The Magnetic Fields

Back When I taught comp, my last observation fell on a day for which I turned out to have assigned really boring reading. I don’t know

how many of you use the McQuades’ Seeing and Writing, but it has a little portfolio of bathroom signs from around the world that caught my eye as I was franticly scanning the pages on the subway up to campus trying to find something more interesting to talk about than what I had already assigned. After thinking about it I decided to ditch my lesson plan and instead have the class talk and write about these signs. Thankfully, it turns out that there’s a mountain of things to talk about with bathroom signs. How do we distinguish male and female bodies, for instance? How much of that is perfo

rmative, an assertion of requirements rather than description of reality? How do we communicate that this is a place to pee, etc?

The cover of the Magnetic Fields latest album, Realism (Nonesuch 2010), which sports the outline of a ladies’ room symbol on a paper bag colored background, would have been a perfect addition to that discussio

n. It is also the perfect image for this new album, which is, in a strange way, the completion of a diptych when combined with their previous album, Distortion (Nonesuch 2008), with its solid black men’s room symbol in the middle of a shocking neon pink cover

Distortion drew out the always-latent noisepop, shoegaze, Jesus and Mary Chain side to the Magnetic Fields music—classic pop buried under massive, echo-y guitar fuzz, with affectless vocals generally pretty low in the mix. Realism, on the other hand, sounds more like the band’s live shows—folksy, mostly acoustic, not so big on traditional percussion. Stephin Merritt, the dictatorially micromanaging, songwriting genius and sometimes lead singer, actually suffers from hyperacusis, a condition

that makes loud noises intolerable. Restrained as the band’s performance is, he nevertheless must wear earplugs to play live and covers his left ear whenever the audi

ence applauds. I’ve never felt more like a grown-up than when I joined the polite clapping between songs from my

comfortable seat at Town Hall at

their last New York appearance. Taken together, the two albums continue the Magnetic Fields’ decade-long practice of structuring albums around loose concepts, which began with their three-disc magnum opus, 69 Love Songs (Merge 1999) and continued with i (Nonesuch 2004), all of the songs on which started with the letter, and generally the pronoun, “I.”

This is not a review, but I do want to say here that I think this new album is incredible—among their best—and is fast becoming a nonexpendable part of my whole body, not excluding its suburbs.

Let’s go back to the two recent album covers, because I think they reveal—this is what I really want to talk about—some of the persistent characteristics that make the Magnetic Fields wonderful. As Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Even on the most exalted throne in the world we are only sitting on our own bottom” (I’ve also seen it translated “Even kings sit on their arses”). Realism and Distortion make this point pretty clearly—as the bathroom icons were designed to do. Dry wit: satirical, even cynical, sometimes loving, always hilarious. That’s one continuous thread running through the Magnetic Fields’ discography, and one that implicates themselves. For example, as against the hot pink, Pop Art slickness of Distortion’s cover image, Realism’s cover is a visual pun that undermines the title. Its trompe l’oiel details make the background look like parchment—a self-consciously artificial signifier of realism. Punning titles themselves are a band tradition. Does Get Lost (Merge 1995), for instance, mean Merritt & Co would rather we leave them alone, or are we supposed to read the writing on the cover straight through: “The Magnetic Fields Get Lost”? The title i is even closer to the irony of called the latest album Realism, since, as Merritt has insisted, all of his songs are sung from the point of view of characters he’s created. No direct, big-R Romantic self-expression from him!

Merritt’s songs have always seemed to enjoy moving between two poles of the same ironic spectrum: artifice and realism, dreamy enchantment and disappointed cynicism—although it’s these latter songs that often sound the most upbeat. “I Don’t Believe You,” for example, from the album i:

So you quote love unquote me.
Well, stranger things have come to be.
But let’s agree to disagree,
Cause I don’t believe you.
…
You tell me I’m not not cute.
Its truth or falsity is moot,
Cause honesty’s not your strong suit,
And I don’t believe you.
It’s an effortful cheerfulness and a hard-won freedom from expectations, as the bridge reveals.
I had a dream and you were in it.
The blue of your eyes was infinite.
You seemed to be in love with me,
Which isn’t very realistic.

Hope and hopelessness go together in these songs. Without romantic illusions, disillusionment would be neither such a dangerous wound nor such a self-preservative necessity.

The two tendencies, nourishing and puncturing illusions, come together most marvelously in what may be the Magnetic Fields’ most popular song—certainly the one I’ve found people who know nothing else about them generally are familiar with and enjoy—“The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side,” from part one of 69 Love Songs. The song is written to an unnamed woman (presumably), and every verse of it cheerfully enumerates the hopelessness of the singer trying to compete with all her other admirers: “Andy would bicycle across town in the rain to bring you candy, / And John would buy the gown for you to wear to the prom / With Tom the astronomer, who’d name a star for you.” But the singer has an edge: “I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.” And that’s why he’s the luckiest guy. He acknowledges all the limits and caveats on his luck—“But when the sun comes out, / and only when the sun comes out, / I’m the luckiest guy…”—but to the very end he maintains his sustaining, pathetic, undeluded but illusory joyfulness:

I know Professor Blumen makes you feel like a
woman,
But when the wind is in your hair you laugh like a
little girl.
So you share secrets with Lou, but we’ve got
secrets too.
Well, one: I only keep this heap for you.
Cause I’m the ugliest guy on the Lower East Side,
But I’ve got wheels, and you want to go for a ride.
Want to go for a ride?

The last line gets two more repetitions, with the final word drawn out longer and longer until, every time I try to sing along, I hope against hope that the sustained last note is somehow digitally manipulated.

Merritt’s lyrics never let things rest, and each of these tendencies finds itself undercut at least once in his songbook. The earnest romanticism turns out to be a sham in 69 Love Songs’ “I Think I Need a New Heart,” in which the persona singing admits that

… I always say I love you
When I mean turn out the light,
And I say let’s run away
When I just mean stay the night.

On the other hand, the character who sings “Save a Secret for the Moon” from Get Lost uses his hopelessness as a seductive lure:

I can show you sadder poetry
Than you ever thought there could be.
I know all the saddest people.
Most of them are dead now.

Let’s go back to the girls’ room/boys’ room album covers.

Talking about gender is pretty much unavoidable when talking about symbols distinguishing the gents’ from the ladies’. There’s the paranoid reading of bathroom signs—which ideally becomes the resistant, or in a slightly older vocabulary, subversive one—that sees the interpolative violence of these reductive, standard-enforcing symbols. For example, neither gender is ever represented as fat. Would it confuse the message of the sexual binary to show them as such? I drew for my class what I thought I would look like as a bathroom symbol. It turned out kind of like a silhouette of Mr. Potatohead with an extra circle on top. I guess the Mrs. version would have a bow in her hair.

But then there are more lovely relationships with bathroom signs. One of my most delightful students that semester, who had only started learning English a few years before, explained that he’d never considered what “WC” might stand for; he’d always just read it as “welcome”—“don’t worry”—“it’s going to be okay”—“here’s what you need for relief.” That’s definitely a message that any bathroom sign can communicate to me in moments of distress, no matter what my gender at the time. (That last phrase makes me sound much more interesting than I am: my gender is pretty much always masculine.)

The radical politics version of paranoia is entirely too earnest for the Magnetic Fields. These two albums’ ironic play on realism and distortion and the gender politics of the loo encapsulates much better the band’s queerness, as does Merritt’s wonderful songwriting practice of having other singers of other genders ventriloquize his personae, sometimes making the sexuality of a song impossible to untangle. Take “Come Back from San Francisco,” from the first volume of 69 Love Songs. Shirley Simms, perpetual “guest vocalist” (though I’m sure she has a much better deal than we adjuncts do), sings Merritt’s lyrics: “Should pretty boys in discos / Distract you from your novel / Remember I’m awful in love with you.” Girl singing to boy who likes boys? Boy singing through girl to—someone? Any which way, the relationships can’t be fit into categories.

Which suggests a comparison to “Girls & Boys,” the Britpop scene-maker by Blur (Parklife, Food/SBK 1994). The two songs are not kindred. Instead of a stadium new-wave-disco beat and the repeated, earnestly ironic proclamation that it “always should be someone you really love,” The Magnetic Fields here give us subtlety and artfulness:

You need me
Like the wind needs the trees
To blow in.
Like the moon needs poetry,
You need me.

Is that a compliment? Or a plea? Or a scornful warning meant to cut “you” down to size? Dry, undramatic presentation, sexual and emotional complexity, and a never-explicit undercurrent of anxiety that the San Francisco boys may be more satisfying in bed than the woman singing “kiss me, I’ve quit smoking / I miss doing the wild thing with you” are the key elements of this song. In fact, low-key delivery, nuanced emotions, dry wit, and romantic despair characterize almost every Magnetic Field song.

Of course, there are levels to Blur’s anthemic mega-hit, too. The eurotrash synths make you think sexual fluidity is delightful. (I should say: I love listing to this song.) Turns out that it’s actually irresponsible decadence. Satire! The real problem is that there aren’t any jobs to keep these kids occupied. All they can do to fill the time is get confused about whom they’re fucking. It makes me wish American youth could just go on the dole after college.

And of course there’s simplicity to The Magnetic Fields’ song as well. Stephin Merritt keeps fanatical control over all the lyric-writing in his many bands and projects. (Others include the 6ths, the Future Bible Heroes, the Gothic Archies, and the songs for the musical adaptation of the Neil Gaiman novella Coraline.) And Merritt is gay. So, on paper, “Come Back from San Francisco” is a song written by a guy to another guy who also likes guys. And there are songs written and sung from just such a direct and uncomplicated relational position. Take for example, “When My Boy Walks down the Street” from 69 Love Songs part 3. Merritt himself sings, and the lyrics include some of my favorite love-song celebrations of a significant other: “Butterflies turn into people when my boy walks down the street,” for example, or “There are whole new kinds of weather when he walks with his new beat.” But the terms of the relationship are clear enough: “he’s going to be my wife.”

But the whole complicated spectrum of sexual subjectivities—and of fannish identification, of the needy projective and introjective love that comprises fandom—has always been an explicit mainstay of the band’s personality. “I was straight when Stephin met me, and I’m gay now, which may have been influenced by the openness of hanging around with so many gay people,” founding, full-time (tenured?) band-member Claudia Gonson said in an interview with the Advocate in 2000. “When we started Magnetic Fields we purposely had one lesbian, one gay guy, one straight woman, and one straight man. The audience could identify with whomever they wanted.”

This is not much of a surprise. Gonson has been a PhD student right here at the CUNY Graduate Center, and was dearly close to our late Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose antihomophobic scholarly and personal project had at its center the goal of vastly expanding and complicating the available understandings of “sexual identity,” of multiplying and nurturing the possibilities for different, individual ways of desiring, identifying, and being in relationship. “People are different from each other” is famously the first axiom in Sedgwick’s extended introduction to Epistemology of the Closet, one of the original big bangs that generated the space for academic queer studies to come into existence.

(There’s a little shout out to academic palaver on the new album in the form of a song called “Always Already Gone.” It’s not the first. 69 Love Songs includes “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure.” Both songs are about loneliness and romantic disappointment, as most Magnetic Fields songs are. And for the avant-gardists, when Merge reissued their first two albums on one compact disc, they were separated by a track called 4’33’’, which was just that—a “cover,” so to speak, of John Cage’s famous silent composition.)

