of volunteer radio hosts across the country. The folks who do this kind of thing offer the most free-wheeling terrestrial radio around. They're to be applauded and their stations supported. Bryant does classical on Sundays on Radio DePaul (Chicago); this entry on his blog includes a link to station and his first show's playlist. Way to go!

One of the precious few highlights of my first attempt to live in the Midwest was my time on-air at WEFT 90.1, in Champaign, IL. WEFT is one of the rare stations in the country that is community owned, volunteer operated. No sponsors, no commercials, no paid DJs, and - best of all - no program directors. The only mandate was that you stick (mostly) to the format of the show you were running. I walked in one day, chatted up the airshifter, and had my first training session within a week. Before long I was a regular, playing the blues every Wednesday, 11:30a-2:00p. Man, I miss that.

Good luck Bryant! Before you know it, running the booth will be smooth as silk.

(Un)favorite things

2005-11-22T06:44:00.000-06:00

My new least favorite word is "accumulation." Even in the context of "...but there won't be enough for accumulation," it makes me grit my teeth.

Return of the Blogger

2005-11-07T18:55:00.000-06:00

Now that Halloween has passed I'm dusting the cobwebs off of the blog. (I was cultivating them here for decoration - yeah, that's the ticket.)

Sadly, I haven't been to as many concerts as I would have wanted at this point. When I have gone (Ian Bostridge, Tokyo Quartet) I've been so exhausted as to only be able to listen with a small part of my musical brain. It doesn't seem fair to comment on a performance under those conditions.

Politics weighs on me.
I do want to mention the first Cincinnati Symphony weekend of the year, which happened back in September. Beethoven's 9th, Paavo Järvi, full house. Good stuff, but as frequently happens to me during the 9th, my mind wandered in the finale.

In this case, I found myself scanning the audience for black faces. When I didn't see any - in a city whose population is at least 40% African-American - all of the high flown idealism about universal brotherhood in Beethoven/Schiller's "Ode to Joy" rang hollow. It's hard to imagine any other sampling of 3,000 Cincinnatians being less racially diverse.

The burgeoning citizen in me can't quite reconcile the city's artistic strengths with its economic struggles and the racial tension that thrums in every neighborhood. Can Cincinnati really afford to fund the arts with so many socio-political issues making it an undesirable place to live?* (Ads for one mayoral candidate claim that 11 people move out of town every day.)

At this point I become very torn. I don't like the obvious answer: no. And I don't have strong enough arguments for the arts. Aesthetic worth, cultural health of the community, etc., all pale when half the black population has been officially boycotting the city since 2001. The question of who the arts are for starts to loom awfully large under these circumstances.**

The Butterworth angle.
In a related vein, I'm disturbed these days by the bottle of Mrs. Butterworth's in my cabinet. After the first few times I had syrup, I noticed that Mrs. B was losing her dusky brown color; underneath, the bottle's plastic is clear. Is Mrs. Butterworth so threatening, too strong a black figure to be nourishing America's breakfast table? Or am I being too sensitive in thinking that her racial heritage is being seriously, insidiously undermined?

* Personally, I've been charmed by the Queen City since we moved here. The landscape and architecture are beautiful, even in the run down parts of town I've been in.
** Greg Sandow's new online book-in-progress is titled "The Future of Classical Music?" I hope he gets into some of these issues. The future's short and bleak if they aren't met head-on.

Checked in...

2005-09-14T10:46:00.000-05:00

...but not completely settled in yet. We hope to have some internet up and running by the end of the week. Blog neglect will cease soon after.

Best wishes to all affected by Katrina. My grandmother's house in Miami got hit while it was still a baby hurricane. We got off easy.

A Classical Music Survivor

2005-08-25T09:13:00.000-05:00

If I cannot remember everything it is because, as Schoenberg so brilliantly understood, life's most intense experiences survive in two forms of memory - as general impression and as sliver-sharp fragments, like shattered glass.

Norman Lebrecht reminds us that when he's not scrawling doomsday prophicies* he sure can write about the music. It would be nice to see him scale back the polemics and promote all the good things going on in classical music.

* "The end is extremely fucking nigh," written on a church wall in zombified London in 28 Days Later, should be in Lebrecht's handwriting.

Tech Ubiquity...

2005-08-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

...has gone too far. I just watched a man take his laptop into the bathroom at a coffeeshop. There's no table in there, so one or both of them's coming out unwashed.

<resume pause>

2005-08-03T23:00:00.000-05:00

This unannounced pause in posting has been brought to you by a looming move 1,050 miles to the north-northeast. Though we are early in the packing phase yet*, there is much to do and none of it makes for interesting blog copy. This pause is in your best interest, dear reader.

Coming in September: Jason tries to become the good graduate student he never was; Jason assists in teaching material that he's only slightly familiar with; Jason faces winter above the Mason-Dixon line; Jason and EKB stalk Cincinnati Symphony music director Paavo Järvi. Stay tuned!

PS- The slogan above is *not* made up. Cincinnati actually has an anti-litter campaign that commands, "Don't Trash the 'Nati." (I've seen the signs myself.) I don't know how this goes in town, but it misses the hip mark for me. The instant association with Natty Light, the college freshman's beer of choice (at least in the South), doesn't help.

* EKB is in the packing phase...I only have a couple things in boxes.

Fitzcarraldo

2005-07-18T20:24:00.000-05:00

Another tangentially on-topic film went into the old DVD player the other night: Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).

Klaus Kinski plays an obsessive visionary kook (shades of José Arcadio Buendía from One Hundred Years of Solitude, but with a crazed intensity that radiates from Kinski's every movement) with a passion for grand opera. An appearance by Enrico Caruso and Sarah Bernhardt at the Teatros Amazonas in Manaus stokes his latest dream: to build an opera house in the town further in the jungle’s interior in which he lives, and to have Caruso sing at the opening.

Fitzcarraldo doesn't really grasp the distance between dream and reality, a distance made vaster by the audacity of his visions. To make the money for his opera house, he enters the rubber business, optioning a plot of land made inaccessible by treacherous rapids and unfriendly natives. He hires his crew from the motley collection of laborers who are unemployed during boom times. Fitzcarraldo’s planned route to his land is virtually impossible. The whole project is ill-advised and destined for disaster.*

While the crew carries various guns and knives, Fitzcarraldo is armed with a stack of Caruso records and an unshakeable belief in his dream. When war drums echo through the jungle, he responds by cranking up his Victrola and serenading the natives with Verdi. And it works. (To Herzog’s credit the native tribe that Fitzcarraldo encounters is treated sensitively and with intelligence. They never become a surrogate for a lost Western ideal, and their motives remain their own even as they undertake the bizarrely ~~impossible~~ improbable task of hauling a steamship over a mountain.)

The movie has a great many scenes that are breathtakingly beautiful: huge old-growth rainforest trees crash into a river; a steamship emerges from dissipating fog at a 45-degree angle on the mountainside; the ship slams through an unnavigable stretch of rapids; plus the innumerable gorgeous shots of the Amazonian basin. The on-location scenery is large part of the mixture of reality and hallucination that makes the film spellbinding.

* To skim articles online, the same could be said for Herzog’s movie. It was shot on location, with real Indians, a histrionic leading man, a maniacal director and the Herculean labor at the heart of the film. There’s also a documentary called The Burden of Dreams (which I’m looking forward to tracking down) that details the “fever dream” of making Fitzcarraldo.

Dodge This

2005-07-18T19:17:00.000-05:00

On a side note, one of Fitzcarraldo’s Caruso records is the famous “Vesti la giubba” from I Pagliacci. That recording is the source material for Charles Dodge’s piano + tape composition Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental, which has to rank near the top of any list of “fun electro-acoustic pieces.”

The pianist begins as Caruso’s accompanist, but as the piece progresses there are episodes of quasi-improvisational give and take and a passage of the arrangement for solo piano with obbligato processed Caruso. The game of humor (and gentle mockery) takes a twist to pathos in the coda, recasting the emotional payoff of one of the most clichéd moments in grand opera - the big climax at “Ridi, Pagliacco.” You can listen to the entire piece (8 minutes) at Art of the States.

Cheap or classy? You decide.

2005-07-18T18:38:00.000-05:00

Pottery Barn cultivates the dead-stick aesthetic.

Trois couleurs

2005-07-13T12:16:00.002-05:00

Easily the most productive thing I did during my week of temporary bachelorhood was visit ye olde local video store to rent Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors. Each film – Blue, White, and Red – represents an aspect of the tricolor French flag: liberté, egalité, fraternité. The colors appear symbolically throughout, often used enigmatically but also with a welcome subtlety. Despite the abstract concept Kieslowski deals with people – real, fully drawn characters, their relationships, and emotions. Liberté is explored via isolation; egalité is a battle of mutual humiliation; and Red finds fraternité that begins with invasions of privacy.

Part of the joy for me in Three Colors (besides the three beautiful women cast in each movie) is that composed music is significant in Kieslowski’s world. It isn’t used as window dressing or in a cheaply manipulative way; unhinged psychopaths aren’t the only ones who appreciate Bach or the Symphonie fantastique. Zbigniew Preisner's scores are woven into the fabric of the films as an important part of people’s lives.

Juliette Binoche’s husband in Blue is a composer who is considered a national treasure. When he dies in a car wreck, his death is mourned by an entire country awaiting his next work. (Whether Boulez would have allowed another composer – and a tonal one! – such ascendancy in France without towing the avant-garde line doesn’t come up in the film.) Binoche’s character tries to block out music as part of the isolation she builds to hold off - or hold in - her grief. The music invades her attempted solitude, and eventually becomes an agent for her future healing.

