Category: Music Contemplations

I read on The Rambler today sad news that Horatiu Radulescu has passed away. I know very little of his work and life, but the little I did come in contact with has made me curious to learn and experience more of his work.  I sighed reading the news, feeling time passing and somehow another connection in the fabric of art music now gone.

Yesterday I finished reading a two part interview with Xenakis, Reynolds, Lansky, and Mâche (Part 1 and Part 2) and found myself once again encountering Xenakis’s views on composition and music, ones that I had found a deep connection with before and now once again. I’ve always felt a depth of seriousness in his work and in his approach to composition and found a great deal to appreciate. I have noticed that regardless of the style, technique, or character, all of the composers and pieces of music I’ve strongly connected with share a certain seriousness to them. Listening to the music, I always felt a certain sense that there was a great deal of the composer in the work, not necessarily something expressive (and more often the case no sense of expressionism at all), but rather… as if the composer had put a lot on the line for this work, that the work in itself means a great deal to the composer and they exposed something very essential of themselves in bringing the work about.

Thinking about Xenakis and all of this as I am starting to focus on my musical work again, I feel there is a great deal to consider and to learn from…

I’m sitting here late into the night working away on some writing, listening to some of the loveliest music I’ve heard in quite some time, Hans Otte’s Siebengesang and Wassermanmusik from his album Aquarian Music (also listenable on Rhapsody). Such lovely harmonies and colors, I’m looking forward to getting to know these pieces much better over the next few weeks…

Kyle Gann noted yesterday the passing of Hans Otte whose Das Buch der Klänge is a work I’ve long enjoyed since I first got a recording of it on CD.  I do not know very much about the man or his other works but am curious to lose myself in Das Buch der Klänge once again…

A month or so ago I had borrowed Bob Snyder’s “Music and Memory: An Introduction” from the library’s LINK+ system and realized now that I had not gotten around to writing about it. What a great book! I have long had many thought about time, particularly the experience of time, and reading the information presented by Snyder in the book were as if reading many of my own thoughts but done much more deeply and clearly than I had ever taken them. I felt really quite lucky to have come across this book when I did.

Unfortunately, the only problem was that I did not have enough time to read the entire book so had to skim through the rest and take notes with pen and paper (which was surprisingly effective for me to do, as taking the notes and speeding through I felt I did cover a lot of the ground and retained a great deal more than if I had not taken notes; certainly will be exploring taking notes more often in this way). One of my favorite lines I read was when he was talking about expectation as “memory cued by present experience but not fully conscience,” Snyder writes:

“With expectations we can “feel” the future in the present.” (p. 49)

I also very much enjoyed reading the section near the end of memory strategies, particularly memory sabotage. The observations about high vs. low information strategies as well as memory length strategies were those which I had thought about a great deal, and I was glad to see in the appendix listing of many of my favorite composers as examples of memory sabotage (i.e. Feldman, Cage, etc.).

It was really quite interesting to learn all about how memory works (or at least how it is currently understood to work), all the different stages and elements involved in the different levels of memory. I would whole-heartedly suggest this book to any person composing and/or analyzing music as I think it can give some interesting ways to think about music, especially as a tool to help analyze in some way how things do and do not work when listening to a piece of music. I will be looking forward to when I will have a chance to read through this text once again!

Yesterday (Thursday) we saw Philip Glass’s Appomattox at the SF Opera. I had read some lukewarm reviews on the internet and heard similar sentiments from friends which lowered my expectations before attending the performance. In the end I found the opera to be somewhat uneven but alright, and I was glad to have gone as I found myself thinking a lot in the end about the opera itself, Glass’s music as a whole, and the experience of attending the opera with the use of video screens (something that I thought I would abhor but was surprised to find I really liked; more on that below).

Appomattox

I found the opening of the opera and the first 2/3 or so of Act I to be the weakest part of the work. The women singers weren’t particularly strong and that there were many of them with different qualities really accentuated the unevenness of the ensemble. For this first section I found myself hearing narration of lines that were set in a way to fit in to the harmony of that moment but that the words of the singers and the story were dominating the musical qualities of their sung lines. I had found myself a number of times of thinking of opera and when I find myself most drawn to the performance is when there is a really perfect balance of quality of text in conjunction with musicality of the lines. I find I can listen to arias and not understand the words but find the musical qualities of what is being sung to be quite strong to have a response, and I had the feeling that words aside I would not have that draw to the Appomattox for this opening section at all. The orchestral writing in this early section also wasn’t particularly strong to me though it might have been that the performance seemed little loose in timing and the stray intonation here and there did not help so much. (I certainly found the Philip Glass Ensemble live performance of Koyaanisqatsi (or was it Powaaqatsi?) a year or two ago in SF to have had problems due to performance though it was a piece I much enjoyed on recording). Some of the orchestral writing dominated the singers at time as well.