My own founding document, I think, is an essay which Sedgwick gave the witty, pop-inflected title “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think this Essay Is about You.” In it, she suggests that—in addition to the paranoid style of theory inflected criticism, which puts its faith in the transformative power of exposing the sinister workings our heterosexist, emotionally impoverishing, late-capitalist society—another perspective is both necessary and available: the reparative. Reparative criticism pays close attention to practices of art and living whose creativity is motivated by love, difference, and need. “The desire reparative impulse,” she writes “is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self.”

I bring this up not just because I love and miss Eve, and I take every opportunity to quote that sentence I can, but instead because the reparative, the anti-depressant impulse at the heart of Eve’s scholarly and personal work is deeply relevant, I think, to the Magnetic Fields’ style of music. The ironic, distant, ventriloqized emotions of Merritt’s lyrics are somehow still entirely relatable and even vulnerable. His vacillation between puncturing illusions and sustaining them—so familiar to any depressive, I would imagine—resonates beautifully with Sedgwick’s observation that the most paranoid artists are also often the most wonderfully reparative ones. His campy, retro, innovative cannibalization of classic pop forms and tricks and subject matter could fit right into her list of the defining, reparative features of classic camp performance, which includes “‘over’-attachment to fragmentary, marginal, waste, or leftover products,” “rich, highly interruptive affective variety,” and “irrepressible fascination with ventriloquistic experimentation.” The Magnetic Fields do that. That’s what they do!

And, as stand-offish as they can seem—or so people tell me; I’ve never experienced them to be so—the Magnetic Fields are and have always been lovely, and loving, and deeply loved by their fans.

P.S. Now seems as good a time as any to say that the teaching observation I opened this meander with went great. It might have been crass, and a different observer might have hated it. But, as Merritt advises in the new album’s “Everything is One Big Christmas Tree,”

Why sit in your dark and lonely room?
Must your every word be sincere?
Here’s a vial of laughing gas perfume:
See that people smile when you’re near.
If they don’t like you, screw them.

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Petrushka

Il mondo della luna by Franz Joseph Haydn. Performed by Gotham Chamber Orchestra.

This review is about three recent adaptations of classical works: The Győr National Ballet’s take on Stravinsky’s early-twentieth-century masterpieces, Petrushka and Rite of Spring, and Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s opera Il mondo della luna (The World on the Moon).

Petrushka was originally composed by Stravinsky for the Ballets Russes, the company responsible for premiering most of the sensational avant-garde ballets that took Paris by storm in the first decades of the twentieth century. It premiered in Paris in 1911. The ballet’s conceit has its roots in Russian folklore, as did most of Stravinsky’s works from this period. It takes place during the festival of Shrovetide, in St Petersburg’s Admiralty Square. The title character, Petrushka, is a puppet whose master endows him and his fellow puppets, the ballerina and the Blackamoor, with real human emotions. The requisite love triangle ensues, and ends calamitously with the Blackamoor killing Petrushka in front of an audience of festival-goers. When the puppeteer tries to reassure the audience that the puppets are not real humans—that they are, in fact, just wooden puppets—Petrushka’s ghost appears above the theatre.

Almost nothing remains of this plot in the Győr Ballet’s rendition of Petrushka. The choreographer, Dmitrij Simkin, states in the program: “I present here, not dolls with human feelings … , but humans who act like puppets in a society controlled by propaganda where misleading the masses and brainwashing controls the whole society.” Simkin’s choreography basically inverts the original tale, presenting Petrushka as a man who refuses to give in to the will of the Soviet equivalent of a puppeteer: a military commander.

The ballet begins (and ends) not with Stravinsky’s score, but with a Soviet song, the type commonly sung in that era by the workers’ choirs that were the government’s favorite form of music-making. As the song plays, a dozen or so Soviet “puppets,” decked out in Soviet costumes replete with red handkerchiefs around their necks, begin a rather mechanistic dance. Even after the song ends, they keep dancing, seemingly incapable of recognizing on their own something as simple as the end of the music. The only two characters who stick out from this corps of good Soviet folk are Petrushka (the only man onstage with a bare neck) and his would-be master (in full military uniform).

The plot of the ballet is abstracted to the point of formlessness. The set comprises statues of a hammer, a sickle, and Lenin’s head, with a glowing red star suspended in what appears to be driftwood presiding over the stage. The ballet itself alternates between the Soviet-puppets’ mechanistic dance, and the existential duel between Petrushka and the commander. Rather predictably, Petrushka dies, and several of the dancers are crushed by Lenin’s head as it rolls across the stage.

This is too bad. Stravinsky’s score was composed for a very specific tale—you hear, in the music, a man with a hurdy-gurdy and a man with a music box fighting for the audience’s attention, the puppeteer charming his puppets to life with his flute, and so on. To erase all of these moments from the choreography seems a waste, and ruins the delicate balance between dance, narrative, and music that first made the ballet such a success. Listening to the score without watching the ballet is similar to listening to a film score without seeing the film. Watching the Győr Ballet’s production does not do much to fill in those blanks. I’m sure it’s possible to update the ballet in ways that would convey the same anti-Soviet message, while keeping the narrative of the original ballet intact. Unfortunately, this production failed at the task.

Perhaps Rite of Spring would have been a better vehicle for an anti-Soviet ballet: the original plot revolves around Stravinsky’s vision of a Pagan Russian spring ritual ending with the sacrifice of a virgin. Surely a group of frenzied comrades in Soviet garb sacrificing a terrified girl who refuses to submit could send much the same message as the Győr Ballet’s production of Petrushka?

At any rate, this is not what choreographer Attila Kun does in his new production of Stravinsky’s watershed ballet. The 1913 premiere, with its scandalously primitive sets and costumes, ugly, angular dancing that more closely resembled a communal seizure than ballet, and jarringly loud, dissonant music, caused a riot: perhaps the most-discussed moment in the history of classical-music concerts.

Kun’s production follows the basic outline of Stravinsky’s scenario, but removes the primitivist-Russian flavour. The dancers are scantily clad in simple white costumes, perhaps closest in ethos to ancient Greece, although some audience members I spoke with thought the look to be more space-age. The set is practically nonexistent: the only thing onstage besides the dancers being a white sheet which they sometimes dance behind, creating ripples in its surface as they touch it. The counterpart to all this whiteness is the lighting, which constantly changes colors and brightness. When the victim finally succumbs to her fate, her white costume is drenched in blood.

This is all fairly effective, but as in Petrushka, something is missing: the original choreography. The dancing in this production was simply too nice, too close to conventional ballet, too artful. The only real signs of primitivism were the several times that the dancers ran around on stage, something that is none too exciting to watch. The thing that made the original Rite of Spring really shocking was the way in which the dancers’ bodies contorted, and the perfect synchronicity between their actions and Stravinsky’s brutal music. Without that, this production felt sanitized.

•  •  •

Gotham Chamber Opera’s production of Haydn’s little-performed comic opera Il mondo della luna was another animal entirely. The company’s production amounts to a postmodern pastiche, collapsing several centuries’ worth of fashion, technology, and performance traditions into each other, but the mélange works: this was one of the most entertaining and enjoyable opera productions that I have ever seen.

The big hype surrounding this production was the unusual performance space: the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium. Where better to produce an opera that revolves around an aristocrat tricked into believing he has been sent to the moon than in a planetarium that can really be made to look like the moon? Yet it seems somewhat miraculous that not only did the folks at the Planetarium agree to allow the production to be staged in the first place, but also that everyone managed to get along well enough to see it through to the end.

The best part about the decision to produce Il mondo della luna at the Planetarium is that it seems to have inspired the company to take unprecedented license with the opera. If you are going to project images of the night sky onto the ceiling of your performance venue (something Haydn could never have dreamed of), what else can you modernize? Perhaps more importantly, what else will the performance space force you to modernize, and how well will you adapt?

The first thing to be changed was the music of the opera itself. The conductor, Neal Goren, explains in the program notes that while some of the opera’s arias are “not only the best of Haydn, [but] the best of music … there is a great deal of chaff among the wheat of Il mondo della luna.” So he trimmed the opera down considerably, from over three hours in length to a swift ninety minutes, with no intermission. Mr. Goren’s shortened version of the opera worked well; it had a snappy pace, only lagging a little towards the end.

The unusual locale of this production presented several obstacles. The planetarium is circular, its 350 seats situated around the circumference. There is no stage; no orchestra pit; none of the comforts of a standard opera house. But the company rose splendidly to the task. The orchestra was seated on a raised platform to one side of the planetarium. The main action of the opera took place directly in front of their platform. The singers moved around between the floor and a second elevated platform and rolling ladders, all maneuvered by a team of stage hands throughout the show. In the end, the lack of a stage turned out to be one of the show’s biggest assets. The fact that the singers were in constant motion made the production more interesting to watch. And because the singers were often on the floor or wandering between aisles, there was an interaction between them and the audience that rarely happens in contemporary opera productions. I found myself wondering whether the ultimate consequence of staging the opera in such a supposedly modern environment was to bring it back to its original setting: the opera was first performed in the Esterháza, the palace of Haydn’s patron, presumably in a hall much smaller than today’s opera houses.

Adding even more to the visual interest were the wonderfully outrageous costumes. At the beginning of the opera, when everyone is firmly earth-bound, the costumes are typical, with the aristocrats wearing the usual 18th-century period costumes replete with fancy wigs. When Buonafede is tricked by the astrologer Ecclitico into thinking he has traveled to the moon (in reality he is merely a little out of it from taking a heavy sleeping potion), the aura changes entirely. Buonafede himself is decked out in an Apollo-style space suit, and the other main characters of the opera get outfits straight off the set of Star Trek consisting largely of shimmery, white spandex. These costumes don’t just look twentieth century and beyond, they are also quite technically advanced. Since the use of stage lights would wash out any projections on the Planetarium’s ceiling, the singers’ faces are lit during the moon scenes by lights that have been worked into their costumes in various ways. This merely adds to the sci-fi quotient of the costumes.

The thing that really made the production a success, though, was the performance style, which had been adjusted forward several centuries, drawing heavily on the comic style of Gilbert and Sullivan shows. All of the singers ham it up as much as possible, and considering how ridiculous the plot of the opera is to begin with, this is really a very good thing. In addition to being very funny, the singers also play up the raciness latent in the opera’s text. The maid sports a fairly scandalous costume, and the lover of one of Buonafede’s daughters sticks his head up her skirts in an ensemble early in the opera. Even traditional 18th-century elements of the opera, such as the moon nymphs’ dance, were updated. Instead of featuring traditional ballerinas, the moon nymphs in this production were hula hoop dancers, decked out in head-to-toe spandex, using light-up hoops that seared through the dark Planetarium.

•  •  •

Watching the Győr Ballet one night and Gotham Chamber Opera the next illuminated what works and what doesn’t when companies try to update classic works. The Győr Ballet’s productions of Petrushka and Rite of Spring added little to my understanding of the works largely because they tried to improve on artworks that needed little improvement. It would take a true work of genius to make those ballets better than they already were. Gotham Chamber Opera, on the other hand, managed to take a second-rate comic opera and update it just enough that contemporary audiences would find plenty to fall in love with. 