Irène Jacob’s character in Red is moved to tears by music she comes across on the radio, eventually finding the recording in a store. The music – by a fictional Dutch composer Van den Budenmayer* – is a connection she shares (unbeknownst to her) with an eavesdropping former judge whom she befriends. The character Valentin is a kind of stand-in for open-hearted innocence that Kieslowski suggests is an integral aspect (buried under deep cynicism in the judge) of fraternité. When the music affects her, it touches that part in all of us.

Classical music has less of a direct role in White, though the main composition – a tango for string sextet (reminiscent in spirit and scoring of Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir of Florence) – gives a vital clue to Kieslowski’s approach to the concept of egalité.

* Kieslowski and Preisner invented Van den Budenmayer as an in-joke, making him Dutch simply because they liked Holland. Apparently Kieslowski was always pleased when people asked where they could find recordings of Van den Budenmayer’s music, and Preisner actually fielded allegations that he had plagiarized the composer he helped make up.

Brush with fame

2005-06-25T23:11:00.000-05:00

Last time I was in Prague, I met The White Stripes.

At the time, the Stripes were just hitting radio with the single for “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground,” and no one else in our group had really heard much of them. I knew just enough to expect the Jack and Meg White on the CD covers.*

Contrary to my expectations, the members of the band we met were two (wild and crazy) heavy-set, drunken mittel-europäische guys. They were very nice, especially Jack. They bought us drinks and tried to pick up our women. I asked after Meg and was disappointed to hear we had just missed her.

* The real Jack White should reconsider his look from the new album; getting a little too close to Michael Jackson. Meg works; she looks like she stepped out of Interview with the Vampire.

Praha

2005-06-23T23:59:00.000-05:00

My lady arrived in Prague today – without me.

I love the city, but I have a one-sided view of it. Having only ever been in July*, my Prague is the restored Baroque jewel of Malá Strana, Old Town Square and the castle area. The hills, parks and gardens are at their greenest and Smetana’s Vltava plays on a permanent mental loop.

Someday we’ll get out there in the winter so I can round out the picture with Kafka’s Prague – walk the streets in deep gloaming, visit the Museum of Torture Instruments, and hit the S&M clubs in Nové Město.

*High tourist season, unfortunately.

Dancing with B.D.

2005-06-23T23:18:00.000-05:00

The better half has gone to compete in the Internat’l Rudolf Firkušný Piano Competition. (Best of luck!) Not surprisingly, Czech music figures in the Firkušný’s requirements. The competition is sponsored in part by the Smetana Music Society, and Bedřich* specifically gets quite a bit of attention.

Smetana was a top-flight pianist. In his early years he campaigned to be a Czech Liszt** and was successful enough that his composing career sometimes got pushed to the shadows. Like Beethoven, Smetana’s hearing deteriorated over time (he dramatized the onset of deafness in the String Quartet “From My Life”). By the late 1870’s, when he wrote his Czech Dances, he couldn’t hear at all.

The Czech Dances are the peak of Smetana’s piano output and probably the best Czech (solo) piano music before Janáček. They’re in two sets. The first contains four Polkas; the second set, with ten pieces, uses a variety of dances and folk melodies as its basis. The dances have none of the desolation found in the last movement of the E minor Quartet. Instead, they are more like Ma Vlast – sparkling music inspired by the composer’s homeland. To quote an Amazon reviewer: “I love the freshness and spontaneity of Smetana, the nationalist elements displayed naturally and with pride but without descending to mannerisms.”

The piano writing is technically difficult, with a lot of variety throughout the set. There are effective showpieces (the Furiant is my favorite), melting tunes, and sprightly dances in abundance. Pianists interested in getting beyond the standard 19th-century rep. would do well to look into the Czech Dances.

* B.D. to his friends. The picture is me and B.D. kicking it by the river in ’02.
** I knew a pun on ‘czech’ would slip through. The double pun is a bonus.

Om

2005-06-20T16:31:00.000-05:00

I visited the Rothko Chapel* for a while this morning in an attempt to soothe some inner torment.

I don’t meditate, though I have managed to have some meditative experiences while listening to recorded music. (I seem to remember some of the earliest accompanied by Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets.) I’m not religious or particularly spiritual, either; most of the profound moments of my life have come alone outdoors or at concerts (another variety of alone). But things in my mind had gotten tangled into knots and sometimes anything's worth a try.

The chapel opened as a non-sectarian meditation space in 1971. It is an austere octagonal room dominated by grays of all tint and depth. Indirect sunlight from above lights the room brightly on clear days like this one. There are fourteen large Rothko canvasses on the walls, most in dark slate. The north wall is the nominal front of the chapel with a triptych whose center painting is a huge rectangular purple bruise.

On first sight, the Rothkos might seem to be solid colors. But they’ve been painted; they have texture, irregularities, varied hues. Hanging for thirty-five years has given some wave to the canvases, too. So there’s a lot to look at in these paintings.

Sitting in front of Rothko’s mammoth black and purple windows, I couldn't go blank. My mind wrote a running commentary. I tried to stop it, but I’m so used to journalizing my thoughts that I couldn’t.

Unable to turn my mind off or channel my thoughts, I stared ahead at Rothko’s monoliths. After a while, something looked back at me. From the purple panel emerged something like a crude straight-line drawing of a voudon spirit or an Afro-Cuban orisha. The bruised face watched me, annoyed. My foot fell asleep.

A couple came in. He led a circuit of the room, taking in the Rothkos as museum pieces. She followed in flip-flops. (I had worn flip-flops, too, but mine were off and hers were flapping.) After noting that all of the Rothkos looked basically the same and spotting the cushions on the floor for meditating, he decided to sit down. The cushions were spaced apart, so she took up one on the opposite side. Seated on the floor, he lost his self-assurance. They looked furtively at each other. He looked at Rothko; she continued to look at him. Within a minute they were gone. You could almost see them cross the item off a list: ~~Rothko Chapel.~~

I was there for a reason. I was searching for peace - or direction, or something. As it turns out, you can't search for peace. I didn’t answer any lingering questions of existence, either. But some anger melted away and I did stop some of the voices in my head, which had been getting frenzied.

Clouds dimmed the incoming light. The gray room took on a glower, foreshadowing Northern winters to come. When the sun came back, a new purple shape foregrounded in the center panel: female lips, broadly shaped into a grin, with dancing eyes above. I left calm with hope for renewal.

* I'm embarrased to add here that I have not yet heard Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel.

Housekeeping

2005-06-18T19:35:00.000-05:00

Did some expanding of the links on the sidebar. Added several great blogs that should've been on the blogroll (In the Wings*, On an Overgrown Path, vilaine fille, twang twang twang, etc.). Women are much better represented now. You want more blogs? Get 'em somewhere else! (Like Alex Ross's side bar or TSR's Les rouleau des blagues.)

Also, I've been playing with del.icio.us and set up a feed further down the sidebar. I still want to do some tinkering with the look of the blog, but that may take me a while as I really don't know what I'm doing. Everything you see up here now is the result of muddling.

*One of Heather's many highlights is this dialogue between Evgeny Kissin and his manager.

In Brief: barmusic

2005-06-18T17:13:00.000-05:00

Somehow I never managed to scrawl* a few words about the barmusic concert a couple weeks back. I didn’t go in with reviewer’s ears on, but there’s still no good reason for this neglect, especially as EKB and I enjoyed the concert.

It was a grab-bag of a program. Almost all of the music seemed to revel in the act of performance, from Erwin Schulhoff’s 1925 Duo for Violin and ‘Cello to pieces from the postminimal repertoire of the Robin Cox Ensemble by Cox and Joseph Koykkar. Shaun Tilburg threw himself into the role of musician/actor for Songs I-IX by Stuart Saunders Smith, a mix of Gertrude Stein-like textual absurdisms and John Cage’s kitchen sink percussion works. The Rosta Jazz Avengers had a brief set that consisted of a long-limbed free composition and a short (and less-successful) tune.

Only Ligeti’s short Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg leaned more toward the “composerly,” though in its intricate polyphony of double- and triple-stops the piece did draw attention to the amazingly broad sound produced by the two strings. Its intense brevity made a good excuse to hear the work twice, leading off each half of the program. The two members of the Enso Quartet who played the Ligeti created an engrossing sound world that seemed to stretch time; I was shocked to see the piece clock in at only 1’09” on the CD I have at home.

The laid-back and involved crowd at the Axiom, a roadhouse-cum-indy theater space with a ramshackle wooden bar in one corner and the stage in another, made for a nice change from most of the concerts I’ve been to this past year. And I’m fully in favor of “drinks allowed” concerts.

Marching toward Gilead

2005-06-15T16:41:00.000-05:00

Links re: the U.S. House Appropriations Committee’s movements on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. NYT, editorial. And Bill Moyers on CPB Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson. Update: More from NYT on Tomlinson & CPB internal politics. #2: NPR reports [6/17] that the House reinstated future CPB funding that was to have been zereoed - but not until 2008; FY06 cuts (over 25%) remain intact.

Arts groups should keep a careful eye on how CPB’s dismantling affects public broadcast institutions. With every cultural dollar contentiously vied for, losing 15% of a budget - about what PBS relies on from CPB - can be crippling. PBS's situation will become even more precarious when the individual stations are forced to make hard decisions about what they can afford to show. How will PBS retool? Will it be able to recast itself as a new type of institution if it comes down to it?

These are the same considerations arts institutions should be gearing up to face. An extended neo-con dynasty will get around to putting the NEA on the chopping block before long, too. Drew McManus is constantly noting that arts managers e-mail him with comments about his blog, Adaptistration. I wonder if any of them are taking up his advice. Certainly I hope they’re working on contingency plans for when arts funding patterns we’re accustomed to change.
--------
Margaret Atwood once said, “I delayed writing [The Handmaid’s Tale] for about three years after I got the idea because I felt it was too crazy.” Then changes began and extrapolating to the dystopian version of the U.S. she called Gilead seemed more plausible. This is in the early ‘80s. With 20 years of momentum leading up to today, the force of the neo-con movement is petrifying.
--------
Also, I recently heard the first half of Poul Ruders’s opera The Handmaid’s Tale via OperaCast [via vilaine fille]. It’s really good. I intend to snap it up when/if it comes out on DVD.

