Welcome to Nowhere

I am nowhere man. If you are here you are indeed nowhere. The music in this collection has nothing in common,
other than the fact it comes right out of nowhere.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Henry Cowell - The Banshee

Cowell playing string piano on the cover of hi...Image via Wikipedia






Henry Cowell



Born: 1897 Died: 1965 
 
A tireless musical explorer and inventor, Henry Cowell was born 11 March 1897 in Menlo Park, California, where he grew up surrounded by a wide variety of Oriental musical traditions, his father's Irish folk heritage, and his mother's Midwestern folktunes. Already composing in his early teens, Cowell began formal training at age 16 with Charles Seeger at the University of California. Further studies focused primarily on world music cultures. His use of varied sound materials, experimental compositional procedures, and a rich palette colored by multiple non-European and folk influences revolutionized American music and popularized, most notably, the tone cluster as an element in compositional design.


In addition to tone clusters evident in such works as Advertisement and Tiger, Cowell experimented with the "string piano" in works like The Aeolian Harp and The Banshee where strings are strummed or plucked inside the piano. Studies of the musical cultures of Africa, Java, and North and South India enabled Cowell to stretch and redefine Western notions of melody and rhythm; mastery of the gamelan and the theory of gamelan composition led to further explorations with exotic instruments and percussion. Later, Cowell developed the concept of indeterminancy or "elastic form" in works like the Mosaic Quartet (where performers determine the order and alternation of movements).



 
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Sunday, November 22, 2009

Komintern - Le Bal du Rat Mort








LastFM:
One of the most legendary of French underground rock bands, Komintern were part of that post-May of ‘68 armada of arch iconoclasts that first established French rock of the era as an unsurpassed force for radicalism, a lineage that would include the likes of Red Noise, Fille Qui Mousse, Martin Circus, Magma, and Moving Gelatine Plates amongst others. Komintern’s particular breed of sonic malarky comes couched in a frothy effervescence and jolliness that can initially mask just how extraordinary their achievement is, at one time or another musically touching on everything from early Gong-like whimsy to chanson and from Moving Gelatine Plates-style post-Canterbury motion to Red Noise-like Dadaist piss-takery. A work of timeless genius.


ThanksSUBURBANBATHERSON
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Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Milton Babbitt - All Set







The Exuberant, Controversial, and Thrilling Milton Babbitt
By PETER GOODMAN


"Milton Babbitt, the crabbiest, most ascetic atonalist in America."
— Norman Lebrecht, Critic


"My view of his music is that it is exuberant, full of playfulness, and at same time it is unbelievably rigorous."
— Peter Lieberson, Composer


"Very few conductors venture into Babbitt territory—either they are afraid of the music or don't like it and revile it, and they know that most musicians in the orchestra will either not understand it or hate it, or both. For myself, I have to say every time I have conducted Babbitt has been a great thrill, to get inside that music with those marvelous sounds and textures, and the incredible variety within each piece."
— Gunther Schuller, Conductor/Composer


There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Milton Babbitt, crabby, exuberant, reviled, playful, rigorous, thrilling. The composer who has been among the most controversial yet influential figures in American concert music of the past 60 years. The theorist whose vision about the direction that music should take dominated the academy for decades. The teacher who has guided generations of young composers both at The Juilliard School and in the Ivy League. The man who, as he celebrates his 90th year, continues to lead a full life as a composer and pedagogue, and who glows at the thought that James Levine, one of his most powerful champions, is now in command at the Boston Symphony.


In person, Milton Babbitt is a small, compact figure whose pursed lips and twinkling eyes behind thick black frames seem always on the edge of a smile. His conversation is quick, his thought fluid, able to dart from one subject to another at the drop of an implication. Just like his music, some might say. Joel Sachs, a Juillliard colleague for many years, makes the comparison directly.


Sachs describes an occasion when he played one of Babbitt's piano compositions at the Dartington Summer Festival in England. "Milton was there," Sachs recalled, "always at the lunch and dinner tables, always gabby, very friendly, very funny." At the recital, Sachs told the audience that one way to "get" Babbitt's music is to think of it as "being like a conversation" with the composer. After the concert, an elderly woman came up to Sachs and said, "Thinking of the conversations with him made all the difference."


"If performers can present his music as conversation that goes by very quickly and very naturally," Sachs said, "that can make a difference."


Gabby playfulness is not the image most concertgoers have of Milton Babbitt, if they have any image at all. Those with some knowledge of music history might recall the February 1958 essay from High Fidelity magazine with the unfortunate—and inaccurate—headline, "Who Cares If You Listen?" That was not Babbitt's choice; he says he would have preferred "The Composer as Specialist."


But the argument of the essay, written in a style that is simultaneously precise and convoluted, was that composers of "serious," "advanced" music should retreat into the cloisters of the academic world. Only there, Babbitt contended, among colleagues in such disciplines as physics, mathematics, and analytic philosophy, could they pursue the creation of work that very few in the outside world would be expected to understand.