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Al Foster Quartet at Nublu

Andrew D’Angelo’s Gay Disco Trio at Drom

Once home to some of the great venues for “downtown” music, the closing of spots like Tonic and The Internet Café have crippled the east village jazz and experimental scene. Avant-garde icon John Zorn moved Tonic further east into Alphabet city and called the new spot The Stone. The club (just a single room with folding chairs and an art space vibe) has been open for about three years. It’s strictly for diehards, however, and does not have a liquor license, meaning it will likely perish even before Avenue C starts sprouting the luxury condominiums that priced Tonic out a few blocks west. Instead, downtown music has begun to attach itself to lounge

spaces that are able to attract a hybrid crowd: fans of electronica, weekend warriors looking for a house party with artistic edge, and finally, fans of jazz and some of its more experimental offshoots. Two such clubs are Drom (Ave. A / 5^th St.) and Nublu (Ave. C / 4^th St.). The latter has just finished hosting its first annual jazz festival, which ran from Nov. 5–22.

Nublu is owned by Turkish saxophonist, record producer, and promoter Ilhan Ersahin. By my count at least three of his own groups work regularly at the club. Wax Poetic is a heady fusion of electronica, world music, and dub funk, with Middle Eastern melodies. Norah Jones sang for the band for two years before becoming a pop star. The Wonderland Quartet features the Danish guitarist/loops/samples man Thor Madsen and two of the great “straight-ahead” players on the New Yo

rk scene: Matt Penman (bass) and Jochen Rueckert (drums). Wonderland, whom I had an op

portunity to see at the festival, seems to be evolving more in the direction of the American postbop idiom (surely because of the presence of Penman and Rueckert) while still retaining much of the Turkish rhythmic and melodic flavors from earlier European incarnations of the group, and the digital loops and samples background provided by Madsen.

My problem was not with the music but rather with the fact that most of the crowd that particular night (and it was very crowded) were there to see DJ Logic, who was performing next. Without sounding like an old curmudgeon (okay…maybe I am) or some kind of jazz purist (I’m not), the uncomfortable feeling I had (a close listener who had come for the jazz) amongst hordes of folks who wanted a house party is symptomatic of my problem with Nublu’s pretensions toward hosting a jazz festival in the first place. The club is really an ambient lounge specializing in electronica and an eclectic variety of live performance, basically the range of its owner’s interests. The house party crowds probably weren’t happy standing through an hour and half of jazz, and I wasn’t happy feeling like a rave was going to break out every time someone stepped near a turntable.

The venue itself was not going to stop me from seeing Al Foster, one of my all-time favorite drummers and musicians in general. Foster was the headline act on that particular night and I arrived late, figuring to miss “DJ Hardedge,” who was performing just before. I should have remembered that these festivals usually run about an hour behind schedule, so after forty-five minutes of deafness-inducing beats (that did not inspire dancing but more of a head-drooping stupor from the crowd), Foster appeared with his quartet. Al Foster is most commonly known for his lengthy stint as Miles Davis’s drummer beginning in the early seventies, and then continuing with Miles after his comeback in the eighties. According to some, he is one of the only people the “Dark Prince” would talk to during his six years of reclusion.

My personal connection with Foster’s music began when I heard his work with the Joe Henderson Trio in the eighties and nineties, a collaboration that produced albums such as State of the Tenor (Blue Note, 1985) with Ron Carter on bass, and the stunning but underappreciated An Evening with Joe Henderson (Red Records, 1987). Foster’s versatility (moving from the heavy funk of Miles’s seventies period to a more straight-ahead context with Henderson and Herbie Hancock) is impr

essive, but as a drummer in the postbop jazz idiom he far surpasses the thundering fusion drummers of the seventies, such as Billy Cobham and Lenny White. Perhaps only Jack DeJohnette is Foster’s rival in having created absolutely original conceptions in both genres.

All of the characteristics that make Foster instantly identifiable were on display at Nublu, where he offered a relaxed set of jazz standards and originals, joined by his current quartet featuring Kevin Hays (Fender Rhodes), Doug Weiss (bass), and Rich Perry on saxophone. The band opened with “Take the Coltrane,” a blues in F by Duke Ellington. I was thrilled to be standing five feet from Foster. There were the waves of rolling tom runs behind the soloist, the distinctive patterns on the ride cymbal bell, and the unmistakable click hiss, click hiss of the “sock” drum (high-hat). Foster brings an intensity, focus and charisma to his approach that is characteristic of the greats. And the telepathic dialogues he engages in with the soloist were evident throughout the show. Like predecessors such as Roy Haynes and Elvin Jones, Foster doesn’t just “kick” the soloist, providing “fills” in the spaces between the horn players’ lines. Rather, he sets up his own rhythmic patterns “underneath” the soloist. He is the Matisse of the drums, painting in bold shapes and colors, rather than the dense polyrhythms of Jones. Overall, the show was an example of beautiful, non-pretentious music with a focus on craft, openness, and freedom within tradition.

Andrew D’Angelo’s Gay Disco Trio

Similar to Nublu, Drom has a dark, lounge vibe with a mix of bar area, scattered couches and seating. Unlike Nublu, the club was underground and it was huge. After walking through a narrow, intimate room, the space opens up into warehouse-like proportions, which certainly affect the acoustics. Sound tended to echo off of the walls a bit more than I would have wanted. I was there to see Andrew D’Angelo, one of my favorite alto saxophonists, playing with his Gay Disco Trio, featuring Trevor Dunn on bass and Jim Black on drums.

Before the performance D’Angelo, a brain cancer survivor, gave a rambling talk about his experience over the past year and a half: seizure, diagnosis, two surgeries, miraculous recovery, and a trip to “The East” to find out if the monks had “the answer.” It turns out they didn’t. Instead of opting for more traditional radiation treatment, he worked with Peter Roth, founder of the Heart River Center for Intuitive Healing, and has made a full recovery that has astonished doctors. While on the one hand, I am sympathetic to D’Angelo’s critique of hospitals, the answer, as he has it: that we are all solely responsible for everything that happens in our lives (including cancer, which he argues is the result of built up resentment) is a little ridiculous. In a way, however, I was glad I heard D’Angelo speak, because it helped shore up one of my critical axioms when evaluating art and artists, probably best summed up by D.H. Lawrence’s “Trust the tale, not the teller.” The way I look at it, anything helpful I get from the artist is just gravy. If the artist starts saying some weird stuff about his own life, or his work, or about life in general, I don’t hold it against him. If the artist is an asshole, I don’t hold it against him. It’s not what matters.

Well, there is nothing especially gay or disco about The Gay Disco Trio. The music is a volatile, exuberant fusion of free jazz, funk, and rock that perfectly suits the unique talents of Dunn (formerly the bass player of the experimental rock group Mr. Bungle) and Black (one of the most ubiquitous drummers on the downtown scene). But even in a band comprised of three “stars,” D’Angelo’s playing is so intense as to exert a gravitational pull. The trio’s songs are mere sketches: maybe a mood set up by a bass riff, or one of the saxophonist’s repeated hammering, spiraling lines. At this point, I’m willing to risk the paradoxical statement that D’Angelo is both entirely original but at the same time sounds more like the early Ornette Coleman than anyone I’ve ever heard. “Ornette doesn’t think I sound like him,” he once joked in an interview. “So that’s all that matters.” But there is that plastic blues cry deep in the sound that comes in part from blowing “through” the horn, exerting more air pressure than normal, which renders more audible the rich overtone set that accompanies each note played. To the casual listener, his playing might seem random or imprecise, but the opposite is true: D’Angelo has incredible control of his horn and produces some amazing multi-phonics, creating effects evoking a range of sounds from the thick richness of an overdriven guitar to the airiness of a flute. On sustained notes, his pitch will often waver, hanging beautifully between pitches, creating a natural “chorus” effect, before being bent sharp or flat as they disappear. Like Ornette, and like Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman, this musician really thinks less in terms of notes and more in terms of sound. To appreciate D’Angelo, understanding this is essential. Listening to avant-garde improvisers is no different than listening to those who are more anchored in tradition. The difference is simply that the initial effort is greater. The listener must learn the private language of the artist—judgment must be reserved until one feels sufficiently familiar with the language. We must grant each artist his own terms.

The appearance of Al Foster and Andrew D’Angelo at Nublu and Drom is a sad reminder that jazz music is still suffering from its inability to support itself. It’s unfortunate that those of us who want to see this great music (and are willing to pay a reasonable price to see it) are forced to be part of a scene that really has little to do with acoustic jazz, and in some ways is damaging to it. On the other hand, I suppose it is reason to cherish those places like The Village Vanguard that are bravely uncompromising.

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Works by Beat Furrer, Bernhard Lang, and Steve Reich at Moving Sounds 2009

Last month, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Argento New Music Project, the Music Information Center Austria (MICA), and Le Poisson Rouge jointly presented Moving Sounds 2009, a festival “devoted to sound and its roles in contemporary music.” The three-day festival, which sought to bring together artists working with sound across different media and genres, featured several concerts of works by “classical” composers as well as by DJs, an art installation at the Austrian Cultural Forum, panel discussions, and parties. In order to get a taste of the festival, I attended concerts on September 12 and 13 and one of the panels on the afternoon of September13.

The curators, Michel Galante and Peter Rantasa, sought to bring together like-minded artists from the United States and Austria. The concerts on September 12 featured works by Austrian composers Beat Furrer and Bernhard Lang, and finished with a performance of Steve Reich’s seminal Music for Eighteen Musicians.

Beat Furrer’s Xenos II, for narrator and a twenty-person chamber ensemble, addressed through the medium of music several of the hot topics of the festival. The basis of the work was Furrer’s own voice: the instrumental parts are a musical transcription of Furrer speaking. At the symposium the next day, the composers spoke at length about the challenges of transcribing non-musical sounds for musical instruments, and the difficulties of notating and conveying to performers the types of sounds they wished to hear. Furrer cited I Am Sitting in a Room, by American composer Alvin Lucier, as an example of what he was aiming for in his own works. In I Am Sitting in a Room, the composer first recorded himself reading a text. He then played it in a room, recording it onto a second tape as it played. He then played the recording of the recording, producing a third recording. With each subsequent recording, the voice becomes less clear and the resonances of the room itself become the dominant sound.

In the first movement of Xenos II, Furrer read a single word, which was then musically refracted by the chamber ensemble, in the form of a soft chord. The sparse, light texture and the static calm of alternating words and chords evoked the restrained, minimal style of Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag. The opening of the second movement immediately jolted the audience out of this Zen-like atmosphere, beginning with a series of alarmingly loud, dissonant chords in the woodwinds and brass. This textless movement was in every way the opposite of the first, with constantly shifting registers, timbres, and dynamics.

In Differenz/Wiederholung 2 (the title is German for Difference/Repetition), Bernhard Lang also explores the human voice, albeit from a different angle. It is written for three vocalists—including a Kurdish singer and a rapper—and a chamber ensemble of approximately ten musicians. Lang used texts by the philosopher Gilles Deleuze (the work is named after his Difference and Repetition) and writers William Burroughs and Christian Loidl. He sought to create a counterpoint between different styles of singing, between improvised and composed music, and between spoken narration and song.

