Category: Field Reports

Your 2013-14 Attitude Guide: Four to Cop, Four to Drop for an Amazing Season

Posted on August 21, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #1: SOBUSYOMG

September is coming, with all of its promise and terror. Remember that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You’ll know you have a problem if, in mid-October, someone asks how you’re doing and this is your response.
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #2: MY SCREEN, MYSELF

Most of us carry our email inboxes around in our pockets, which is both a blessing and a curse. Read the research on how addictive, counter-productive, and psychologically damaging the whole “constantly plugged in” thing can be, and make sure The Machines are serving you.
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #3: MY FINANCES ARE FINE

You can’t pretend to be surprised anymore when April comes and you owe the government two months’ rent. And it’s getting a little ridiculous how infrequently you change your strings. Get a savings account and put plenty of money in it so that you can invest in your instrument, your career, and yourself when those moments arise. Ally Bank allows you to create multiple online savings accounts so that you can set aside money for different financial goals (like paying taxes, traveling, or buying an important new piece of gear).
SOUL-KILLING ATTITUDE #4: INSTRUMENT, WHAT INSTRUMENT?

I know. Being a musician sometimes feels like 973 hours of emailing, commuting, teaching, and Sleigh Ride and 2 hours of quality practicing. But your relationship with your instrument (or your compositional process) is a primary relationship, and feeling distant from that often means losing touch with your roots. When you stay grounded in the basics, a lot of great stuff will follow.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #1: SELF-PRESERVATION

This fall, you must become a fearless practitioner of The Art of Saying No. We both know that time is the most valuable resource you have, and that you never have enough of it. Approach your life and your Google Calendar like a zealous weed-whacking gardener, ruthlessly clearing space for the things that actually matter. Only one morning available for composing this week? Postpone those advice-giving coffee dates. Super busy performing month? Let friends know ahead of time, so you don’t feel guilty turning down their dinner invitations. And if people don’t like it, they can deal with it.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #2: GRATITUDE

If you’re a performer or composer, chances are you don’t work alone. You probably rely pretty heavily on tolerant quartet-mates, long-suffering stand partners, and miraculously organized artistic staff. Busy working musicians have a bad habit of not expressing appreciation often enough, heartily enough, or—in the case of Frodo and Sam—homoerotically enough. This fall, practice gratitude for the delicate ecosystem of wonderful people who make your career possible.
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #3: JOY

You trained all your life for this stuff, and now you get to do it. The best gig is not at some future time; it’s the one you’re playing right now. So stop complaining and texting during rehearsal and take some joy in what you’re doing. (If there’s absolutely no joy in what you’re doing, see Soul-Healing Attitude #1. You know what to do.)
SOUL-HEALING ATTITUDE #4: CONFIDENCE

Believe in your unique self. Our classical music training sometimes makes us feel like we’re all striving endlessly towards the same unattainable ideal. But the truth is, it’s your quirks and unique gifts that make you an important contributor to our art form. Have you heard of impostor syndrome? The feeling that you’re not good enough, that you’re going to be found out as a fraud any second? It’s a thing that a lot of people—women especially—suffer from. Confidence is the opposite of that. So put on an amazing outfit and fake it ’til you make it.

New England’s Prospect: The Manicured Lawns (Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music)

Posted on August 19, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

There is no good reason for Tanglewood to be where it is, apart from the late, latent imprint of Gilded Age fortunes, the leftover patronage that lured first Henry Hadley then Serge Koussevitzky to the Berkshires in the 1930s. This season’s Tanglewood anniversary—lately, every year seems to bring one—is the 75th of the Music Shed, erected in 1938 as a riposte to nature: conceived, funded, designed, and built in a spasm of pique over an epic rainstorm the previous season. The place channels history at every turn, but it is not so much the history of the land it sits on, or the century’s worth of people who passed through it on its way to its current incarnation. It is the history of itself. The past that Tanglewood leverages is its own. It is a recursive monument.
I mention this as a possible explanation for why, even after more than four decades, Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music still seems to be making itself up as it goes along. In one sense, it should—the music keeps changing, so the FCM should, too. But the goal seems to change from year to year. Is it a survey, a snapshot of the time? An in-depth exploration of particular personalities? A stake-in-the-ground vision of the future? A chance to adjust the ledger of the past? An educational exercise? All of the above?

Under the direction of pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, this year’s festival—Thursday to Monday, August 8-12—glanced off several of those possibilities without settling on any one. The festival-as-portrait was divided up three ways—and across two continents—between Elliott Carter (in memoriam), Marco Stroppa, and Helmut Lachenmann. The festival-as-rewind centered around a concert that sought to bring some venerable American classical counterculture into the Tanglewood fold. The festival-of-the-moment brought the U.S. premiere of George Benjamin’s opera Written on Skin, presented in concert on Monday night.
At the same time, the FCM felt weirdly hemmed in. A limited, all-male, all-white roster of composers was hardly an adventurous template. But the festival also, from piece to piece, seemed to be changing its mind on what exactly it wanted to be.

***

Thursday’s concerts (which I covered for the Boston Globe) had included Instances, Carter’s second-to-last work; Friday’s opened with his last, Epigrams, performed by violinist Sarah Silver and cellist Michael Dahlberg (both members of the New Fromm Players) and Aimard at the piano. Like Instances, the piece is aphoristic, mercurial in the alchemical sense, its prima materia seeming to encompass all manner of metals, soft and hard, dark and bright. Also like Instances, it seems to play with the idea of late-period music: efficiently brief and often elegiac—some of the string writing in Epigrams is as lyrical as anything Carter ever wrote, going all the way back to his neo-classic Americana—but constantly surrounded by sharp, disjunct, even fierce commentary and contrast.

Lachenmann’s portfolio—introduced on Thursday with “…zwei Gefühle…,” a quite thorough deconstruction of texts by Leonardo da Vinci—continued on Friday with his Third String Quartet, Grido (beneficiary of a phenomenal performance by the JACK Quartet). As is Lachenmann’s wont, Grido is a canvas of noise: bowing on the bridge, bowing behind the bridge, bowing the tailpiece, bowing the tuning pegs, dragging the bow up and down the strings like a howl of wind, with occasional incursions of denatured pitch. Grido also shares with “…zwei Gefühle…” a seeming multitude of endings, the music coming to a halt only to start up again, on its way to another (temporary) halt. It gives Lachenmann’s music a kind of eschatological heaviness, an enervating existential persistence built into the music’s structure.

The Tanglewood Music Center performed the U.S. premiere of Marco Stroppa's Let Me Sing Into Your Ear on Thursday night with amplified basset horn player Michele Marielli. Photo by Hilary Scott.

The Tanglewood Music Center performed the U.S. premiere of Marco Stroppa’s Let Me Sing Into Your Ear on Thursday night with amplified basset horn player Michele Marielli.
Photo by Hilary Scott.

Let Me Sing Into Your Ear, Stroppa’s electrified basset horn concerto performed on Thursday night, proved a divertimento next to Friday’s Traietorria, for piano and computerized sound. Stroppa, a three-decade veteran of electronic composition, has a style that falls somewhere between music and sound art; Traietorria, finished in 1989 but only making it to the United States now, is a catalog and a summation, a 45-minute marathon of acoustic/digital interaction that is both strikingly advanced, considering its ‘80s vintage, but also technologically limited in a way that—compared with 2010’s Let Me Sing Into Your Ear—seemed to have demanded a more deliberate and conscientious curation of its resources. The piano writing is of a fascinating virtuosity: Gaspard de la Nuit, maybe, or the Three Pieces from Petrouchka, crushed and compressed into dense recycled fury. Traietorria is vast and uncompromising, and a lot of the audience was squirming by the end. But I loved it. True, I love big, obsessive manifesti. But I also loved the opportunity to hear it. Aimard clearly wanted to bring the piece here, and was clearly using the FCM as the chance to do it. Is that enough reason for the festival itself? Traietorria made the case for a resounding maybe.

***

In past years, something like Traietorria—or Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, the anchor of the Sunday morning concert—probably would have been a concert unto itself: a prelude to one of the full-length festival concerts, or a late-night happening in the old Tanglewood Theatre. The FCM, when I first started going, ran from Wednesday through Sunday night. Now it runs Thursday through Monday. Given the immoveable object that is the BSO schedule—Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday afternoon, now also an open rehearsal on Saturday morning—that one-day shift has both limited the FCM’s offerings and increasingly bumped its concerts up against the Boston Symphony Orchestra itself.

Saturday’s concert, for instance, was presented as the 6:00 p.m. prelude to the 8:30 p.m. BSO concert, which meant a visiting contingent of BSO patrons shifting and grumbling their way through what actually was one of the more entertaining programs of the week. Aimard played a sampler of Carter’s post-Night Fantasies solo piano music (Retrouvailles, Tri-Tribute, and 90+), his nervous, crystalline touch ideal for the music’s hyper-intelligent, kitten-on-the-keys style. Stroppa’s Ossia: Seven Strophes for a Literary Drone (an homage to Joseph Brodsky) was another assemblage of effects, this time for piano trio (violinist Matthew Leslie Santana, cellist Louise Grevin, and pianist Katherine Dowling), but with the visual and aural diversion of a different stage placement for each movement. Where Stroppa went delicate, Lachenmann, on this concert, went slapstick: GOT LOST, in a performance of unfailing deadpan mastery by pianist Stephen Drury and soprano Elizabeth Keusch, deconstructed the idea of art song, its own text, and the conventions of performance into a monument of weighty goofiness. Like the rest of Lachenmann’s works, it is deliberately drawn out, though here the lengthy disintegration is played as a bleak, I’m-not-dead-yet joke.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs piano works by Elliott Carter. Photo by Hilary Scott.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard performs piano works by Elliott Carter.
Photo by Hilary Scott.