Born in Jackson, Miss., in 1916, as a child Babbitt was both musical and mathematical. The interest in numbers came from his father, who was an actuary. The interest in music was eclectic. He studied piano, clarinet, and saxophone, and by the time he graduated from high school he was already playing jazz and popular songs.


When he entered college, Babbitt's first impulse was to study math at the University of Pennsylvania, but he quickly switched to music, studying with Marion Bauer and Philip James at N.Y.U., and later studied privately with Roger Sessions. He did graduate work at Princeton, and continued to divide his time between music and mathematics. Although Babbitt's intellectual bent was toward the mathematical side of music (in 1946 he wrote a paper on "The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System"), he didn't give up on pops, with some film scores and an unsuccessful Broadway musical.


Once he settled in, however, the music Babbitt wrote was meant to be as carefully defined as the most complex experiment of physics or the most elegant mathematical solutions. In his musical universe, expanding on the 12-tone system developed by Arnold Schoenberg, every note of every composition needed to be prescribed not just by pitch, but by other sonic variables including register, dynamics, duration, and timbre.


This was music that seemed, in its apparent unpredictability, extreme and unexpected leaps in pitch and dynamics, to be almost incomprehensible to the general listener, a fact which Babbitt not only recognized but advocated. "The time has passed," he wrote, "when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields."


Nearly everything that he has written presents such difficulties to listener and performer. From Philomel, an extraordinary work for soprano, recorded soprano, and tape premiered in 1964 using computer-synthesized sound, to Concerti for Orchestra, commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony one year ago, Babbitt's music demands extremely concentrated listening, and more than once.


Not only has Babbitt been the exponent of a radical method of writing and analyzing music, he has also been a pioneer in methods of making its sounds. During the late 1950s and '60s he worked extensively with the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Not a performance instrument such as the synthesizers used by popular bands today, it was nevertheless the first electronic music synthesizer.


Philomel, written for soprano Bethany Beardslee, is the most famous of his compositions using the synthesizer. Set to a text by the poet John Hollander, it uses the soprano's live voice, her taped voice, and sounds created by the synthesizer to create an alien, disorienting, intense sonic environment.


And, although Babbitt turned away from electronics after the Mark II was vandalized in the 1970s, his music continues to seem disorienting and intense. Yet, despite the complexity of the method by which he writes, and the dense language used to explain it, Babbitt's music is surprisingly transparent, even spare. It is often tender and gentle, and filled with important silences, rather than being harsh, abrupt, and thick.


In his Boston Globe review of Concerti for Orchestra, critic Richard Dyer wrote: "Babbitt's music thrives on the borderline between extreme intellection and extreme emotion. The new piece has all the brainpower of its predecessors within it, but without the bristling density of event. It is music of remarkable transparency of texture, clarity of detail, and spaciousness."


Peter Lieberson compares Babbitt's music to his personality in a way similar to Sachs's assessment: "His mind works very fast. You can hear recalls, subtle references to what happened earlier. It is so subtle that, if you listen to it once it will bypass you. If you listen over and over, while looking at the score, you realize that that kind of association is happening constantly in the music. There are so many of them that it is sometimes difficult to absorb in one listening."


Whatever the theory and impact of his own music, as a teacher Babbitt does not demand stylistic loyalty. On the Juilliard composition faculty since 1971 and at Princeton University's music department from 1938 to 1984 (when he retired and became professor of music, emeritus), he has worked with generations of students who have a remarkable variety of styles. Besides composers such as Lieberson and fellow Juilliard professor Jonathan Dawe, Babbitt's pupils have included Stephen Sondheim, whose music is known for a different sort of complexity. Clearly, he did not impress his own views on their work.


"He never tried to impose himself," Dawe said. "He never tried to spin things in a direction he would think was his esthetic or style. But he had a very strong, intrinsic awareness of your music. In a lesson situation, he does seem to get into a student's music, to get to know it. He was very helpful."


Lieberson had the same experience. "There was no attempt on his part to guide me in a particular direction," he said. "If he was interested in what I was doing, he made himself completely available," even if Babbitt's ideas weren't immediately comprehended.


Babbitt's late wife of 66 years, Sylvia, once told Lieberson, "Milton doesn't want people's music to sound like him, to become like him as a composer."


Viewed from the opposite direction, Babbitt's music is unique. "There are no composers, really, that you can say stylistically sound like Milton Babbitt," Lieberson said. "Nobody sounds like Milton Babbitt."


Peter Goodman recently retired from a career as a music critic, reporter, and editor at Newsday. He is the author of Morton Gould: American Salute (Amadeus, 2000).