In addition to these dichotomies, the work also explores the possibilities of repetition. Lang, in addition to being a classically-trained composer, has been heavily influenced by turntablism and DJ culture, and the effects of this aesthetic came to the forefront in this work. The vocalists often get “stuck” on a word or syllable, mimicking with their voices the effect of a DJ looping a sound over and over. The aesthetic of repetition carries over into the instrumentalists’ parts as well. Violinist Miranda Cuckson and electric guitarist Oren Fader built some thoroughly enjoyable improvisations out of small, simple motives throughout the piece, which lent the whole work a sense of unity and dramatic force.

While Saturday’s concert focused on the voice, in various forms, Sunday’s looked at quite a different aspect of sound. It featured works for percussion and electronics, performed by TimeTable Percussion Trio and DJ Christopher Just. In addition to works by Bernhard Lang and Beat Furrer, the trio performed works by New York composers Sam Pluta and Elizabeth Hoffman.

First up was a multimedia work by Sam Pluta, a young composer studying at Columbia. In addition to some percussion instruments and electronics, there were two TV screens hooked up to the electronic equipment. As the performers made different sounds with the electronics, stripes would flash across the TV screen with varying intensity. While the work had a completely different texture from those of the other night, dominated by electronic sounds, some of the same compositional ideas were clearly at play, with a focus on repetition and consistent texture.

The oldest work on Sunday evening’s concert was Beat Furrer’s Music for Mallets, composed in 1985. In this work, each of the three percussionists played a different mallet instrument: the xylorimba, the marimba, and the vibraphone. The work was in a way an etude in composing for a limited timbre, and at the same time fit with the general trend in this festival towards an exploration of repetition and minimalism beyond the style of Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

In a fitting twist, Furrer’s work was reinvented later on the program by DJ Christopher Just, who performed a live mix based on Music for Mallets. This performance was one of the highlights of the festival. Just combined many different styles of music, classical and popular, in his mix, with fragments of Music for Mallets weaving in and out above everything else. This work struck at the heart of what the curators were trying to achieve with this festival, by directly synthesising a classical work and a DJ set. If anything, I would say that the festival could have used more of this type of collaboration. Because the different media and genres showcased in the festival often appeared in separate events at separate venues, it was easy to ignore what you were less interested in, and to focus only on the classical music or on the DJ parties or on the symposia. But by putting the two types of music in one concert, and ensuring that the audience listened to both, the curators achieved a fusion of styles and provided the necessary context for fruitful discussion and collaboration across genres.

Just’s remix was sandwiched between two works by Elizabeth Hoffman, an Assistant Professor in composition at New York University. The first work, Ascension, was a tape piece—the only work on either of the programs that didn’t involve any live performers. The second work, Vissera, was for percussion trio and live electronics. Both works showed Hoffman to be a composer preoccupied with questions of timbre, who took the festival’s focus at its most elemental level. She was the only composer who used a wide variety of percussion instruments, instead of limiting herself to a few of one type or another. In this way, her work had more in common with the many American composers who have been exploring expanded percussion timbres throughout the twentieth century.

The final work on the program was Bernhard Lang’s Monadologie IV, for three drum kits. As in Differenz/Wiederholung 2, Lang drew on a philosophical text as his source of inspiration—in this case, Gottfried Leibnitz’s Monadology. Leibnitz sketches in this text a metaphysics based on the idea that everything in the world is derived from simple cells, called monads. The parallels between this idea and Lang’s aesthetic are easy to see: Lang derives his works from simple motivic cells, which he constantly expands, repeats, and varies.

In Monadologie IV, Lang combined his aesthetic of repetition and variation with a desire to return to the basics of percussion—the drum kit. In this way Lang’s work paralleled Furrer’s Music for Mallets. Lang wanted to strip away all the extra sounds and instruments that have entered the percussionist’s arsenal in the last few decades—no chimes, no marimba, just drums. “The drum set is a kind of musical sign or symbol for jazz music, for rock music, and it’s both the sound and the energy which interests me,” says Lang, “and in Monadologie IV, it’s especially the energy of three drummers playing together, one drum set in the middle being the engine for the whole piece.” The end result was a powerful work that had the energy and momentum of Differenz/Wiederholung 2 despite the pared-down timbre. It was a great finale to
the concert.

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The roots of Neko Case go back a few generations. In the mid-twentieth century depths of post-war McCarthy commie hunts and black and white TV, the fecund seeds of Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash grew instantly rustic ballads of the post-cowboy: the humming tramp-rebel, hungover and earnestly anti-authoritarian. Guthrie, of course, is more widely known for protest songs than Cash. But Cash’s voice captured an edgier, sexier, and more intimately combustible 50s genesis of Salinger novels and Elvis Presley – popularly existential, somewhat wry, and on the edge of danger. For those so inclined to measure the implicit politics begotten by them, one has to start by emphasizing how they place history into the ordinary lives of the songs’ characters. In the blood of Cash’s song “The Long Black Veil” is a dishonest exchange between a man and the law, and honor falls on the man’s side. Indeed, one of the most celebrated recordings of this song happened at Fulsom Prison in 1967.

Cash can get even more straightforward. In “The Man in Black,” he sings “I wear black for the poor and beaten down / living in the hopeless hungry side of town.” What unites the middle-class exile and the “beaten down” is the destructive loneliness of an atomized life. The former has more choices than the latter, but both can potentially make money singing. Yet if the blues are about turning the hard life into art, then Cash and Guthrie songs are blues’ in-laws. All indie rock is a distant relative, too, because it attempts to produce that humming, emotional identification with a speaker left by herself to artfully moan. Some complaining is sexy.

In the ‘60s, the songs of Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez arose to explain the uncomfortable but sprightly place where the personal became political. They sang in elegant, medieval voices about the tension of relationships built to decay in a culture that disposes its art into museums like stuffed birds in a natural history diorama. It’s no accident that their voices, like those of Neko Case, would turn to interrogate any contradictory desires for another space by winding new words through an old sound. Think of Mitchell’s “California,” or the way Baez’s early ‘60s stuff sounds like lost recordings from a stunning Renaissance peasant. In “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Baez sings, “whatever you wish to keep / you better grab it fast.” Compare this with Mitchell’s “River,” where she can say, “I wish I had a river so long / I would teach my feet to fly.” They are the arch forerunners of Neko Case because they signal desire as the only constant in a world where everything solid eventually melts.

Through the singular and exceptional figure of Bob Dylan, whose own early 1960s persona can be seen as an uncanny blend of Cash and Guthrie, the roots of the guitar-song in American popular music became a democratic source of catchy perspectives on the emotional tailwinds from larger economic and political shifts. John Lennon, too, has an Americaness filtered through his love and association with New York, passed to him through Dylan’s joint, made con-crete in Central Park’s Strawberry Fields. There is a living hand that carried “Imagine” into Neil Young’s “Rockin in the Free World,” and from there even the Indigo Girl’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” and Tracy Chapman’s “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.” Dylan and Lennon together beget Neil Young, whose fingerprints are all over work like Eddie Vedder’s Into the Wild soundtrack, itself written for a film attempting to trace the mysterious protest behind a dude’s decision to permanently hit the woods. Neko Case is just off to the side of them, singing on a porch, watching a tornado spin close.

The movement ran away in the ‘90s. The romantic destruction that lurks behind the Into the Wild character Vedder channels in that soundtrack isn’t far from Pearl Jam’s somewhat forgotten ‘90s hit “Jeremy.” In fact, Vedder’s character from Into the Wild and his character Jeremy from Ten are close cousins of that psychofamily known as the deranged white American male, his thoughts bursting with suicide and homicide. Kurt Cobain isn’t quite the opposite of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the Columbine shooters, but more like their artistic great-uncle who shared their obsession with guns but not for the same purpose. There’s a reason, though, that Gus Van Sant made them two of the three subjects of his Elephant, Last Days, Gerry trilogy about ‘90s male madness. Schoolage guys have killer urges. Cobain couldn’t stop singing about high school adolescents, either on Bleach (an incessant chant of “no recess”) or in “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”

In the political spectrum of an alienated anger that characterized the psychotic extremes of the white middle-class ‘90s, Cobain’s shotgun suicide became the radical inversion of the Columbine shooting and Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing. Grunge amplifies and distorts the affect of anger. It makes more sense as an anti-political emotion than any politics as such. In his critique of McVeigh, Noam Chomsky called that brand of thinking “anti-politics.” It bled out in the wake of NAFTA, and puked up a death groan for the absolute absence of practical revolutionary ideas exorcised by the culture wars. It’s the screaming, stupid: 1994 was the year of Cobain’s explosion, and the passing of NAFTA, and the Republican Revolution’s “Contract with America.” Not coincidently, Jon Krakauer’s original article about Into the Wild appeared the year before. In 2007, note the way Vedder positions the character of Christopher McCandless on “Society”: “I think I need to find a bigger place / because when you have more than you think / you need more space…Society / crazy indeed / I hope you’re not lonely / without me.” This voice of self-centered melancholy is the strength and weakness of this period. It’s the voice of the middle-class narcissist driven to death by the majoritarian strangeness of consumer culture, and is directly relevant for understanding our current group of indie guitar artists.

Earlier this decade is where a not insignificant split occurs in the tone and lyrics of the guitar-based transatlantic rock tradition. Though they’re both politically active, the difference between Eddie Vedder and, say, Thom Yorke of Radiohead isn’t just one of tone, but of practicality: Vedder is a far-left liberal who believes in voting and, once upon a time, fighting corporate monopolies like Ticketmaster. As Yorke sings on Kid A’s “Idioteque,” he counters that optimism from a bunker, laughing until his “head comes off,” the ship sinking: “ice age coming / throw him on the fire…we’re not scaremongering / this is really happening.” For Yorke, the problem isn’t reforming the system. For him, the system is the problem. This direction informed what paths new songwriters would follow. For the most part, the specific brand of 90s despair would transform from anti-politics to an excitable anxiety about the culture of climate change, resource wars, fear of terrorism, peak oil, and—until 2008—enormous wealth bubbles. As the music industry collapsed along with Lehman Brothers, the songs of Wilco and Neko Case were already popular downloads on college campuses. They were played with Vedder and Arcade Fire.

Among contemporary American singer-songwriter traditions, the old tradition of the folky political song has passed through its anti-political stage and found its way into another realm altogether: the odd and exciting genre that might be called “doomer” songs. Bob Dylan’s “Things Have Changed,” from the Wonder Boys soundtrack is perhaps one of the cornerstones of this genre.. Although the beat is basically a frisky blues trance, Dylan’s character culls together the best of the apocalyptic American beat-down bums that mumble stories all through his recent records. They sound like aged, aimless ex-ministers lurking around a Cormac McCarthy novel, prone to violence and out of weed. “People are crazy and times are strange,” he sings, “I’m locked in tight / I’m out of range. I used to care / but things have changed.” He goes on to catalogue a restless night of hot nightmares and last second desires: “if the Bible is right / the world will explode…feel like falling in love /with every woman I meet.” There is nothing like this newschool millennial angst, so prescient in its fanatical rapture, to mark those early Bush years when kids threw bubble-wealth parties as American war planes bombed Afghanistan. This is the Dylan that can hang with Radiohead’s Kid A and Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, which contains perhaps the ultimate “doomer” track of the decade, “Keep the Car Running.”