The 8:30 p.m. concert at the Koussevitzky Music Shed included the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s annual nod at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music: Sound Fields, Elliott Carter’s brief exercise in string-orchestra klangfarbenharmonie that was premiered at the 2008 FCM. Four minutes of soft chords is, on paper, about as perfunctory a contribution to the festival as the BSO could make, but they did a lovely job with it, conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi energetically cueing the structural accents beneath the music’s placid surface. The audience? At least where I was, the audience was unusually terrible, coughing throughout. I finally made peace with it by imagining it as an impromptu Lachenmann jest: a memento mori of audible ill-health, paying tribute to Carter by acknowledging that no one in the audience was likely to live as long as he did.

***

The three middle FCM concerts were marked by a comparative absence of Tanglewood Music Center Fellows. The New Fromm Players are TMC alumni, a troupe of contemporary specialists specially hired for each summer season, and they shared the stage with a stream of guests: Aimard, the JACK Quartet, Drury, and Keusch. The student fellows filled out the more orchestral-sized ensembles on Thursday’s concert (and the Reich). But Grevin, the cellist in Stroppa’s trio, was the only fellow on these chamber concerts—that is, until a last-minute substitution let a quartet of fellows (Matthew Vera, Thomas Hofmann, Adrienne Hochman, and Francesca McNeeley) open Sunday morning’s concert with an exhilarating performance of György Ligeti’s 1954 String Quartet No. 1, replacing the previously scheduled Monument—Selbstporträt—Bewegung (that was to have been performed by Dowling and Nicolas Namoradze, both New Fromm Players).

Having Ligeti’s early quartet rather than his later, puckish salute to minimalism, somewhat unraveled the programming thread of the concert, which, on paper, was to lead up to the Reich 18. The addition of more Stroppa, too, was a bit of a detour: BSO cellist Mickey Katz (a former New Fromm Player himself) played Stroppa’s Ay, There’s the Rub, a slow formal morph between pitch-based and noise-based extended techniques. (Katz followed it with an encore, another memorial, one of Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher that did much the same as Stroppa’s piece, but with a more deft accent.) The ceremony proper started with a dashing rendition—by Dowling and Namoradze—of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies Nos. 5 and 6 (in a transcription by Thomas Adès), then, after intermission, concluded with Music for 18 Musicians. If the performance was clean but a little square—more downbeat than backbeat—the familiar machinery made Ozawa Hall ring.

***

By the time everyone reassembled on Monday night for Written on Skin, it felt like yet another festival. Benjamin’s opera was having its American premiere, and the anticipation was high. Premiered in 2012, Written on Skin is fugitive in a way that echoes the FCM itself, constantly shifting its own identity. The plot is medieval: a love triangle between a severe Protector (baritone Evan Hughes), his wife Agnès (soprano Lauren Snouffer), and the Boy (countertenor Augustine Mercante), hired by the Protector to produce a lavish, expensive illuminated book. A pair of angels (mezzo-soprano Tammy Coil and tenor Isaiah Bell) offer commentary and, in the guise of Agnés’s sister and brother-in-law, a brittle mirror to the Protector and Agnés. And to us: Martin Crimp’s libretto freely drops in anachronistic reference to contemporary consumerism, class division, and religious fanaticism. The characters alternate between proclaiming their own symbolic status and narrating their own stage action.

Augustine Mercante, Evan Hughes, Lauren Snouffer and conductor George Benjamin performing Written on Skin in Ozawa Hall 8.12.13.Photo by Hilary Scott.

Augustine Mercante, Evan Hughes, Lauren Snouffer, and conductor George Benjamin performing Written on Skin in Ozawa Hall.
Photo by Hilary Scott.

None of this should work; it all does, spectacularly. The orchestra (conducted by Benjamin) seethes and burns like molten steel; the vocal lines stutter and soar, forever off-balance but ready to take flight at a moment’s rage; the climax of the opera—the Protector kills the Boy, serves his heart to his wife, who then commits suicide in joyful spite—shifts from lurid to magical with breathtaking dexterity. After the rest of the festival’s cross-purposes, even in its more rewarding moments, to bring this piece across the Atlantic felt like a real coup. And the performance—mostly TMC Fellows, only Hughes and a few extra instrumentalists joining as guests—had fierce grandeur. More than that, though, the opera’s cross-referenced multiplicity—the way it combined the distance of legend with the immediacy of reinvention, the precise description of its action with its euphoric evocation, the proclamation of archetype with individual specificity—offered a possible mission statement for the FCM as a whole: a glittering interchange, ever-shifting, looking forward and looking back, equal parts ritual and experiment, all held together by sheer musical brio.

The self-conjured nature of Tanglewood extends to the FCM; it means, for one thing, that no one will ever be happy with what it is, because it seems like it could be whatever you want it to be. I can’t think of another new music festival that people have quibbled and argued about for so long, but that, too, is a kind of heritage: not many new music festivals are so worth the quibbles and arguments. Give the FCM credit: it leaves you wanting more—more concerts; more American innovations, more European innovations, and more input from the wide world beyond that axis; more musicians sinking their teeth into the repertoire; more sheer when-else-will-we-ever-do-this impractical madness. It’s a tall order. But if you can make your own history, why not shoot for the moon?

TMC Fellows perform "Music for 18 Musicians" by Steve Reich as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood on 8.11.13. Photo by HIlary Scott.

TMC Fellows perform Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood.
Photo by Hilary Scott.

Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival: A Sandbox of Sounds

Posted on August 15, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines


A montage of concerts, rehearsals, and random happenings from throughout
Bang on a Can’s 2013 Summer Music Festival.
Video footage by MASS MoCA and Zach Herchen, edited by Zach Herchen.

This past July I was fortunate enough to attend Bang on a Can’s Summer Music Festival as a 2013 fellow. The three-week event was held at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art), a huge modern art museum in North Adams, Massachusetts. I wasn’t exactly sure what to expect, but a distinct vibe quickly developed during the first week: non-stop youthful creative energy.

Right this way to MASS MoCA

Right this way to MASS MoCA’s 110,000 square feet of contemporary art galleries.
All photos by Zach Herchen.

During our time together, faculty and fellows performed a large amount of music. This doesn’t simply mean that Bang on a Can programmed a lot of pieces, though we certainly dug into plenty of great works. The festival is structured in a way that encourages everyone to explore and collaborate. Think of it as half festival, half artist retreat. Daily lunchtime recitals were open for fellows to perform anything we liked in the art gallery of our choice. These concerts included improvisations, commissioned works, modern repertoire, and numerous new compositions composed by fellows during the festival. In our free time, fellows often met up for jam sessions, readings of compositional drafts, and one or two unscheduled concerts. After-hours hangouts included two karaoke nights at the local bar with a live backing band of festival participants.

Bang on a Can fellows improvise

Bang on a Can fellows Brendon Randall-Myers (left), Lucie Grugier (center), and David Sánchez García (right) improvise music alongside artwork by Joseph Montgomery during a lunchtime recital.

Faculty and fellows were placed into several structured groups ranging from standard quartets, to chamber orchestras, to bands mirroring the Bang on a Can All-Stars instrumentation. These groups performed ten premieres by composition fellows, daily evening recitals, and a seven-hour concluding marathon. In addition to these concerts, fellows learned and performed African drumming, Latin jazz, a sign language for conducting improvised music called sound painting, and new ways of creating music in the Orchestra of Original Instruments.

An evening recital in a gallery of Jason Middlebrook’s painted hardwood planks.

The Bang on a Can All-Stars present an evening recital in a gallery of Jason Middlebrook’s painted hardwood planks.

By asking fellows to learn and perform so much new music within a few days, we were pushed to absorb and explore, often in ways we weren’t used to doing. African drumming was taught by ear with no discussion of rhythm or meter. Latin jazz involved quick arrangements and comfort in following new ideas on the fly. Sound painting required attentive improvisation to understand directions in a sign language that was new to most of us. The Orchestra of Original Instruments asked us to explore sound creation through tubes, balloons, humming, Québécois clogging, and a variety of original instruments made by Gunnar Schonbeck. Here the music wasn’t just new—it was sounds we’d never heard and instruments we’d never played. In this environment it was natural to broaden our self-image from a specialist in one instrument to a general sound-maker. The overlapping theme of each day? Forget your expectations, discover what your peers can offer, and be surprised by what you can create.

Fellows explore Gunnar Schonbeck’s original instruments.

Fellows meet in an undeveloped section of MASS MoCA to explore Gunnar Schonbeck’s original instruments for the first time.

While these ideas are not completely new, it was the fellows and faculty that made them so compelling. Every style performed throughout the festival (contemporary, funk, classical, hip-hop, jazz, folk, and classic rock, to name a few) was presented with the same passion and interest. Fellows were often found trying out new lessons such as drumming patterns, sound painting symbols, and clogging in our free time. While performance technique was of the highest caliber, technical perfection was not an end in itself. Instead, presenting the best art you can and enjoying the moment was at the heart of each concert.