All Set:



All Set (1957)


Composed in 1957 for the Brandeis University Arts Festival, which in that year was a jazz festival, All Set is scored for a small jazz ensemble consisting of alto and tenor sax, trumpet and trombone, bass, vibes, piano and drums. While written in the jazz idiom, the work utilizes an all-combinatorial 12-tone row as its material. Characteristic of the "Chicago style", solo and ensemble juxtapositions recall "certain characteristics of group improvisation (Barkin), while the sections correspond to serial technique. While the available literature concerning the work is quite limited, Milton Babbitt has this to say on his work:



"Whether All Set is really jazz I leave to the judgment of those who are concerned to determine what things reallyare, and if such probably superficial aspects of the works as its very instrumentation, its use of the 'rhythm section,' the instrumentally delineated sections which may appear analogous to successive instrumental 'choruses,' and even specific thematic or motivic materials, may justify that aspect of the title which suggests the spirit of a 'jazz instrumental,' then the surface and the deeper structure of the pitch, temporal, and other dimensions of the work surely reflect those senses of the title, the letter of which brings the work closer to other of my compositions, which really are not jazz."
Although remaining faithful to his 12-tone system of composition, Babbitt's effective use of jazz inflection proves that 12-tone music not only can be extremely flexible, but also can indeed be fun! Salzman (1988) remarks that while Babbitt remains "... faithful to a vision of total rationality and control..." the work itself relates "... to [the] character of the live performance, situation and virtuosity of the performers." In this sense, the virtuosity reflects the extremely complex rhythms of the instrumental parts, often polyphonic, which are sounded against a more regular pulse of the drums. Not only are these instrumental parts rhythmically complex, but the melodic lines are extremely angular, requiring a great deal of concentration and control on the part of the performers.


The work is experimental, in that it is the first one in which Babbitt used the idea of ‘time point sets.' Glen Watkins (1988) asserts that Babbitt was "... dissatisfied with the incompatibilities of serial procedures used for pitch and rhythm..." which resulted in Babbitt's creation of a system that could be applied in a more flexible way. Watkins: "Here the obvious need for a clear and audible metric organization is acute if such an organization is to have any meaning for the listener." This statement obviously refers to Babbitt's famous and much misunderstood article "Who Cares if You Listen?" in which Babbitt places the responsibility of understanding and recognizing serial procedures upon performers and listeners.


The problem, as approached encountered by European serialists such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, was a matter of whether the serial technique was perceptible when applied to a rhythmic system. Boulez and Stockhausen, among others, attempted to solve this by applying serial technique to duration. However, when Babbitt understood that the perception of duration was a subjective phenomenon, he successfully solved the issue by applying serial technique to a system of ‘attack points’ corresponding to the series. Simply put, the human brain understands the beginning of an event, but has trouble perceiving ‘how long’ the event has lasted without an external reference of measurement. Therefore, a variety of durational values could be assigned to notes in the series, creating a fluid and flexible system while at the same time adhering to a ‘strict’ rhythmic system that is perceptible to the listener.


Watkins describes the concept of time point sets as one in which "... various note-values are identified by their position at the point of attack within the bar". However, Charles Wuorinen is much more specific in elaborating on Babbitt's concept. Wuornin (1979) defines a time point as "... simply a location in the flow of time." In describing the time point system, he informs us that the concept is based upon two principles: "1) The relationships of the pitch system are transferred in their totality to the sphere of time relations; 2) This transfer is accomplished through the linkage of one simple equivalence - that of time intervalcorresponding to pitch interval." In this usage both time and pitch continuums are applied to modules which correspond to respective intervals, thus arriving at a flexible system in which time and pitch intervals can be varied from work to work. Wuorinen: "... twelve interval divisions of the time modules will therefore make up twelve time-point classes..." In this system, the time points may be identified by locating their points of attack, which have nothing to do with individual event duration. While in All Set Babbitt applies this use to the traditional 12-note series, this system is flexible in that it can be used in series containing other than 12 notes. Additional flexibility can be obtained by varying the lengths of time interval divisions.



While Babbitt obtains contrast by applying operations to different groups of instruments, the overall sonority and way in which he applies the time-point set theory in All Set creates an extremely unified composition.







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Saturday, November 14, 2009

Aaron Copland - Piano Variations










The Piano Variations of Aaron Copland may come as a something of a shock to those familiar with Appalachian Spring or Billy the Kid.


Aaron Copland, Piano Variations:


The Piano Variations of American composer Aaron Copland were written for piano solo from January to October 1930. The approximate performance time is 11 minutes.






The Piano Variations were a product of Copland's second-style period, also called the abstract period, which comprised only instrumental (non-vocal) compositions. During this time, the composer moved away from the jazzy idioms he experimented with in the 1920s and started working more in the direction of absolute music. The influence of composition pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, with whom Copland studied in Paris at the Fontainebleau School of Music for Americans, is prevalent in the formal style, logic, patterns, and attention to detail in the Piano Variations and other works in this period.


