The 21st Century Philharmonic

Glenn Branca has an entry in his New York Times blog in which he programs a season of his imaginary "21st Century Philharmonic" [the link is subscription only]. A couple of representative programs:

REICH Triple Quartet
ADAMS Guide To Strange Places
ADAMS Slonimsky’s Earbox
FELDMAN Violin and Orchestra
CARTER Holiday Overture

STALLING Selected Music From Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig
ROTA Music for the Films of Fellini
MORRICONE Music for the Films of Sergio Leone
BARRY Music for the James Bond Movies
HERRMANN Selections from the Soundtracks

TAKEMITSU Twill by Twilight (In Memory of Morton Feldman)
IVES Central Park in the Dark
IVES Fugue in Four Keys on “The Shining Shore”
MESSIAEN La Ville d’en haut
BRANCA Symphony No. 11

He also has 9 programs consisting entirely of commissions, and all-Xenakis, all-Messaien, all-Glass, all-Reich, all-Scelsi programs, and complete performances of Ligeti's Le Grande Macabre, Strauss's Elektra, Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle, and Weill's Dreigroschenoper. While there's a lot more to it, that gives a sense of what Branca's thinking of for this orchestra.

What struck me, though, wasn't the exercise, but the comments people left. Naturally, it's a very personal thing to plan a season for such an orchestra, and he left off pieces I'd view as musts (and he'd probably look at my selections with puzzlement). Most of the comments consist of people asking how could he leave out such-and-such composer (from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Golijov and Tan Dun). Many agree with the sentiment of the project, wishing that such an orchestra existed.

Two of them, however, struck me as very odd.

Guess we “old fogies” have no rights whatsoever. The diletantes have spoken.Remember please that theirgeneration [sic] invented the comedy of rock and roll.

What do us “social security types” and “old fogies” know about music? Aside from insulting an older generation, there is the implication that the music by Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach, and the myriad of Baroque composers are no longer to be appreciated. Notwithstanding the professed views of these devotees “modern” music, I would be willing to wager that Beethoven’s music will be appreciated long after the purveyors of dissonance will pass from the scene.

I'm astonished that the inference from this exercise is that all the composers from "the box" would be impossible to hear in a world with a 21st Century Philharmonic. Beethoven isn't going anywhere; every year will continue to be a Mozart year. Why not make room for some newer music as well?

While I don't sympathize, I can understand why some people grumbled a little about the inclusion of the Wourinen commission on a BSO program last month. But to go so far as to say that no ensemble should be allowed to perform new music? That's a new level of closed-mindedness that is stunning.

Newbury Comics Classical Newsletter

For classical music fans interested in maintaining access to traditional brick-and-mortar record stores, the response by Newbury Comics has been encouraging. As co-founder Mike Dreese put it:

Like many in the Boston community, I was truly saddened to see the "mega-stores" of music leave the market late last fall. We had a very healthy competition with both Virgin Megastores and Tower Records over the years, and previously with HMV and The Harvard COOP. Their abrupt departure, while perhaps a sign of the digital times, represents a great loss of cultural resource for the region. We at Newbury Comics feel an obligation to try our best to serve the enormous hole these closures leave for Classical fans.

One way to track their progress is through the new weekly classical e-mail newsletter, which features new releases, sales, and offers coupons. The focus of the newsletters will be the Newbury St. and Natick locations, but hopefully, with enough positive feedback, the rest of their locations will also embrace a wider classical selection.

You can sign up here by clicking on the "Beta Classical Newsletter" option (or by filling out one of the forms in the Newbury St and Natick stores). I encourage everyone to let their voices be heard by signing up for the newsletter and showing that the classical audience does exist.

The Glob's Silence on Hatto

At this point, the Joyce Hatto plagiarism scandal is becoming old news, but there's still one voice I'm waiting to hear on the subject.

Seemingly every article on the scandal used the first line of this Richard Dyer profile (calling Hatto "greatest living pianist that almost no one has ever heard of) as evidence of established critics having been taken in by the fraud.

So why has the Glob yet to cover the story? The story broke last week, yet, as of right now, she only shows up in a very positive light in the archives. This is particularly strange, given that the Times, which owns the Glob, had the story on Saturday. So how about a follow-up given all the new information that has come to light?

Update 2/23:

They finally weigh in, complete with the Richard Dyer quotation.

