0:00:06 George Enescu (1881-1955); Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 3; I. Sherban Lupu (v) w/ Claude Cymerman Continuum
0:08:58 Ştefan Niculescu (1927-2008): Sincronie II (Homage to Enescu and Bartók, 1981) Horia Andreescu: Bucharest National Radio Symphony Orchestra
0:21:22 Tiberiu Olah (1927-2002): Symphony No. 4 “Giocosa” Horia Andreescu: Bucharest National Radio SO
0:44:49 Aurel Stroe (1932-2008): Aleph (1989) for saxophone quartet, arranged for E-flat clarinet and tape Cosmin Hărșian, clarinet (Atem Ensemble)
0:51:34 Corneliu Cezar (1937-1997): Ziua Fără Sfârșit
1:00:23 Lucian Meţianu (1937- ): Trio Tetraktys for violin, viola and cello (1984) Concordia Trio
1:25:04 Cornel Ţăranu (1934-2023): Floraison (Flowering) for orchestra (2023) Gheorghe Costin: Orchestra de Cameră Radio (Bucharest National Radio Chamber Orchestra)
1:34:16 George Enescu (1881-1955); Sonata for Violin & Piano No. 3; II. Sherban Lupu (v) w/ Claude Cymerman
0:00:06 Octavian Nemescu (1940-2020): 14 minutes of the Fatal Hour Adrian Morar: Orchestra Naţională Radio recording of the first performance (Bucharest, May 29, 2015)
1:05:59 Mihai Mitrea-Celarianu (1935-2003): Evian, Evian Barrie Webb: Ensemble Antidogma 10° Festival Internazionale Di Musica Contemporanea (Antidogma – Torino, 1987)
1:27:38 Ana-Maria Avram (1961-2017): Assonant III Iancu Dumitrescu / Ana-Maria Avram – Mnémosyne, Impulse, etc. (Art Gallery (FR))
1:38:56 Adina Dumitrescu (1964- ): Tuned to the real world – Denial Eva Alkula, Heidi Äijälä, Jenny Vartiainen Adina Dumitrescu – Chamber Music Works For Kantele (IMU-Inkoon Musiikki (FI))
0:00:31 Adrian Pop (1951- ): Insomnia II for flute, piano & percussion Trio Contraste Youtube
0:07:14 Corneliu Czar (1937-1997): Aum Corneliu Cezar – Ziua Fără Sfârșit (Anastasia, 2000)
0:15:43 Liana Alexandra(1947-2011): Symphony No. 4 (1984), 1st mvt. Cristian Brâncuşi: Bucharest National Radio SO (?)
0:24:58 Mihai Mitrea-Celarianu (1935-2003): Pins 1 (1991-1992) Jean-Louis Vicart: Ensemble Instrumental de Juvisy live recording of the 1992 premier, Youtube
0:31:02 Horatiu Radulescu (1942–2008): Piano Sonata No. 5 (2003), 1st mvt. Stephen Clarke Radulescu Piano Sonatas & String Quartets 1 (Mode, 2016)
0:41:42 Octavian Nemescu (1940-2020): Cumpana Portii (1975-1976) Fernando Grillo (double bass) & Electronics Romanian Contemporary Music (Electrecord 2xLP, 1982)
0:57:09 Ana-Maria Avram (1961-2017): Swarms (III) Romanian Radio Chamber Orchestra Outranos (Edition Modern (Electrecord) 1997)
1:07:21 Corneliu Dan Georgescu (1938- ): Model Mioritic, pt. 1 Petre Sbârcea: Sibiu Philharmonic Orchestra Model Mioritic (Electrecord LP, 1982)
1:27:53 Adina Dumitrescu (1964- ): Tuned to the real world – Diagnostic Eva Alkula, Heidi Äijälä & Jenny Vartiainen (kanteles) Adina Dumitrescu – Chamber Music Works For Kantele (Inkoon Musiikki, 2015)
1:31:54 Alina Kalancea: Distant Shores [ H // S // O // C ] Soundcloud
This mixtape pays homage to a group of pioneers in the field of electronic music, all of whom happened (or happen, in the case of Alice Shields, Eliane Radigue and Christina Kubisch) to be women. Women were around from the start of electronic music’s heydays in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. It starts with what many consider the first important composition in the realm of electronica, Johanna Beyer’s “Music of the Spheres” from 1938 (one of two duplicates from the radio show I posted last week, which was more… pop, I suppose…) It includes pieces by the two legendary women from the BBC radiophonic lab in the ’60s, Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, one from Pauline Oliversos (“Bye Bye Butterfly is a piece I have come to love, so it is the other duplicate…) as well as two from the fascinating Danish supergenius Else Marie Pade, who came to compose electronica after a stint in a Gestapo prison at the tail-end of WWII left her unable to play the piano. Also included are pieces by two of the big name grand dames of contemporary classical, Sofia Gubaidulina and Kaija Saariaho. Ideally, you’ll want to be in Colorado, Oregon, Washington or California while listening (to any of the mixtapes, really…) Like everything good, it’s headphone music. This is late-night listening: please do not try to play between sunrise and sunset!