Festival fellow Joe Tucker performs a work for vibraphone and playback.

Festival fellow Joe Tucker performs a work for vibraphone and playback next to one of 105 large-scale wall drawings designed by Sol LeWitt.

We were asked to shed restrictions, open our ears, and return to a place of youthful excitement where we found our love of music; take risks, share that idea we’d kept to ourselves, and always say yes. Whether it was a rendition of “The Old Castle” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition over a 3/4 drumming rhythm, playing a trumpet into a bowl of water, or overlaying Stevie Wonder’s “Superstitious” with The Beatles’ “Day Tripper,” this year’s festival was a breeding ground for projects, ideas, and new experiences. It’s easy to miss the utopian feel of a three-week music festival, and difficult to keep that energy and excitement as I reintegrate to normal life. I can say with certainty, though, that I look forward to hearing what my peers create next and feel ready to get a dream project off the ground.

Performance under Xu Bing's Pheonix. a Can Summer Music Festival

Festival fellow Ben Willis sings into his bass during a performance under Xu Bing’s Pheonix.

In the Bay Area: Cahill at the Piano and Music@Menlo

Posted on August 8, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Pianist Sarah Cahill’s engaging solo recital last Friday, presented by Old First Concerts, included an advance look at a program that Cahill is planning to perform at San Quentin State Prison next month of music by Henry Cowell. Also included were pieces by three other composers who were either born or now live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and several works by the late Canadian composer Ann Southam. In a hall filled with familiar faces, Cahill introduced Piano Step by Samuel Carl Adams (composer John Adams’s son) by saying “most of you have probably known him since he was little.” Similarly, Cahill and Shinji Eshima, whose Delta 88 was given its premiere performance, have a friendship dating back 40 years, and John Kennedy, who moved to the Bay Area from Santa Fe only a year ago, has already established a regular local presence.

Sarah Cahill, using her forearm to play clusters in Henry Cowell’s High Color

Sarah Cahill, using her forearm to play clusters in Henry Cowell’s High Color

Cahill played two works by Cowell on this program, Rhythmicana and High Color, which were both written in 1938, during the four-year period when Cowell was incarcerated on a morals charge at San Quentin in Marin County, north of the Golden Gate Bridge. (A recording of Cahill playing High Color is available on New Albion Records’ document of the 1997 Henry Cowell Piano Festival in Berkeley, which coincidentally is when Cahill first met Kennedy.) Cahill’s upcoming project is a performance at the prison on September 20 of music that Cowell wrote while imprisoned. In addition to works for piano, Cahill hopes to accompany a few of the inmates in Cowell’s songs from this period and to enlist other musicians to perform Cowell’s United string quartet and other works. (The prison has a history of arts advocacy; the Marin Shakespeare Festival has been working with inmates annually to present a Shakespeare play, alongside works written by the incarcerated reflecting Shakespeare’s themes.)


Delta 88 by Shinji Eshima, a longtime bassist with the San Francisco Opera and San Francisco Ballet orchestras, was constructed with the idea of using each key across the full range of the piano once, with the sustain pedal held throughout the two-and-a-half minute work. The metaphor, Eshima writes, is of “the many things we experience but once in our lives.” As such, Eshima moves through some of the notes very quickly using fast arpeggiations up the keyboard, but other pitches are slowed down and observed more carefully, like the final three which settle at the lowest and highest ends of instrument.

John Kennedy’s Naturali Periclitati (“Endangered Natures”) was written in 2007 for a program that Santa Fe pianist Marthanne Verbit was preparing on the deteriorating state of the environment. (Her recording was released on Albany Records’ Endangered.) An evocative 15-minute piece in three movements, Kennedy uses large register separation between voices throughout the work, creating an unsettled sense of multiple realities coexisting uneasily. Piano Step (2010), written for Lisa Moore by Samuel Carl Adams when he was 25, is constructed on an 11-chord passacaglia that begins its eight-minute journey as an oddly mixed-metered homophonic hymn. Along the way it breaks apart into different registrations, dissolves into stuttering single notes, and gets interrupted by occasional interjections, before settling into an unexpected, quiet and simple statement in the distance right at the end.

Richard Friedman introduces work by Ann Southam

Richard Friedman introduces work by Ann Southam

While Eshima and Kennedy were both on hand to speak about their pieces (Brooklyn-based Adams was not able to attend), Cahill asked Richard Friedman, who has a weekly program on KALW called Music from Other Minds, to introduce the works by Ann Southam—Glass Houses No. 7 and Rivers, Series II, No. 2. (Cahill also hosts a new music program on KALW, recently renamed Revolutions Per Minute.) The infectious enthusiasm with which Friedman spoke about coming across Southam’s music for the first time is probably familiar to all NewMusicBox readers who have at one time said, “OMG, I just heard this great thing and I have to play it for you right now!” Indeed, this delight in discovery pervaded the entire concert, which had the feeling of a small group of friends taking pleasure in sharing some nice things they found.

Cahill’s performance of Southam’s fluid, minimalist works—Glass Houses No. 7 has a rolling nine-note pattern in the left hand that repeats throughout; Rivers a gentle rocking pattern in the right hand—were mesmerizing and organic. In his introduction, Friedman said that while many composers write music about water, Southam’s music “sounds like water,” and in fact, as the left hand melody crossed and flowed through the repeating right hand figure in Rivers, the line picked up and subsumed the notes of the ostinato like pebbles carried along by the current.

Cahill closed the program with a spirited delivery of Cowell’s High Color, which evokes the “dazzling gold” in the hills of Ireland. Cowell overlays an Irish jig tune with forearm clusters, which results in a joyous cacophony that Cahill confidently delivered with her refreshing lack of unnecessary showmanship and pretense. The concert was greeted with a rousing standing ovation, which yielded a final work by Southam, also from the Rivers series—a quiet and reflective send-off into the evening.

***

Christopher Froh, Ian Rosenbaum, and Ayano Kataoka (from left) performing Part One of Reich’s Drumming

Christopher Froh, Ian Rosenbaum, and Ayano Kataoka (from left) performing Part One of Reich’s Drumming
Photo courtesy of Music@Menlo

The small rural outpost that Henry Cowell was born in bears little resemblance to the Menlo Park of today. Located in the midst of Silicon Valley, Menlo Park is now home to Facebook and numerous venture capital firms, as well as the Music@Menlo summer chamber music series, which was founded 11 seasons ago by New York-based artistic directors David Finckel and Wu Han, who also head the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Though nearly all of the festival’s programming is traditionally in the Bach/Beethoven/Brahms vein—especially this season, which is titled From Bach—one concert on this year’s Carte Blanche recital series stood out for its programming of Nancarrow, Cage, Reich, and other 20th-century composers, featuring percussionists Christopher Froh, Ayano Kataoka, and Ian Rosenbaum.

Menlo-Atherton High School’s Center for Performing Arts

Menlo-Atherton High School’s Center for Performing Arts

Held in the 500-seat theater at the Center for Performing Arts on the campus of the Menlo-Atherton High School, this shrewdly chosen program of solos, duets, and trios drawn from international contemporary percussion repertoire was an unadulterated delight for the audience throughout. More than once during the intermission I overheard people say with pleasure, “That was really fun!” and “This is not what I expected!” (The only work from earlier than 1948 was Kataoka’s transcription for solo marimba of the first three movements of Bach’s Violin Partita No. 3, which she played with such grace and flair that audience members applauded heartily after each movement.)

Kataoka and Froh perform Kagel’s Railroad Drama from Rrrrrr…

Kataoka and Froh perform Kagel’s “Railroad Drama” from Rrrrrr…
Photo courtesy of Music@Menlo

The three percussionists, who do not perform regularly as a trio—Froh is based in the Bay Area, while Kataoka and Rosenbaum are from the East Coast, both having been members of CMS Two—collectively demonstrated an interest in theatricality, employing lighting designs for several of the works and programming Thierry de Mey’s Table Music, performed with virtuosic verve and occasional moments of hamminess, and two movements from Mauricio Kagel’s Rrrrrrr…. The three gathered around one bass drum for Nebojsa Zivkovic’s wild and wildly entertaining Trio per uno, and followed that with the highlight of the program for me, Rosenbaum’s supremely elegant and meditative reading of John Cage’s In a Landscape adapted for solo marimba.

Trio per uno by Nebojsa Zivkovic

To conclude the program, four pairs of bongo drums were arranged in a T (instead of a straight line) for the three musicians to play Part One of Steve Reich’s Drumming, written for four percussionists but reconfigured to be possible for three. The Music@Menlo crowd, which had never before been offered an all-percussion concert at this festival, gave the musicians an enthusiastic and well-deserved ovation, showing yet again that with compelling programming and a charismatic performance, even an audience used to a steady diet of the European classical canon will respond to an excellent concert filled with music new to their ears.