Copland stated that he worked on the variations individually without an agenda for fitting them together or sequencing them, which seems to contradict the piece's highly ordered construction and seemingly inevitable development. Copland acknowledged this contradiction but maintained that, in fact, "One fine day when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place." Copland had ambitious plans for this "serious piano piece" — the first of three including the Piano Variations (1930), the Piano Sonata(1939-41), and the Piano Fantasy (1957); he worked painstakingly and thought at epic proportions, saying he "should like to call them like Bach did the Goldberg Variations — but thus far haven't been able to think up a good one."


Unlike a traditional theme and variations, Copland's Piano Variations are not episodic. They are continuously played through, in an undisrupted development of the four-note "row" in the theme from which Copland builds the rest of the piece. All of the content can be traced back to this or transpositions of this four-note motif, suggesting the serialist techniques of Schoenberg. The concision, rigor, and lack of ornamentation have been compared to that of the style of Anton Webern (as in his Variations for piano). The dissonances (ubiquitous minor seconds, major sevenths and ninths) are precisely chosen for their degree of "shock value." While working on the Piano Variations, Copland cultivated a tautness and clarity of form and texture that became a precursor to the style of his other works.


Copland does not actually follow the precepts of the Second Viennese School exactly, although he considers them. Aside from the fact that the four-note "row" is eight tones short of being "12-tone," Copland frequently uses repetition in a declamatory style, as well as modifies and inserts new ideas into his motifs. This is another, smaller-scale form of "variation" that pervades the whole piece. This additional degree of freedom for the composer's imagination permits a gradual metamorphosis of the theme, and in a short period of time he explores many different moods, textures, tonal centers, harmonies, tempi, and rhythms, with a powerful cumulative effect. Copland describes the result as manifesting a "very dry and bare grandiosity."


Copland also experimented with the potential of the physical instrument, as he did with microtones on the stringed instruments in Vitebsk. In the Piano Variations, some notes are held down silently while pitches selected from their overtone series are struck, which produces an effect of ringing resonances without hammering the tones directly.


Another prominent characteristic is the piece's rhythmic irregularity. The meters change constantly within an essentially 4/4 framework. 

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Friday, November 13, 2009

Captain Beefheart - Ashtray Heart







Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet), Ashtray Heart (1980)


You used me like an ashtray heart
Case of the punks
Right from the start
I feel like a glass shrimp in a pink panty
With a saccharine chaperone
Make invalids out of supermen
Call in a "shrink"
And pick you up in a girdle
You used me like an ashtray heart
Right from the start
Case of the punks
Another day, another way
Somebody's had too much to think
Open up another case of the punks
Each pillow is touted like a rock
The mother / father figure
Somebody's had too much to think
Send your mother home your navel
Case of the punks
New hearts to the dining rooms
Violet heart cake
Dissolve in new cards, boards, throats, underwear
Ashtray heart
You picked me out, brushed me off
Crushed me while I was burning out
Then you picked me out
Like an ashtray heart
Hid behind the curtain
Waited for me to go out
A man on a porcupine fence
Used me for an ashtray heart
Hit me where the lover hangs out
Stood behind the curtain
While they crushed me out
You used me for an ashtray heart
You looked in the window when I went out
You used me like an ashtray heart.

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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Iannis Xenakis - Metastasis







"Xenakis, prophet of insensibility" (Milan Kundera)


"European music is based on the artificial sound of the note and the (tone) scale; it opposes the brutal and objective sonority of the world. As a result of an unbreakable convention European music is obliged from the beginning to express a subjectivity. It seems to fight the sonority of the outside world, like a sensitive being resisting the insensitivity of the universe. European civilization (from the year thousand on) is one of the only civilizations accompanied by a huge and dazzling history of music. This civilization - with its adoration of the suffering of Jezus, its courtly love, its cult of the bourgeois family, its patriotic passions - shaped the sentimental man. Music has played an integral and decisive part in the ongoing process of sentimentalization. But it can happen at a certain moment (in the life of a person or of a civilization) that sentimentalitybecomes unmasked as ‘the supra-structure of a brutality’. This was the moment at which music appeared to me as the ear deafening noise of the emotions, while the sound-world in the works of Xenakis became beauty; beauty purified of the dirt, purified of sentimental barbary. To be a ‘prophet of insensibility’ Joyce could remain novelist; Xenakis had to step out of music. Xenakis opposes the whole of the European history of music. His point of departure is elsewhere; not in an artificial sound isolated from nature in order to express a subjectivity, but in an earthly ‘objective’ sound, in a mass of sound which does not rise from the human heart, but which approaches us from the outside, like raindrops or the voice of wind."