0:00:00 Johanna Beyer: Music of the Spheres (1938)
Iran abuts two countries whose “classical” composers of the 20th C. I revere and have done shows on – Armenia and Azerbaijan – and countries to its east whose improvised classical music (in the Indian sense of the term) I also love – Afghanistan and Pakistan – so in that sense it was no huge surprise to discover there is more cool Western classical music from Iran than I’ll ever be able to listen to. Major composers with lengthy careers writing music that appeals on multiple levels, names well-known in Europe, tertiary composers pushing the envelope, dabblers in electro-acoustic music, all that… The surprise, to me at least, was that Western classical music has such a strong presence in a country which has maintained a strong anti-Western bent since the 1979 revolution that brought a strict theocracy into power, a theocracy that has issued many proscriptions.
Tehran
Before we head on to the music, perhaps a little background may be in order regarding the country itself. It is safe to say, I think, that most Americans in 2022 know little about Iran beyond a vague awareness of its bogeyman status as perpetuated by the news media. To that end, it can be safely stated that Iran is no threat to the United States, and even if it did want to engage militarily the 35 U.S. military bases in bordering countries – that’s right, 35 – would make such a decision suicide. (I am aware of no Iranian bases in Mexico or Canada.) It is nevertheless undeniable that Iran is and has been a miserable place to live for many of its citizens for most if not all of the time period considered on this blog, which is from the turn of the 20th C. on up to today. In Iran today, it is inarguable that corruption is third world-level rampant, thug police forces operate with impunity, freedom of speech is not permitted, and torture is prevalent and systematic. The generally hard-line theocratic regime in place since the 1979 revolution – the tenor of which is reflected in the the president at any given time – makes life especially difficult for citizens who happen to be women, ethnic or religious minorities, and/or LGBTI.
At any rate, here is the back of the baseball card for Iran: It is a country with a population of 83 million (17th largest) and an area about two and a half times the size of Texas (18th largest). (And since you no doubt wondered, Iran spends about $20 billion a year on its military, compared to the $750 billion the U.S. spends, which represents one thirty-eighth…) On the orb, Iran is flanked by Iraq to the west and Afghanistan/Pakistan/Turkmenistan on the east. It has access to shipping on the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman to its south. (It also has the Caspian Sea on its northern border, but that is pretty much a toxic sludge pit at this point.) Tehran, Iran’s largest city and capital, is located in the north and has a population of 8.7 million, and there are seven other cities with over a million people. Iran used to be called Persia and was the heart of ancient empires (“Iran” is a sort of generic label, from the same root as “Aryan”…) Iran is NOT an Arab country. Its population is two-thirds ethnic Persian, and Farsi, aka Persian, is the national language, not Arabic. Iran, just as significantly, is Shia Muslim, which puts it at odds with most of the rest of the Middle Eastern countries – most importantly Saudi Arabia – which are Sunni.