Table Music by Thierry de Mey

New England’s Prospect: All-Lou Harrison Concert At Monadnock Music

Posted on August 6, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Ludwig Zamenhof originally imagined Esperanto as a local balm, not a global one. He grew up in Bialystock, then the capital of the Belostock Oblast, a province of the Russian empire that included about half of modern Poland. In Bialystock, the Jews spoke Yiddish, the Poles spoke Polish, the Russians spoke Russian, the Belarusians spoke Russian (and Belarusian), the Tatars spoke Belarusian (but used the Arabic alphabet), the Germans spoke German, and everybody was constantly at odds with each other. Zamenhof invented Esperanto in the 1880s with the hope that getting everyone to learn a single, simple language, unburdened by history or tradition, would eliminate misunderstanding and thus eliminate conflict—internal conflict, at first; international, as the movement took off.

Lou Harrison, the composer, was an Esperantist. He translated the Mahāyāna Buddhist Heart Sūtra into Esperanto for his choral setting, La Koro Sutro—a universal wisdom in a universal language. And then, paradoxically—and in a reversed echo of the progress of Zamenhof’s idea—he set it in a way that guaranteed that performances would be few, far in between, and heavily dependent on where you were.

***

Conductor Gil Rose opened Monadnock Music’s all-Lou Harrison concert on July 27 with a quick tour of Old Granddad, a just-intonation assemblage of pipes, sawed-off oxygen tanks, plate metal, and large tin cans spread across the floor in front of the stage of the Peterborough Town House in New Hampshire. (This is the second season Rose has had the directorship of Monadnock Music in his brief, which also includes the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and—just recently announced—the newly formed Odyssey Opera company.) Old Granddad, the original, was the “American Gamelan” Harrison and his partner, William Colvig, built from scratch in the early 1970s. Rose explained how, after the University of California at Santa Cruz (owners of that original Old Granddad) stopped renting the instruments out, he was lucky enough—having already scheduled a BMOP concert requiring Old Granddad’s services—to learn that Richard Cooke, a longtime Harrison associate, was building a copy for the Rhythm Discovery Center museum. Cooke agreed to build Rose a second copy. Rose also strongly hinted that, having performed (and recorded, for future release) the two works on the evening’s concert (La Koro Sutro and the Suite for Violin and American Gamelan), he was now eager to program Young Caesar—the puppet opera that is the only other piece Harrison composed for Old Granddad—and then hand the care and storage of the instruments off to someone else.

The Suite is, on the surface, modeled after a Baroque dance suite, prompting Rose to program it alongside J. S. Bach—the G minor solo violin Sonata (BWV 1001), which Gabriela Diaz played with a phrase-by-phrase rubato, micro rather than macro, that emphasized the music’s complex intricacies. In the end, it made more of a contrast than a complement to the Suite, which seems built more out of measures of moods than layered lines. The piece, the last written for Old Granddad before Harrison turned his attention to gamelans more explicitly modeled after Javanese examples, was a collaboration—Harrison wrote it in partnership with his student Richard Dee—and you can kind of sense where one composer leaves off and the other picks up: the opening movement, full of double-stop drones and ostinati, and the following “Estampie,” busy and wandering, are like A and B sides of the same record; the moody, modal-hymnody-tinged “Air” and the long-line, almost Samuel-Barber lyricism of the final “Chaconne” are more like each other than like any of the rest. But it’s all part of the Suite’s grand tour, a stylistic rail pass that comes out most clearly in the trio of “Jhalas” in the center, the first full of Debussyian haze, the second pentatonic and jangly, almost a Russian-frontier Christmas, complete with sleigh bells, the third (for gamelan alone) stateless and ambient. It was a confidently drawn performance, Diaz indefatigably expressive, the six-man crew of Old Granddad (Craig McNutt, Jeffrey Means, Robert Schulz, Nick Tolle, Aaron Trant, and Mike Williams) working with concentrated efficiency.

Monadnock Music Artistic Director Gil Rose conducts an American gamelan ensemble and the Monadnock Festival Singers in Lou Harrison's La Koro Sutro on Saturday, July 27 at the Peterborough Town House.

Monadnock Music Artistic Director Gil Rose conducts an American gamelan ensemble and the Monadnock Festival Singers in Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro on Saturday, July 27 at the Peterborough Town House.
Photo courtesy Monadnock Music.

La Koro Sutro marked the debut of the Monadnock Festival Singers, one of a handful of diversifying initiatives Rose has embarked on since taking over the festival. The singers, recruited from a host of New Hampshire towns, with Krystal Morin as chorusmaster, made a good first showing, especially in those movements where Harrison sends the chorus off on long, elaborate chants in octaves, maximizing the ensemble’s sound and intonation while minimizing the top-heavy imbalance of forces. And long, elaborate chants make up much of La Koro Sutro: it is a piece of ritual and stasis. When Harrison does open out into harmonized singing, the melodies turn in tighter, motivic, repetitive circles; as the singing becomes more expansive, the accompaniment becomes more circumscribed, and vice versa, an undulating equilibrium of texture. The gamelan features most in the bright, steady processional and recessional—“Chime and Glory,” “Mantram and Chime”—or in short, call-and-response litanies with the chorus. The peroration of the 7th paragraph of the Heart Sūtra (“the Transcendental Wisdom is a mantram of true greatness”) unfolds as a SATB anthem, over a drone on the organ (Linda Osborn) and a three-note loop on the harp (Maria Ridenello-Parker).

The sense of asceticism is strong, not so much in the musical surface—which is actually quite rich—but in the lack of the sort of referential web that makes the Suite seem so cosmopolitan by comparison. Harrison later arranged the Suite for Western orchestral instruments, but not La Koro Sutro; it is an insular epic, even more so given its unorthodox equipment. The novelty has kept Old Granddad in periodic use (most recently, in Berkeley last year); still, I realized, there’s a good chance this concert may very well be the only live performance I’ll ever experience. It is a little odd that chances to hear a piece so suffused with a universal, border-free message have been so dependent on one’s geographical proximity to its instrumentation, that a piece steeped in ideas of perpetual change—the renunciant devotion to the attainment of wisdom, the linguistic dissolution of national and ethnic differences—would be necessarily manifested as such a specific, singular event. From the Buddhist perspective, that way of viewing the piece would most likely be judged incomplete, limited. As the Heart Sūtra puts it: “Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form.” But maybe the better way to consider La Koro Sutro, or even Harrison’s grand, impractical homemade gamelan itself, is as something more akin to a Zen kōan—like the one recorded in the collection The Gateless Gate, attributed to the Chinese master Yúnmén Wényǎn. “The world is vast and wide,” he said. “Why do you put on your robes at the sound of a bell?”

No Place Like This—The 2013 Mizzou International Composers’ Festival

Posted on August 5, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Simon Rehearsal

Alarm Will Sound rehearses Greg Simon’s Draw Me the Sun in the Missouri Theatre.
All photos by Greg Simon unless otherwise stated.

Last Sunday, I stumbled off a tiny commuter jet and into the airport at Columbia, Missouri, arriving in town to attend the Mizzou International Composers’ Festival. Along with seven other composers from around the world, I had been chosen to write a piece for the festival’s resident ensemble: the incomparable chamber orchestra Alarm Will Sound. We gathered in Columbia for a week of making music, talking shop, and what AWS affectionately calls “the hang.” There were concerts by Alarm Will Sound and the University of Missouri New Music Ensemble; lessons with Daniel Kellogg and Augusta Read Thomas; bouts of laughter, tough love, elation, anxiety, terrible food, amazing wine, new friends, old teachers; and, of course, world-class music. The week ended with a concert featuring the premieres of the works we had written for Alarm Will Sound, a truly hair-raising program showcasing a wild array of backgrounds and styles. I’m still processing the whirlwind of emotions I experienced during the festival and the amazing premieres, but I left certain of this: the MICF is a truly special event, an opportunity young composers will be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.

The Festival

Presented by the University of Missouri and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation, the festival brings together eight resident composers, two guest composer mentors, and the ridiculously talented members of Alarm Will Sound for a week at the end of July. The ensemble workshops, records, and premieres pieces written specifically for them by the eight residents. The guest composers work with the residents, in individual and small-group sessions; the residents work with Alarm Will Sound, sitting in on rehearsals and lending their ear to the preparations for the premiere performances. Just about everything is open to the public, including rehearsals and lectures by the guest and resident composers.

Like most composers, I’ve done the summer festival dance for a while now. Before coming to the Mizzou International Composers’ Festival, I was lucky enough to spend two summers among the bats at the wonderful Brevard Music Center. Before that I was the worst operations intern in the history of the Aspen Music Festival, and tagged along with their composers for the six-week session. At Mizzou, the eight-resident roster also included alumni of Aspen, Bowdoin, California Summer Music, ACO and EAMA workshops, and more. Every music festival is different, but there’s one thing I’ve learned: It’s a bit weird to be a composer at any of them. While your instrumentalist friends are getting yelled at in rehearsal, you’re taking hikes or having lighthearted talks with knowledgeable mentors and colleagues. You might compose, but not nearly as much as your buddies practice. The performances of your work, if there are any, might be well-attended but will pale in comparison to the crowds at the operas and symphony concerts. The festival is, in most cases, very good to you and your colleagues; but ultimately, you’re on the fringe, a vital part of the mission statement but one that spends precious little time center stage.

It’s a brand-new experience, then, to come to a festival where composers are the main attraction. The eight of us were the focus of the festival’s final night, but the MICF love affair with new music runs much deeper than just the last night’s festivities. The three programs presented during the week featured more than 20 works, just about 100 percent by living composers. No fewer than twelve of us were in the building, introducing our work and talking to our audience before and after the performances. The emphasis of MICF is unequivocally on creating an environment where new music can flourish and grow. As was pointed out to me by Ryan Chase, another 2013 resident composer, MICF makes a statement through its very use of the word “resident”. The eight of us aren’t “student” composers or “young” composers; we’re residents, brought in to be creative partners in the festival and its offerings.