Witticism

The caliph said to Ja'far, "Damn it, tell her who we are, lest we are slain by this mistake." Ja'far replied, "This is part of what we deserve." The caliph yelled at him, saying, "This is no time for your witticisms."

"The Story of the Porter and the Three Ladies," The Arabian Nights, translated by Husain Hadawy

Life is a Dream

When the prince is born, a prophecy is made: he will bring disaster to the kingdom. The king tells everyone he died and stows him in a tower on top of a mountain, where he cannot harm anyone. He stays hidden away from everyone's eyes, save one advisor. Only decades later is he finally introduced to the world, and even then, it's far too brief.

The premise of Lewis Spratlan's opera, after a play by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderòn de la Barca, has unfortunate parallel's to the opera's history. It was written in 1978 on a commission by the New Haven Opera Theater. By the time it was ready to perform, the opoera company folded. It remained hidden away for another two decades, until Spratlan organized a performance himself, with the support of Amherst College. That performance was just act II, though, and was all too fleeting, even with the Pulitzer Prize it brought. Like Segismundo, it sits in a tower having experienced the real world ever so briefly, waiting to be liberated.

*

Calderòn's text lends itself to setting as an opera. Unlike many plays, which require significant shuffling and rewriting to become suitable libretti, James Maraniss's task was primarily to truncate his translation. The play's many long speeches serve as built-in arias. (This act does include two elaborations: where Calderòn calls for musicians to perform, he supplied a two-stanza madrigal text, and added a speech for Rosaura's lament to close the act.)

Spratlan handles the libretto nimbly. The best example, I think, is before Segismundo's entrance. Basilio and Clotaldo continue their conversation without changing the same musical style of their singing. Against, this, however, the orchestra leaves them behind and instead becomes source music. First they "noodle, as if warming up" (original instruction), before settling on a unison B-flat tuning note. The singers maintain their triple meter as the orchestra is reduced to a military band playing a duple march.

After the chorus welcomes Segismundo with a flourish, a "people's entertainment" follows. This section is scored as a solo violin playing in parallel fifths with a flute. What's remarkable is that even though I generally find parallel fifths grating, they sound good here. I think there are two reasons this works. First, the opera as a whole doesn't treat fifths as perfect consonants. By treating fifths sparingly, it's as if the interval becomes a dissonance. Second, the timbre of the violin and flute are different enough that they don't "lock in" the way they do when similar instruments play in perfect parallel invervals. This is followed by a madrigal in imitative counterpoint.

It's a travesty that the entire opera has never been performed or recorded. You can only hear it if you happen to know the right person. Ironically, Spratlan's recent opera "Earthrise" seems to be headed for a similar fate: although the San Francisco Opera commissioned it, they have yet to perform it publicly, citing budget difficulties. Both these operas deserve to be heard. In the story, Segismundo is liberated by an army, and given the opportunity to take his rightful place on his throne. It's time someone did the same for these operas.

Why people don't like new music.

From The Composer's Datebook

[2/4/]1837 - Franz Liszt performs a chamber recital in Paris, featuring the then-unfamiliar Piano Trios of Beethoven; At the last minute, the performers decided to reverse the printed order of the program, performing on the first half of the concert a trio by Pixis, and a Beethoven trio on the second half; The audience (and critics) warmly applaud the Pixis, mistakenly thinking it was the Beethoven work, and react coolly to the Beethoven, assuming it was by Pixis; Among the critics, only Berlioz notices the program switch.

Dinosaur Annex's Super Sunday

The good thing about the Patriots' stunning loss last week:

It removed the major obstacle to attending Dinosaur Annex's Young Composer's Festival. The concert will feature music by Mason Bates, Richard Whalley, Derek Jacoby (not to be confused with Sir Derek Jacoby), MissyMazzoli, Sergei Tcherepnin, and Sarah Kirkland Snider. As far as I can tell from the biographies, these young composers seem to be in the under 35 age bracket, rather than the under 50 that passes for young in the field today. The 7:00 concert at First Church on Marlborough St caps a full weekend of events.

This won't be the first Super Sunday Dinosaur Annex show I've attended. I had the good fortune to be at the long overdue permier of [Act II of] Lewis Spratlan's Life is a Dream, opposite what turned out to be a pretty good game. It was a pretty good opera too, though, earning that year's Pulitzer.


[edit: the rest of this post has been adapted into a stand-alone discussion of Life is a Dream here.]