Strange Fruit

2005-06-14T21:18:00.000-05:00

Resolved, That the Senate--

(1) apologizes to the victims of lynching for the failure of the Senate to enact anti-lynching legislation;

(2) expresses the deepest sympathies and most solemn regrets of the Senate to the descendants of victims of lynching, the ancestors of whom were deprived of life, human dignity, and the constitutional protections accorded all citizens of the United States; and

(3) remembers the history of lynching, to ensure that these tragedies will be neither forgotten nor repeated.

The Senate passed this resolution Monday by voice vote. Reports are that the resolution had only about 80 signatures. Shameful. There should have been a roll call, with every Senator standing up to not only vote ‘aye,’ but to recite these words and apologize to the country. The House passed anti-lynching legislation several times over the years; when measures reached the Senate floor they were killed off by conservative, white Southerners via – wait for it – the filibuster. Shameful.

The NewsHour presented a powerful interview Monday (read, listen or watch it here) with the great, great granddaughter of one Anthony Crawford, who was lynched in 1916. Mr. Crawford was a black landowner, an active citizen and patriarch of a strong South Carolina family. He was arrested for cursing a white man, in a brawl caused by Crawford's unwillingness to accept an unfair price on his crop of cotton seed.

And all the Senate could do was apologize 90 years later for its ignoble impotence.

By the way, if you don't know the chilling Billie Holiday song Strange Fruit, read here and seek out a recording.

Baah

2005-06-03T21:28:00.000-05:00

Just released: eighth blackbird’s newest is an all-Frederic Rzewski disc featuring the Pocket Symphony – which has made Lawrence Dillon’s 111+ Influential Works list despite this being the first available recording. Also on the disc are two of his early classics, Les Moutons de Panurge (hence the sheep on the cover) and Coming Together.

Cedille Records’s page for the CD has some enjoyable discussion between Rzewski and eighth blackbird. I love this exchange about the melody for Les Moutons:

Rzewski: I remember I was walking down the street in Paris near the Ecole Militaire [in September of 1968] and I had just bought one of these Philips micro-cassette recorders. They had just come out. And I was having fun, just, you know, playing with it. And I was walking down the street and I just whistled this tune [ … ]

Matt Albert: And that’s just the tune, as it occurred to you, as you wrote it?
FR: Completely. That tune is absolutely what I whistled walking down the street.

MA: Really?
FR: I didn’t change it at all.
MA: You whistled a 65-note tune…
FR: Yes
MA: …In f minor slash major?
FR: Yes.
MA: Okay. (laughter)
FR: Yes, and then I transcribed it. And I think of course, I’ve lost the original recording.
MA: Of you whistling?
FR: Yeah, I don’t know what happened to it.
Molly Barth: That’s too bad.
MA: That would be fun.

Robert Gable has aworks pages for Les Moutons and Coming Together. Here's a program note for the Pocket Symphony by the composer.

* This picture of Rzewski has always looked to me like actor Jonathan Pryce in a wind machine.

Concert Anncemt: barmusic Saturday

2005-06-02T22:06:00.000-05:00

Andrea Moore, Houston-area percussionist and IASIAR reader*, sent me the following announcement:

barmusic 2005 presents music by Erwin Schulhoff, Gyorgy Ligeti, Robin Cox, Joseph Koykkar and Stuart Saunders Smith.

Featuring Houston ensemble The Rosta Jazz Avengers playing original music and music by Brandon Ross.

Saturday, June 4 at 8:00 PM, The Axiom, 2425 McKinney - $10 at the door. For information, call 713-522-5356.

Come on out & support live new/contemporary music.

* I just found out - it's kind of bizarre to suddenly consider the readers you didn't even know you had. <maniacal laughter> My public! </maniacal laughter>

Meme Too

2005-06-02T17:21:00.000-05:00

Picking up on a current meme:

Total volume of music on my computer. Laptop: 9.44 GB in 1,940 “songs.” Desktop: 7.13 GB in 1,593 files.

Last CD I bought. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Wing on Wing. Sadly my finances this year have kept me out of the CD store (PS – Houston has a classical-dedicated CD store. It’s true! Joel’s Classical Shop at the corner of Bissonnet & Wesleyan.)

Fortunately, I’ve been able to continue exploring music lists* thanks to Rice University’s Music Library. Currently out on loan: Michael Finnissy, Etched Bright with Sunlight; Mangus Lindberg, Kraft & Piano Concerto; Juilliard Orchestra playing Druckman, Schwantner & Stephen Albert.

Song(Piece) currently playing. Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 in f minor - streaming the first recital of final round at the Van Cliburn Competition. Roberto Plano is playing. He’s a convincing musician with a great sound – an audience favorite, too. But after watching him play Liszt’s Venezia e Napoli in the semifinals, EKB (who is working the piece up for competition herself) noticed a lot of tension in his playing that affected the Tarantella section at the end. The first movement of this Brahms Sonata had some audible cracks, too. I’m beginning to wonder if he won’t injure himself before he manages to finish all three performances (a 50-minute recital and two concerti) in the finals.

Five songs(pieces/albums) I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me. Liszt Sonata in b minor. Discovering the Liszt Sonata (and some of the named Beethoven sonatas) in high school was what got me back to playing the piano. Everything I’ve done since has its roots in those first CD’s I borrowed from the public library. Schnittke Piano Sonata No. 2 – one of the most moving and shattering concert experiences I’ve had. Recent frequent spins: The Bad Plus’s cover of “Flim.” Stephen Hartke The King of the Sun, Cibo Matto “Flowers.”

Argh! It’s hard to keep this from turning into a “favorites” list – one things reminds me of another and all of a sudden how can I keep from listing Talking Heads, Medeski Martin + Wood, Janáček? (or Little Walter, Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite, the Barber Cello Concerto, Beethoven 3, Guy Davis, Mikel Rouse’s Dennis Cleveland, Etta James’ gospel-tinged cover of “Take it to the Limit,” CCR, The Lounge Lizards, Souvenir of Florence, The People United!, Ligeti Etudes, etc. etc.)

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton. I usually don’t like to subject my friends to forwarded memes, jokes, or stories. (Though I guess it doesn’t specify friends … ) If you're interested in carrying on, feel free - and let me know when you post yours.

* Sequenza 21 composer/blogger Lawrence Dillon’s list of 111 (or so) Influential Works since 1970 is my latest exploration guide.

Plantanos

2005-06-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

It's been requested that I post something new to push Jean-Yves off the top of the page. So, I hereby recommend you usher in the summer months with some chifles (plantain chips). They're available unsalted and in some other flavors, but I'm a purist; I like 'em salty. Mmmm, plantanos. [drool]

Review: Houston Symphony

2005-05-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

Like in the old joke, Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the Houston Symphony played Tchaikovsky Saturday night. Tchaikovsky lost in a battle of conductor vs. soloist reminiscent of the Bernstein/Glenn Gould Brahms 1st Concerto that prompted Lenny to give a pre-performance disclaimer to the audience.

Trying the unsentimentalized, bat out of hell approach to that old warhorse, the First Piano Concerto, the performance started out refreshingly bracing. Unfortunately, the lyrical phrases that could have used some Romantic rubato were also taken at breakneck pace. It didn’t take long for Hans Graf’s discomfort with the situation to become apparent, either. He frequently had to push the orchestra to keep up with Thibaudet*, and more than one orchestral passage took a more sedate tempo that was immediately canceled out with the reentry of the soloist.

By the third movement, the tug of war had turned into comedy (this is Tchaik 1 – there’s no need to invoke “travesty” on such an oft-maligned composition). I laughed out loud more than once and exchanged several bemused glances with EKB (the better half). She’s now comparing the performance to Yosemite Sam cartoons. I’m wondering how much of this caricature was Jean-Yves being petulant after disagreeing with Graf in rehearsals. (A backstage report informed us that the musicians were highly agitated over unresolved issues before curtain.)

The fight with the orchestra over interpretation wasn’t the only battle to watch. Thibaudet was also struggling with the instrument he had on stage. The piano (apparently a replacement since the flooding from Tropical Storm Allison ravaged the Symphony’s offices in 2001) did not project well in its upper registers, and when it did sound with any volume, the tone was thin. Thibaudet’s execution also had some sloppy stretches at such high speed, though I got the impression this was more a function of attitude than of any strain on his formidable technique.

The audience lapped the performance up, of course. I’m conflicted about this. On the one hand, it’s great to see people strong attendance and enthusiasm at the symphony. And who am I to say “Wise up, folks. That was the most tasteless Tchaikovsky Concerto I’ve ever heard!” But on the other, how can I not? This was like a sci-fi B-movie; so bad it was funny. Thibaudet sure as hell didn’t deserve the extended ovation that followed.

Opening the program, the performance of Jennifer Higdon’s blue cathedral was handicapped by the tension thrumming through the orchestra. After intermission, the Symphony rallied with The Firebird – a little too long in its complete form, but it was nice to settle down after the preceding madness. Original costume designs were projected as a welcome visual accompaniment. (The picture here is not one of them. It’s a storybook illustration by Ivan Bilibin.)

See also: Houston Chronicle

* The picture at right should have a caption along the lines of 'Jean-Yves should be locked away after Saturday's concert,' but I quit fighting with HTML after awhile.