Post-rehearsal

Composers Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Greg Simon, Ryan Chase and Wei-Chieh Lin
having a post-rehearsal round on Tuesday night.

The Community

There are many great festivals around the country and the world with similar goals and aims for new music, it’s true. But what makes MICF so special isn’t just its artistic bent, but the community it serves. The eight residents came from all over the world to Columbia, including visitors from New York, California, and the Netherlands. Not a one of us had ever been to Columbia before our arrival here in town, save for local boy David Witter. None of us knew what to expect from the community or its listeners, but I don’t know that we were expecting an appetite for new music on par with New York or L.A. Columbia, after all, is a college town separated from the nearest major city by a two-hour drive. At 100,000 denizens, it’s less than half the size of Buffalo and could fit into Los Angeles 38 times.

But its smaller size makes the presence of community members at rehearsals, talks, and concerts even more inspiring. At most events, the residents sit elbow-to-elbow with members of the Columbia community, who come out in droves for the chance to see this elite group of performers in action. There’s real conversation and familiar faces—it’s not unusual to see attendants to lectures or concerts grabbing their morning coffee the next day. (By the way, be sure to get a chocolate shake at Lakota Coffee. You’ll thank me later.) Most of those who come out aren’t affiliated with Mizzou’s School of Music, although there are plenty of students hanging around, too. Each of the three concerts of the week drew a sizeable crowd, with Columbians from all walks of life.
And of course, no account of MICF would be complete without mentioning the local heroes of the festival, Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield. Financial support of the festival through the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation is just the beginning for Jeanne and Rex. The Sinquefields opened their incredible estate to the MICF performers and composers to start the week with a kickoff banquet. (Side note: Rex drives a golf cart much better than I ever will.) You could find them at just about any of the week’s events. Jeanne has done some incredible work in service of her mission to grow Missouri’s contemporary music offerings, and MICF is a beautiful example of that. By including Mizzou faculty and students at every stage of the festival (Stefan Freund, cellist for AWS, is a faculty member at Mizzou), from composer to performer to administrator, she ensures that it will always be a blend of the best talent in Missouri and musicians from afar.

Jeanne Sinquefield and Augusta Read Thomas

Jeanne Sinquefield (left) chats with guest composer Augusta Read Thomas (right)
at the Sinquefield Estate.

Alarm Will Sound

Whether they’re working on your piece or someone else’s, it’s a pretty valuable composition lesson just to watch Alarm Will Sound in action. It’s no surprise: the group brings together twenty phenomenal players to form a chamber music superpower. Not only that, but the time and attention they grant every composer’s music is almost unheard of elsewhere in the orchestra world. AWS rehearses repertoire for the festival (including the eight world premieres) six or more hours each day during the week, including performance days. That’s on top of a three-day pre-festival “band camp” at the Sinquefield Reserve for more rehearsal.
The rehearsal schedule is intense and all-consuming; each participating composer gets a generous block of time to try things out, make changes to their pieces, and field questions. After the day’s activities, all is set aside in favor of beer, wine, and really awful music jokes. For the eight residents, the festival is an opportunity to take risks with incredible players and test their limits. It’s also an opportunity to skip most of the growing pains of passing out new music—the fumbled runs, the missed key changes—and skip right to drawing the music out of a brand new piece. And yes, it’s a chance to have a drink or two with some extraordinary musicians.

Most importantly, though, it’s a chance to put music in front of true professionals and get their full, brutal honesty. There were frank discussions about what notation worked or didn’t work, how to craft scores and parts for maximum efficiency, and how extended techniques like multiphonics can be used without being exhausting for the performer. Even in moments of tough love, AWS is kind. Even in the hardest trial-by-fire moments, AWS is adventurous. Regardless of style, writing for them is a pleasure, and having them as a lab to try out compositional ideas is an invaluable learning experience for a composer.

The Composers

The composers invited to the festival came from all over the world, as far away as the Netherlands and as close by as across town. We were a diverse group with eight totally different stories and styles—from Ryan Chase’s luminous tonality to Wei-Chieh Lin’s intricate, Grisey-influenced sonic landscapes. Andrew Davis, Elizabeth Kelly, and myself all profess to be influenced by jazz and pop, to three radically different ends. Eric Guinivan comes out of his experience as a world-class percussionist, and David Witter writes music that reflects his love of free improvisation. On Saturday night, the concert of eight premieres revealed a radical cross-section of the contemporary music world.


An excerpt from Jason Thorpe Buchanan’s Asymptotic Flux: First Study in Entropy (2012).
Video courtesy of Jason Thorpe Buchanan.

I’ve found this one of the greatest perks of attending music festivals: to encounter the music of other young artists that you might otherwise gloss over for lack of time or chances. Our field is one where the blinders go on all too easily, if only because there’s far too much great music out there to spend much time seeking out the brand new. Composers at music festivals have the opportunity to throw those blinders in the trash, and Mizzou goes the extra mile by surrounding you with nothing but living music.

In fact, Mizzou offers an even steeper inundation into the new music landscape than many. The focus of the eight composers at MICF is on building the premiere of a big new piece. As a resident, not only are you seeing new music from seven other voices in composition, but seeing the growing pains that come along with it. Composers sit in on the others’ rehearsals, following along with the score and observing the agony and ecstasy of the rehearsal process. The strengths and weaknesses of each piece are in the forefront when pieces are raw, and the residents see each other’s. In our off hours, we talked through issues both musical and extramusical. We talked about developing craft, shaping the voice, and silencing the demons. Every aspect of the process was laid bare. The usual festival experience of encountering colleagues’ music is enhanced by watching their process, understanding their anxieties, and—at the premiere performance of their work—sharing their elation.

On Stage Interview

Guest composer Daniel Kellogg interviews resident composer Elizabeth Kelly
as Andrew Davis, Wei-Chieh Lin, and Eric Guinivan look on during the final concert.

The End

So here I am, a few days after the incredible last concert at MICF 2013, trying to make sense of the experience. There’s no doubt in my mind: In a country filled with inspiring opportunities for young composers, the Mizzou International Composers’ Festival is unique. The wealth of offerings to the resident composers, the “bring it on” attitude that Alarm Will Sound applies to every new piece, and the emphasis on composers and performers growing together are all remarkable, made doubly so by the (somewhat unlikely) surroundings.

Throw in the emphasis on local participation and talent, and the festival’s aims become clearer: MICF is hoping to create a new kind of space for new music in the community. The festival brings world-class performers and young composers together with an uninitiated audience, inviting them to experience the process of building new music in all its painful, rapturous glory. Audience members can interact with and understand composers and performers in their element, in a way that might only be possible in such a context. Featuring local talent gives Columbia a voice in the festival, and a presence that lingers long after the applause dies down from the premieres concert. MICF is creating a new music festival that its college-town community owns, and is going a long way in building Mizzou and Columbia into major destinations for contemporary music in town and beyond. If it can work in Columbia, maybe one day it could work in Corvallis, Tallahassee, Boseman… who knows? If one thing’s for sure, it’s that this is a festival to watch, in a town to watch. Composers, take note: There’s no place quite like this.

***

Greg Simon

Greg Simon
Photo by Erin Algiere

Composer and jazz trumpeter Greg Simon is currently pursuing a doctorate at the University of Michigan and is the young composer-in-residence for the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings. His music has been performed by ensembles and performers around the country, including Alarm Will Sound, the Fifth House Ensemble, the Playground Ensemble of Denver, and the California All-State Symphonic Band, and is featured on recordings by the California State University, Fullerton Wind Ensemble, the Fifth House Ensemble, and violist Karen Bentley Pollick. When he’s not composing, Greg enjoys hockey, microbrews, and short stories.

Wanted: Local Bay Area Musicians

Posted on July 31, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Crissy Field (Courtesy of Department of Transportation; Photo by Bill Hall)

Crissy Field
(Courtesy of Department of Transportation; Photo by Bill Hall)

This fall will be an exceptional time for San Francisco Bay Area musicians of all stripes who are interested in making music with a large community of fellow new music lovers. Two massive projects—Lisa Bielawa’s Crissy Broadcast and Rhys Chatham’s A Secret Rose—will be rehearsed and performed in the Bay Area in October and November, respectively, and both are actively asking the local music community to join their ranks as performers. Bielawa is assembling a coalition of 800 musicians to join her on San Francisco’s Crissy Field, and Chatham has put out the call for 100 electric guitarists to fill the Craneway Pavilion in Richmond, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay.


Lisa Bielawa’s project is the second in a now developing series that began this May in Berlin with Tempelhof Broadcast, an outdoor performance on an airfield that had been converted into a park. The 250 musicians who participated in the Tempelhof performance included members of the San Francisco Girls Chorus; though still based in New York, Bielawa is a Bay Area native who was named the artistic director of the Girls Chorus earlier this year. At a recent event preview discussion held at the Center for New Music in San Francisco, Bielawa mentioned that the idea of doing the project in her hometown on Crissy Field, also a park that was once an airfield, hadn’t even occurred to her until she was in San Francisco, working on the music for the Berlin project.