M. Kundera, Prophète de l’Insensibilité, in M. Fleuret (ed.), Regards sur Iannis Xenakis, 1981, Paris



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Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Morton Feldman - For Samuel Beckett







From Samuel Beckett Apmonia:




For Samuel Beckett
1987. For chamber orchestra: Double wind quartet, muted brass septet, string quintet, piano-harp-vibraphone trio. (45-55 minutes.)


Morton Feldman's For Samuel Beckett
The last large work composed by Morton Feldman before his death in 1987, For Samuel Beckett comes from a ten-year relationship with the writer, and was partly inspired by his work in setting Beckett's Words and Music in 1986.

Like many Feldman pieces, 
For Samuel Beckett is a lengthy exploration in sonic textures. (As Paul Cook calls it, an "eerie, meditative study in slow, dissonant pulses and atonal moods.") Since the many liner notes below go into great detail explaining the structure and compositional theory behind the piece, I will confine my remarks to a simple description -- which is fairly easy, as Feldman's work often seems best described, rather than explained. Indeed, my description is quite similar to that of Wilson's liner notes, which I read only after writing my own impressions. (I am completely aware that I am about to use visual metaphors to describe an aural experience; if this troubles you, please redirect your browser to Gramophone.com and look up something nice by that Brahms fellow.)

Imagine if you will being suddenly immersed in a vast space that extends around you in all dimensions. Above and below you are great, drifting blocks of color and texture -- dark reds, burnt yellows, occasional swatches of vibrant blue. They drift, slowly, ominously, shimmering as they pass over each other, sometimes blurry, sometimes snapping clearly into focus. Once in a while wavering forms seem to percolate up from the depths and vanish through the obscured ceiling, and somewhere in the distance it sounds like a child is playing a piano. Occasionally the blocks seem to line up, and just for a second you can see through the patterns into a vast, silent space beyond --- but only for a second. Or, at other times, they seem too clustered, too muddled, and you can almost hear the rasp of their edges as they slide off each other. There is also something vaguely sinister about them; perhaps their edges are to jagged, and they seem to loom a bit too much. In fact, it seems to be a bit claustrophobic in here, and the fact that you were just dropped there all of a sudden doesn't help -- has this been going on forever? Will it continue to go on forever? And when will you emerge? But after awhile you begin to feel less confined; in fact, there is something almost peaceful about the drifting blocks, like God gave Mark Rothko permission to design tectonic plates. After a while the patterns seem to become more pleasing; once you stopped trying to look for them, they started to emerge more readily. Oh, sure, this isn't a place where you'd want to settle down, set up shop and raise some kids; but its really not that sinister, is it? The blocks haven't actually hurt you, have they...? And just around the time you are starting to grow used to them, if not actually fond of them, they dissolve, and you are left with a silence like a thundering roar.




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Sunday, November 8, 2009

Henry Brant - Orbits








From Other Minds:



In Memoriam, Henry Brant
by David A. Jaffe
April 29, 2008

I first met Henry Brant in the late 1970s when I studied composition, orchestration, and 16th century counterpoint with him at Bennington College in Vermont. This eventually led to a thirty-year friendship with discussions of music that have been among the most important in my life.


Henry Brant was unlike any other composition teacher I've ever had in that he offered a meta-perspective on the process of composing. Instead of suggesting that a particular theme should be developed or that a particular note might sound better as a Bb, he taught how to write quickly, how to think hierarchically, how to make deadlines, how to ask for commissions, and how to avoid writers' block. He also was the first to suggest to me that there might be a place in my musical language for the various non-"classical" styles I played, such as bluegrass, klezmer and jazz. This directly led to my writing such works as Silicon Valley Breakdown and Cluck Old Hen Variations.


Throughout the years, I have discussed many incipient projects with Henry and invariably he would offer key insights and suggestions that would lead me in fertile directions. As an example, in 1992, I was planning a concerto for RadioDrum-controlled Disklavier piano and large ensemble. I discussed the project with him, including my plan to use a string orchestra. He suggested I instead employ an ensemble of plucked strings. When I pressed him to elaborate, he suggested mandolin, guitar, harp, harpsichord, harmonium, bass and two percussionists. This became the seventy-minute work, "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World," premiered by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in 1998. Such interactions were always at the very start of a project. Then, at the conclusion, I would play him the result, he would offer his thoughts and then ask "what next?"


Anyone who has spent time with Henry Brant cannot help but be impressed by his vital, daring, unbounded imagination. Coupled with an acute analytical sense and a mastery of the nuts-and-bolts of his craft, the music he wrote is without precedent. He was a maximalist in many senses. Stylistically, he combined extremely diverse material into polyphonic wholes that somehow made sense. Emotionally, his music has great scope, ranging from the most serious material to highly satirical elements, often presented simultaneously in such a way as to suggest the cognitive dissonance of modern life. In terms of instrumentation, he employed African drums, Balinese gamelan, jazz ensemble and steel drum band, often in the same work. The scope of his wit and compositional topics (though he insisted he did not write program music) are evident from the fanciful titles of his works, often with political references such as "Homeless People", "Labyrinth", "Signs and Alarms", "Statesmen in Jazz" (1945, for Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin), "All Souls Carnival", "Peace Music for UN Day" (1955), "Ghost Nets", "Prisons of the Mind," "Immortal Combat" and "If You Don't Like Comets, Get Out of the Solar System."