Cliburn Online

2005-05-22T13:39:00.000-05:00

[from The Well-Tempered Blog] The Van Cliburn Competition* is being shown via live webcast (yes, it's video! - and yes, the connection can be dodgy). Ah, the wonders of the Internet Age.

* For the record: I enjoy the idea of competitions, though politics always find their way into the judging. The Van Cliburn does tend to promote mediocrity over truly interesting musicians (at least as near as I can gather from the Cliburn documentaries I've seen). But I just can't pass up a good piano orgy, so I'll be streaming whenever it's available.

In Brief: HGO's Falstaff

2005-05-18T23:35:00.000-05:00

I had meant to elaborate on Houston Grand Opera’s production of Verdi’s Falstaff,* but this graphic from LA Opera sums it up perfectly.

The supporting cast ranged from excellent (Patricia Racette as Alice Ford) to not quite there (Jesus Garcia’s Fenton). The acting was superb all around. The production by Olivier Tambosi and stage direction sparkled with great comic timing. Conductor Patrick Summers did a fine job with the score, etc., etc.

But Bryn Terfel is the story of this production (starting next weekend in LA). He’s hilarious – whether buffooning, pitiable, or unrepentant – and always the center of attention. I have never had more fun at the opera and any other night out is going to have to go a long way to top this Falstaff.

See also: Houston Press, Houston Chronicle & Dallas Morning News (via a Terfel fan site).

* To be headed with the awful pun “Bryn there, done that.” It was too groan-inducing to not share.

Review: Houston Symphony

2005-05-18T17:26:00.000-05:00

This weekend saw the world premiere of a Clarinet Concerto by Richard Lavenda, the fourth of six concerti commissioned by the Houston Symphony for several of its instrumental principals. (Next year John Harbison contributes a new Doublebass Concerto.) Clarinetist David Peck played the solo in the Lavenda and Weber’s Concertino.

Lavenda’s work is in three movements, conservatively atonal, and largely rhapsodic in its construction. The brief first movement lives up to its billing as “Tempestuous.” There are vigorous exchanges of a main angular theme between the soloist and orchestra, many knotty solo runs, and continuous thread of momentum throughout.

The second movement is the Concerto’s center of gravity. It opens with a too-lengthy, rambling episode featuring some interesting instrumental combinations (a passage for harp, low marimba, and muted bass drum was particularly ear-catching) and requires great control from the clarinet. Soloist David Peck was at his strongest in these haunting moments softly suspended in the instrument’s upper register. A contrasting section is ushered in by an explosive crescendo in the bass drum and introduces some wild percussion outbursts before calming down again.

The finale returns to a faster tempo, but is not as assertive in its manner as the opening. The orchestra takes the driver’s seat to the detriment of the solo part, sometimes overshadowing its role.

The Concerto is generally effective in its own right, but the performances lacked spark. After attending two nights, I was left with the feeling that a great deal of energy had been left untapped. David Peck is a solid and able player, but by his own admission is much more comfortable as a member of the full orchestra. His stage manner was very reserved; he stood back from the spotlight, nearly level with the conductor’s music stand. As the orchestra played the final bars of the Weber Concertino, he nonchalantly stuck a hand in his pocket. A little more flash and tension would have been appreciated.

Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 in C and the Bizet Symphony in C rounded out the program. Mozart is one of Hans Graf’s specialties, and Saturday’s performance was crisp and brilliant. The Symphony’s strings sounded better than I’ve heard them all season, precise, focused, and warm. (Monday night’s performance didn’t fare quite as well. The dynamics had flattened out, and the tempo was slack in the slow movement – a fellow attendee later called it “an excess of moderation.”)

See also: Houston Chronicle Music Critic Charles Ward's review.

Gypped

2005-05-11T17:30:00.000-05:00

A recent review in the Houston Chronicle was pointed out to me so that I could note the slightly personal edge taken by the local music critic against a local group’s artistic director and pianist.* Having not been at the concert, I can’t really judge the aptness of the article’s criticism. What bugged me, though, was this opening:

Gypsies and Bohemians, the final Da Camera program of the season, swirled with a rambunctious energy too intense for the stylized musical representations of outcast life.
And the title had an element of cuteness.

First off, I’d (more often than not) rather have a concert full of rambunctious energy than tamely rendered interpretations.**

There’s something pleasantly oxymoronic about “stylized representations of outcast life.” The concept seems to leave a lot of interpretive wiggle room; does one harness the implicit wildness of the original source, try to attain a “stylistic authenticity” appropriate to the composer, or stress the irony of recontextualizing the Other in classical form? (Can you tell I’m getting ready to go back to grad school?) Clearly, Da Camera took a different road than Charles Ward would prefer.

What I mostly object to is the dig against the title. It’s unduly belittling, particularly on its own as a newspaper-sized paragraph, and not particularly warranted. Ward never explains what he means by “cuteness.” What else would you propose calling a concert featuring Smetana, Dvořák, Janáček (Moravian, I know), and more than one work with “Gypsy” in the title? “Symphonies in C”? (Sorry, wrong rant.)

Da Camera’s entire season has been called “Rebels and Visionaries.” It’s been an engaging theme around which to build a season featuring some of the more challenging and enjoyably adventurous programming in town. (Examples of the “Rebels and Visionaries” encountered were Beethoven, Crumb, Nancarrow, Zorn, Gesualdo, Shostakovich, Gidon Kremer, Peter Wispelwey, FLUX Quartet.) Calling this last concert – which featured some of the season’s most traditional programming (Janáček was the only maverick on the bill) – “Gypsies and Bohemians” brought it nicely into the thematic fold. And it sure beats the heck out of the pedestrian titles we usually see in concert brochures.

* That’s the curse of community: the more you hang around a place the more you pick up on its politics.
** A reason I have always found listening to András Schiff recordings to be less than inspiring.

Streaming Orgies

2005-05-03T16:39:00.000-05:00

vilaine fille blogs about - and provides a handy outline of - Spring Orgy season at Harvard’s WHRB. Their main page gives live streaming options & links to the detailed schedule. Usually I find out about the orgies after they happen, so it's been nice to catch this one near the beginning. Upcoming highlights include a Mighty Handful orgy (even Cui gets some airplay), Left Hand Piano Orgy and the Charlie Parker Orgy. 84 hours of Bird – Stream & Enjoy.

NB: When I get around to expanding my blogroll, vilaine fille will be one of the first additions.* It's a first-rate blog - well written, beautifully and tastefully illustrated and with copious linkage. Highly recommended.

* along with twang twang twang, Sieglinde's Diaries, and the individual blogs and Composers Forum at Sequenza 21. As for Trrill, they recently shocked the classical blogosphere with an announced retirement. But recently the archives were put back up, and those are worth perusal.

Review: Musiqa

2005-05-03T16:17:00.000-05:00

The concert we meant to be at on the 30th was Musiqa’s performance of Pierrot lunaire and new(er) works by mostly Houston composers.

This was my first live Pierrot, and it was a darn good one. Soprano Karol Bennett was dressed for the part in Pagliacci-like attire, the stage was dramatically lit, and a spectral tree was projected on the backdrop. My only issue was that there could’ve been a little more flutter-tongue from Pierrot where it’s called for, but Bennett’s performance was still highly enjoyable. She even made getting a water glass refilled during a pause entertaining. The ensemble, led by conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto, was beautifully lithe and mercurial, hitting their marks with grace and apparent ease.

The second half started with a literal bang – Rob Smith’s athletic showpiece Essential Torque for piano and tape. The piece opened with quiet impressionisms interrupted by huge forearm clusters. With the clusters came the introduction of electronic creakings that sounded like the strained turning of already tight bolts, as if the piano was being held together by the will of its groaning tuning pins. Timothy Hester then ramped up for a virtuoso duo with the tape part in an aggressive, jazzy style that often required bass lines in the piano and tape to stay in perfect lockstep. Hester was nearly flawless and the display was breathlessly exciting.

Pierre Jalbert’s The Invention of the Saxophone took a poem by Billy Collins of the same name as its basis. Picking up on evocative phrases from the narrated poem, the alto saxophone takes its first smoky breaths in an imagined nocturnal Paris “waiting for the invention of jazz.” Saxophonist Valerie Vidal brought a beautifully dusky tone to the piece and was supported nicely by Hester and narrator Rob Bundy.

The remaining two pieces accompanied choreography – a slight, but enjoyable work by Australian Ross Edwards (Ecstatic Dances in an arrangement for violin and alto ‘cello) and the world premiere of Karim Al-Zand’s The Waiting Game. Ecstatic Dances was full of delightful* interplay between the two voices, and a pair of dancers twisted gracefully along, often mirroring or in canon with each other.

The Waiting Game seemed clearly designed in tandem with the dance and drew on illustrative effects and borrowings from Debussy and Ravel. The choreographed scene was slight and a little silly – in one story line, boy meets girl, boy is awkward and ungraceful, they part a little unsatisfied; in the other, girl searches for ideal clothing accessory from a pile, is disappointed, find mystery box, takes great joy in red wig found within. Why these were framed with Blair Witch/X-Files hunting scenes featuring day-glo water pistols is beyond me.

Musiqa has put on some excellent concerts this season. Their roster of composers and performers is largely drawn from the outstanding artist faculty of Rice Univ. and the Univ. of Houston. Each program balances old and new 20th/21st century music and features a non-musical contribution from the Houston arts scene. They finish the 05/06 season May 20th with an educational program revolving around folk music from throughout the world.

*not a word I like to use much, but appropriate here

Making Lemonade with Gounod

2005-05-03T10:39:00.000-05:00

Friday night we headed downtown for a concert scheduled on the 30th. I had the right date in mind, but Friday was the 29th. Imagine our surprise when my slippery grasp of the present was uncovered. D’oh!

