Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Rothko at dusk

O Albion 2

Tonight in London I happily and gratefully received the Guardian First Book Award. Deepest thanks to the Guardian jury for bestowing this honor and also to broad-minded readers' groups from the Waterstones chain for voting The Rest Is Noise onto the shortlist. Hors d'oeuvres at the ceremony were handed out on serving trays containing copies of the shortlisted books; hence the photo in the corner. I'll be able to catch one concert during this very brief trip to London; tomorrow night at Wigmore Hall, Steven Isserlis and Thomas Adès play a program of Debussy, Janáček, Fauré, Kurtág, Ravel, and Poulenc. By the way, if you are new to this site, you can here find an Audio Guide to twentieth-century music and also a glossary of wacky musical terms.

Ghost trio

Hello, Bay Area! Other Minds is holding another day-long New Music Séance on Dec. 6 in San Francisco's Swedenborg Church. Works of Grazyna Bacewicz, Barber, Berio, Johanna Beyer, Steed Cowart (world premiere), Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, Feldman, Gabriela Lena Frank, Mamoru Fujieda, Grainger, Harrison, Ingram Marshall (world premiere), Dylan Mattingly (all of seventeen), Messiaen, Meredith Monk, Per Nørgård, Dane Rudhyar, Somei Satoh, Tan Dun, and Lois Vierk. Performances by pianists Sarah Cahill and Eva-Maria Zimmermann and violinist Kate Stenberg.

Messiaen agenda update

With the centenary of Olivier Messiaen drawing nigh, here are some additions to my Messiaen 100 post of some weeks back. First, the DG label is releasing a mammoth, thirty-two-CD Complete Edition of the Maître's works, with authoritative performances by the likes of Olivier Latry, Roger Muraro, Pierre Boulez, Myung-Whun Chung, and Kent Nagano (his great recording of Saint François d'Assise). Also, I earlier neglected to mention that the Cleveland Museum of Art is offering a strong cluster of events over the next several weeks: the Quartet for the End of Time twice, Christopher Taylor playing Vingt Regards on the night of the birthday (Dec. 10), and From the Canyons to the Stars with Oberlin players on Dec. 13. Note also ongoing observances at Jacaranda in LA; Mark Robson will do the Vingt Regards on Dec. 6. Matthew Odell plays the same huge work at An Die Musik in Baltimore on Dec. 7. Up in New Haven there's a series called Messiaen at Yale, with Paul Jacobs undertaking Livre du Saint Sacrament, the composer's final organ masterpiece, on the 10th. Here in NYC we'll have a Quartet in the Music at Our Saviour's Atonement series in Washington Heights on Dec. 7; the same work at NYU's Mission Française on Dec. 10; a Voices of Ascension concert the same night at the Church of the Ascension in the Village, with yet another Quartet and Jon Gillock playing organ selections; a Miller Theatre tribute with AXIOM on Dec. 13; and Reinbert de Leeuw conducting the Turangalîla with Yale players at Carnegie on Dec. 14 ($10-25). But nothing on this continent beats the climax of Automne Messiaen in Montreal: the entire organ output during the day of Dec. 10, plus Vingt Regards that night and a Nagano-directed Saint Francis on birthday eve. See the master event list for Messiaen events around the world. The day after, of course, Elliott Carter turns one hundred; James Levine leads the celebration at Carnegie, with a Making Music event the following night. At Southbank in London, the unstoppable Boulez will lead a Messiaen concert on Dec. 10 and a Carter concert on Dec. 11, including something of his own on each night for the sake of variety — or, perhaps, continuity.

Happy Thanksgiving

Remembering Harvey Milk, who died thirty years ago today.

Apparition of the Chapel

Any performance of Morton Feldman's mysterious and sublime Rothko Chapel is an event. Musica Sacra will present the work tonight at 7PM at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden, as part of WNYC's New Sounds Live series. Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater is also on the program. Admission is free.