Why is Brant's music not better known? First, it is difficult to represent spatial music on recorded media. Secondly, the sheer number of musicians involved in some of his works presents an organizational and economic challenge. Thirdly, he was always more interested in writing new works than in promoting old ones.


I see Brant as fundamentally an orchestral composer who painted large strokes with a broad brush. He preferred writing for large ensembles and sought the most emphatic expressive gestures. He once said, "some composers write for orchestra as if it were chamber music, I try to write my chamber music to sound orchestral." (In fact, it is surprising to note that his catalogue includes more chamber pieces than orchestral works.) His approach to orchestration was refined during his years as a film composer when he had access to whatever instrumental combinations he might desire (eight bassoons? No problem!) He once said "there are three ways to orchestrate: after the composition, during the composition and before the composition. I prefer the last of the three." Thus, orchestration was a fundamental pre-compositional decision. He often used cooking analogies for orchestration and referred to particular combinations as "recipes." Conversely, he would complement a tasty soup as "well-orchestrated."


While most of his works are for extremely contrasting ensembles, he also had a particular fondness for groups of like instruments, as is evidenced by such works as "Orbits" for 80 trombones, as well as works for flute choir, works for Carleen Hutchins' violins of different sizes, and a work for 100 guitars. Incidentally, he felt that plucked strings were an under-used timbre in western concert music-he included mandolin parts for me in several works.


Henry Brant's orchestration deserves a treatise of its own and, in fact, one has been written by Brant himself. Over the thirty years I have known him, I have seen him come back again and again to the orchestration book in between composing gigs; with each visit to Santa Barbara, he would show me the latest chapter and more recently I have been involved in proof-reading and editing. Many of us thought he would never finish it, but he did manage to get it done in his last years. The work, entitled "Textures and Timbres," is a condensation of a lifetime of experience. Soon to be released, it is, in my opinion, the most significant orchestration book since that of Rimsky-Korsakov.


Brant's approach is based on classifying instrumental combinations that can combine harmonically, in terms of timbre, articulation and dynamic level. He groups timbres not in terms of instrumental families but in particular instrumental sub-ranges. For example, he lists the lower fourth of the bassoon with the oboe and straight-mute trombone, while the upper octave of the bassoon is grouped with the flute, fiber-mute horn and clarinet; the middle of the bassoon is considered a separate timbre from any other. The book goes far beyond that, classifying all types of musical textures in terms of a few fundamental categories such as monophony, harmony, imitative
counterpoint, similar polyphony and contrasting polyphony.



All of this is motivated by and in the spirit of practical music-making. Brant was a consummate professional who wrote music that could be easily put together with a minimum of rehearsals. He used clear economical notation and was able to achieve great textural complexity with a minimum of rehearsal problems. His instrumental and vocal writing is idiomatic and maximizes the "bang-for-the-buck" of each player in the ensemble.


Similarly, Henry Brant had a hands-on approach to composing. He advised his composing students and friends to be performers and conductors as well, and to be as involved as possible in the performance of their works. Whenever possible, he wrote himself parts for his pieces. When he was not conducting, he performed on such diverse instruments as pipe organ, mouth organ, percussion and flute.


Much has been written about Brant's iconoclastic maverick approach. Much less well-known is how deeply he studied and absorbed the classics, from Josquin to Ives (he named his son after both of these). Rather than being intimidated by these masters, he felt free to connect with them by rewriting their works. His arrangement of Ives' Concord Sonata for full orchestra is a masterwork in its own right. (The Innova recording by the Concertgebouw Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies is not to be missed.) He made an arrangement for wind quintet of the Beethoven Op. 131 string quartet. He created a new Mozart viola sonata from a piano sonata. The list goes on.


His seminal paper on spatial music ("Space as an essential musical parameter") lays out the fundamentals of the sanest approach on the subject of any 20th century composer. Simply put, he observes that space weakens harmonic relationships and strengthens polyphonic independence. Following this principle, he used space to make contrapuntal complexity more intelligible. He explored the possibilities of spatial distribution more rigorously, and with more variety and depth than any other composer in history.