And then there is Neko Case. Neko Case says that the characters in her songs “live between the world and history, or memory, they kind of fall between the cracks.” Like Joni Mitchell, Case writes songs on Middle Cyclone that resemble her best work: torn-up lovers seeking spiritual solace in the morning cup of coffee, or from a speedy race up a country road in an old truck. Not unlike a doomer song, her characters are waiting for something big, but it’s a big gesture from a long-lost friend, or a weird sign from the woods. On the upbeat song “This Tornado Loves You,” she touches Guthrie and Arcade Fire at once: “I have waited with a glacier’s patience / smashed every transformer with every trailer / ‘til nothing was standing.” These lines come out of an apocalyptic ecology that forces grid-crash in the name of some dark heart’s desire. She is singing from the perspective of the tornado. It destroys lives as if it were sucking them to death as a necessary food: “I left them motherless, fatherless / their souls they hang inside-out their mouths / but it’s never enough/ I want you.”

For Neko Case, love can be perverse like this. The need for it hangs in the chest like the need for money. On the album’s calm title track, she says, “Can’t scrape together quite enough / to ride the bus to the outskirts / of the fact that I need love.” A piano trickles through the song like a xylophone under water. Her character is desperate, vulnerable, and full of terminal insight. “It was so clear to me / that it was almost invisible,” she croons. “I lie across the path waiting / just for a chance to be / a spider-web / trapped in your lashes / for that I would trade you / my empire for ashes / but I choke it back / how much I need love.” It’s a haunting song, but it makes you feel alive with longing. Her people are trapped by old desires for new bodies. As the only constant, desire becomes one’s best friend. On her earlier and magnificent Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, her fans would instantly recognize the intense, sad recognition of its opening frame from “Hold On, Hold On”: “the most tender place in my heart / is for strangers.” This is a person addicted to the devil of unknown faces at parties, or in the street, and who claws through remote corners of foreign beds rummaging for him or herself in the dreams of post-laid sheets.

But Neko Case doesn’t write doomer music. She writes about the gorgeous nomads sipping the sensitive moments recovered from that ‘90s anger. Her voice soars; it’s awesome. Her music renovates old country houses. If music could go green, hers would. It plays in the holes of the continent where people grow vegetables in their garden and, like Michael Caine’s stoned activist in Children of Men, they laugh and smoke pot in the tiny sustainable corners of their rural quarantine.

The record is best heard in this long context, because it unleashes the wistful acoustic interplay of the pianos, the guitars, and her voice. It’s a rainy Sunday afternoon record. It doesn’t have the impulsive charm of her previous work. It succeeds as an album and not as a collection of songs—there really aren’t “singles” on it. To the extent she drops images of birds, car alarms, and teenage marriage, her voices seem crossed with moody memories of old farm towns and the regretful sighs of lovers three times the age of their first engagements. It’s not nostalgia that animates the emotional dynamics of the record, but the sudden remembering of lost sex that burns in the mind: “you kept me wanting, wanting, wanting / like the wanting in the movies and the hymns.” In this way, her songs are about loss; they communicate a desire that remains zealously hungry as the body shuts down. They are as smooth as lullabies. They’re sewn together with riffs that wouldn’t be out of place on R.E.M.’s Out of Time. This record is a minor piece of perfection from maybe the most poetic and impressive of this decade’s songwriters.

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My personal and admittedly partial lineage of the jazz saxophone trio starts with Sonny Rollins’s pair of 1957 recordings Way out West and A Night at the Vanguard. Way out West was a studio album, with bass icon Ray Brown anchoring and Shelley Manne on drums. The cover pictures Rollins in full cowboy get-up, Stetson, gunbelt and holster, the lone hornman in the desert. The explosive live set entitled A Night at the Vanguard paired the saxophonist with Wilbur Ware (bass) and the young and still developing Elvin Jones (drums), who three years later would storm the citadel with the John Coltrane Quartet. Rollins was instinctively attracted to the trio configuration for a couple of reasons. The absence of another horn provided extra space for his tenor explorations, allowing him to develop at length thematic seeds he planted in the early choruses of a solo and which often bore brilliant fruit on the tenth or even fifteenth chorus of the song. Charlie Parker, the inventor of bebop saxophone playing, who had died three years earlier, once said that anything more than two choruses was “just practicing.” Rollins might have responded that anything less than two choruses was “just warming up.”

The idea of a horn playing “on” chords without a piano “comping” the harmony behind the soloist had been pioneered at least five years earlier when Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker formed their “pianoless quartet,” which allowed Mulligan to compose melodies for two horns in counterpoint, rather than the standard (then and now) horn melody in unison with the piano supplying the harmony. Rollins seemed to like the pianoless format because he was an intensely lyrical player who emphasized the priority of melody over harmony, and without a piano filling in a preexisting harmony he could, in the process of improvising, discover new harmonies under the standard melody of the song. So beginning with Mulligan/Baker and Rollins, the pianoless format had really been a kind of jazz frontier; it was about what could be done with more space, both in terms of melodic development and harmonic freedom.

The pianoless format became far more common in the 1960’s after Ornette Coleman’s pioneering free jazz albums from 1959. On The Shape of Jazz to Come and Change of the Century the leader’s elastic blues lines and trumpeter Don Cherry’s spastic explosions were heard in a kind of improvised counterpoint with bassist Charlie Haden, a running dialogue between horn and bass. This music was less about melody against harmony, and more about melody against melody. In Stockholm in 1965, Ornette recorded in the saxophone trio format with bassist David Izenson and drummer Charles Moffett on Live at the Golden Circle, this time ditching his trademark plastic horn for a metal one. (His playing was never the same…) By 1961, Coltrane’s pianist McCoy Tyner was “laying out” large sections of the leader’s solos, allowing Coltrane to conduct his explorations simultaneously vertically and horizontally. In 1964, the tenor player Albert Ayler recorded Spiritual Unity in New York City with the like-minded Gary Peacock (bass) and Sonny Murray (drums). Peacock and Murray think more texturally than rhythmically, creating washes of sound, while Ayler communes with Dionysius through blues-drenched howls and screams. No words could do justice to the sustained and joyous energy of Spiritual Unity, a record that has achieved cult status but has made less headway among wider groups of jazz listeners.

By the 1980’s then, a substantial if slender body of saxophone trio work had been recorded. It took the master tenor player Joe Henderson twenty-five years before he tried the format, recording State of the Tenor live in 1985 at the Village Vanguard with Miles Davis alums Ron Carter on bass and the underrated Al Foster on drums. Two years later, with the crucial substitution of Charlie Haden for Carter on bass, Henderson’s trio recorded a sublime live set in France (An Evening with Joe Henderson). The archetype for this trio’s style is most certainly the early Rollins recordings, as Haden “walks” quarter-note bass lines throughout the set, but his superior sensitivity to the harmonic nuances of Henderson’s playing sets up breathtaking moments of improvised counterpoint as they explore such Henderson favorites as the Latin-colored “Invitation” and Thelonius Monk’s knotty ballad “Ask Me Now.”

In 1988, bassist Dave Holland pared down his usual quintet and sextet linups to give extra space to the innovative young alto saxophonist Steve Coleman on Triplicate. Joined by his frequent cohort Jack DeJohnette (drums), the result was one of Holland’s freshest records to date–far more spontaneous than much of his last five or six efforts, which have fallen into comfort and predictability. Coleman has gone on to become an important bandleader in his own right. The 80’s and early 90’s brought the “young lions,” a new generation led by Wynton Marsalis (and his institutional backers) dedicated to a resurgence of “respectable,” tradition-based approaches. Wynton’s brother Branford is joined Reginald Veal (bass) and powerhouse drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts for the post-Coltrane exercises Bloomington and The Dark Keys, where no new ground is broken. And a more recent, self-conscious trio effort was recorded by another young lion, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman, who is arguably the current jazz improviser with the widest audience. (Sincerest apologies to Kenny G fans who think he is a jazz musician). On Back East, Redman tips his (cowboy) hat to Rollins by covering two of the latter’s selections on Way Out West, and employing a variety of trio configurations featuring a handful the best postbop players on the New York scene (bassist Larry Grenadier of Fly appears on six of the tracks). On Back East, Redman does what he does well, taking elements of the tradition (in this case the trio tradition), and distilling them into a style that is uniquely his, always tasteful and soulful, though never quite goose bump inducing.

*  *  *

All of which brings us to Sky & Country, the second release from the New York-based jazz trio Fly, comprised of Mark Turner on tenor saxophone, Larry Grenadier on bass, and Jeff Ballard on the drums. Fly’s roots are west coast as Grenadier and Ballard met playing in high school and college together in the late 70’s in northern California and Turner grew up in Long Beach. Predictably, after their paths diverged, all three ended up in the thriving New York postbop scene in the 90’s and Grenadier and Ballard currently form the rhythm section of the pianist Brad Mehldau’s important trio. Two of the most in-demand players on their respective instruments, Grenadier has toured extensively with such high-profile acts as the Joshua Redman quartet and the Pat Metheny trio, while Ballard is a member of Chick Corea’s working band. Turner, who has recorded four albums under his own name (check out Dharma Days), had also worked with Ballard for several years as a member of the guitarist (and kindred spirit) Kurt Rosenwinkel’s group. So when the three decided to form Fly in 2002 and to record their eponymous debut two years later, there was already a deep familiarity and a lot of shared territory.

The band does not identify as a saxophone trio, as they strive toward a more collective approach to trio playing, with no one instrumental voice as the leader. This in itself is not novel, the idea having been pioneered fifty years ago by the pianist Bill Evans, who allowed equal creative freedom to the traditionally subordinated bass player and drummer. This approach in a saxophone trio, at least on such self-conscious terms, is somewhat new, however. “What we do in this band,” Ballard says, “is work collectively. I always use gears and mechanics as an analogy. The way we’ve written the tunes, there are these functional elements. A bass arpeggio may be outlining the chords, but it’s also laying down the rhythmic foundation, which any of us might respond to. It’s wide, it’s not constricted. But what I love about it is the interdependency.” Turner adds: “We’re trying to distill that element of interdependency within the repertoire. We’ve been writing music where the tunes themselves will make that apparent. And the solo sections are engineered, in a sense, with that in mind.”

Turner, Grenadier and Ballard eschew such currently fashionable gimmickry as covering British pop and indie rock tunes (done sublimely by Mehldau and less successfully [though with some commercial success] by the Ethan Iverson-led piano trio The Bad Plus). Instead, their compositions are all originals, with each band member contributing material. For Fly, composition and improvisation are seamlessly integrated, and on Sky & Country it often sounds as if the compositions are mere sketches setting up melodic or rhythmic motifs, and leaving an optimal amount of room for each player to explore. Turner commented on the trio format in an interview for Jazz Weekly, “I like the simplicity of it. It is just three people… There is no…How can I put it… Harmonic middleman.” It is on the one hand an album that takes on a kind of rarefied mood, full of hints and guesses. Says Ballard, it’s about “filling the spaces, and not filling the spaces. It’s about what’s inferred, what’s in the air.”

