Saturday night in Brooklyn

WE TALKED a couple of weeks back about the efforts of music critics to evoke new music in words. Here is another brave struggle, by Nate Chinen in today’s New York Times, to do justice to a performance by Keiji Haino, of Japan, at the “No Fun Fest” of extreme experimental music, in Brooklyn:

A longtime hero of the Japanese noise-rock scene, he … began his set with a passage involving a mandolinlike stringed instrument and a vocal torrent, backing his own brackish growls with a plangent, wobbly twang.

Eventually he switched to guitar, unleashing a wave of barbed static. Through the haze there was occasionally a beam of something almost normative—pure amplifier feedback, or a drone processed through a ring modulator—but the general effect was a relentless hissing sludge.

I guess you had to be there.

A tragedy for mum

MY MOTHER could not understand why the Washington National Opera would choose to perform Jenufa on Sunday, Mother’s Day. Reading the libretto hours before showtime, my eyes certainly stumbled on some not-so-promising phrases, such as “in a jealous rage, he slashes her cheek with a knife”, and “she then discovers her step-mother killed her baby”. Good grief. “Placido“, I yelped, “what were you thinking?”

Three acts of transfixing opera later, damp-eyed beside my mum, everything became a little more clear (particularly why Jenufa made a name for Leos Janacek when it was first performed in 1904). The WNO was not crazy to foist a tragedy about cloistered, unlucky women on to mothers seemingly unlucky enough to have season’s tickets.

A Gesamtkunstwerk run amuck

In an 1849 essay on “The Art-work of the Future”, Wagner imagined a synthesis that would combine media to create a Gesamtkunstwerk, or “total work of art”. The performances in the Bayreuth theatre which he built to stage his operas were a partial realisation of that idea. Now, with the “Tristan Project”, which played twice last week in New York at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall, the video artist Bill Viola, the director Peter Sellars, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Los Angeles Philharmonic seem to be having another stab at creating a Gesamtkunstwerk. 

Alas, this is a Gesamtkunstwerk for the multitasking generation. Or rather for their parents, since the tickets were $175-$500.

Alice doesn’t live here

THE Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Centre closed for an 18-month renovation on Monday night. The last-night concert was, by the New York Times’s account, a happy affair:

Drinks were allowed into the auditorium—since there was no worry about a cleanup—and the proceedings were punctuated by the clink of glasses.

Among the glasses, Philip Glass gave a piano solo—”slightly lethargic”, according to the Times’s Anne Midgette. Laurie Anderson contributed a “rapid-fire sing-song screed” about global warming. The evening was “half festive, half somnolent”. See for yourself: the concert, “Good Night Alice” is being broadcast tomorrow on PBS.

The front page would like to sing

A PERMANENT problem for music critics: how can you describe music in words? With established pieces from the classical repertoire the problem doesn’t arise so much. You assume the work to be known; you describe the performance and your response to it. But with new work by new composers where do you begin?

Here is Steve Smith grappling with the task in today’s New York Times, writing about three pieces performed at the Mannes Contemporary Music Festival:

—The players meshed in scampering, circling lines and growls, then parted, the piece ending as it had begun.

—Bryan Wagord played stark pulses and zitherlike strums on a prepared piano. The gentle prelude and interlude were haunting processions of twinkles, clangs and thumps.

—Minoru Miki’s “Sohmon III” offered a curious, uneasy combination of lyrical arioso, Noh-inspired inflections and florid marimba writing for which Mr Miki is best known outside of Japan.

It is beautiful writing, but does it get us any closer to the experience of listening? To stretch a point, if you had come across the phrase “lyrical arioso”, or “Noh-inspired inflections”, or even “haunting processions of twinkles, clangs and thumps” in a taster’s notes on an old Burgundy, would you not have accepted them equally well as attempts to decribe a fine wine?

I suddenly hanker for a newspaper which could play fragments of music from its arts pages, like those greetings cards that play “Happy Birthday” using embedded silicon chips. A sort of online journalism in reverse: instead of putting newspapers on to computers we could put computers into newspapers. Given that the world produces more semi-conductors each year than it does grains of ice, this is not such a stupid idea.

Ladies on the podium?

THE gender-gap among conductors is narrowing, despite the view that certain composers are too macho for women to grasp (Wagner, Strauss, Mahler…be still our beating hearts). 

According to the International Association of Women Conductors, 22 out of 270 music directors of “C level” American orchestras–below a $1m (£505,000) annual budget–are women. At the top 38 orchestras with an annual budget of more than $10m, there are two female music conductors–Marin Alsop and JoAnn Falletta. This is an improvement.

Wagner a-go-go

AS a sop to Wagner fanatics, WNYC has produced a full week of programming dedicated to his operas. “The Tristan Mysteries” is a rare treasure–and a great example of why we need public radio.

True fans can alarm their friends with a Wagner ring-tone. If memory serves me, it was a Wagner ring-tone that led Daniel Barenboim to conduct a Wagner piece–”Tristan and Isolde,” actually–at an annual Israel Festival in 2001, thereby breaking a decades-old taboo (owing to Wagner’s many Nazi devotees).

“The telephone’s ring was ‘The Valkyries’ of Wagner and I thought: if it can be heard on the ring of a telephone why can’t it be played in a concert hall?” Barenboim said.

Your own Wagner ring-tone may not yield the same dramatic cultural reconciliation. But its aching poignance may be an appropriate way to herald a call from a new love.

Wordless blogging

A BLOG without words? Very nearly. At Good Vibrato the only text is in the links. The substance of the blog is a series of lovely, calm pieces of music and art. The effect is terrific. It’s open for comments; there aren’t many, but they are heartfelt. Here’s one:

This is the best website/music blog ever to have been created. We are blessed for having such a remarkable source of music and art at our fingertips each and every day. Thank you for what you do. Will you make love to me?

This wordless blog is run by the Wordless Music team, whose main vocation is to promote pairings of eletronic and classical musicians in “intimate concert settings”.

The next Wordless Music concert, by the way, is tonight at 7.30, with The Books and Real Quiet, at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, 2 West 64th Street, New York City. The New York Times says that The Books are

a duo of New Yorkers-turned-New Englanders [who] make quiet bricolage folk songs that sound as if they’d crumple if you touched them.

See you there.