At a loose end the better half and I wandered toward the opera house. To our great delight, the evening’s performance was about to be PlazaCast on giant monitors for the free enjoyment of all. On the bill: Gounod’s Roméo & Juliette.

The weather was beautiful (a touch warm, a slight breeze) and a good crowd of about 300 had turned up with lawn chairs and coolers. A number of other people revolved on and off the plaza, but most stayed for at least 10 minutes worth of the show. Concessions were set up offering pizza, ice cream, and drinks. We skipped the lemonade in favor of a White Russian-coffee mix at intermission.

The performance itself was unexceptional – mostly solid, but not fantastic – dramatically a little slack and with a dull stage production. [I should note here that we missed Act II, iii – including Stephano’s aria – when most of the action happens while getting coffee.] Anyway, I’ll defer to local critic Charles Ward for details.

The neatest part of the evening came after the opera when an announcement asked those of us enjoying the show on the plaza to stay put for a curtain call. Sure enough, a golf cart appeared from around the corner carrying the vocal principals and conductor.* The plaza-sitters crowded around and gave lusty rounds of applause. It was great of HGO to acknowledge the open-air audience as contributing significantly to the success of the evening, even if we didn’t shell out for tickets.

(To be honest, I had wanted to see the production more out of a sense of duty to HGO [we’ve only made one other opera this season] and idle curiosity than any great love for Gounod’s R&J which has to be one of the worst offenders in the opera-as-bad-drama camp. Lucking into it for free and in an atmosphere where we could openly laugh at the contrived death scene was an optimal way to go.)

Joshua Kosman of the San Francisco Chronicle was visiting to check out David Gockley, on his way to run SF Opera. ArtsJournal links to his article on HGO’s weekend.

*I wonder if they’ve gotten away with carting established stars out to the plaza…I suppose we should’ve showed up for the Gala the next night to find out.

Symphony Program Titles

2005-04-24T18:13:00.000-05:00

Two of the Houston Symphony’s concerts during the last month or so of the season are titled “Flor Conducts Mozart” and “Symphonies in C.”

Innocuous enough, if not very informative. In each case, you have a vague sense of what the evening will offer: at least two works alluded to by the title and something of equal or lesser weight to round out the program. But in each of these cases the marketed title ignores the music of greatest interest on the program and misrepresents the concert to ticket buyers.

The only Mozart Flor conducted was a piano concerto - and note also that the soloist, Anne-Marie McDermott, did not receive headline billing. The remainder of the concert was a Symphony funèbre by Joseph Kraus (a near exact contemporary of Mozart’s and a pretty interesting and original composer in his own right) and Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony. Surrounded by this music, Mozart’s buoyant K. 414 concerto seemed out of place – and certainly not the central work of the evening. In fact, the first night of the weekend, the Mozart came off worst. Shostakovich had clearly received the bulk of the rehearsal time and McDermott was still figuring out what level of projection she needed for the hall.

Hidden on the “Symphonies in C” program are two Clarinet Concertos – one of them a world premiere. Yes there are two Symphonies in C (Mozart #34 and Bizet), but isn’t the story of the night the commissioned concerto by a local composer – Richard Lavenda, who is on faculty at Rice Univ. – performed by the Symphony’s principal clarinetist? Rename the concert “Houston Pride” and see if people don’t turn out in greater numbers just out of curiosity.

Greg Sandow – consultant, critic, blogger & cool kid – shows us the greener grass with his titles for the St. Louis Symphony’s 05/06 season. (Thanks to Alex Ross for the link & 411 on Sandow’s involvment.) “Light in the Darkness,” “Radiance,” “Joie de vivre,” “Layers of Purity.” That piques my interest and makes me wonder what’s on the program (the programs themselves are pretty intriguing, too) . It makes me look more closely at works I might otherwise dismiss as familiar or not of interest in order to unpack the thematic connections. That’s poetry, man.

A few dozen more Sandow’s out there would be a very nice thing. Great work, Greg.

Lively Up Your Blog

2005-04-23T17:36:00.000-05:00

I was pretty darned ecstatic when, within a couple weeks of setting up residence in the classical* music blogosphere, I was linked to by several blogs that I read regularly. "How cool," thought I, "instant blog cred." The curse was that I had nothing to say – or rather I had plenty to say but none of it felt new, relevant, clever, or particularly well put. Combine those inferiority issues with a trough in my personal manic cycle and you have lengthy hiatus.

It's time to get some content on this here blog and earn my links from the cool kids. I'm going to loosen up a little bit - go for a conversational tone, but try to avoid ranting or babbling. (Punctuation's bound to get ugly – grammarians are forewarned.) Over the next couple days, I'll put up a barrage of posts - things I meant to say that I'm just now getting around to. Share and Enjoy.

* replace at will with your preferred alternate descriptor

Sol - La - Ti - D'oh!

2005-04-23T17:33:00.000-05:00

The Simpsons roasted classical music a couple weeks back. I only saw the episode mentioned on a couple of the blogs on my regular route. The Artful Manager & Adaptistration both have quick synopses and relevant quotes. Follow the links for a recap if you didn't see the show. Neither writer found the episode’s treatment of classical music as disturbing as I did.

In the space of two minutes the music was summarily dismissed as dull and irrelevant. Three separate strands - the core symphonic tradition, complexity/atonality and simplicity/minimalism – got this treatment, and a handful of diminishing stereotypes were thrown in for good measure (effete musicians; even the players don’t like new music; da-da-da-dum – the hook as cell phone ring - is all that matters).

Usually the show balances respect for art and artists while backhanding the greedy, corrupt and misguided motivations of the people and institutions around them. In an earlier episode, Homer is exploited by an art dealer who sells his heap of junk as "outside art." After being a flash in the pan, Homer decides to find his voice and create an original piece. Marge introduces him to Pop Art with humorous results that do not once denigrate the art.

In the same way, this recent episode skewered Springfield’s plans to build a performing arts center to bridge the “culture gap” with its rival neighbor Shelbyville. They hire Frank Gehry to design the hall and while both he and the Disney Hall-esque PAC are gently lampooned, the radical design was never ridiculed. None of the townsfolk looked at the model and said "What the hell is that?" Gehry even guest voiced his character.

Classical music did not get the same evenhanded treatment. No one stood up to defend it. Couldn’t the writers have found a place to drop in a classical music luminary - someone like Renee Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, or Lang Lang? The conductor was a generic nobody, basically a straight man. And Lisa - the musician of the family and the cultural conscience of the town – why didn’t she have anything to say about the Philistines of Springfield?

The darkest irony is that on opening night the hall was completely full of precisely the people arts administrators want to see – the everymen and women of Springfield. And they walked out of the most sure-fire programming imaginable – Beethoven’s Fifth. If things have got that bad then we are right and royally screwed.

Hiatus/Cincy

2005-03-24T17:50:00.000-06:00

Sorry about the lack of posting recently. In the past month I've been alternating between frenetic activity and contemplation. Anything I wrote during that time would've been well off topic. I have spared you, dear reader.

There is a move to Cincinnati coming in September. My better half has been accepted into the piano program at CCM, and I'm waiting for word from the musicology division (I've decided to return to school for my Ph.D.). We are looking into housing. If you know the Cincy area and want to help, drop me a line.

Update: The word is official - I'm accepted and picked up as a TA for the Autumn quarter. Back into indentured servitude go I.

Attack!

2005-02-22T15:42:00.000-06:00

I've been writing a letter to my local classical music station. It's gone through several drafts, but the basic sentiment is in a sentence I haven't decided whether or not to use:

"The classical music world is not as wretchedly moribund as a week’s worth of KUHF playlists would suggest."

If you're dissatisfied with the state of classical radio in your neck of the woods, let 'em know.

Update: I decided to use that line in my letter, which has now been sent. Another sample:

"Let’s face it; nobody falls in love with classical music on a steady diet of Telemann, Bax, and Galuppi."

Informal Review: EAR Unit

2005-02-21T11:43:00.000-06:00

Last Thursday the California EAR Unit played at Rice. At the end of the evening I felt like I'd heard an earful (bad pun stolen from fellow audience member) but that there was another dimension to the experience that I couldn't express consciously. Because I was reviewing the concert I spent the next morning thinking about this and compiling my mental notes. While in the shower I started to piece it together.

The EAR Unit ended with Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together, a piece I know well and the only one on the program I knew going in. The instrumental component of the Rzewski was fine, but the delivery of the text by the EAR Unit's clarinetist was disappointing. First of all, he was a vocal dead ringer for Michael Moore. This would have been distracting enough, but his delivery was dry, words were swallowed, and what dramatic shading there was was sporadic.

Despite all that, I found the performance really powerful. At first I figured my familiarity with the piece was compensating for the poor reading. Then I started to see threads in the overall design of the program that built up to Coming Together, making it the summation of the evening.

The pieces on the first half of the program were concerned with processing external stimuli. Amy Knoles' Squint was described in the program note as an aural complement of squinting one's eyes. The accompanying video extended the idea with night shots of road traffic and lighted directional arrow that gradually morphed from positive to negative images (or shots on damaged celluloid as in Decasia). Eric Chasalow's Suspicious Motives used real-time electronic processing to expand the sonorities of the live instruments, creating occasional disjunctions between the visual performance and the sounds produced. James Sellars' Go reveled in the rush of momentum that comes with high-speed freeway driving (something we don't experience much here in H-town).

The second half of the program turned inwards. Eve Beglarian's Cave sets part of an Eileen Myles poem that ends "a cave inside your soul may be the only place to go." The dynamic was quiet throughout, with sustained long tones supporting a repeated pop-based piano riff and Vicki Ray's whispered delivery of the poem a word or two at a time. This was followed by Kaija Saariaho's Cendres (Cinders), the strongest of the pieces that were unfamiliar to me. To borrow Aaron Einbond's description in San Francisco Classical Voice:

Rather than pursuing traditional thematic development, the distinguished Finnish-French composer draws the listener's attention to the beautifully-crafted, evolving tone-colors of the three instruments as they play with a range of standard and extended techniques. From the opening gesture, in which soft pizzicato morphs into a cello harmonic trill molto sul ponticello and back to a soft tremolo, the ensemble sculpted composite timbres with great care.

