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A nice reminder that we're living in a golden age of instrument building, with entry-level instruments being produced (largely in China) at historically-low prices, top-end professional instruments are made by luthiers and builders of astonishing skill, and re-creations, conjectures, and experiments of every imaginable sort, from the astonishing viola da spalla above to circuit-benders laying-on-hands almost everywhere.  The notion that the Bach cello suites were composed for an instrument along the lines of that in the video is controversial, to say the least, but there ought not be much controversy about Sigiswald Kuijken's musicality, uniquely balancing the robust and the tender. 

I was really looking forward to spending time this Winter with Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (five volumes, now available in paperback with a reasonable discount).  I have long admired the author's work, especially for his willingness to question received wisdom  as when he has famously and fearlessly entered controversies on "historically informed performance practice" or the politics of Shostakovitch.  In particular, the two volumes of his Stravinsky and Russian Traditions (which I read last summer in the reading room of the local University library, as it is one of those books which is considered too valuable to lend out), in which the mixture of historical, cultural, and biographical context was consistently (and admirably) balanced with musical analysis betraying a gifted ear are a stunning achievement.  What I had heard or read of Taruskin's Oxford History in advance was very encouraging; the balance of topics considered — with tw...

HR staged their second Klang Biennale this weekend, with the theme "Satellit Maderna", centered around the figure of composer-conductor Bruno Maderna (1920-1973).   The major impetus for this choice of themes is a new set of five cds with all of Maderna's orchestral works, played by the hr-Symphonieorchester under Arturo Tamayo.  (The first two have already been released, the remainder should appear early in the new year.)   WHILE it was certainly a good thing to be able to hear so much of Maderna's work, most of it very attractive — indeed with a gentleness quite distinct from his near-contemporaries — and with formidably idiomatic instrumental writing, AND especially to hear the orchestral works played by an orchestra that does them very well, AND it was also good to hear the work in contrast to major works that were contemporary to Maderna's by, a.o. Berio ( Serenata ), Nono ( Due espressioni ), or Boulez ( Le Marteau *),  AND it was good to rehear some of Ma...

Just finished John Tilbury's massive* biography Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) a life unfinished and can recommend it highly, as a scholarly and — discretely — personal account of both the person and the musician.   Cardew was very important to me, as a music student, if chiefly as the composer of Autumn '60 and the Octet '61 for Jasper Johns , two kit-like pieces in which the performer has to engage with the score in challenging ways in order to create individual parts as well as forge an ensemble from a set of notations that initially appear very open but gradually reveal themselves to be systematic and carrying many constraints when followed consequently.  (For a term paper in college, I compared Boulez's original version of ...Explosante/fixe... with the Cardew Octet '61 , much to the advantage of the Cardew. I also had the pleasure of performing the piano-as-percussion-solo Memories of You several times, one of the most charming pieces of the era; my best vers...

Filmmaker Robert Bresson: "Not to use two violins when one is enough." Mozart on his own concertos: "They hold the happy mean between the too difficult and the too easy. They are brilliant..., but they miss poverty." This blogger-to-be, on the edge of a manuscript, 1981:  "Everyone talks about having too many notes uptown and too few notes downtown.  Isn't the real problem not that of having too many or too few rather that of having the wrong notes?"

One of my standard post-concert cocktail party jokes has been about someday writing a history of music based entirely on the use and development of the fermata and the caesura , bearing the name Birds' Eyes and Railroad Tracks .  But now, lo and behold, what piece of musicological obscuria should have just landed in my mailbox but a history of the accent, Orchestral Accents (1960) by one Richard Korn?  Yep, analysis and history of the use of the accents, and there are two of them: and sf(z) .  (There is, to be sure, also a brief appendix discussing the ^ / v markings which are somewhat different beasts, more articulation than accent).  Notated accents, according to Korn,  begin with the vertical lines of C.P.E. Bach and the equivalent wedges of the early classicists, and their use gradually changes from a notation for emphasis of a tone other than the first in a measure (syncopations) to an expressive device of its own (peaking in Stravinsky who has entire movements with more no...

Repetitive stress does not necessarily imply injury.  It can be musically useful.  From a Ghanaian post office, a worker cancels stamps, spontaneously changing the pattern to fit each envelope: Another example from a Ghanaian post office, an ensemble: Various styles of counting cash, far less interesting than the basic pulse of each sequence are the rhythms internal to each pulse: (See also this: Villagers in Iseh, Karangasem, Bali, stomping rice , in interlocking patterns.)  And this: from Robert Bresson's film Le Diable Probablement . Bresson, preferred not to use non-diegetic music in his films, but his use of sound was nevertheless extremely musical.  This example uses diegetic noises to propel, through their increasingly rhythmic character, a didactic sequence (Bresson wrote: "Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through a sort of relay.")