Now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, the beautifully restored Crissy Field is a large park on the Bay with iconic views of the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, frequently traversed by runners, picnicking families, and tourists on bicycles. On October 26 and 27, these regulars will encounter 800 musicians, drawn from around a dozen ensembles, ranging from volunteer choruses to middle school bands to traditional Chinese instrument orchestras, as well as individual amateur musicians, who, through the course of the work, will expand to fill the park with sound. The musicians will be guided by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, who will be acting as the lead professional ensemble for the performance.

Lisa Bielawa at the Center for New Music, reviewing the Crissy Field site plan

Lisa Bielawa at the Center for New Music, reviewing the Crissy Field site plan

As described at the preview panel, the musical material in Crissy Broadcast is fully composed and notated, with the musicians divided into groups who have specific trajectories and defined musical material to play at specific points. (At the moment SFMOMA, which has just closed for expansion, has an astonishing year-long installation of eight monumental steel sculptures by Mark di Suvero up in Crissy Field which are juxtaposed beautifully with the bridge; these sculptures will be used in defining the movement paths of the musical groups.) Bielawa spoke of wanting to explore in the Broadcast pieces the experience of hearing sound across non-resonant spaces, and how great separation allows for very different musical material to occur simultaneously without clashing as it would even in a large indoor space.

Individual musicians are encouraged to join the project through the San Francisco Symphony’s Community of Music Makers program. There is no cost to apply, and the rehearsal and performance commitments are detailed on the project’s website.

***

The Craneway section of the Ford Assembly Building, Richmond, California. Photo by Billy Hustace Photography (2008) © Billy Hustace

The Craneway section of the Ford Assembly Building, Richmond, California.
Photo by Billy Hustace Photography (2008) © Billy Hustace

On the other side of the bay is the Craneway Pavilion, another historical waterfront location, where Other Minds’ presentation of A Secret Rose for 100 electric guitars by Rhys Chatham will take place on November 17. Located in the city of Richmond, in the East Bay north of Berkeley, the Craneway Pavilion sits on the site of a former Ford assembly plant from the 1930s that was reconfigured to build tanks and jeeps during the Second World War. After sustaining damage in the 1989 earthquake, Craneway reopened more than a decade later as an event space, with broad views out over the bay and adjacent to the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park, a nod to its former function.

Rhys Chatham performing Guitar Trio at The Lab, San Francisco

Rhys Chatham performing Guitar Trio at The Lab, San Francisco

Other Minds brought Paris-based Rhys Chatham to San Francisco in June for some preview events to put out the call for volunteer guitarists to join Chatham’s orchestra. New music enthusiasts and Chatham devotees packed The Lab, a small art space in the Mission, for enthusiastic performances of an excerpt from his legendary Guitar Trio (G3) and The Out of Tune Guitar no. 3, with Bay Area guitarists George Chen, John Krausbauer, Ava Mendoza, Bill Orcutt, and John Schott joining Chatham, along with bassist Lisa Mezzacappa and Jordan Glenn on drums. Earplugs were available on the way in but they tended to dampen the beautiful overtone series that sang out above the massed guitar sound. Other Minds has made the full recording of the preview event, including the discussion with Chatham, available on RadiOM.


Structured in five movements, A Secret Rose will have three sections of guitarists with leaders, plus a bass player and a drummer. Though certain parts of the piece are sure to be “thunderous and rousing,” Chatham assured that “the purpose of the music is not to assault people… There’s nothing like the sound of 100 electric guitars playing quietly.”

All guitarists with a rudimentary ability to read notation are welcome to apply. The deadline is August 15; the rehearsal and equipment requirements can be found on the application page.
Chatham Facebook announcement

New England’s Prospect: Arlene Sierra at Yellow Barn

Posted on July 25, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

Sierra Wall Program

Yellow Barn, July 16, 2013: Wall program by Rose Hashimoto, Qing Jiang, and Ahrim Kim.

Ah, terminology. Arlene Sierra is not considered an experimental composer, and that says more about how we’ve constrained that term and less about her attitude toward composing. I don’t mind the categorization of the kind of composers that, for the past fifty years or so, have been called “experimental”—Tenney, or Feldman, or Meredith Monk, or John Luther Adams. There’s some benefit to recognizing that some composers are farther to the left of the process-to-text continuum than others. But the name, I have always thought, is annoyingly arbitrary, and a little exclusionary. Because all composers experiment. Outsider composers experiment. Academic composers experiment. Film, Broadway, jazz, techno, ambient, blues, commercial, gospel, and telephone-hold-music composers—they will all try new things just for the sake of seeing what it sounds like. Composition is experimentation.
Which made Yellow Barn an ideal place to hear Sierra’s music. The organization—which supports residencies, a summer concert series, and a summer school, all centered around the refined-groovy I-91 way-station of Putney, Vermont—has an easygoing way of programming all manner of cutting edges, from safety scissors to samurai sword, with a sense of hospitality rather than crusade. Sierra was this year’s composer-in-residence, joining a roster that has extended all the way from John Cage to Mario Davidovsky. The Big Barn—where a portrait concert of Sierra’s music was presented on July 16—is a big tent.
Sierra’s style is definitely more modernist than maverick—to use two more terms that, while burdened with troubles of their own, are at least amorphously meaningful—but her accent is a little more subtle and elusive. The music is dense, dissonant, precipitously fluid, but there’s a groundedness to the extravagance, pitch and even tonal centers anchoring the busy crosstalk. American-born but now resident in the U.K., Sierra can easily be heard as mediating between the punctuated equilibrium of the American canon and the smoother assimilations of its European counterpart. In conversation with Yellow Barn Artistic Director Seth Knopp—such chats, interspersed between performances, functioned as the evening’s program notes—Sierra noted the contrast between the American schools of composition, marked by aesthetic sharp turns and reboots, and the European penchant for promoting new styles as continuances of long tradition. Within the tradition, Sierra might be plausibly categorized as a New Romantic, at least in a late-’70s and early-’80s way: modernist sounds wrapped around a core of heightened expression. (It was one of Sierra’s teachers, after all, Jacob Druckman, who exemplified that original “New Romantic” style.)

And it’s in her experimental penchant that such a Romantic sense really comes to the fore. What Sierra loves to experiment with is formal concepts. All of the pieces on this portrait concert took their cue from external frameworks, and the frameworks—nature and the visual arts—would have been familiar sources to the Romantics of yore. Two Etudes After Mantegna, a pair of cello solos written back in 1998 but only now getting a U.S. performance, was a kitchen sink of postmodern virtuosity: “Visage” (played by Madeline Fayette) whipped a lot of dramatic bowing and high-on-the-fingerboard passagework through a moody, minor-tinged chromaticism moored by open-string left-hand pizzicato, C, G, and D rumbling around an old-fashioned circle of fifths; “Painter’s Process” (played by Sang Yhee) was literally noisier—heavy bow pressure, col legno, deliberate rasp. The first is a classic gambit, inspiration via artwork (in this case, Madonna and Sleeping Child by Andrea Mantegna); the second tries to image its creation, starting with a scraped white-noise white canvas, sketching in outlines, brushing in underlayers. You can hear how Sierra’s experiments are a layer removed from the more commonly called “experimental” tradition—she is not so much concerned with inventing a process whole-cloth as finding a musical analogue to a non-musical process. But you can also hear the push into something unexpected.

Art of Lightness (from 2006, another U.S. premiere), for solo flute, went to a visual source unknown to the Romantics—the kung-fu movie, specifically, the gravity-defying wire-fu qinggong kind—and if the framework merely added a little extra theatrical fierceness to a standard new music set-up (switching between a collection of  contrasting channels—high and low, speedy and sustained, straight and extended techniques—with ever-increasing speed), the piece itself did achieve the acceleratingly absurd dexterity of a good wuxia showdown. (Much of the credit must go to flutist Sooyun Kim’s terrific rendition.) The one homage on the program displayed both Sierra’s comfort zone and her willingness to warp it with novel games and stratagems. Le Chai au Quai was composed for an Elliott Carter centenary concert in England, and plays off of both the instrumentation of Au Quai, Carter’s own tribute to Oliver Knussen (another Sierra mentor)—Carter’s bassoon/viola duo is dropped to bass clarinet and cello—and Carter’s style itself, Sierra applying Carter-like rhythms to pitches borrowed from part of Bach’s Musical Offering. Performed by Wai Lau and Anne Yumino Weber, Le Chai au Quai had moments redolent of its dedicatee—a ritornello with both instruments tripping down a tumbling chortle of scale made musically manifest the very idea of l’esprit de l’escalier—but also the slightly hazardous fun of turning on a machine without quite knowing what it’s going to do.

The rest of the program drew from the natural world. Both Cricket-Viol, for a singing violist (played and sung by Jinsun Kim), and a movement from Sierra’s string quartet Insects in Amber (performed by violinists Ariel Mitnick and Luri Lee, violist Sophie Heaton, and cellist Ahrim Kim) had something of the packet-switching of Art of Lightness, but working in a more measured way. The two works share material of an appropriately buzzing and flitting kind, but it was fascinating how the novelty of the added singing in Cricket-Viol was enough to disguise that its construction, too, was essentially the same as the quartet, and essentially exploratory: a recombinant schematic, creating a form not out of high contrast, but out of shifts of emphasis within a close orbit of ideas.