This, of course, is the introspective side of the group. What makes Fly work is a heady blend of introspection with groove, plenty of which is provided by Grenadier’s supple, funky bass and Ballard’s irrepressible polyrhythmic undertow. On “Lady B,” the opening track, Turner displays his vaunted command of the tenor’s altissimo register, soaring and landing in unexpected places, pursued and sometimes overtaken by Ballard’s ecstatic thirty-two-note answers. Those of us who have seen Turner live know the collective breath-holding that takes place during these flights. His sound and vocabulary are utterly his, a wicked fusion of Coltrane and (the largely forgotten west coast tenor great) Wayne Marsh. On the title tune Turner plays soprano saxophone, the first time I have heard him do so. The song begins with Turner and Grenadier reticent, almost testing tones, picking the sound palette, before a meandering rock feel is established by the bass and drums. Turner’s soprano floats above the groove as he gets an almost flute-like tone from the horn, prodded lightly by Ballard’s bass drum suggestions. On this track, as on others, these musicians make the stripped-down sound of the trio format work to their advantage, achieving a lazy, pensive flow–a modest, even a minimalist sound.

Sky & Country is a record whose beauty lies in its nuances, Turner’s grace notes as he slips into or out of a melodic run (the “wow: he did that on purpose” moment comes on the third or fourth listen…); the way Ballard tunes each drum in his set, conceiving of each as a separate instrument; the contrapuntal consonances and dissonances established by Turner and Grenadier. Frankly, this is a difficult, demanding record because of the uncompromising musicianship of those involved. Yet the payoff is well worth the effort. Sky & Country is a noteworthy step forward for these three players, all of whom stand at the pinnacle of the art form, and who have collectively produced the best saxophone trio record since Joe Henderson’s collaboration with Charlie Haden and Al Foster twenty-two years earlier. 

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Zachary Francis of Beirut

Throw Me the Statue, Purpleface (Secretly Canadian)

Beirut, March of the Zapotec / Holland (Ba Da Bing!)

The careers of Throw Me the Statue and Beirut are still young, and for the moment it seems both bands are doing exactly what they should. The stories of their success almost make this music business stuff sound easy: TMTS frontman Scott Reitherman created the debut LP Moonbeams largely on his own, released it on his own Baskerville Hill label in 2007 (to luxuriant blog press), and was picked up by Secretly Canadian, who re-released the album in 2008. Beirut mastermind Zach Condon, having fallen in love with Balkan folk and French pop in his teens, self-recorded an album steeped in the former (2006’s Gulag Orkestar) that got him signed to Ba Da Bing!, and followed it up with an effort heavily influenced by the latter (2007’s The Flying Club Cup)–all of this by the age of twenty-one.

After a one-man bedroom band explodes into relevance, the usual Step Two is to get a proper backing band together and tour like hell, which both artists have done impressively–Reitherman filling out his onstage sound with a tight four-piece, and Condon surrounding himself with a veritable army of brass and strings. It’s when it comes time to record again that question marks begin to pop up. Do you incorporate the backing band, or stick to your old format? What effect does the experience of performing for an audience, instead of just your four-track or computer, have on your arrangements? Does being a professional musician, instead of just a kid with a dream, change the way you write songs? The buzz machine is buzzing, expectations are high, and sometimes the best way to make everyone shut up for a minute is to release an EP. Not a huge commitment, not a definitive statement on the band’s direction, just a little something to whet the public’s collective appetite. That’s the route these two intriguing acts have decided to take; this past month saw the release of Throw Me the Statue’s Purpleface and Beirut’s March of the Zapotec / Holland.

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Purpleface begins with a disorienting jumble of sounds that, ever so slowly, converges into something resembling a coherent whole. A Casio-type beat, typical of TMTS’s repertoire, takes center stage for a precious few seconds before giving way to the heavy pounding of live drums, signaling a patent break from form (the way Elliott Smith did when the drums kicked in on “King’s Crossing”). An acoustic piano, another anomaly in the band’s formerly synth-centric world, adds some moody, resonant tones to the mix, its sustain pedal evidently floored. The heir apparent to Moonbeams opener “Young Sensualists” is “That’s How You Win,” a far more complex and cryptic beast. Where its predecessor related frankly the story of a friendship ruined by selfishness and lust, there’s no clear narrative in the lyrics of “That’s How You Win”; all that comes through in its string of free-associative phrases is a sense of world-weary chagrin, couched in ironic affirmation: “Unblinking eyes make for tired days,” goes the refrain, “But don’t let it get you down.”

A melancholic tone now set, Purpleface proceeds with a reworking of Moonbeams track “Written in Heart Signs, Faintly” that suggests Reitherman spent a lot of the time between releases listening to Mogwai and Explosions in the Sky. The album version was a rare moment of acoustic sparseness–just Reitherman and his guitar, accompanied by tambourine and the faint plinking of bells. The EP version does away with the campfire instrumentation and gives the song the post-rock treatment, adorning it with blippy guitars, warm waves of malleted cymbals, and thick clouds of reverb fog. The flood of new and diverse sounds gives the song a dynamic malleability it couldn’t have in its previous incarnation, conjuring drama and passion in what once seemed little more than an idle daydream. We are tossed headlong into the fantasy landscape the lyrics describe, the place in the clouds “where the kissing never, ever stops.”

Reitherman’s lyrics deal prominently in wanton sexuality, and even more prominently in the shame that such abandon often brings about. His lotus-eating protagonists generally know they’ve crossed the line, and yet never seem all that sorry for their misdeeds (see the bridge of “Heart Signs”: “Another girl’s eyes got wet / I was a total fool / But what can I do?”). It’s nice, then, to see him take a break and indulge in some genuine sentimentality, as he does on “Honeybee.” The narrator still has one foot in slumberland, and through soft blankets of woodwinds and heartbeat-like tom-tom thumps, he speaks to his lover in sleepy half-phrases of the dream from which he has just emerged. With some snappier, less shoegazey production, this could easily be an early-period Belle and Sebastian song, and Reitherman’s delivery matches the mood, trading his usual deadpan for a gentle coo. His mumbled sentence fragments don’t make much sense, but they are sung so sweetly that it hardly matters.

“Ship” rounds out the disc. It begins with a march beat, then adds instruments and vocals one by one, ramping up tension on the verse, exploding into a Sunny Day Real Estate-style jam on the chorus, then gradually falling into tight, regimented order again. This is the closest thing we’ve heard so far to the Throw Me the Statue we know and love; the vocals are clear and present, the drums no longer sound like they’re underwater, and the structure is alternately catchy and chaotic. It’s a good sign that while TMTS is clearly evolving, they haven’t abandoned the sound their fans first fell in love with. Purpleface doesn’t have a “Lolita” or an “About to Walk” or anything else on par with the ecstatic power-pop that made Moonbeams stand out from the pack, but it is certainly not without its compelling moments. This EP may only be a detour on the path to the band’s sure-to-be-buzzworthy sophomore LP, but it is a thoroughly memorable detour at that.

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Beirut’s case is a bit different. Their latest release is eleven songs long, more than enough for a full-length album, but it is divided in purpose. March of the Zapotec / Holland is actually a pair of EPs, one of them inspired by (and partially recorded on) a Mexican soujourn in the spring of 2008, and the other one a throwback to Zach Condon’s pre-Beirut days, as the electronic solo act Realpeople.

Zapotec had its genesis in the town of Teotitlan del Valle, Oaxaca, where Condon discovered his newest world-music crush: the Mexican funeral march. Aiding him is Band Jimenez, a nineteen-member brass ensemble whose performances were captured on field recordings in Teotitlan and are woven through the fabric of Condon’s usual multitrack alchemy with some cunning studio cut-and-paste. It’s a rather engaging bit of mythology, but sadly it doesn’t translate to an engaging album. The songs on Zapotec blend together for the most part; the mind wanders, forgetting for minutes at a time that it’s listening to Beirut and not just a rummage-sale mariachi record. The success of Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup was based in Condon’s ability to wed his international influences with the Western ones he grew up with; it’s that instinct that created “Postcards from Italy,” a sublime bit of genre-mashing that ought to be as appreciable to the old folkies of Eastern Europe as it is to the Williamsburg / Park Slope set. But on Zapotec, Condon’s presence within the music feels almost incidental. His vocal contributions lack their usual passion and come off as an afterthought; the arrangements, though sonically as grand as ever, feel strangely arbitrary.

Holland suffers from a distinct but related dilemma. On it, Condon-as-Realpeople shies away from Beirut’s old-world grandeur and turns to techno, perhaps the only kind of music that’s meant to sound like it was made in a bedroom. The plan, however, works a little too well; there’s nothing technically wrong with the arpeggiated synths and ditty-bop beats on these five songs, but there’s nothing terribly interesting about them either. Really, the most surprising thing about the Realpeople recordings is how spare they are–for all the trumpet calls, conga rhythms, accordion strains, and clarinet flourishes that assault the senses in Condon’s other material, the soundscapes on Holland are unadorned and conspicuously tame. And that’s a shame, because the core material here sounds far more earnest and ardent than that on Zapotec, and the Postal Service-grade accompaniment is far too often a distraction. Opener “My Night with the Prostitute from Marseille” has a particularly affecting melody, and makes one wish Condon would turn off the drum machine, pick up a guitar, and just belt it.

March of the Zapotec and Holland are a fitting pair, but more for their complementary flaws than for any kind of thematic connection: the first is all style and no substance, the second all substance and no style. Here’s hoping that on his next outing, Condon finds a middle ground, a way to stay true to the best of his creative instincts while continuing, as he has on past releases, to transcend indie-rock insularity and help make the cultural landscape in his own backyard more interesting and exciting.

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Chinary Ung’

FOCUS! Festival at Lincoln Center.

In trying to untie the many strands of classical music’s storied history, one of the most common techniques is to proceed country-by-country: the Austro-German school with its musical superheroes (Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms) ostensibly dominates, but there are equally fascinating stories to be told about the histories of the French, Italian, Russian, British, and of course, American musical traditions.

Juilliard’s recent FOCUS! festival went one step further, focusing on the music of just one state: California. In his thoughtful introductory note to the FOCUS! programme booklet, the festival’s director Joel Sachs asks: “Is there a ‘California music’ and, if so, what is it?” His reply: “Yes, and it is everything imaginable, and more.” After attending five of the festival’s six concerts, I have to agree wholeheartedly with this assessment. As I sat in the theatre, I experienced the auditory equivalent of strolling around a World’s Fair. While California’s most renowned composers, Henry Cowell and John Adams, featured prominently in the festival, the vast majority of the works performed each night were by relatively obscure composers. The festival presented an excellent opportunity to get to know some works that rarely travel across the country.

The most exciting performances were those that involved electronics, extended techniques, or unusual instruments. This is not simply because these works by necessity have a unique sound, quite distinctive from standard chamber music concert fare. Rather, I was continually amazed by both Juilliard’s willingness to program such unconventional works, and by the extraordinarily high level of performance attained by the students involved in the festival. Finally, while the festival proved through sheer quantity that Californian music is “everything,” these were the works that resonated most strongly with my preconception of what California music might be.

The finale of the January 26 concert, Chinary Ung’s Grand Alap—“A Window in the Sky”—is a case in point. Ung, who was born in 1942, grew up in Cambodia and later came to the United States to continue his musical studies. In addition to his training as a classical composer, he has extensively researched traditional Cambodian music, and his compositions fuse Eastern and Western styles and instruments. This type of cultural fusion seems endemic to Californian music—it reaches back past the midcentury immigrants to America such as Ung, to California’s earliest composers, such as American-born Henry Cowell, who grew up alongside Asian immigrants in the slums of San Francisco, and forward to California-born composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank, whose mother was of Peruvian-Chinese ancestry, and whose father was a Lithuanian Jew.