The family spent a long late afternoon at the opera today with the Strauss/Hofmannsthal Frau ohne Schatten , which I had not heard since college. It's a monster of a piece, a Märchenoper (fairytale opera) in which the orchestra really gets to show off, pulling out all the stops, and the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra under Sebastian Weigle is sounding very good these days indeed, which alone made going worthwhile. Also, listening this time was a reminder that the breadth of vocal technique required suggested that Strauss was less distant to the extended techniques of the late 20th century than one would reflexively suppose. But all that said, there was something a bit embarrassing about spending time with the piece as a work of theatre. Does anyone know of a repertoire opera that is more retrograde about the role of women? (Stockhausen's Montag comes close, but it's not repertoire.) Between its essentialist reduction of women to child-bearers (in the logic of ...

Here's a recording of Douglas Leedy's The Leaves Be Green , for solo harpsichord, played by Margret Gries on an instrument made by Owen Daly.  The performance is a bit ponderous for my taste, but it's still great to have it available.   In case you're not familiar with Leedy's work, Brett Campbell of The Eugene Weekly recently wrote : Oregon teems with artists of national significance who should be better known than they are but are content to maintain a low-key existence here in paradise. One is Douglas Leedy, the Portland-born composer who was right there at the inception of minimalism with his University of California classmates LaMonte Young and Terry Riley in the early 1960s. Like Riley, he also studied Indian music and went onto found the electronic music studio at UCLA and make some of the earliest major synthesizer recordings. Following the example of fellow Portland native Lou Harrison, Leedy made important contributions to the study of musical tuning and...

Heinz-Klaus Metzger once suggested that I write the "secret, underground, history of American experimental music, all in anecdotes".   While I'm not going to be doing that anytime soon (I'm still waiting for the blackmail checks to clear), Metzger was certainly right about the format.   Between Ives' Memos and Cage's stories and Diary entries, the anecdote has proven itself to be the form best suited to conveying the feel of musical life on the far edge, and a form more pliable to experimental recycling for new artworks than plain vanilla prose.* One quality inevitably associated with the radical music due in large part to its exclusion from big official institutional music making is that much of the experience can only be captured in the informal discourse, much of it only surviving in messages scrawled on scraps of cocktail napkins or back of envelopes, or in memory, anecdote, and story.  A lot of this information may be of questionable veracity.  Much of ...

Stravinsky conducting, Paris, late 1920's. Silent film.

A friend mentioned that she had been teaching her daughter to play test, but that the daughter, six, was unhappy that the game had not princess.  I immediately thought of Martian Chess or Jetan (in Barsoomian), which Edgar Rice Burroughs invented for his 1922 novel The Chessmen of Mars (the complete text of which is at Project Gutenberg here ).   I last read the novel in grade school, but I can still recall the symbiont Kaldanes and Rykors and Jetan, which is played by live players in the game, to the bloody end.  I also remember constructing my own ten-by-ten-square Jeton board and making a set of pieces from acorn shells.  I cannot recall the rules, save for one which happens to be musically relevant. That move belongs to the Princess, who is allowed once, and only once in a game to "escape", to any unoccupied space on the board.  What's musical about that?  I think that every composer, no matter how strictly he or she likes to work, should allow themselves the possib...

A younger* colleague ponders the use of, and frustrations with, foreign plumbling here .  While the much-travelled Mr Muhly is certainly more enlightened about these things than the title figure in Gahan Wilson's cartoon "The Paranoid Abroad" — who finds himself confronted with alien bathing and hygene devices — I fear that the composer may have had some misconceptions about the mechanics and usage of certain water-bearing instruments and, in particular, seems to have been fed that line of baloney about the bidet which Europeans — in good fun, mind you — feed to all American naifs and to which I once myself succumbed, which would have the bidet serve as a machine for all manner of exotic and intimate ablutions. Rest assured, if you have heard such a story, your legs are being pulled en ensemble , for I have discovered, after twenty years of thorough-going fieldwork, interviews, and scholarly research, that Europeans do no such thing with their bidets .  They are used fo...