Audio: 1) Philip Brett conducting the UC Berkeley Chamber Chorus; with David Abel, viola, Karen Rosenak, celesta, and William Winant, percussion; New Albion NA039. By kind permission of New Albion. 2) The final minutes of my Feldman tribute on WHRB-FM, Dec. 17, 1989, with Magnus Lindberg's Kraft as the signature tune.

Lenny in the common room at 2AM

Carnegie Hall's Leonard Bernstein festival is heading into its final weeks: On the Town has a short run at City Center starting on Wednesday night, and Alan Gilbert conducts the Juilliard Orchestra in the Kaddish Symphony on Nov. 24. American Scholar offers a nice bit of Bernsteiniana online: an account of a memorable appearance that Bernstein made at Harvard in 1986, with Gilbert as his student presenter. Two others who helped to organize Bernstein's late-night soliloquy at Adams House were James Ross, then a music tutor and now on the faculty of the University of Maryland School of Music; and Robert Kiely, beloved master of the house. Kiely recalls that Bernstein gave his speech while puffing on a cigarette and sipping Scotch from a dining-hall glass. His topic was terrorism.

Photo: Library of Congress

Alsop on C-SPAN

Marin Alsop, the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, will speak at the National Press Club tomorrow (Monday) at 1PM; there will be a live broadcast on C-SPAN. A press release promises that Alsop will "challenge business, philanthropic and arts leaders throughout the nation to stimulate a collaborative movement that leverages arts-based education programs to encourage positive social change in our communities." Read here about Alsop's OrchKids initiative in Baltimore.

Sad news

Fulfilling hints by Andrew Patner and La Cieca in recent months, Gerard Mortier has withdrawn from New York City Opera. Mortier had set forth a remarkable plan for an all-twentieth-century opening season, but adequate funding failed to materialize, and Mortier walked out. What happens next for City Opera is anything but clear. Dark days may lie ahead for many artistic institutions; as Tim Mangan reported three days ago, Opera Pacific is shutting down, and, according to Mark Swed, the Pasadena Symphony is in trouble. This will hardly be the end of it. Sympathies to all those who are losing their jobs in difficult times.

Newly arrived

Listening:

— René Pape: Gods, Kings, and Demons (DG, out Nov. 11)
— Brahms, Symphony No. 1 and Schicksalslied; John Eliot Gardiner conducting the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and the Monteverdi Choir (SDG)
— Corigliano, Dylan Thomas Trilogy, with Thomas Allen and Leonard Slatkin conducting the Nashville Symphony (Naxos)
— Carter, Complete Piano Music, with Ursula Oppens (Cedille)
— Lully, Psyché, with Carolyn Sampson, Karina Gauvin, and Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs directing the Boston Early Music Festival Orchestra and Chorus (cpo)
— Bob Dylan, Tell Tale Signs (Columbia)

Reading:

— Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley)
— Eric Salzman, The New Music Theater (Oxford)
— Simon Morrison, The People's Artist: Prokofiev's Soviet Years (Oxford)
— Daniel Heartz, Mozart, Haydn, and Early Beethoven (Norton)
— Judith Tick (ed.), Music in the USA: A Documentary Companion (Oxford)
— Joseph Polisi, American Muse: The Life and Times of William Schuman (Amadeus)

Union Square, 11/5/08, 1AM

The last time I heard spontaneous singing in Union Square was in the days after September 11, 2001 — an experience I wrote about here. The crowd on Tuesday night consisted largely of college students and people in their twenties; some were children when 9/11 happened. I doubt that many members of this exuberant throng were thinking about what happened in this city seven years ago, but, for various reasons, I certainly was. The young man in the foreground is holding up a rush edition of the Daily News: President Obama.

A quick search of YouTube reveals that young crowds across the country broke into the national anthem in the early morning hours. You can find videos for the East Village, Times Square, Berkeley, Portland OR, Amherst, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Madison WI, and Harvard Yard (with band), among others. Two obvious conclusions: 1) contra Palin, the entire country is "pro America"; 2) increased support for music education would be nice.

One more musical angle: Bob Dylan announced the outcome of the election by playing "Blowin' in the Wind."

