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If you had to choose a Hallowe'en costume of a famous composer, who'd it be?  I'm about 16 inches too tall to pass for Richard Wagner and, as cool as his sideburns were, he had that weird under-the-chin beard going on.  Rossini, especially as he reached my age, is a more attractive idea, between the pajamas, the tournedos and, presumably, some other conspicuous signs of a sinful old age.  A choice more consistent with this particular holiday might be Gesualdo, sword and gun in hand (for more colorful and ghoulish parties, however, Gesualdo's cuckolding victim, the Duke of Andria, might make a more exciting apparation, bloodied and wearing Donna Maria Gesualdo's  dress.)  Or how about going soaking wet, as Robert Schumann, freshly fished out of the Rhein?  Or all in black velvet, as Erik Satie?   Perhaps because their images are still so fresh, contemporary composers don't appear to provide many more attractive alternatives, with Cage's denim uniform, fungi ...

Too little of Heinz-Klaus Metzger's writings or interviews have been translated into English; even — or especially — when you disagree with him, he can be a pleasure to read. Here's a taste  (my hasty translation) of an interview from 2002 : "History has really shown that the emancipation of the dissonance was easier than that of women or of gays, let alone the proletariat.  It really happened easily.  Thus, it's no great wonder that certain revolutionary steps, in areas where they are easier to realize, get realized and even done well.  Somewhere in his Aesthetic Theory , Adorno notes, entirely as an aside, that even the most ingenious architectural plan must necessarily be left behind by a simple musical composition, because, by nature, it is already limited by practical concerns that a musical composition must not face.  In architecture, new structures should be built so that they do not collapse.  In music, it can be good it they collapse." From another interv...

The critic/theorist/philosopher/musician Heinz-Klaus Metzger has died at the age of 77. Metzger trained to be a private piano teacher, then studied composition in Paris with Max Deutsch, a student of Schoenberg. Metzger's earliest allegiances were to the Schoenberg school and his theoretical bent brought him into early contact with Adorno.  The relationship to Adorno's work — more as sparring partner than as student (a collection of their correspondence is in preparation) — was far from simple and Metzger's article The Aging of the Philosophy of New Music (1957) — the title plays on the titles of an essay and a book by Adorno — was an important document of the Darmstadt moment, defining a critical break with prior musical practice that Adorno was never really able to comprehend.   Metzger was one of the first public advocates for the work of Stockhausen, but also the first who would make a public break with the composer.   The disappointment with Stockhausen's developm...

What music does a composer respond to?  What music does a composer have to be responsible to? Is there repertoire of such importance that response in inescapable?  With so much repertoire available that an overview is increasingly impossible, why can't a composer just pick and choose arbitrarily among influences?  Or forget influence altogether and begin from scratch, from first principles, tabula rasa , with blissful disregard for the past? Ron Silliman has an interesting post ( here ) about poets and influence and a "center of modernism" that seems, at first, to have a curiously strident historical determinism about it in its critique of a poet colleague's idiosyncratic version of history, but he saves his argument with the same turn that saves Adorno from only being the advocate for a particular and parochial program of German modernist musical hegemony and makes it possible to use Adorno's methods in fresh contexts, wholly unimaginable to Adorno himself*.   Th...

This is the season which is marked, in this part of Germany by the Zwiebelkuchen and, across the border in Alsace and Lorraine, by the quiche , and a very good season it is. For better or worse — mostly better, but let's face it, fingers have been cut and tears have been shed — the onion, Allium sepa, the lowly, bulbed, garden onion, the center of both these closely-related savory pastries, is the center of European cooking, indeed, virtually all of the world's cuisines. Sure, wheat and rye and milk, butter, and cheese and olive oil and salted cod and all manner of things that rise, rot, ripen, cure or ferment or take astonishing form or flavor when smoked, fried, baked, grilled, or boiled are each and all important. The truffle and the saffron thread, capiscum, ginger root, and the cardamom pod are miracles. But the onion provides a uniquely useful bulk and range of flavors upon which good things become better. What would Hungarian cooking, for example, be, without the c...

For some time, the series of landmarks I've been compiling for this blog (see the list of links in the sidebar) has been hung up over a single piece, Luigi Nono's 1980 string quartet, Fragmente-Stille, An Diotima .  As a marker for the European post-War avant-garde's final turn away from a dertain ideological and technical rigidity, it clearly has some importance and there are features in the music — the exploration of the lower threshold of audibility, the glacial tempi, Nono's use of a scale of fermati, the fragmentary continuity, and the incorporation of poetic-philosophical texts (by Hölderlin) into the score, as messages to the players —  which are extremely attractive.  However, I am not able to hold back a persistent sense of doubt about the piece as a whole.  Some of this doubt is because these features are romantic in character, a spirit not quite my own, and more of this doubt is of a technical nature, as the facile application of the slow and the low and the ...

One of the best-kept professional secrets among classical musicians is the wild state of affairs that persists in sheet music for even the most standard repertoire.  While meticulously researched editions of scores are readily available and new editions, based on alternative souces and editing principles, appear with some regularity, very often the sets of parts that an orchestra will have on their stands — whether an orchestra owns or borrows a set and which particular set they own or borrow often depends upon some delicate practical and financial considerations —  belong to older editions, at variance with the chosen score, and many sets of parts can only be brought into reasonable concordance with the conductor's preferred score through considerable amendation by the conductor, orchestral librarian and/or section leaders.  For this reason, orchestras with their own libraries work hard to conserve such edited sets and many of the best conductors make a point of owning their own s...

This afternoon, I was sitting on a bench outside the stage entrance to the Frankfurt opera, waiting for my daughter to finish her rehearsal with the childrens' choir. It was about an hour before the evening's performance was to begin, so there was quite a bustle of musicians and singers and technicians and supernumeries coming into and going out of the house, in addition to the street noises behind me. Accompanying all of this was a low lyrical brass line that came out of a rehearsal room window, a cimbasso, in fact, the valved contrabass for the trombone section required for a lot of Italian opera repertoire. (If you haven't ever encountered a cimbasso in the flesh brass, suffice to say that it looks like something that Dr Seuss could've built, and sounds much lighter and agile, if somewhat thin, in the low bass register than a tuba or a low slide trombone.) The actual music that the cimbassist was playing during his warm-up was negligible, forgettable, just bits an...

In the midst of the word he was trying to say In the midst of his laughter and glee He had softly and suddenly vanished away For the Snark was a Boojum, you see. I've begun a baker's dozen worth of blog postings in the past week, and abandoned all of them for their tone.  Readers of music blogs have plenty of places elsewhere to turn for daily doses of detritus, snark, surliness, or lamentations of worldly wrongs, so any of that on my part would have been superfluous. So, instead, here are a few items that have brought cheer around here: (1) Debussy's meme. Here are the questions — in their original English — from a young girl which a 27-year-old Debussy answered; consider it a new internet meme: Your favorite virtue. Your favorite qualities in man. Your favorite qualities in woman. Your favorite occupation. Your chief characteristic. Your idea of happiness. Your idea of misery. Your favorite color and flower. If not yourself, what would you be? Where would you like to liv...

The work of artist Robert Irwin is essential; I find that the way he talks about his work is essential, too: a model of radical clarity.