He was always experimenting, always curious, always looking for and finding new ideas for his music from the most diverse sources. In the 1980s, in a huge abandoned room at the former Artificial Intelligence Lab of Stanford University, he had me run at breakneck speed while plucking the E string of a violin, in an attempt to determine whether rapidly moving sound sources could be musically emphatic. He decided that they could not. Another time, on a visit to Santa Barbara, he took me on a musical tour of the neighborhood houses of worship, including a Mexican church's rock band and the chanting at a Greek Orthodox church. His works include a piece for four Jewish cantors and one shofar. He once strung a violin with two E strings and two G strings, being of the opinion that these strings are superior to the A and D strings. He was not happy with the string quartet as a combination and experimented with substituting a tenor cello (an octave below the violin) for the second violin. This eliminated the large gap between cello and viola and the duplication of the violin range. He wrote works for barges of musicians, for fire truck sirens, and for music boxes.


It is sad to lose such a great spirit, but we are thankful that we had him for so long. The best way to honor him is to disregard fashion and continue composing, performing and conducting new adventurous exciting music. When asked how he could produce at such a prodigious pace even at an advanced age, he would respond "I love my work."

View Henry Brants Ice Fields (requires Quicktime 7)


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Charles Ives - Universe Symphony, estratto dalla Section A: "Wide Valleys and Clouds"




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Symphony, Finally


Realized by Johnny Reinhard, AFMN Orchestra (The Stereo Society,SS007)
The premiere of Johnny Reinhard’s realization of Charles Ives’s Universe Symphonyat Alice Tully Hall on June 6, 1996, is still justly remembered as counting among the great concerts of the 1990’s. It included dozens of “downtown” performers, including flautist Andrew Bolotowsky, percussionist Slip La Plante, violinist Tom Chiu, and pianist Joshua Pierce, most of them working out of an appreciation of Reinhard’s effort to produce Ives’s final, purportedly unfinished piece.
Though Ives lived to be eighty, he had his first debilitating heart attack around the age of forty-five and thus spent decades in semi-retirement, not only from composing but from insurance retailing, at which he and his partner Julian Myrick were so successful. Legendarily, he spent decades working on a magnum opus that was simply too ambitious for an invalid to complete, especially since his earlier compositions were rarely performed until Ives was in his late fifties.
Once interest in his work grew, Ives invited younger composers to produce definitive scores of works that were scattered in his notebooks or on miscellaneous sheets of paper. Once these scores were published, Ives, by then independently wealthy, gave them to these composers in perpetuity. The composer Lou Harrison thus literally owned Ives’s Third Symphony. The premiere of his Fourth Symphony, likewise a masterpiece, occurred more than a decade after Ives died.
While a guest at Lou Harrison’s culturally fertile compound in Aptos, California, Reinhard discovered some Ives worksheets that suggested they came from the unfinished symphony. These scores became the foundation upon which he did more research, eventually producing a score whose notes were all written by Ives, Reinhard just placing himself in a distinguished tradition of younger American composers who made Ives performable.
For some years, Reinhard had a recording of the concert that he could not legally distribute, so that those of us who had received copies had something with which we could impress our friends, much like a childhood trading card that no one else has. Finally obtaining necessary clearances, he was, thanks to contemporary technology, able to re-record a few musicians one at a time, the sum of them mixed into a definitive disc that is now commercially available. Expanding his labor of love, Reinhard also produced a book-length manuscript that is available from him on a CD-ROM, exploiting the new technology to distribute a finished text that would have taken ages to get through the traditional book-publishing bottleneck.
From its beginning, the Universe Symphony is provocatively odd, opening with thirty minutes wholly of percussion, played by thirteen people—triangles, bells, a woodblock, a clay pipe, glasses, two kinds of metal pipe, a low gong, and, of course, drums of various kinds and sizes. Later there are nine flutes, each with its own part. Despite its length of over an hour, this recording is continuous sound, and this “symphony” lacks separate “movements.”
In his informative notes accompanying the disc, Reinhard testifies that, “The Universe Symphony contains the groundbreaking structure of a rhythmic grid defined purely by percussion, called the Pulse of the Cosmos and based upon repeating time frames equivalent to sixteen seconds (called ‘Basic Units,’ or BUs).” He continues, “You can hear the ‘melody’ in the changing relationships of the percussion’s pulse in different musicians.” Believe me when I say that the result has a unique signature, which is to say that particularly in its varying, almost chaotic tempo it is distinctly different from any extended percussion you or I have ever heard. The subtitles of other sections indicate the grandeur of the music: “Wide Valleys and Clouds,” “Birth of the Oceans,” “Earth and the Firmament,” “And Lo, Now It Is Night,” and “Earth Is of the Heavens.” The music Ives composed at the end of his compositional career was no less innovative than the masterpieces from its apex.
The genius of Johnny Reinhard as a conductor/impresario of contemporary music is that perhaps half of his concerts are devoted to music not heard before, as is the case with the Universe Symphony. Much of his repertoire exploits the sounds between the traditional twelve tones, as befits his founding of the annual American Festival of Microtonal Music. His performances of classics, most prominently by Johann Sebastian Bach, customarily incorporate alternative tunings, about which he customarily gives instructive prefatory lectures (in the tradition of Leonard Bernstein!).
Much like his contemporary Gertrude Stein, also born in the USA in 1874, Ives at his best thought Big and New; the greatness of Reinhard’sUnfinished Symphony comes from his realizing Big and New as well.
Richard Kostelanetz’s recent books include Intellectual Correspondence in the 21st Century (a CD-ROM, published by Archae Editions).
Charles Ives: Universe Symphony is available here.
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Saturday, November 7, 2009