All of this set up Rzewski's Coming Together. From 1972, this probably counts as one of the earliest examples of post-minimalism, using minimalist processes towards extramusical ends to add layers of subtext to the words of Sam Melville. Melville was a left-wing activist jailed at Attica and killed during the prisoner riots - or, as some conspiracy theories have it, picked off by a sniper after the uprising (which he likely had a part in organizing) was quashed and control regained by the State. In a letter to his brother Melville wrote:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time. It's six months now and I can tell you truthfully few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead but I feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am I dealing with my environment. In the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men I can act with clarity and meaning. I am deliberate- sometimes calculating- seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

Rzewski divided this text into its eight sentences and employed a variation of minimalist additive technique in its deployment. He called the process "squaring," in which "a melodic sequence is gradually built up by adding a note at a time, and then washed away by subtracting notes from the pattern once completed, in a slow, giant wave." As in the sequence: 1, 1-2, 1-2-3 ... 6-7-8, 7-8, 8.

The musical material also employs this squaring process on the thematic and structural levels. More than one commentator has noted that the steady stream of sixteenth notes playing only a pentatonic scale that is constantly unfolded and washed away is a likely metaphor for the confined cycles of prison life. The spoken text, unfolding in the same manner but on a slower temporal scale (each sentence is divided into units that are spoken one to a 4/4 measure), has a different effect. The listener, sensing the repetitions, spends the first half of the piece keying in on the phrase "I think," which recurs at greater distances of time as more of Melville's words are revealed. Once the first sentence is erased, the touchstone phrase becomes "the inevitable direction of my life," which begins to come more frequently as the squaring wave washes away.

As if to complement Rzewski's design, the first half of the EAR Unit's program was concerned with external input, corresponding to the metaphorical cycles of prison life in the (constantly active) instrumental component of Coming Together. Melville's words clearly come from the internal cave suggested by Eileen Myles and Eve Beglarian, from which Melville clinically observes the world of jailed and jailer.

Again, it's as though everything else played over the course of the evening contributed to amplifying the concepts of external and internal life which coexist in Coming Together. This enhanced the darkly ironic ending of Rzewski's piece, in which the driving piano part approaches the end of its last wave, converging on the G root of a minor pentatonic scale and sweeping the other instruments along in its wake as the final climax builds. As the voice of Melville is "feeling for the inevitable direction of my life" for the last time, the external forces finish their process and come to a sudden halt. In the loud reverberations that drop quickly to silence (thank you, Duncan Hall), that inevitable direction has been decided as Melville's life is abruptly cut off.

I'm not sure how likely it is that this design was intentionally built into the EAR Unit's programming, or if that's even a relevant issue. I also don't know how much of this I projected backward in time onto the concert experience as I was trying to account for the dimension I felt was missing in my understanding of it. But I will say that it made the evening come together (ack - another bad pun) for me in a pretty powerful way.

Any comments, thoughts, or tales of similar experience are welcome.

Updated for clarity and to add links.

The Crane/La Grue

2005-02-17T13:46:00.000-06:00

Pierre Boulez's Favorite Movie

...the week that's to come.

2005-02-15T09:45:00.000-06:00

Tonight 2/15: Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble - Mendelssohn Octet, Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht (HouFriends of Music); FLUX Quartet - Nancarrow 3rd, Scelsi 4th, Zorn Cat o'Nine Tails (Da Camera); Wednesday 2/16: First in a three-concert survey of Beethoven's Violin Sonatas with Kathleen Winkler and Jon Kimura Parker (Rice); Thursday 2/17: California EAR Unit - Rzewski "Coming Together" & more (SZYZYGY: New Music at Rice)

I'm reviewing the FLUX & EAR Unit concerts for hopeful publication and then collapsing for the weekend. All of this activity will be coinciding with new employment (either the good arts admin. job I'm waiting to hear back on or something with less appeal - one way or another I need to work).

The week that was...

2005-02-15T09:09:00.000-06:00

Saw many concerts this past weekend that I neglected to blog about, partly because I got to do a little music journalism and I was being painstaking about it. I wrote a small article for local ArtsHouston magazine for which I interviewed Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. This was my first composer interview and I could not have had a more gracious subject.

Rice U's Shepherd School of Music had several concerts over the weekend, including their Symphony and Chamber Orchestras. I caught enjoyable performances of Dvořák's 7th and Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin (though I missed hearing the Toccata from the original version for piano). Young 'cellist Yeon-Sun Joo tore into the Schumann Cello Concerto. While she skipped out on subtleties her tone was surprisingly huge and rich. Thursday, the faculty played chamber works of Sam Jones, former department head and current Seattle Symphony resident composer. Jones is a solidly neo-romantic composer fond of bitonality and film-music style picturesque music. His Piano Sonata and Cello Sonata were effective.

Houston Symphony welcomed pianist Steven Hough, who played an elegant and dashing Saint-Saëns Egyptian Concerto. Hough has a very smooth, effortless technique and looked unruffled even during the bravura finale that brought the audience out of their seats. Franck's D minor Symphony closed the program, and though I know the tunes, the workings of the piece are less familiar. The structural incoherencies may have been Franck's failing or guest composer Louis Langrée's. But still, it is beautiful music and was well played.

Sunday caught the final performance of Houston Grand Opera's Idomeneo. Very crisp all around. Richard Croft in the title role was the standout among the cast. Lingering thoughts: amusement that in Greece they call the gods by their Roman names - how prescient! Poor Elettra, she's basically a walk on in the drama, there to be abused by fate - though she does get the most pyrotechnic aria before leaving the stage to commit hari-kari.

A Little Midnight Music

2005-02-12T17:22:00.000-06:00

A search for the score to George Crumb's Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik led me to an entry in WNYC's New Sounds series featuring an in-studio performance by Simone Dinnerstein. Stream and enjoy.

In October, Crumb visited Houston during his 70th birthday tour and gave a concert. Bob Shannon played EKM, which is subtitled Ruminations on "'Round Midnight" by Thelonius Monk. Monk and Crumb - what an inspired mix of two guys that developed strongly individual, mysterious piano sounds. The silences that are so much a part of Monk's tune lend themselves perfectly to Crumb's penchant for dropping out all activity to let the unearthly shimmer of excited piano strings fade into the foreground.

Italian pianist Emanaule Arciuli was involved in the commission that produced Mitternachtmusik. In addition to Crumb, a host of other composers wrote variations on Monk's tune. I haven't heard any of these, though I'm hoping that the 'Round Midnight Project will lead to an eventual recording. (Crumb told me in October that a recording of EKM was in the can awaiting release.)

Crumb's contribution stands on its own at 15 minutes, and I think it'll become an important contribution to the piano repertoire. When we first heard it, both my girlfriend and I were captivated. Now that Peters has the score out* she can put it on her "to do" list and I can start retraining my fingers to move.

Links: Robert Gable's aworks has an entry on the piece. Lawrence Budmen reviews Arciuli's performance of the 'Round Midnight Varations at last year's Festival Miami (yay for the hometown!).

* It's not listed on their website, but Sheet Music Plus shows it available.

Job Opening: Houston Grand Opera Director

2005-02-08T09:55:00.000-06:00

The official announcements have come overnight: David Gockley is leaving Houston Grand Opera to become General Director of San Francisco Opera.

There are many aspects of this move which make me uncertain. First, I'm disappointed in the dissing of Pamela Rosenberg, who seems to have done some really cool programming in SF. Second, I'm dubious about Gockley's "new music" credentials. I am admittedly a bit of a snob on this point and haven't heard most of the 33 new works staged during his tenure, but Gockley does seem more focused on the tamer side of Americana in his commissions. (I could probably be swayed from this viewpoint by some persuasive argument and better grasp of HGO's history than I have.)

Thirdly, the hole here at Houston Grand Opera needs to be filled. Despite my reservations about his programming, Gockley has done an admirable job staying in the black (or at break-even) while insisting that HGO produce new opera. According to the local paper, HGO just set a number of long-range goals which likely contain Gockley's fingerprint. But beyond that, will the leadership fight to keep that spirit alive or retrench if they run into fiscal trouble?

It should be noted that my definition of "cool programming" is highly personal, and has little to do with the production or vocal talent involved. When I look at a season schedule, I like to see a well-blended mix of new opera (preferably seminal modern works or composers I dig), operas in Czech, Russian, or English, a little bit of Wagner, and a smaller than average complement of the rest of the core repertoire. Compare SFO's current season with next season. 05/06 - with the major exception of John Adams' Doctor Atomic - strikes me as less interesting from a programming standpoint.

Update: San Francisco's Classical Voice has articles about the transition on its front page and, in greater depth, here. They don't seem sorry to see Ms. Rosenberg go, despite the recent announcement that SFO was in the black last fiscal year after major deficits the preceding years.

Juicy Panic/Philistines

2005-02-07T16:37:00.000-06:00

Juicy Panic
Found this whilst reading Running the Voodoo Down.

Sometimes you randomly encounter something that reminds you that people you've never met have a totally different conception of what constitutes "music" than you.

Listen/watch the linked tune. These are some people who seem incredibly happy to be who they are and create what they have. My knowledge of electronica and Asian-precious cuteness* is strictly on the casual level, but darned if I didn’t fall in love with this – especially the slightly maniacal dancing/spinning cat. (Kinda makes you want to look if you haven’t followed the link yet, huh?)