In this case, it was the world of nature reworking the world of music, a quality that carried over into Book I of Birds and Insects, a collection of piano pieces. The title animals “have a different sense of timing than us larger creatures,” Sierra remarked. While the pieces themselves had some familiar birdsong touches—a toccata-like “Cornish Bantam,” a fast-note grid “Titmouse,” a slow-flapping, long-limbed impressionistic “Sarus Crane,” the piano’s pedals used to keep the instrument’s extremes in ringing play—the unfolding of the music had a close-up, asymmetrical quality that seemed to privilege the natural world over the musically formal. And the departures from the expected carried the biggest expressive punch—as in “Cicada Sketch,” a stretch of quiet, smudged resonance that Sierra realized, she said, probably had as much to do with her own cross-Atlantic distance from the North American habitat of the most famous genus of that insect.

Those four pieces were played by Hui Wu with a surfeit of atmosphere. The suite’s extensive finale, “Scarab,” was performed by Michael Bukhman. It wove a far larger web, musically, interpretively, and programmatically. The beetle itself shared the inspirational spotlight with a massive sculptural representation from ancient Egypt; sections of regal scurrying, obsessive repeated notes, and dark clouds of bass evoked both the insect and its heavy history of symbolism. Formally, the piece went to a circular extreme exceeding that of Insects in Amber: it finally rounded off with a big ending, but any long-ish excerpt would have worked just as well, creating a congruence between local and global time that made it not so much a composerly statement as an object of perusal, an invitation to wander among the layers of meaning on the listener’s initiative. It might not be experimental, as the term is used now, but it was entertainingly hypothetical.

Austin Chamber Music Center Summer Festival: Victoire and Pride

Posted on July 25, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

I’ve commented in recent stories on sea changes in the Austin landscape, both musical geographical. It’s hard not to be a bit curmudgeonly about the growing pains that are impacting the place I’ve called home for 13 years, but it comes with the territory. I suspect that even those who’ve been here for only a few years would have a few things to say as traffic, construction, and festivals pile on, making the most stoic of us think wistfully of the salad days of, say, 2008. A manifestation of this change is the move of blues club Antone’s from its downtown location (not the original 6th Street establishment mind you, but one maintained for some time) to Riverside Drive, just southeast of downtown on the other side of the river. I used to live about two blocks from there over a decade ago, and at the time the building housed a succession of clubs in which things occasionally got shooty and stabby. The area housed all the vices of an early-’80s Times Square and stood in stark contrast to the lovely homes and neighborhoods west of I-35. Despite my concern about change, it was nice to pass by my old digs and to be reminded that sometimes change can be good.
Antone's
As part of the Austin Chamber Music Center Festival, Victoire was invited to play a show at the new Antone’s venue. This was my first trip there and my first time to see Victoire, so I was primed for something new and different and I wasn’t disappointed. Austin Chamber Music Center’s core audience does skew toward the traditional, so I was also curious to see how the show would be received. For their first appearance in Texas, Victoire chose to perform their debut album in its entirety, and though it’s not a “concept” album, the moods and themes explored did create continuity among the ten or so tunes played that evening. By and large the strings, and to a lesser degree the clarinet, were relieved of their traditional roles and assigned smaller circling riffs throughout much of the set. The opening track, A Door in the Dark, stands as a great example of indie classical in its moody, detached coolness,; a slightly intellectual character showing up in the 4+4+4+3 phrasing, clearly indicated in the conducting and cueing of leader Missy Mazzoli.  Perhaps a nod to the Pixies/Radiohead/Kinks school, subtle alterations of typical pop song structure (such as the lopping off of a single beat from the end of four bars) are among the key elements of this style, and Victoire fires on all cylinders in this department. Cathedral City, the title track, bore these features as well. The piece rides in on an electronic intro featuring a post-808 [1] hi-hat track hyperkinetically chugging along in a pattern that had just enough hiccup in the pulse to keep you guessing. This framework was set up in stark contrast to the longer, measured vocal and violin lines that intertwined above. While recorded elements served as preludes to individual tunes, at other times they carried the banner for an entire work. In A Song for Arthur Russell, this treatment lead to a harmonically static but rhythmically active texture, with punchy sixteenths kicking around above the pulsing electronic bed.

It’s in the vocal parts that Victoire separates the indie from the classical. The lyrics (at least in this performance—the sound and mix were great but you never know!) were uniformly obscured and it was difficult to hear distinct words when they were used, much less get a sense of sentence or meaning from the lyrics. This is not at all meant pejoratively, and truly it could just be that I couldn’t make things out clearly for any number of reasons aside from composer intent…but I think it was in fact composer intent, and that the use of the voice here was as an instrument primarily as opposed to a lyric delivery device.  Even in the music of the late Beatles one finds (not always, of course) the use of lyric and story which are altered based on presumed listener expectations. [2] Victoire simply doesn’t have this discussion and presents the vocal elements as music artifacts, pure and simple. And it works like a charm.

Victoire takes a bow at Antone's

Victoire takes a bow at Antone’s

*

Moving across town from blues club to St. James Episcopal Church, ACMC’s annual Pride Concert marked its fifth year with an almost exclusively new music lineup. Hosted by composer Russell Reed, local and national composers and performers celebrated the musical contributions of the LGBT community.

Russell Reed introduces the ACMC Pride concert

Russell Reed introduces the ACMC Pride concert

Following a rousing performance of three Szymanowski mazurkas by Jim James, Reed was joined by baritone Phillip Hall for three sections from David Del Tredici’s Gay Life as well as “Matthew Shepherd” from his Three Baritone Songs.  From the lilting sway of “In the Temple” to the tongue-in-cheek earnestness his setting of Ginsberg’s “Personal Ads,” to “After The Big Parade” a lyrically solemn and musically spiky rumination on the impact of AIDS in the early 1990s, the three songs were musically and lyrically crystal clear and made for a well-placed run-up to the final piece of the set. The murder of Matthew Shepherd is horrifying, but Jaime Manrique’s text—which imagines Shepherd’s final moments—is a gripping meditation on transfiguration, and Del Tredici’s encapsulation of the text, from the descending lament-inspired bass line which never fully descends to  the whole-tone ascension representing the spirit leaving the body was completely spot-on and riveting.

Reed’s Fantasy Variations on “Una Furtiva Lagrima” played hide and seek with its theme, the flute, harp, and bassoon trading long lines in odd time, while Pauline Oliveros’s To Valeria Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition Of Their Desperation added piano and clarinet to the mix. An initial thrum-thrum-thrum from all instruments was among the few times that homophony trumped polyphony in the work. Having said that, the various lines did all follow the same gravitational pull, moving to and fro in a flock-like fashion throughout the bulk of the work. Ben Stonaker’s Soliloquy for clarinet alone provided a workout for Jon Guist, whose wonderful tone was complimented by his technical agility. A quiet introduction ornamented with grace notes led to a series of increasingly complex and intricate sections that put both to the test.

The final work was Lowell Liebermann’s Sonata for Flute and Piano performed by Reed and Timothy Hagen. A simple ostinato in the piano became a compelling counterpoint to the initially simple flute line of the first movement. Labeled Lento con rubato, the movement built to a fever pitch and fooled most of the audience (all of us? I was clapping…) into applause when we thought that perhaps the movements were played attaca. But when the Presto Energico burst from the gate, we realized that the drive at the end of the first movement was just a taste of what was to come. Hagen and Reed tore through the work, displaying a wide variety of technical virtuosity and musical sensitivity, and the final notes only rang briefly before everyone was whooping it up.
ACMC logo
ACMC has been around for decades—long enough to have existed when the governor was a Democrat [3], SXSW was a baby, and Austin was just a gleam in marketers’ eyes. Its summer festival is more recent, and the inclusion and promotion of new music even more so. I suppose that there were people who (like me with the recent general direction of the city) resisted that change, that growth. Though I’m holding steady with my arms-crossed, head-shaking stance on Austin change, clearly in the case of ACMC programming it’s a trend that’s both welcome and growing.


1. You may remember hearing this all over the place 30ish years ago.


2. For instance, what the hell does, “She came in through the bathroom window / Protected by a silver spoon / But now she sucks her thumb and wanders / By the banks of her own lagoon” really mean? I don’t know, but it works lyrically and manages to paint a picture in the same way that “I Want To Hold Your Hand” does without telling a standard story. The Beatles were great at this (both in terms of music and lyric) specifically because they spent so much time playing and writing standard blues and pop fare that they understood it on a molecular level and could therefore change it just enough to make it new and interesting without losing the essence of the style.

3. Fun Fact. Number of Republican governors of Texas: 5, Democratic: 39.

New England’s Prospect: Babylon Revisited

Posted on July 18, 2013 by - Field Reports, Headlines

The Great Gatsby

Ryan Turner leads the orchestra and chorus of Emmanuel Music in The Great Gatsby, featuring Gordon Gietz as Gatsby.
Photo by Hilary Scott.

His life had been confused and disordered since then, but if he could once return to a certain starting place and go over it all slowly, he could find out what that thing was….