Glenn Branca - Structure 1981 (from the album Ascension)

Glenn Branca Presents New Work For Guitars Wit...Image by DG Jones via Flickr



Ascension:
Finally, a legitimate re-release of Glenn Branca's seminal debut long playing record that was originally released in 1981 on the most important independent New York label of the day, 99 records (home to Liquid Liquid, ESG). After moving to New York and fronting two of the most caustic no wave bands going (Theoretical Girls, Static), Branca honed his vision, taking out the histrionics, but leaving in the theatricality and grandiosity. This is huge music made with a small ensemble, and yet for all its reputed ugliness, the compositions here actually soar. Patterned guitar riffs create a forward moving velocity that belies the density of the songs. This is possibly the most listenable music to be sprung from no-wave; in fact it practically turns on the genre's conventions by getting downright romantic at points. Branca's ensemble famously employed Lee Renaldo (who is featured here) and Thurston Moore in their pre-Sonic Youth days, and the more you listen the more you realize how intensely this must have influenced their subsequent careers. Put this on and then give "Sister" (recorded three or four years later) a spin and you'll see what I mean. Essential. [MK] (June 17, 2003)

The video is from a British horror short, Where Has Poor Mickey Gone?

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Friday, November 6, 2009

Gyorgy Ligeti - Chamber Concerto, Mvt. 3
















Gyorgi Ligeti:


Ligeti’s creative outlook has been formed by his experiences under two dictatorships – those of Hitler and Stalin.


A Jew born in Transylvania just as Hungary was losing that region to Romania, he survived World War II in a labour camp (his brother and father, less fortunate, both died in Auschwitz).


Following the war, he studied and taught at the Budapest Academy, but fled after the crushing of the anti-Soviet uprising in 1956. Arriving in Cologne he became an associate of Stockhausen at the WDR electronic music studio, where he rapidly caught up on the musical developments from which he had been cut off in Hungary.


In the 1960s he emerged as a leading member of the international avant-garde. Since then he has lived mostly in Hamburg and Vienna, becoming an Austrian citizen in 1967.


As Ligeti has remarked of the traumatic experiences which have shaped his life and artistic outlook, “I am permanently scarred; I will be overcome by revenge fantasies to the end of my days.”


And yet, despite his work’s penchant for the surreal and the grotesque, he is the most approachable, as well as one of the most fascinating and compelling, of postwar composers.


A feeling of loss and nostalgia characterizes much of his output, often evoked by the haunting modalities of East European folk music – but pathos is balanced by absurdist humour, most notoriously in the twenty-minute Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes, a surreal jeu d’esprit which, composed shortly after Ligeti’s arrival in the West, signalled his intention of finding an entirely personal route out of the creative impasse of post-war music.


Ligeti’s highly individual creative trajectory – as embodied by the tongue-in-cheek Poème – was developed in his orchestral works of the 1960s such as Apparitions, Atmosphères and Lontano.


Rejecting the serial complexities favoured by contemporaries such as Stockhausen and Boulez, these early works instead embarked on a back-to-basics re-examination of music from the bottom up, stripping away all extraneous musical matter in favour of a style based on pure texture, with vast masses of sound in the process of slow creation and transformation.


At the same time, Ligeti’s maverick sense of humour expressed itself in the quasi-theatrical Aventures and Nouvelles aventures, a pair of exuberant vocal works setting nonsense phonetic texts, and the imposing Requiem, Ligeti’s summatory early work, which combines the sound-mass textures of the orchestral pieces and the zany theatricals of Aventures to disturbing effect.


The cloudy sound-masses of these early works are typically created out of microscopic tangles of intertwined instrumental lines – a kind of musical spider’s web, described by the composer as “micro-polyphony”.


In Ligeti’s works of the later 1960s and early 1970s the lines gradually become clearer, reintroducing a sense – albeit a rather peculiar one – of melody, counterpoint and harmony, while rhythm also resurfaces, often in the form of crazily superimposed pulses or psychotically fast instrumental outbursts, like the deranged functioning of some vast mechanical instrument.


In works such as the Chamber Concerto, Melodien and the Double Concerto for flute and oboe Ligeti pushes this style to its limits, creating a compellingly strange musical world, at once eerie and beautiful.






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