Iran’s government is, as noted, a theocracy – one of just five in the world today, all of them Muslim (and no, Vatican City is not a “country”) – with democratic elements. Which is to say it has an elected president who is nevertheless entirely subordinate to a religious leader (Ayatollah Khamenei, who succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini) and a council of clerics. The degree of adherence to Sharia law (the medieval laws in the Koran) depends on the whims of the Supreme Leader and is administered by the president. Under the “populist” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whom many Iranians likened to trump in terms of rousing the rubes and who held office from 2005 to 2013 (the election for his second term in 2009 was widely condemned as bogus and sparked huge riots), tolerance was in short supply. After eight years of relative moderation under the leadership of Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021), a hardliner named Ebrahim Raisi took office last year in a move orchestrated by the now-decrepit Khamenei, and people are being executed or beaten to death for moral “corruption” like homosexuality and dress code violations. According to Amnesty International, the government killed at least 281 people in the first six months of 2022. That figure is going to be WAY higher by the end of the year, as people have taken to the streets again to express their rage against the morality police. The Iranian police use bullets to disperse protests. The United States hates Iran, though not for its human rights abuses; after all, Saudi Arabia does the same shit – hell, they can even execute a U.S. citizen AND dismember him and we don’t object. No, it is, of course, all about petrodollars, and it goes back to 1953, when the CIA, along with Britain’s MI5, organized a coup that deposed a popularly-elected leader who had the audacity to try to nationalize the British Petroleum operations there (BP had been hoarding 85% of the profits of its Iranian endeavors til then). This coup put in his place a rich, playboy stooge who was from the old “royal” family. The rich playboy stooge – a.k.a. the Shah – used a CIA-formulated and -trained secret police called SAVAK to terrorize or murder anyone pushing for reforms to his autocratic rule or to the profit-”sharing” schemes of Western oil interests. Even by 20th C. standards SAVAK was unusually brutal, but then they’d been trained by the best! (Here’s a fun fact: the electric chair SAVAK used to torture hooded prisoners in the ’60s and ’70s was nicknamed Apollo, after the NASA space program!)
This went on for 25 years. Argo, the worst movie to ever win the Academy Award for Best Picture (which is saying something), depicts (albeit in contrived, banal and fantastical Hollywood fashion) the period where Iranians finally ousted the Shah and the theocracy took effect. The people who rose up against the murderous Shah also rose up against the people who had propped him up for a quarter century – us. As witnessed in subsequent U.S. misadventures in the Middle East, we tend to leave in our wake very grim and vehemently anti-U.S. theocratic regimes – think Al-Qaeda and ISIS, two other direct results of U.S. bumbling in the region…
From the 1979 Revolution on, most people in the U.S. think of Iran, if they think about it at all, as some kind of vague menace, and of Iranians, if they think of them at all, much as Ben Affleck depicted them, which is to say as angry and bushy-bearded automatons. After the humiliation of the Iranian Revolution, the U.S. instigated a war between Iran and Iraq (in which the U.S. backed Saddam Hussein and Iraq before turning on him a decade later) and has since maintained harsh economic sanctions on Iran, which, as harsh economic sanctions are wont to do, exact their toll on a citizenry who has little to say in matters of government conduct or international relations. Suffice it to say, if you were Iranian you would probably despise the United States, too.
Unsurprisingly, depending upon who is president, the regime has either been dismissive or forbidding of Western-ish arts. Under Ahmadinejad, the Tehran Symphony folded and prohibitions against things like women singing pretty well snuffed art music in a country that had been, for all of its faults, a second-world country – VASTLY richer and more developed than its neighbors – for much of the 20th century. Under Rouhani (2013-2021), the artsrebounded to a significant extent. The Tehran Symphony got back up and running and expatriate composers who’d maintained ties to their homeland until Ahmadinejad have reengaged. Time will tell how things play out for Western classical music under Raisi.
Finally, there is an amazing-looking Iranian record label, Mahoor, that is maintained, I gather, by a government cultural ministry and features all sorts of Iranian music. Most of it is traditional (which I’d also like to hear) but there are scores of CDs, all with brilliant artwork, by most of the composers on this “mixtape” and many I would purchase straight up based upon what I know now. I have written them but I don’t think it is possible for people in the U.S. to buy commercial goods directly from Iran. I will change this post if I find out otherwise. The website is http://www.mahoor.com/en/
As usual, much of the music on this “mixtape” comes from classical-music-online.net, which is, as usual, a treasure trove of otherwise impossible-to-find recordings – if you do not have a membership to this site, you absolutely should – but often is lacking key information. Info on the playlist below is as complete as I could muster.