This is a fascinating confluence of activity:  The composers James Saunders and John Lely have begun a major project about prose scores ( here ) and Phil Ford of the Dial M for Musicology has been using text based exercises in his teaching and there's some interesting discussion about this at the blog ( here ) . Also, Frog Peak Music has recently placed Christian Wolff's very influential Prose Collection online ( here ) and, of course, there is Upload...Download...Perform, which is just chock full of textual/musical excitement ( here ). Such text-based exercises or pieces or scores were central to the teaching (in music and extra-departmentally)  of the extraordinary pianist and theorist Jon Barlow at my grad school, Wesleyan, with immediate connections to Cage, Wolff, Oliveros, Lucier, Young, Fluxus, but also to Barlow's other interests, which ran to Euclid, C.S. Pierce, Wittgenstein, Ives,  Baseball, Blake, Faulkner, Joyce, and Stein.  Barlow's student, Kenneth Maue,...

Take a moment to remember Claude Lévi-Strauss, a social scientist who took music seriously, indeed as a model for the discernment of structure in cultural artifacts that do not speak for themselves.  In turn, the work of Lévi-Strauss was important to many composers, for example Luciano Berio, who used texts from the anthropologist's The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia . I'm not well enoughed informed about the present statis of Lévi-Strauss's as a theorist within the disciplines of Anthropology and Ethnography ( this post at Savage Minds is one place to start looking), but his writing retains its strange beauty, whether in the reflective travel book Tristes Tropiques (which begins with the sentence "I hate traveling and explorers" ) or in the four volumes of Mythologiques . 

Pliable, ever on the money, proposes, in response to BBC Radio Scotland's annual "no music day", a day of music programming without any talk by the classical DJ's.  Such a "no presenters day" is an appropriate answer to the downward spiral of replacing more and more music with mediating speech and, eventually, eliminating music altogether.  This has been tragic in the case of classical and new music programming at some of the Pacifica stations in the US (I well realize that there are other causes as well, in a mad scramble among interest groups for limited air time, but the tendency in all areas is that talk trumps tunes)  and the increased tendency of management to insist upon music programming packaged in talk is very much at work in Europe as well.  There is a place for some smart talk about music on air — and there is such a tradition in the major European broadcasters (i.e. it wasn't unusual to hear an Adorno or a Barraque introduce a piece; as a ki...

Back in grade school, before any of us really had any idea about how baseball or football really worked, many of us could manage to sum up firm opinions about this player or that or one team or another, and make authoritative rankings among them.  These opinions were often based on nothing more than a few words overheard from adults, or a memorable name (Drysdale and Coufax were THE sporting names of my earliest childhood), or even just a favorite mascot or color combination.  Not yet the stuff of a convincing argument.   There are probably no better BS artists than 5th graders arguing about sports, but sometimes I think professional music critics come awful close and particularly so when they fall into the trap of  reducing their criticism to crude comparison (" x 's performance of n was better than y 's")  rather than doing the heavy labor of actually saying something concrete about particular performances.  ( Here's a recent example, reviewing Loren Maazel gu...

I believe that it's safe to say the reputation of J.S. Bach went into the celebratory year of 1985 as that of the universal genius and came out more that of a brilliant but very much local hero, parochial not universal.   A wider exposure to the complete catalog of Bach's work placed the canonical works of abstract and speculative brilliance in the unfamiliar perspective of being set alongside the huge quantitative bias in the BWV catalog towards functional liturgical works, almost all of them examples of extreme craftsmanship and taste, but all of them firmly anchored in a style and body of technique that was completely anchored in its particular time and place.    Similarly, we have seen recent performance practice and scholarship — in particular, Taruskin's two volumes —  restore to Igor Stravinsky's reputation much of the Russian identity, or even, more particularly, a St. Peterburg identity, that had been very much displaced — by the composer himself, foremost, but...

The director/actionist Christoph Schliengensief is planning to build a " Festpielhaus for Africa". More here (in German). Schliengensief is someone I have found to be at his best as a talk show guest on late-night TV: as a passionate social critic and, originally, something of an outsider to the professional arts world, he has always been, at the least, articulate and entertaining, and makes an unfailingly sympathetic figure. His projects as a film and stage director, however,  inevitably appeared to drift off if not collapse altogether, and rarely in an interesting way.  Beginning as a school kid and devoted altar boy making homemade horror films and staging events in his parent's cellar, he rapidly came to some notoriety and was — and it must have been inevitable — ultimately caught, or, as the Situationists would have it, recuperated , by the Regietheatre industry in which the director's ego trumps all else, but, as his ideas have tended more to the naive than pr...