Showing this to my significant other then resulted in my introduction to Cibo Matto and a trip to the record [sic] store.

* Not meant as a slur of any kind. There is something cute-quirky about Asian pop culture that lends itself to commodification (i.e., Hello Kitty) and becomes one of the primary elements in Asian fetishes.

Philistines
[unfinished, coming soon]

One-Month Anniversary

2005-02-03T10:06:00.000-06:00

Yippee! This blog is one month old today. Many thanks to all of the people that have read the blog and/or linked here.

The classical* music blogosphere was hungry enough to find me before I had even planned to go public. I take that as an encouraging sign that there are a great many people invested in the music, despite the current cycle of doom-saying. Keep up the good work all!

*insert your favorite label for the music here

From the Blogosphere

2005-01-31T16:17:00.000-06:00

Marcus posts about Houston Symphony's newly announced 2005-06 season. I'm right with him in looking forward to the several highlights of next season - it is such a pleasure to live in a city with a full-time orchestra (esp. after spending most of my life in the backwater of Florida). I'm going to complain that they are bringing Leila Josefovicz to town in back-to-back seasons and neither time is she playing the Adams Violin Concerto. Dammit! Also - I love Chopin but could do without the Concerti, do I really need to hear both of them in one season?

Kyle Gann's PostClassical Radio is currently loaded with piano music (playlist), including an hour's worth of La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano. This is one of the few works where I've had a truly vertiginous listening experience that involved a recording rather than live performance. When I started it up this afternoon, the first things I heard were a piece from Terry Riley's The Harp of New Albion and one of Elodie Lauten's Variations on the Orange Cycle. Lovely Music, indeed.

¡Cubanissmo!

2005-01-26T14:23:00.000-06:00

ArtsJournal posts a link to this Village Voice article about rejected visas for Cuban musicians. This saddens me. I had been hoping that the success of Buena Vista Social Club and subsequent U.S.-Cuban musical collaborations might signal the beginning of a real attempt to erode the U.S. embargo.

I have long been in favor lifting the embargo, believing that the best thing that could happen to Cuba is an influx of tourists, visiting exiles and information. A flood of information will do more to undermine the Castro regime than the corresponding income of U.S. dollars would prop it up.

Unfortunately, the will of the Cuban Exile community has gained serious political leverage during my lifetime and they’re not about to let anything like that happen. They are now a solid cadre in America’s reigning neo-con dynasty. Not only will the Bush family accede to their proposals re: U.S.-Cuban relations, but the Bushes are better served by keeping Fidel in power and the exiles rabid and focused north of the Florida Straits.

(On the Castro front: In 2001, his doctors said he could live to be 140, despite the wishful-thinking roster of diseases he has been given over the years - heart disease, gout, and various cancers, especially prostate - and assassination attempts.)

Speaking of Buena Vista, on its heels Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba put together Calle 54 – a tribute to Latin jazz (as opposed to the older Cuban song styles of BVSC). Calle 54 is more about the Latin diaspora than the pickled nostalgia Ry Cooder discovered in late 90s Cuba. Trueba pointedly films musicians during winter in frigid and desolate locations (Stockholm, upstate NY, the barrios) that contrast sharply with the tropical heat of the music.

The brief musician profiles are program notes, infusions of context for the filmed performances that are the meat of the movie. The performances take place in vividly lit studios, with multiple camera angles, well-engineered sound, and a kick-ass roster that includes Chucho Valdés, Paquito d’Rivera, Tito Puente (one of his last appearances), and Cachao. There are no cuts, voiceovers, or other interference with the musical numbers, which was one of my biggest complaints with BVSC. Trueba is so in love with this music that he wants you to enjoy it unadulterated. His presentation is almost fetishist in its clean lines and close-ups; the way the camera lingers on attractive Brazilian pianist Eliane Elias is obvious enough, but Trueba is just as intent on focusing on Tito Puente's toungue and the yellow-toothed glee of Michel Camilo. His joy is infectious and the film is great.

Fun with Lists

2005-01-24T20:41:00.000-06:00

In an as-yet (perhaps to remain) unpublished blog item, I’ve been facing my biggest dilemmas. One of them has always been the sheer quantity of stuff – music, books, films, ideas – that vies for my limited time on this plane. I’m not the most disciplined of people (another dilemma), but I have found that if I have a list to follow point by point, I can at least reduce my scope a little and get some things accomplished.

Recently, I’ve been exploring new(er) music from the 20th/21st century. Culling textbooks to establish some direction is tedious – and, unless you randomize the list, gets you into historicist thinking that isn’t part of my project. Instead, I have taken guidance from some lists compiled by others:

The Century List & Another Century List by Frank Oteri (editor of NewMusicBox)
– The first is subtitled “100 Reasons to Play This Century’s [sic] Music.” An interesting, wide-ranging list of works that could be radio-friendly if classical radio would loosen up some (or quite a bit in several cases).

Music Since 1960 by Tim Rutherford-Johnson (The Rambler)
– Each installment has come with a beautifully and effectively written appreciation. Read the recent post on Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel for a prime example. The Rothko Chapel is a meditative sanctuary of austere grace located here in Houston.

101 Essential Pieces of 20th Century Concert Music by Steve Hicken (listen.)
– The list, in a block paragraph at the foot of every page on the blog, has undergone recent revision. Also, Steve Hicken has recently added me to his blogroll. Many thanks!

The Postclassical Piano Repertiore List by Kyle Gann (Postclassic)
– As a (non-practicing) pianist, I love finding out about new piano works – especially from a corner of the rep. that doesn’t get much mainstream exposure. Scroll up to the previous post for some updates.

Jan Lenica - Tannhäuser (1974)

2005-01-21T11:40:00.000-06:00

The newest addition to our home is this vintage poster for a Polish production of Tannhäuser. The artist is Jan Lenica (len-EE-tsa), poster designer and animator, who we found out about quite by accident while looking at opera posters that might adorn our bare walls. I was getting tired of the standard fare and started exploring until we found Lenica. My girlfriend forgot about posters for a couple months until I presented her with this for Xmas. She was delightfully surprised. (Actually, she gaped in shock - I got tons of "good boyfriend" points.)

Review Notes: Michael Mizrahi, Fnd. for Modern Music

2005-01-18T14:22:00.000-06:00

On Marcus Maroney’s recommendation, I caught the beginning of a solo piano recital by Michael Mizrahi on Sunday. I only managed to catch the first work, Bach’s Partita No. 6 in E minor. Mizrahi has a sure hand, decent range of color and good presence at the keyboard. I was bothered by some bass lines that started in relief but became swallowed before they had run their course, and I would have liked to hear the music dance a little more. Otherwise, it was quite good (the Allemande especially) and I’d like to hear him in more recent repertoire.

I left to see the Fndation for Modern Music’s concert downtown. I really wanted this concert to be successful, not only because it was my first live experience of Ancient Voices of Children, but because FMM does a decent job of presenting new music in a comfortable atmosphere. Artistic Director Rudolfo Morales teaches at the High School for Visual and Performing Arts, so there’s always a following of students at their concerts. The board members are warm, inviting, and generally a nice group of people.

Unfortunately, the concert just didn’t come together. Here’s a rundown:

Silvestre Rivueltas – Five Children’s Songs: Well sung by Tracy Rhodus, but slight pieces mostly in a Mexican folk/popular style.

Manuel Enríquez – Maxienia: Piano solo played by Max Lifchitz. This was the strongest performance of the concert. Maxienia is improvisatory, gestural, and post-tonally chromatic, with enough narrative/dramatic backbone to keep the music moving forward. Lifchitz had good dynamic nuance and let the space between gestures breathe. He was helped out by the resonance of Zilkha Hall, which is a really nice space for the Steinway that was used.

Mary Jeanne van Appledorn - A Liszt Fantasie: Take several Liszt snippets (my scorecard noted A Faust Symphony, the Sonata, and several bits from Années de Pèlerinage), some Lisztian cadenzas and passagework, stir, notate, and serve. Another minute or two longer and I would’ve called this execrable.

Max Lifchitz – Yellow Ribbon No. 38 (world premiere): It felt like Lifchitz didn’t really know what to do with his ensemble of oboe, harp, two guitars, three percussionists, and piano. The material wasn’t particularly interesting and some of the ideas were half-baked. There was no convincing reason why a movement called “Solitude” should have duet for oboe and percussion. The “Peace” movement consisted of interminable repetitions of music from the earlier movements. Each instrument was assigned its own motive and juxtaposed with the others without development resulting in a vision of peaceful coexistence in which nothing interacts.

Crumb – Ancient Voices: Like the performance of Lifchitz’s piece, this didn’t amount to anything. The musical ideas didn’t flow, and there was little palpable ancientness, ritual, or exoticism. Some nice moments were lost in general muddle of the performance.

If I had been reviewing this for a publication, I would be having a really hard time right now. What do you do when you admire a group’s mission and their dedication to it, but their concert doesn’t cut it?

Review: Blood and Sinew

2005-01-17T23:37:00.000-06:00

Houston Symphony, Sat. 1/15/05
Brahms - Symphony #3, Bartók - Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

It began and ended in darkness, with low strings intoning the long notes that frame Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. The drama of Béla Bartók’s lone opera involves light that has limited and temporary power to illuminate Bluebeard’s world. Hans Graf conducted the Houston Symphony in a concert performance lit by local duo the Art Guys, who confined the light in Jones Hall to the space under the musicians’ chairs, music stand lights, and two lanterns carried by François LeRoux and Sally Burgess in the roles of Bluebeard and his young bride Judith. The rest was darkness.