Starting at the destruction of Richmond scene things became very interesting to me. The large ensemble singing with their short gesture of descending seconds together with the staging of the bombing (performers look out on stage, lights glaring for bombs going off was reminiscent of Doctor Atomic though I felt much more effective in this work) was quite strong for me. (Listening to the chorus singing these gestures brought the Sirens movement of Debussy’s Nocturnes to mind, a piece I’m rather fond of…).

I found the second half of the opera much stronger musically and dramatically than the first half. Certainly by this time I found myself very interested in the characters of Grant and Lee, thinking it would be worth while to spend some time reading up on them and perhaps a bit more on this part of American history. The scenes of future injustice were a bit sickening to me and felt at times to be over the top, though I guess you really can’t relay those parts of history in much any other way. The music was generally of a much bigger scope for this second half than the first as was appropriate for the shaping of the drama and the story. I also liked very much how things end with the scene with all the women singing, a very gentle and tender musical moment.

Overall, I thought the work was good but inconsistent work.  There are a couple of pieces within the opera which are true gems, but in its entirety I don’t see it surviving to become a staple in the opera repetoire.

Philip Glass

Watching the opera made me think of Glass’s music as a whole and its development over time.  Within the opera I was impressed by his work in the very tenderest of scenes as well as in the biggest, most dramatic moments.  It’s a credit that he can really touch on that wide a range of human experience.  On the other hand, I also found that the unevenness to be somewhat frustrating too, with Naqoyqaatsi and White Raven coming to mind as other fairly recent works which I found both a mix of the exceptional and the unremarkable.

I found myself comparing Appomattox to John Adams’ Doctor Atomic while watching the performance. I found Glass’s experience in working as Music Theater composer (as I have read him describe himself) really showing itself as I felt the shaping of the experience to be handled much more adeptly than with the Adams work.  I have long felt English not very well suited for opera and neither of the mentioned works succeeded to change that opinion. (It was after learning to speak a little Polish and falling in love with the lyrical quality of that language did I look at English and find its accents and pacing to be so angular and stilted…)

Thinking about Glass’s music I found myself thinking that I most enjoyed the pieces of his which were most abstract (absolute music).  Even in Appomattox, I found myself most taken by the destruction of Richmond scene where the chorus was singing tones and not words. It is the moments like those which make me continue to be interested to hear new works by Glass.  I will be looking forward to experiencing what he works on next.

Video at the Opera

SF Opera introduced using a video screen in the upper balcony section which showed video footage from camera zoomed in on performers or on the stage.  When I had first heard about it I thought I would absolutely abhor it but in watching the performance last night I found I really enjoyed it!  Being up in the balcony and watching the performance with my eyes not exactly the best, I found when looking up at the screen and seeing very close up shots of the performers I found a wealth of emotion on their faces and in their body that I would never have seen or experienced without the video.  In addition to the staging of just the work on the stage, I also found myself quite interested in the “staging” on the video and the use of fades from close shots to ensemble shots, pans across the stage, and other effects that framed and shaped a lot of dramatic points in the opera.  I felt that in the same way that television can enhance and offer a more dramatic experience for sporting events, it too–if tastefully applied as I felt it was at the opera last night–could offer something which could enhance the experience.

One note though, I think if I had sat any higher than where I was (which was near the front of the balcony), and had the screen been more in my main view when looking at the stage, I think it would have been too much of a distraction from the live stage.  The balcony area at the SF Opera does rise up fairly steeply, so for future performances I think if they are marked as having video and I was looking to purchase balcony tickets I would look for them closer to the front than to the back.

Yesterday’s sfSound series concert–Small Packages–was one of the most enjoyable concerts I’ve seen done by sfSound.  The 19 3-minute long pieces showed a wide variety of styles and approaches to sound and was well programmed.  While I did not find myself getting into every piece, I did find that the pieces I did find myself enjoying that I enjoyed them very much, and overall didn’t find myself having a really negative reaction to any of the pieces really.  Overall I was very glad to have attended the concert and coming home last night I felt fresh and wanting to work on music. ^_^

It’s been interesting to see sfSound over the past 5 years since living in the Bay Area.  I feel like the past two concerts I’ve seen of theirs since I got back to California were the best I had seen them do and get the feeling that something has clicked for them now.  I’ll be looking forward to seeing what they’ll do for their future concerts.