Post for Niki

I thought you might be interested in this.

Chamber Concert!

Hey all! Since we don't have class this week, I wanted to remind everyone that next Friday, April 4th, there will be a recital of contemporary chamber music in the SCFA Concert Hall. The works being performed are:

Red Arc/Blue Veil by John Luther Adams

Vox Balaenae by George Crumb

Drumming: Movement III by Steve Reich

The Farthest Place by John Luther Adams

All works are being presented with live video by local multimedia artist Jason Corder. Please come if you can: admission is free and this will be a concert you don't want to miss!

woops my bad

To anyone who has read this blog in the past three hours and been confused: I accidentally posted a blog entry meant for my other blog on this blog. Sorry!

Remembering Music

Last night I attended the UK Symphony Orchestra’s concert featuring world famous cellist Lynn Harrell. As they opened with the dramatic and resonant sounds of Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, I suddenly remembered why I loved music in the first place. I am drawn to the powerful, the emotional, the personal. The Elgar Cello Concerto was all too fitting, a work written just after the composer underwent a possibly life-threatening surgery. I wonder if Elgar was making a statement that life is precious, that it is worth living, even that music is life.
As I was leaving campus after the concert I ran into a fellow classmate and one of her adult students who had just picked up playing the cello about a year ago. We had a great conversation about his love for music and how he came to love the cello as well. I mentioned to him in passing that I had been steeped in music since 1968, so it was refreshing for me to hear Beethoven and Elgar again (not to say 20th and 21st music is not as good, but only to say it was nice to be reacquainted with those guys). His humorous response: “You poor thing. Just stick to the romantic period.” Funny as it may be to hear someone say this, it’s actually not an uncommon response even among many musicians. To be fair, we do live in a pluralistic age of musical creation, and it’s hard to find our bearings with so much going on. On the other hand, upon hearing some modern piece of music that is difficult to understand, the easy response for listeners is: “I just don’t like that modern stuff. I’ll stick to ___________ (fill in the blank). But there is much more out there, and it would probably take a lifetime to even come close to finding it all – especially with the constantly changing currents of contemporary music. So the question for me is (laying aside my sophisticated grad student mentality): What do I look for in a piece of music? To put it another way: What kind of listener am I? These questions help give me a certain clarity as I try to find my bearings in modern music.
Well, to go back to my opening statement: I think I can find the answers in Beethoven. Yes, that music is very different from today’s – but it has power, it has heart, and it is personal. So as I wade through the masses of modern compositions, that’s what I’m looking for. And I don’t mean I’m looking for the simplicity and unity with which Beethoven wrote – I am simply searching for that spirit of Beethoven which has a deep love for music, regardless of how the music is packaged. George Rochberg wrote at one time: “Why do you want to write music nobody can love? Do you hate yourself? Or do you hate them?...Why do you want to write music nobody can remember? Do you hate music?” As the Beethoven and all the other pieces were being played so beautifully last night, I felt a sense of naivety – that delightful pleasure and excitement in hearing music that I experienced long before I ever put on my smart music major cap. My intentions are to always pursue musical knowledge and insight, so I don’t wish to leave behind all the good things being a music major has taught me – I just hope I can continue on, always having that naïve perspective, always delighting in music.

Is there hope for musicology?

In Kyle Gann’s lecture, he discusses, at some length, Leonard Meyer’s three phases of development within musicological movements: Pre-classic, Classic, and Mannerist. However, simultaneous and pluralistic musical movements, coupled with a lack of historical perspective on recent movements in music, make it impossible to empirically categorize modern music using Meyer’s methods. Furthermore, this issue makes it impossible to use ANY pre-existing musicological method to categorize or quantify new music.

This is not, however, to say that musicological study of modern music is impossible. Gann, himself considered one of the foremost chroniclers of new music, admitted to me in conversation that he had little, if any, grasp of popular music, and imparted in his lecture that he did not purchase his first “pop” record until he was 22 (even then, Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” is a pretty left-of-field recording for “popular music”). Gann went on to say that he is no longer an appropriate chronicler of new music, because he can not critique music from a holistic perspective; the convergence of “popular” and “art” music have made it difficult to undertake study of one without study of the other. The terms “popular” and “art” are, in my opinion, ridiculous and outmoded- “popular” music has been art music since the release of Sgt. Pepper’s in 1968, and “art” has been pop since the same time, since Yoko Ono decided to open her loft to “classical” musicians and take art music into the realm of rock and jazz.