0:00:00 Sahba Aminikia (1981- ): Salam Alaykem (2020) after a monody by Hassan Kasaei Kronos Quartet
Aminikia is a San Francisco-based composer. He has had a substantial amount of work recorded for a 41-year-old, in his case because it is good. He was born in post-Revolution Tehran and maintained ties to his home country after studies abroad (he studied with Boris Tishchenko in Russia and John Adams in the U.S., among others) but on a 2012 visit to Iran (during the Ahmadinejad presidency) he was arrested, interrogated, tortured and left in the desert, an experience he recounts in a radio interview on his Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/sahbakia?id=4508429) and wrote about in a piece for piano trio titled “Shab o Meh” (“Night and Fog”) from 2014 (and which can be heard at 1:13:45) Lots of info and links at his website, http://www.sahbakia.com
Aminikia
0:02:13 Hormoz Farhat (1928-2021): Piano Sonata No. 2 (2010); II. Largo con molto espressione e flessibilita Mary Dullea Persian Autumn (Metier, 2020)
Next to Alireza Mashayekhi (twelve years his junior), Farhat would seem to be the most important composer in 20th C. Iranian Western classical music. (That “seem” is tentative – I am finding my way here…) Farhat was the first Iranian to study in the U.S. (among his teachers were Darius Milhaud and Lukas Foss) and was a longtime faculty member at UCLA and Trinity College in Dublin, with works performed all over the world.
Farhat
0:08:25 Houchang Ostovar (1928–2016) : Iranian Suite, I. Pishdaramad Ali Rahbari: Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra Symphonic Poems from Persia (Colosseum, 1980)
This is the only work of Ostovar’s released to date.
Ostovar
0:15:17 Amir Mahyar Tafreshipour (1974- ): Elegy for Harp, Violin and Cello Manon Moris (harp), Darragh Morgan (violin) & Zoe Martlew (cello) Pendar (Hermes)
Tafreshipour has music on multiple albums released on Western labels, including a Naxos release devoted entirely to his music featuring Crash Ensemble. Educated in Tehran, Belgium and London, he is a composer who moves freely between the two worlds. He writes a lot for harp and he does it well. He recently wrote an opera about the nationalization of the oil resources in the 1950s, which led to the U.S/U.K.-sponsored coup. A nice website for Tafreshipour at http://www.tafreshipour.com/
Tafreshipour
0:23:44 Ali Rahbari (1948- ): Nohe Khan, Symphonic Poem No. 1 (2018, rev. 1972); III. Paula Rahbari (v) w/ Alexander Rahbari: Prague Metropolitan Orchestra My Mother Persia, v. 1 (Naxos, 2019)
Rahbari (who also goes by Alexander) made his name as a high-profile conductor in Europe before returning to Tehran in 2016 to helm the re-vamped Tehran Symphony. His compositions tend to ride the folkloric groove. This third movement of an outstanding violin concerto turns up on the first of three volumes of his music on Naxos, and is performed by Mrs. Rahbari along with an orchestra he’s conducting.
Rahbari
0:33:02 Behzad Abdi (1973- ): Mulla Sadra (excerpt) Vladimir Sirenko: Ukrainian National Symphony Orchestra
0:39:46 Ahmad Pejman (1935- ): Divertimento in 4 Movements for SO (2016); II. Sergey Skripka: Russian State Cinematography SO
Pejman was in NYC, studying at Columbia with, among others, Vladimir Ussachevsky, when the Iranian Revolution took place, and he moved to L.A. and stayed. He nevertheless maintained regular contact with Iran, receiving and fulfilling commissions.
Pejman
0:45:10 Hormoz Farhat: String Quartet No. 3; II. St. Petersburg Quartet Farhat String Quartets 1-3 (Ravi-Azar-Kimia, 2017)
0:53:17 Parviz Mahmoud (1910-1996): Violin Concerto Julius Aria Sahbai (v) w/ Manuchehr Sahbai: Bulgarian State PO
Mahmoud is considered the founder of the modern Tehran Symphony Orchestra. He moved to the U.S., received his Ph.D from Indiana’s famed music school, and lived out his life as the conductor of the University of Dubuque (Iowa) Symphony Orchestra(!!!) It seems unlikely many of the pig farmers at the Dubuque iHop would have cottoned to this violin concerto, which was written some time before 1959 (when he quit composing) and which packs a serious modernist wallop.
Mahmoud
1:04:33 Ali Radman (1973- ): Argument for Orchestra Roozbeh Rahimi (Santoor) w/ ?