American operas, apparently, can have the second acts American lives cannot. The concert performance, at Tanglewood on July 11, of John Harbison’s The Great Gatsby—after the novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, who famously hypothesized that particular limitation of biographical dramaturgy—was a bid for redemption. The program notes (and pre-concert discussion) were less about the piece than its time in the wilderness, from its lukewarm reception at its 1999 Metropolitan Opera premiere, through various salvage operations, small and large (a set of songs, a set of piano etudes, a suite, a chamber-sized version) to this full-orchestra reprise—itself a reprise, the chorus and orchestra of Emmanuel Music and the cast repeating their performance from May. The concert was presented as an opportunity for vindication, a chance to replace that original reception with something more generous, a chance to “fix everything just the way it was before,” as the protagonist put it. The opportunity was taken: a large and enthusiastic crowd saved its biggest ovation for Harbison himself.

That The Great Gatsby still doesn’t come off as an effective piece of music theater seemed beside the point. So it might be worth asking in what guise the piece might work, what it might be, what people might hear it to be—or want it to be.

* * *

The performance, to be sure, was enviable. Conductor Ryan Turner drew out the score’s depth and sway; the orchestra gave everything a patina of assurance. The singers were similarly fine. This was musical boosterism of a high level, musicians determined to present the piece in the best possible light.

In such an accomplished realization, and in a concert performance, one alternate way to hear The Great Gatsby emerged, and that is as a three-hour tone poem of Gatsbyian moods, with an obbligato layer of singing. Three hours is a lot, but the orchestral writing is frequently marvelous, a perpetually fluid swirl of plush fabric. The shading can be subtle and exquisite. Towards the beginning, an interlude transitions the scenery from the opening—Nick Carraway (David Kravitz) visiting his cousin Daisy Buchanan (Devon Guthrie), her hulking husband Tom (Alex Richardson), and her friend, the professional golfer Jordan Baker (Krista River)—to the Valley of Ashes, the industrial wasteland that is home to Tom’s mistress, Myrtle Wilson (Katherine Growdon). Harbison takes the bass clarinet from the previous scene and sharpens it into a more mechanical clarinet-marimba combination; high strings, previously providing an upper overtone to the singers’ brief litany of Gatsby’s name, suddenly get an ominous cushion of horns and a brittle piano-and-harp ictus. Later, for the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, Harbison pulls out a terrific orchestral shimmer of radiant cool—fluttering winds, hollow brass, washes of glissandi. Harbison is a composer for whom the orchestra seems a natural habitat.

Ryan Turner, with soloists Devon Guthrie (as Daisy) and Gordon Gietz (as Gatsby) during the Emmanuel Music performance of The Great Gatsby. (Photo by Hilary Scott.)

Ryan Turner, with soloists Devon Guthrie (as Daisy) and Gordon Gietz (as Gatsby) during the Emmanuel Music performance of The Great Gatsby. (Photo by Hilary Scott.)

But the result is that the orchestra drives the piece, not the voices. In a few places this is effective—instances of civility and strained politeness that can’t quite escape the roiling instrumental tension. In other places, it ties the drama down. This becomes especially apparent when Harbison is emulating 1920s pop, which he does with a stage band and a cornucopia of authenticity—banjo, choked crash cymbals, and a megaphone-wielding singer (Charles Blandy), arranged with uncanny precision—while adding just enough sophistication to make his compositional touch apparent. Again and again, though, as that music drifts into the orchestra, the characters are left to fit their lines to this material, settling into the trompe-l’oeil like some sort of musical Tetris. As Myrtle and Tom are going about their adulterous fencing, for instance, the orchestra’s simulation of pop radio is so exact that it becomes a distraction—or keeps their interaction too light and trivial to make the escalation to violence convincing. When Nick and Jordan are setting the scene for Gatsby’s entrance, they seem trapped in the party’s dance music, to the point that their own characters are effaced.

Harbison’s text-setting is largely syllabic and beholden to speech rhythms—clear and natural, but rarely letting the singing take flight. In his program note, Harbison remembers Sarah Billinghurst, the Met’s Artistic Administrator at the time of the commissioning of Gatsby, telling the composer, “It is my job to prevent you from becoming the librettist of this opera.” One wishes she had been more diligent. Harbison hits all the novel’s marks—the mystery surrounding Gatsby (Gordon Gietz); his yearning for Daisy; the affair between Tom and Myrtle, with Myrtle’s husband (David Cushing) lurking in the background; Gatsby’s parties; Gatsby’s underworld partner, Meyer Wolfshiem (James Maddalena), sidling in and out; the observers, Nick and Jordan, observing—but the whole thing unfolds less as a drama than a slightly perfunctory tour of Fitzgerald’s landmarks. The libretto is, often, its own synopsis. (This reaches a kind of absurd apotheosis at the beginning of the second act, when the chorus is so busy singing about how rumors are spreading about Gatsby that they largely fail to spread any actual rumors). The opera is not so much concerned with telling us the story as assuring us that it knows that story well enough to tell it.

The problem is not that the libretto is clunky—plenty of operas have thrived on even clunkier libretti—but that there is a mismatch between the blunt exposition of so much of the text and the expansive, emotional musical style Harbison pursues throughout the piece. If there were a Nobel prize for music, one that worked like the awards for the sciences—for innovation and discovery—some composer would probably win one for coming up with an effective modern version of recitative. The Great Gatsby, certainly, could use some of that explanatory speed. Opting for the modern perpetual-arioso mode of operatic composition, Harbison gets stuck treating plot-heavy dialogue at a deliberate tempo better suited to freeze-frame emotional peaks. Slowed down to a lyrical crawl, the prosaic nature of the text becomes a liability.

Harbison defaults to Fitzgerald’s language in a way that gives some scenes a pageant-like feel—and frustrates operatic energies. The novel’s more famous phrases duly appear, but stick out as quotes among the surrounding abbreviation. (Harbison’s deference to the novel is especially apparent in comparison with Baz Luhrmann’s movie version that came out this spring. Harbison has Gatsby fade in, his small talk with Nick about the war veneered into the middle of another ’20s-pop recreation. Luhrmann skips all that in favor of an extravagant reveal, Gatsby filling the screen, lovingly lit, with a backdrop of fireworks and the slightly anachronistic climax of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue blazing forth. Ridiculous? Absolutely. But also more effectively operatic than anything in the opera version.) Nick’s final peroration—the orgiastic green light, the boats against the current—is justly famous, but setting it word-for-word, as Harbison does, is to deprive opera of its own chance at storytelling. One suspects that a Puccini or a Strauss would have sent Nick on his way, given us and the orchestra one last flash of the green light, and rang down the curtain.

* * *

Cast of The Great Gatsby

The cast of The Great Gatsby bows following their performance. (Photo by Hilary Scott.)

But there is still another way of listening to the piece, one I actually found the most interesting. One can hear The Great Gatsby as an attempt at the Great American Opera—and, crucially, an attempt that is not only a) fully aware of its own status as such an attempt, but also b) fully aware that the category is largely nonexistent. Think about some of the more plausible candidates for the Great American Opera: Susannah, or Vanessa, or Einstein on the Beach, or Nixon in China, or (my own vote) Bernstein’s Mass. There are other candidates, certainly, but even that little gathering is indicative of a category either so wide open as to defy usefulness, or based solely on a kind of epic quirkiness.

Harbison has done something a little different, though—he’s fashioned a convincing simulation of what an ideal Great American Opera might have sounded like to someone who, at some time in the past, might have cared about such a thing. The overall sound: tonal but brawny with dissonance, muscular yet lyrical. The use of an American vernacular: those lovingly exact pop tunes, given the structural prominence of Bach chorales. The source material, classic literature honored with a fidelity to please a high-school English teacher. Through this lens, The Great Gatsby becomes something intriguing: a consistent evocation of an imaginary art form, complete with flaws. Maybe that’s what the audience was applauding, sensing the audacity of a truly grand-scale bluff.

Harbison’s idea of the Great American Opera is, essentially, modeled after Verdi. The party scenes owe a debt to the last act of La Traviata; perhaps Harbison’s decision to write Tom Buchanan, essentially the opera’s heavy, for a tenor voice is an emulation of the Duke of Mantua in Rigoletto (which would make Nick, a baritone, an appropriately jester-like figure). But Verdi would gut-renovate his sources until he had a vehicle for lapidary musical characterization. The Great Gatsby doesn’t come close to such a ruthless translation of the novel’s delicate style.

There are a couple places in the score where we get a glimpse of the terms on which the opera might have worked: the duet between Gatsby and Daisy at the end of the first act; and the second scene of the second act, with all the main characters gathered at the Buchanans’ house and wilting in the heat. The characters are suddenly in the sharpest focus, paradoxically supported by the most impressionistic passages in the piece, both scenes suffused with a transparent, luminous haze of orchestration. And, significantly, both scenes are among the opera’s least-plotted. In those passages, one got the sense that simply situating the characters among a loose string of symbolic images—the parties, the car, the eyes on Dr. Eckleburg’s billboard, the green light—might be more than enough to hold up a Gatsby opera. Gatsby’s frangibility, his airy tragedy, is of a piece with the most elliptical, dream-like qualities of American life and American celebrity: all charged snapshots and everyday epiphanies, the ephemeral and inconsequential turned into the everlasting and paramount.

Late in his short life, Fitzgerald, who was in the habit of sending his daughter letters of advice, informed her that “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” The Great Gatsby, the opera, making sure that the pipes are free of leaves, ends up draining the pool—but not before, for at least a couple of brief moments, casting off the novel’s reputation and diving into the deep end.