The point I am trying to make, however discursive, is that there is hope for musicological study of contemporary music, but that musicology needs, in the face of continually subdividing musical currents, to become LESS concerned with sub-stratifying specific movements and more concerned with total, non-exclusive study of ALL forward-thinking music.

Side note

In case anyone is interested, the Wordless Music Concert is now streaming online.


"The Sinking of the Titanic" (1969) by John Adams
"Christian Zeal and Activity," by Gavin Bryars
and
"Popcorn Superhet Receiver" by Jonny Greenwood

Check it out if you've got a moment..

The Importance of Re-defining "Downtown"

In the preface to Music Downtown, Kyle Gann claims that the “younger generation” (the one to which I think I still belong) is more interested in vernacular music than classical, presumably inferring that this stands in stark contrast to the attitudes of former generations (namely, I assume, his). This assertion is patently ridiculous. While I won’t argue that my generation is, indubitably, more interested in vernacular music than classical music, we are not the first generation to adopt this attitude. The generation that “killed” classical music is not mine, but my parent’s (the one to which Gann belongs). Were I to ask my father to name five Romantic symphonies, he would laugh at me and go back to his Pink Floyd records. Were I to ask him to name five Rolling Stones songs, he’d have them listed in the time it took me to construct this sentence.

However, as much offense as I might take to Gann’s statement, I invoke this quote not so much to fault a specific generation, or even to fault Gann’s contention as such, as I do to engender an understanding of what my definition of Downtown music consists of, and why I feel Gann’s is faulty. Downtown music is more of a philosophical stand than a musical one, yet Gann is attempting to define it as one would normally group a music genre: by finding artists that share compositional common ground. With Uptown and Downtown, this won’t work. Even if we are to exempt geography (which, given that there are composers in places other than NYC, we certainly should), Uptown and Downtown composers should not be grouped by musical style, which would merely be divisive, but by similar philosophy.

The European influence that Gann cites as being indicative of Uptown and Midtown music is not so much a musical influence as it is an influence of attitude. The European tradition of sitting in concert halls, listening to music in a prescribed and narrowly defined genre, where compositional practice is defined by sets of rules, and analyzing that music strictly for academic content, is what uptown music has derived from European tradition. Downtown music took music out of the concert hall and into a setting comfortable to its participants, one generally tread upon by rock musicians. The very fact that composers of my parent’s generation were so interested in vernacular music is the reason that Downtown music even exists! The composers of “Downtown” music are steeped in the aesthetics of rock and jazz (so much for the assertion that Gann’s generation doesn’t place the same weight on vernacular music that mine does), and their musical philosophies reflect a sentiment not characterized by rules or confinement, but rather by expansion; taking different influences, refusing to be pigeonholed, questioning definitions, and removing art music both from the concert hall and from its pedestal as “art music”.

Furthermore, the definers of Uptown and Downtown with regards to musical content have become blurred. I find it amusing that in the introduction and preface to Gann’s Music Downtown, he cites that New Complexity, as led by Ferneyhough, Reynolds, and their ilk, is a rallying cry for Uptown music, yet, in American Music’s chapter on post-Cage conceptualism, he cites New Complexity as a conceptualist style, thus, according to his criteria, rooted in the DOWNTOWN scene! Additionally, Steve Reich, perhaps the very picture of downtown music, himself claims major influence from Stravinsky, the primary exponent of European neo-classicism! This is one of Downtown music’s most fascinating facets: it can draw influence, in the same piece, even, from Bach, The Beatles, and Berio, and still be Downtown. In fact, this diversity of influence might even, according to some, make this hypothetical piece MORE “Downtown”.

Gann makes the statement, towards the end of the introduction, that, as he transitions from the world of Downtown New York City to the world of academia, he finds that he is now “too old” to be a faithful and reliable barometer of Downtown music. It seems to me that Gann is primarily associating Downtown music, a burgeoning music style characterized by aggressive challenging of musical precept and a relaxed attitude towards the uncommon, with youth, and, no doubt he is right to do so, as Downtown music is A) a young movement, and B) these values are also characteristic of adolescence and post-adolescence. Now, I’m not one to be ageist-great composers and performers, even great critics, can come at any age. Reich, Perlman, Christgau: all are icons of the aforementioned three fields, and all three are over 60. Similarly, Nico Muhly, Hilary Hahn, Chuck Klosterman: all are of my generation, and they continue to excel in fields set by their predecessors. So, perhaps, then, Gann isn’t too old: perhaps he’s just too crotchety.