Grand Alap, for cello and percussion, derives its title from the opening, improvisatory passage of Indian Raga music, the alap. Ung merges this Indian concept with musical materials derived from the traditions of South and Southeast Asia, to create a work of great beauty and intense emotion. To say that this is merely a work for cello and percussion would be misleading; both the cellist and percussionist have extensive vocal parts as well. For instrumentalists, there are few concepts more daunting than singing alone in public. I think it has to do with not being able to mediate our voices through our instruments, as we are accustomed to doing. That being said, these two talented musicians rose to the task and performed beautifully. This was without a doubt my favourite performance in a night full of excellent performances.

There were a few other compositions in which the musicians were called on to use their voices instead of their instruments—only in these instances as speakers. At the January 26 concert, the pianist Evan Shinners performed Pauline Oliveros’s The Autobiography of Lady Steinway. Oliveros describes her composition thus: “The performer imagines himself to be the invisible voice of the piano and tells the stories, relationships and feelings that may be resonating within the piano.” The performer not only acts out the part of the Steinway, but in fact writes his own part. Shinners’s monologue detailed the (often humorous) daily trials and tribulations of a Steinway, including an affair she once had with a Canadian pianist, Glenn Gould, who was considerate enough not to stamp all over her gold feet. I was surprised to learn that Shinner himself was a pianist; his delivery was so good, I assumed that he was an acting student.

One of my favourite works on the program was Paul Chihara’s Logs, which could be performed by any number of double basses (at this performance, there were four). The work is part of a larger group of pieces dealing with trees, including Branches, Redwood, Driftwood, and Forest Music, to name a few. Logs consists of a main phrase and several contrasting phrases which are continuously repeated and varied by the bassists. The double-bass is a perfect choice for a piece about logs; the instrument, after all, is made out of wood, and is rather large. In addition to the traditional means of playing a bass, that is by bowing or plucking the strings, the bassists played on the instruments themselves, treating them almost as very delicate percussion instruments. The result was a work of naturalistic beauty that transported me out of the concert hall, out of a cold New York in January, and into one of California’s redwood forests.

The earliest composer represented at the Focus! Festival was Henry Cowell, one of America’s great modernist composers. Cowell gained widespread notoriety in the 1920s for his revolutionary approach to the piano. In his many compositions for the instrument, Cowell uses a variety of techniques that no one before him had dared to introduce, such as using a fist or the entire forearm to play a whole cluster of notes at once, or reaching inside the piano to play on the strings themselves. These advances in piano composition were important not just because of the unique sound that they imparted to his works, but because of the effect they had on later generations of composers. In the 1940s, John Cage (a student of Cowell’s) began to “prepare” pianos by placing objects such as screws and erasers on the strings, creating a completely different timbre more akin to an Eastern percussion ensemble than a piano. Since the time of Cage and Cowell, many composers have begun to use extended techniques of all sorts on every instrument, including several of the composers featured at the Focus! Festival.

Given this context, it was a wonderful treat to hear Euntaek Kim play some of Cowell’s piano pieces on January 28. Particularly exciting was his performance of The Harp of Life. In Cowell’s words, “According to Irish mythology, the god of life created a new living creature with each tone sounded on his great cosmic harp, a harp described as reaching from above heaven to beneath hell.” The work consists basically of a simple melody, accompanied by tone clusters in the piano’s lowest range; these clusters start off as rumbles in the depths of the instrument that gradually grow in intensity. Kim conveyed all the nuances of this work with great command, and in doing so, turned the focus away from the unusual techniques required of him by Cowell, and back to where it should be: on the music itself.

One aspect of Californian music that has gained recognition throughout the country is the pioneering work that has been done in the field of tape music, largely at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Out of the many tape and electronic works presented at the festival, Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes, scored for tape and brass, stood out as the most obviously Californian. The tape part consists of ambient noise from the San Francisco Bay, most notably the sound of foghorns, as well as some vocalisations and some sounds on the gambuh, a Balinese bamboo flute. The work’s climax is especially striking: as the lowest-sounding foghorns get louder and become more and more prevalent in the work’s texture, the brass sound a minor chord in unison above them.

Sachs admitted that since the point of FOCUS! is to provide performance opportunities for Juilliard’s students, it had to “shortchange” California’s performance-art scene. Most performance artists compose exclusively for themselves, often not writing down their music, thus making it nearly impossible for others to perform their works. However, the festival did include one work by San Francisco-based Pamela Z. For the most part, Pamela Z composes for her own voice and electronics. The work performed on January 28, Four Movements for Cello and Delays, is in fact the only solely instrumental work she has written. In each of the four movements, the cello and its delayed playback interact in a different way. In the first movement, the opening motive became an ostinato underlying the rest of the movement, In the second, by contrast, the cello’s long, rich melodies were superimposed on one another, so that at first, only one line was heard, then two in counterpoint, then three, and so on. The sense of formal cohesion and motivic unity present in each movement, combined with Pamela Z’s conception of the cello as an extension of the human voice, made this a work of incredible beauty, and possibly my favourite of the entire festival.

For the grand finale of the festival, John Adams led Juilliard’s musicians (joined by the Concert Chorale of New York) in a moving performance of Death of Klinghoffer. Concert performances of operas (where the opera is not staged at all, merely played and sung through) can often be quite dull, not to mention confusing. However, this was easily the most exciting concert performance of an opera I have seen to date. To begin with, the opera lends itself well to this type of presentation. The opera is mostly reflective in character; the individual characters have their own arias, which are interspersed with choruses, but rarely do they interact in the way that they would in a play or in a more conventional opera. Most of the action takes place offstage, and the characters rarely enter into dialogue with each other; rather they sing at each other. Beyond the opera’s natural capacity for this type of performance, this production tried to make the concert setting as realistic as possible. The characters were all in costume to some extent, and the cast did their best to act out the parts given the obvious constraints on their movements.

All told, Death of Klinghoffer provided the perfect end to a thrilling week of Californian music at the FOCUS! Festival, and left me filled with anticipation for next year’s offerings.

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Composer George Crumb

George Crumb, The Sleeper, Vox Balaenae, and Voices from the Morning of the Earth at Carnegie Hall.

Works by Charles Wuorinen at the Guggenheim.

Many people feel intimidated by attending concerts, especially those focusing on new music. They don’t know the scene, they don’t know the music, they don’t know the performers. Sometimes programme notes are helpful, sometimes they’re not. So why not attend a discussion-concert?

Several of the city’s cultural institutions offer concert series in which each performance spotlights a different composer, featuring both performances of some of his or her works and an on-stage discussion with the composer. Earlier this month, I attended concerts that belonged to two of these series: Carnegie Hall’s Making Music, and the Guggenheim’s Works and Process.

The concert at Carnegie Hall featured three works by the composer George Crumb: The Sleeper, Vox Balaenae, and Voices from the Morning of the Earth. At the beginning of the concert and immediately after intermission, Carnegie Hall’s Jeremy Geffen interviewed Crumb onstage.

Seeing any composer in real life is always exciting. Just as in the pop music world, classical musicians tend to mythologize composers—but in some instances it goes much further than in pop music, as most composers are dead. We fantasize about what it would have been like to meet Beethoven in person, to see Liszt play his own devilishly hard compositions on the piano, to meet Brahms for a pint in the local biergarten… but ultimately we can never know.

Before attending this concert, I knew and admired a couple of Crumb’s better-known works: Songs and Ancient Voices of Children and Makrokosmos. However, I knew almost nothing about the man himself. I hadn’t given much thought to his age or even his place of birth, so I was quite surprised to see a white-haired man, with thick glasses, and a white moustache, come out on stage. I was even more surprised when he spoke with a West Virginia drawl. When Crumb speaks about his compositions, they come alive. He recalls in vivid detail the ideas behind each of his compositions, and, what’s more, he’s willing to share these secrets with the audience.

Discussing the first work on the program, his song “The Sleeper,” Crumb pointed out that he had only set certain lines of the Edgar Allen Poe poem of the same name because he just didn’t like all of the poem; he found it to be too dark, and chose to set only the lines he found most beautiful to music.

His comments on Vox Balaenae were equally revealing. The piece was composed in 1973, for piano, flute, and cello, and has become one of Crumb’s best-known works. The title is Latin for “voice of the whale.” Crumb was moved to write Vox Balaenae after hearing some of the very first recordings of whale song. While these sounds are readily available today, up to the first forty years of George Crumb’s life, it just was not possible to hear that sound.

Equally surprising were Crumb’s revelations about one of the most striking aspects of a live performance of Vox Balaenae: all three performers are required to wear masks. While Crumb is known for emphasising the dramatic aspect of music-making, and waxed poetic about the “choreography” of Beethoven’s string quartets, he insisted that this was not his intent with the masks. Rather, he had requested that the performers wear masks because his work represents the music of nature; he felt that the performers themselves should intrude as little as possible. Obviously, he remarked, that concept had backfired!

After intermission, Geffen and Crumb discussed Voices from the Morning of the Earth. This group of ten songs marks the final instalment in his American Songbook cycle, a project that has occupied him for the last decade. Crumb talked briefly about the genesis of the cycle: his daughter, Anne, who began her career as a Broadway singer but is now transitioning to the classical world, asked him if he would compose concert settings of some of her favourite Appalachian songs. He has since expanded beyond Appalachian folk songs; this final volume contains African-American tunes, such as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” cowboy songs such as “Goodbye Old Paint” (also used in Aaron Copland’s cowboy-themed ballet, Billy the Kid), and some more recent folk tunes by Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger (“Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” respectively).

Crumb sets these familiar tunes for two singers, four percussionists (who together play over 150 different instruments in the work), and piano. Just as Ives, Bartok, and Mahler would situate the folk and popular music of their time into their own, often dissonant, sound-world, so too does Crumb. For example, one of the original tunes was based on the pentatonic scale, which has been used in folk music around the world. It became associated in the early twentieth century with Asian music in particular, though, and here Crumb plays with this association by accompanying this very American folk tune with Asian percussion instruments and idioms. And in his raucous setting of “When the Saints Come Marching In,” Crumb adds to the original tune the cacophony of six marching bands playing at once in a parade—creating an effect not so different from his predecessor, Charles Ives.

The performances of all three works were inspiring, particularly the performance of the flautist in Vox Balaenae, who, among other extended techniques, must at times play the flute while singing. As you can imagine, this is no mean feat, but not only did she pull it off, she had a beautiful singing voice to compliment her excellent tone on the flute. All three instrumentalists together created a captivating performance that left me spellbound. Even without hearing Crumb speak, this concert would have been a highlight for hearing them play this challenging work.

The standout on the rest of the program was Anne Crumb, who sang in both The Sleeper and Voices from the Morning of the Earth. Her American accent perfectly suited her father’s works. Her acting experience helped her to convey the varied emotions of the songs, without quite falling into the realm of overacting. Her fellow soloist in Voices from the Morning of the Earth, baritone Randall Scarlata, and the instrumentalists were quite competent too, but Ms. Crumb clearly stole the show.