Sack of Salonen

The LA Philharmonic has set up a sumptuous website in celebration of Esa-Pekka Salonen's final season as the orchestra's music director. The audio portion of the site has some fifteen hours of free music, emphasizing such Salonen specialties as Debussy, Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Bartók. One noteworthy item: Steven Stucky's brilliant, intensely winning Second Concerto for Orchestra, which has yet to be commercially recorded. (Via ArtsJournal.)

The indescribable

"Alles Vergängliche" from Mahler's Eighth.

For Barack Obama

It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

— Wallace Stevens, "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Postcard from Chicago

Reminders

I'm appearing with Joshua Kosman tonight at the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, and on Saturday afternoon at Northwestern School of Law's Thorne Auditorium, as part of the Chicago Humanities Festival. My Audio Guide is here.

New day at the Phil

At a meeting with a group of journalists today, Alan Gilbert, the incoming music director of the New York Philharmonic, divulged some details of his first season, which gets underway next fall. Also in attendance were Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic's president, and Matías Tarnopolsky, the artistic administrator, both seconding Gilbert's commitment to combining traditional repertory with contemporary work — what the conductor calls a "museum plus laboratory" approach. The orchestra is not yet ready to announce the entire season, but Gilbert did describe his opening-night gala program: a new piece by Magnus Lindberg, Messiaen's Poèmes pour Mi with Renée Fleming as soloist, and Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Lindberg — pictured above — will be the Philharmonic's composer-in-residence, a position that lasts two years. The Finn will write another new work for Gilbert's opening season and also direct one of two programs by the Philharmonic's new-music ensemble, which commences operations next season. Lindberg and Gilbert are looking at a long list of potential composers for commissions, including a number of little-known younger Americans. Other items of interest: Valery Gergiev will lead a three-week Stravinsky festival in spring 2010; Thomas Hampson will serve as Artist in Residence, curating several programs; and, in a sign of his commitment to the city, Gilbert will lead all of the Philharmonic's summer parks concerts. Overall, the feeling was good. Dan Wakin has more.

An excerpt from Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, with Kari Kriikku, clarinet, and Sakari Oramo conducting the Finnish Radio Symphony; Ondine 1038.

Photograph of Lindberg: Richard Haughton.

Copland will rock you

Listening to the New York Phil play Copland at a Young People's Concert the other night, I realized I'd omitted a favorite tidbit from the Audio Guide for my book: the derivation of Queen's "We Will Rock You" from the Fanfare for the Common Man. The sonic evidence is, I believe, incontrovertible:

Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic, Sony 63082.

Political music

Judd Greenstein is among New York's most gifted younger composers. I extolled his piece Folk Music sometime in the early days of this blog, and have followed his work closely since then. I couldn't possibly have predicted, though, the latest turn his career has taken: Folk Music is now serving as the soundtrack for the Obama-Biden Tax Calculator. The recording is from the NOW Ensemble's recent disc on the New Amsterdam label. (Hat tip: Dan Johnson.) On Oct. 29, NOW plays with composer-vocalist Corey Dargel at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC, on the same evening the Jack Quartet plays Xenakis quartets.

As regular readers know, I strive to be strenuously fair and balanced in political matters. In the interest of equal time, I offer this video of Sarah Palin's magisterial explication of the Wall Street bailout, with an ingenious, speech-based accompaniment somewhat in the manner of Steve Reich's Different Trains. The pianist is Henry Hey:

Manhattan nocturnes

In November, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center will present an imaginatively programmed festival entitled Night Fantasies: works of Crumb, Ligeti, Debussy, Carter, Berg, Schumann, Messiaen, and various others, on a nocturnal theme. Klaus Lauer, of the Römerbad festival in Germany, serves as guest curator. To spread word, CMS has created a striking short video of musicians in Manhattan at night. The soundtrack is the "God-music" from Crumb's Black Angels, with a slight admixture of Chopin and Ligeti.

Opening at ISSUE Project Room in Brooklyn tomorrow: Darmstadt's Essential Repertoire festival, celebrating American experimental and minimalist music of the postwar era.