The libretto by Béla Balázs calls for colored lights to accompany the opening of each of the seven locked doors that Judith confronts in the main chamber of the castle. The Art Guys' effective lighting scheme installed LED lights under the chairs in the orchestra, controlling the varied shades and intensity of color through computerized algorithms that affected each light individually. Without obvious patterns, the light was able to undulate in waves, sparkle with the glint of treasure, and become tainted with the red of blood.

The performance was excellent. Hans Graf can be too restrained and a little stuffy sometimes, but his pacing and balance were right on here. Burgess and LeRoux were in good voice and nicely characterized their roles. My only complaints have to do with two interpretational choices: 1) the Prologue was skipped; and 2) Judith’s emotional range was too broad (a compliment to the execution, but not the conception).

The spoken prologue is a kind of Brechtian framing device, transitioning the audience from their preoccupations and into the realm of Bluebeard’s Castle . The last verse reads:

"Enter. Start the music. Raise the curtain.
Put away your lives that may find them. Lo!
Bluebeard’s castle! Soon you’ll see…but you know
The story, know the moral. Are you certain,
Ladies and gentlemen?"

This address to the audience is a challenge directly from Balázs and Bartók to delve into the opera’s symbolism rather than passively watch events unfold. This is no fairy tale, they say.

Fleshing out Judith’s personality brings more realism to the role than I think there should be. Beyond a few early references that establish her as external to the castle, Judith is not really a person, but Love as a force working on the dark corners of Bluebeard’s psyche. Bring too many shades in – Burgess tinged the role with youthful fear, impertinence and imperiousness (Judith is a newly minted duchess, after all) – and Judith becomes more clearly situated as a victim.

This overshadows Bluebeard’s tragedy. In an inversion of the classic Wagnerian formula, he cannot be redeemed by Love. Unlike Tristan, he is bound to blood and sinew, despite repeated attempts at salvation. The wives living in the seventh chamber have each failed to heal the psychic wounds of Bluebeard. Judith’s love is part of a cycle likely to repeat as long as Bluebeard lives. (Granting Judith the crown of night implies Bluebeard is at the end of his life, but the final passage leaves the dominant unresolved and open-ended.)

The concert opened with Brahms’s Symphony No. 3. It wasn’t the smoothest rendering, but the taut and sinewy first movement sounded well. The Allegretto third movement was the highlight, with beautifully shaped long paragraphs played with just a touch of delicacy by the Symphony’s strings. The second and fourth movements rambled some, and I'm not sure how to distribute the blame between Brahms and Graf. Since my natural tendency is to abuse Brahms, I will refrain from trying.

======
So, then. A practice review, under 600 words. Feels a little stiff, but I'm still getting my legs. And I keep having to hold back from typing "But I may be full of sh*t" after every other opinion.

Left this out. It seemed a little much and I was self-imposing a word count. It is reasonbly well thought out, though:

Bluebeard knows the tragedy is his. He is powerless to stop the doors opening, but keeps trying to raise his defenses. With the fifth door he presents his magnificent wide-reaching lands. The light and music are both dazzling in their brightness, and Bluebeard does virtually all the singing, not because he is proudest of his kingdom, but because this is his last chance to halt the revelations. He is begging Judith to become lost in their splendor. This is the point where the lighting failed by being so contained in the space under the musicians. I was hoping to have to shield my eyes from blinding whiteness. (By this point in the performance, Judith was already gazing vacantly, with an inkling of what the last chamber held.)

Would you like some (French) toast?

2005-01-16T10:56:00.000-06:00

A.C. Douglas' winter ritual of challah bread French toast sounds great - except for the winter part.

Argh! Foiled!

2005-01-14T22:12:00.000-06:00

In lieu of blogging this week I've been doing some advance work ahead of this weekend's concert slate. I was looking forward to attending the Musiqa/Chiara Quartet performance tonight and writing about it upon my return, finally getting some content on this blog.

Unfortunately my car had other ideas. She had just enough juice to get a mile away and back home as quick as I could make it...actually I had to walk the last half block after the battery gave up the ghost. Alternator, battery, or electrical system - it's still a pain in the ass.

My main consolation is that at least I'll probably get more chances to hear Tony Brandt's The Dragon and the Undying and Shih-Hui Chen's Quartet #4, which was to premiere tonight, in performances at Rice. (By the way, I found the score for Brandt's Dragon here.)

Tomorrow I'll say a few things about Bluebeard's Castle in anticipation of the Houston Symphony's concert - I have a driver for that one.

Exposure

2005-01-14T22:09:00.000-06:00

Robert Gable of aworks :: "new" american classical music and Marcus Maroney of Sounds Like New have posted links to the blog (Marcus has honored me with a spot on his blogroll). Many thanks to both, whose blogs I read and enjoy regularly. Stay tuned while I try to meet the challenge of being included among the admirable writers of the blogosphere.

Later that same evening: Alex Ross links to the Room (a nickname I'm trying out - better than IASIAR, but may unfairly steal from TSR). There is something surreal about sitting down to scan the 'sphere only to keep running into references to your own fledgling blog.

Houston Concert Life: 1/14 - 1/18

2005-01-11T16:28:00.000-06:00

Coming up this weekend:

1/14 - Musiqa's second concert, with the Chiara String Quartet. Musiqa is composer-run series dedicated to new music. They're performing works by Rice faculty members Tony Brandt & Shih-Hui Chen, along with Dutilleux's* ...ainsi la nuit... and possibly more. Each Musiqa concert also features a new work from another discipline. This time it's a one-act play by Douglas Mitchell.

1/15, 16, 17 - Houston Symphony has Brahms 3 and Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle. Bluebeard won't be staged, but it will be lighted (no, not lit). The Art Guys, a pair of screwball performance artists, are providing dramatic lighting via LED lights that will be under the musicians' chairs. As near as I can tell, the color and intensity of the lights will be controlled by computer-inputted algorithms with minimal cueing (i.e., when Judith opens each of Bluebeard's seven doors). The lighting idea is a good way to tackle Bluebeard, which would seem like an ideal opera to do in a concert version since it isn't very long and has only two singers. But the action of opening the doors is central to the drama and ought to be represented somehow.
It's a good project for the Houston Symphony, too. The creative collaboration and new and unusual use of technology on stage makes this feel like an event. Hopefully that will attract enough of an audience to meet or exceed their expectations so they won't shy away from "the new" in the future. It's the only way to survive. I think orchestras have been missing out by not creating and harnassing the frisson of anticipation that comes from a new experience (and doesn't come from the umpteenth performance of a Brahms Symphony). It's also good that this is an interdisciplinary collaboration, and one that reaches out into the community - the Art Guys are a beloved local institution, like Art Cars (direct to pictures). Not to mention that it has been a fairly inexpensive commission - about $50,000, which is probably recouped in intangible publicity.
Anyway, I'm excited...and also amused at the thought of a Brahms Symphony as a "lighter" work to fill out the program. I'll be there Saturday and might catch the Monday repeat, too.

1/16 - The Foundation for Modern Music has "A Musical Evening with the Poetry of Garcia Lorca." Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children is the centerpiece, complemented by settings of children's songs by Silvestre Rivueltas and a premiere by Mexican composer Max Lifchitz. I'll be getting prepared with my LP of Ancient Voices that I got Crumb to sign in November. :)

1/18 - The more mainstream oriented Houston Friends of Music brings in the Daedalus Quartet. They're playing Schubert's Quartettsatz and the Ravel Quartet, so me and the girlfriend each have something in it we're fond of. After intermission is the second Brahms String Quintet.

This'll keep me busy well into next week. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

* Ha! Spelled it right on the first try! ...screwed up ainsi, though.

Updates

2005-01-11T16:11:00.000-06:00

After much fun with XHTML (I'm a muddler, not an expert), I've tweaked the look of the blog and added some links to the sidebar. There's more to do, including getting a real profile up

My blogroll is far from exhaustive, but just listing the blogs I read fairly regularly took quite a bit of space. What's scary is to think of that in terms of time spent keeping up to date with reading. I usually use Alex Ross's blogroll to launch from, so if you want more sites go there. Here's his list of Music Blogs.

Later that same day: Joined up at H-Town Blogs, so Houston's represented among the Links now. I guess this means I'm officially open for business.

By way of Introduction...

2005-01-03T17:31:00.000-06:00

If 'blog' was the watchword for 2004, it is more than likely that '05 will be "The Year of the Blog."* January seems like the perfect time to jump on the bandwagon – especially since I procrastinated through the “just before it hits big” stage of the blog-writing trend.

I'd been considering starting a weblog for a few months now to support a burgeoning music criticism preoccupation. The choice to borrow the title of Alvin Lucier's composition "I am sitting in a room" was a flash of inspiration when Blogger prompted me to name the blog. The piece consists of a spoken expository text ("I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now...") recorded, played back in a room and re-recorded in that space over and over through many successive generations. In Lucier's words, "what you will hear then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech."

Something similar has been going on in my mind. Processes of reading, thinking, listening, and filtering have been working (I hope) to reinforce the resonant frequencies of my aesthetic, which I will be trying to articulate in writing.

Most posts will be about classical music, with commentary on conventional wisdom, posts on music I’m examining, and reviews from the Houston concert scene. I'm also trying to learn how to write well and vividly about music, and the blog will act as a portfolio for those efforts. I want to develop into an intelligent critic, which I believe involves: 1) being able to access my honest emotional reactions to music (art, film, literature, etc.); 2) becoming a stylish analyst and wielder of metaphors; 3) investing commentary with a broad cultural scope; 4) having the ability to formulate, defend, and argue aesthetic positions.

You are invited to follow my progress, say hi, make comments, and throw rotten fruit as appropriate. Welcome.

* [Remember when '03 was "Year of the Blues?" It was a nice try, but I don't see the blues with any higher profile after the fact. Which is a shame, but it goes to show that invented media hype does not always pan out - which may be something of a blessing.]