The Guggenheim’s Works and Process series is more far-ranging than Carnegie’s Making Music. Not only does it cover a wider range of performance arts, from classical music to jazz to ballet to spoken-word, but it offers many more programs—twenty-five total in 2008 alone!

The concert I attended honoured the composer Charles Wuorinen’s 70th birthday. It began with a short work—Praegustatum for James Levine, for solo piano, performed by Wuorinen himself. Then came The Mission of Virgil, a work for two pianos dating from 1993. This performance marked the premiere of the piece as a ballet, fulfilling Wuorinen’s original intention for the work. After the intermission was Wuorinen’s song cycle Ashberyana, composed in 2004.

In this instance, I had mixed feelings about the discussions. Wuorinen’s music is notoriously difficult both to perform and to listen to, as it comes directly out of the harsh, dissonant atonal tradition of Arnold Schoenberg. Wuorinen would seem to be a perfect candidate for this type of event; his music needs explaining in a way that the music of more accessible contemporary composers might not. Yet he seemed reticent to talk about his own music, stating repeatedly that he just “didn’t remember” all that much about this or that aspect of a piece, because he had composed it awhile ago and simply didn’t think about it anymore. However, each discussion featured other personalities who were integral to the two big works on the program, the choreographer Sean Curran and conductor James Levine, and they both had many interesting things to say.

The Mission of Virgil was inspired by the British poet/painter William Blake’s illustrations of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Curran outlined the general narrative of each movement, pointing out along the way things that the audience should watch for in his production. He also discussed the process by which he came up with the choreography: studying Wuorinen’s music and consulting with the composer, and studying many different depictions of Dante’s masterwork, including those of Salvador Dali.

As in the Crumb concert, the second half of Wuorinen’s concert featured a song cycle, Ashberyana. Scored for baritone, trombone, two violins, viola, cello, and piano, in this cycle Wuorinen set poems by the American poet John Ashbery. Maestro Levine, in discussing the work, found the pairing to be quite appropriate: he sees Ashbery’s poetry as being primarily about language, and Wuorinen’s music as being primarily about music; in other words, art for art’s sake. Levine also made some interesting comments about performing Wuorinen’s music. He praised Wuorinen for the clarity of his performance indications, something not readily apparent to the audience but that has a big impact on the quality of a performance nonetheless. In relation to Ashberyana, Levine praised the clarity of line, despite Wuorinen’s potentially heavy orchestration, as well as his naturalistic text-setting.

The outstanding performance of the evening belonged to the Sean Curran Dance Company. Their movement throughout the ballet was fluid and beautiful, and provided an elegant visual counterpoint to Wuorinen’s score. “Flight from the Three Beasts,” featured one dancer alone on stage; the three beasts were a triple projection of the dancer’s shadow onto the rear wall of the stage—the dancer was being chased by himself. “Monsters of the Prime” also featured some interesting lighting: one could only see the silhouettes of the dancers, who stood on each other’s shoulders to create writhing, ten-foot-tall, many-limbed creatures.

I wouldn’t want to say that either series, the Guggenheim’s or Carnegie’s, is better than the other. I enjoyed both concerts a great deal, and the performance level at each was very high. I gained more from the discussion with George Crumb than that with Wuorinen, but that’s something that will vary with each personality that these series choose to feature. These are by no means your only options for hearing composers speak in New York.

Besides those that live in the area and are regularly featured at various concert series, composers from across the country and around the world frequently stop by in New York. The city’s many music schools also offer a number of cheap or free programs featuring composers, ranging from concerts to masterclasses.

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Upcoming performances in Carnegie Hall’s Making Music include: Elliot Carter on Dec. 12, and Peter Eötvös on Jan. 29. Upcoming Works in Process performances at the Guggenheim include a discussion of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf Dec. 13–21.

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The idea to do an opera about the atomic bomb was the brainchild of Pamela Rosenberg, who in 2002 was the politically-minded director of the San Francisco Opera. The genesis of the bomb’s music, however, came much earlier, in a childhood experience of John Adams: “I do remember as a kid—I don’t know how old I was, maybe seven or eight years old—living in the most secure, Stephen Spielbergesque, idyllic village in New Hampshire… getting into bed one night, and my mother gave me a kiss and turned out the light. I heard a jet plane way, way high up in the sky, and I went into a panic, because I wondered if that was the Russians coming to bomb us.” Adams’s experience, the vague but numbing fear of nuclear annihilation, was the experience of the entire baby-boomer generation, who grew up during a cold war and an era of widespread paranoia, symbolized most poignantly by ‘the bomb’ itself, whose invisible waves of radiation threatened skin and sanity alike. As Norman Mailer has put it in his 1957 essay “The White Negro,” the bomb ushered in a new phase in the history of human consciousness; a kind of psychic fracturing occurred where normal Americans would go about their everyday lives of getting and spending, all the while aware, on another level, of the possibility of the instant, impersonal, absolute extinction of the race. Such bone-chilling thoughts provide the psychic materials for Adams’s bracing score in Doctor Atomic, which

opened at the Metropolitan Opera House on October 12, and runs though November 13.

The opera is Adams’s third, and continues the composer’s commitment to giving operatic treatment to controversial social and political issues that have deep significance in the collective American psyche. 1987’s Nixon in China (the title pretty much sums up the plot) was the beginning of a collaboration between Adams and the adventurous director Peter Sellers. 1991’s The Death of Klinghoffer, which stages the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation front, brought heavy criticism including charges of “romanticizing terrorists,” which drove Adams away from the medium for over a decade. Doctor Atomic, the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer and the making of the first atomic weapon, is perhaps a less politically charged topic, though certainly no less psychologically unnerving. While it was first staged by Sellers in San Fransisco in 2005, the Met’s version features an entirely new stage design by Penny Woolcock, a British television director whose film version of Klinghoffer helped mitigate some of the earlier criticism of the opera. Woolcock’s vision of the stage is stripped down, as she eliminated Sellers’s chaotic, electron-like dancers. In fact, there is relatively little movement on stage, the visual dynamism coming more from electronic gimmicks like the digital projections of mathematical equations and Japanese bombing targets grafted onto the oversize windows of the Oppenheimers’ bedroom. The over-worked, strung-out physicists even nap at one point.

The story spans the tension-filled two weeks in the summer of 1945 before the first testing of the weapon, scheduled for July 16 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site Oppenheimer would name “Trinity” in a deeply personal nod to John Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart, three-person’d God.” Here Donne’s famous poem serves as the text of Oppenheimer’s aria, which ends the opening Act. The line “bend / your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new” is addressed not to God, but to the bomb, which hovers menacingly over the stage, suspended by wires. Not surprisingly, the focal point of the entire opera is the soul of the enigmatic director of the Manhattan Project, who was a brilliant physicist with the heart of a poet, and whose struggle is here projected in Faust-like magnitude.

Act I opens near the testing sight in New Mexico with Oppenheimer (played by Gerald Finley) and fellow physicists Edward Teller (Richard Paul Fink)and Robert Wilson (Thomas Glenn) arguing the merits of deploying the weapon in Japan at a time when the war in Europe was winding down. Sellers’s libretto, perhaps the most experimental element in the opera, is a collage of pre-existing texts, a heady mixture of the prosaic and the sublime: declassified military documents, transcripts of meetings, interviews with participants in the project, standard histories, and poetry. The effect rendered is an odd mixture of gritty realism and surreality. When the idealistic Teller laments that Americans will lose their souls if they release the deadly weapon, the mercurial Oppenheimer responds by quoting Baudelaire: “The soul is a thing so impalpable, so often useless, and sometimes so embarrassing that at this loss I felt only a little more emotion than if, during a walk, I had lost my visiting card.” The three principals go back and forth in heated debate until the matter is decided.

Scene two takes place in the bedroom of Oppenheimer’s house in Los Alamos, late in the night, where Oppenheimer tries to calm his wife Kitty (played by Sasha Cooke), who tries and fails to sustain her husband’s attention. The two briefly connect through poetry: Kitty sings Muriel Rukeyser’s “Three sides of a coin” and Oppenheimer again responds with Baudelaire. In these tense times, the emotional heights of poetry are the plane on which husband and wife can briefly meet. After an argument, Oppenheimer leaves and Kitty is left alone to contemplate the uncertain future. In the first act’s final scene, the eve of the testing date, the weather turns ugly at Trinity, and the barrel-chested military supervisor of the project, General Leslie Groves (Eric Owens), stampedes around the stage, frustrated by a meteorologist’s predictions of continued storming. Oppenheimer warns of the possible dangers of testing in storm conditions, and then, in an attempt at comic relief that he can’t quite carry off, teases the General about his weight. Groves leaves, and in what is certainly the emotional climax of the opera, we find Oppenheimer alone with his creation, singing Donne’s sonnet. The Act ends with what is perhaps the opera’s most effective tableaux: the bomb is lowered into view and hangs suspended in air, a pool of yellow light on its upper left corner, and as we gaze at the illuminated sphere we perceive the linkages between the spherical weapon, the physicist’s brain, and the earth itself. A moment of reflection ensues: is this the end of the road for technological man? The curtain falls.

Act Two opens with a rumbling electronic white noise created by blending numerous radio frequencies, a static froth and aural analogue of the nuclear radiation shortly to be released into the desert air. Adams’s score deftly interweaves “found” radio sounds and various types of musique concrete with traditional orchestral sounds. His palatte in Doctor Atomic is particularly rich, emphasizing how far he has come from his minimalist work in the 1970 and early 1980’s, and even from Nixon in China, which featured live stage voices imitating the sound of tape loops. Minimalist repetition still plays an important role, but Adams draws from a far larger array of symphonic styles, incorporating molten Wagnerian brass, lush French impressionistic harmonies, and (what Peter Sellers dubs) “Stravinsky emergency music,” which Adams employs as a leitmotif.

Two hundred miles from the test site, the Oppenheimer’s Indian maid Pasqualita (played by Meredith Arwady) croons a lullaby to their child: “In the north the cloud-flower blossoms/ And now the lightning flashes, / And now the thunder clashes, / And now the rain comes down!” The baby sleeps but the storm rages deep into the night and Adams’s music rides along in its electricity. The radio rumblings gain in prominence and compete throughout with the “Stravinsky emergency music,” the French horns and trumpets, the oboes buzzing pedal tones below, strings swirling wind spirals above. The General Leslie Groves has disregarded all warnings about the storm, and the test shot is scheduled for 5:30 am.

From this point on, time itself seems to warp. Narrative fizzles and we the audience wait with the scientists and the generals, the Indians and the children. There is nothing, really, left to do. In a brilliant move, Adams emphasizes the deathly slow pace of the final day with a choice bit of minimalism, introducing an array of clocks which tick away underneath the orchestra, looping in an out of sync—not one countdown but many… an infinity of countdowns. The physicists, in a touch of black humor, make predictions about the size of the explosion: how far will the heat travel? Will the radiation reach their families? Will the earth’s atmosphere catch fire and the planet burn? Suddenly the night sky is filled with a vision of Vishnu, as described in the Bhagvad Gita. The chorus chants in slow crescendo: “At the site of this / Your shape stupendous / full of mouths and eyes / terrible with fangs / when I see you Vishnu / with your mouths agape and flame-eyes staring / all my peace is gone / and my heart is troubled.” The physicists and military personnel lie in rows of ditches as the warning shots are fired… It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now. 

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