This is Aminikia’s musical reflection on his run-in with police/thugs on a visit home in 2012. The recording is a live take from the Great Lakes Chamber Festival in Ann Arbor.
Farhang is based in France, where he studied at IRCAM and where the fine album from which this track was culled was recorded.
Farhang
1:34:26 Mehdi Hossseini: Symphony of Monody Daniel Black: Saint Petersburg State Academic SO Hosseini: Monodies (2020)
Hosseini is a major figure in the St. Petersburg (formerly Petrograd and Leningrad, home of Shostakovich and Stravinsky) art music world, where he has established a new music organization (homepage at reMusik.org) and a new music festival. This symphony put me in mind of another St. Petersburg denizen – Galina Ustvolskaya.
1:52:41 Fozie Majd: Dreamland, I. Lento Darragh Morgan & Patrick Savage (v), Fiona Winning (va), Deirdre Cooper (c) In Absentia: Music by Iranian Composers (Metier/Divine Art, 2019)
Majd
1:58:48 Alireza Mashayekhi (1948- ): Panopticon 88, Op. 97 Vladimir Sirenko: National SO of Ukraine
Mashayekhi is a composer I should’ve heard of before now. Extremely prolific, he has an extensive discography and is regarded as a major composer of avant-garde skew overseas. His music is often jarring and melds the ancient to the postmodern. The Mahoor label has released a slew of CDs of Mashayekhi’s music, if only I can figure a way to get some of them…
Mashayekhi
2:06:41 Sabha Aminikia: Bāde Sabā; II. Aeron Flutes No Era (Innova, 2018)
Aeron Flutes is a female flute trio from San Francisco. They showcase three SF-based composers on this LP. Included here is the middle of three movements.
Born in Tehran, where she studied composition with Mashayekhi, Seyedi is based in Europe, where her work is performed by leading new music ensembles. She has a Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/elnazseyedi) with eight works available for listening, including this killer.
Seyedi
2:19:45 Gity Razaz (1986- ): Metamorphosis of Narcissus for CO & electronics Andrew Cyr: Metropolis Ensemble The Strange Highway (BIS, 2022)
As I always say on my radio show, when the Swedish BIS label does a record of a composer’s work, that is as close to a guarantee of quality as exists. Brooklyn-based Razaz’s The Strange Highway just came out (August, 2022) and features a variety of configurations, including a solo cello piece played by Inbal Segev and a cello octet. I’m assuming she must be a cellist… More of her music can be found on her Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/gityrazazcomposer)
0:00:00 Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): “Oiseaux triste” from Miroirs (1904-5) Maurice Ravel Duo-Art piano roll, recorded London, 30 June 1922
0:04:59 Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992): “Les Ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldebaran” from Des canyons aux étoiles… Roger Muraro (p) w/ Myung-Whun Chung: PO Radio France Messiaen – Des canyons aux étoiles… (DG, 2002)
0:13:40 Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928-2016): Cantus Arcticus, Op. 61, “Concerto For Birds & Orchestra” (1972) Hannu Lintu: Royal Scottish National Orchestra Rautavaara (Naxos)
Toshio Hosokawa: Meditation Tan Dun: Trombone Concerto – Three Muses in Video Game (2022) Ko-ichiro Yamamoto (soloist) Kala Ramnath & Reena Esmail: Concerto for Hindustani Violin (2022) Kala Ramnath (soloist) Claude Debussy – La Mer (1903-5)
As this is a blog that literally no one reads, I am not particularly worried about stating unequivocally something that, in today’s knotted, virtue-signaling echo chamber, would undoubtedly be considered “racist” by SOMEONE: The best thing about Seattle is the large Asian population. (By Asian, I refer to ALL of Asia – SE, S and SW.) The Northwest rim has a lot going for it – natural beauty always on the periphery, nighttime temperatures in the 50s in midsummer (for now, at least), elected officials who don’t embarrass the human species, a massive natural boundary (mountains and desert) between it and the Nazis in the interior – but it is those times when I am walking around and feel like I am in a foreign country that I feel most grateful to be here. While I am utterly sick of identity politics and all of that, I am pretty burned out on “Western Civilization”…
Really, I’m pretty sick of everything. Not post-Mahlerian classical music (which I consider one of the only legit dissident art forms)… And springtime. Effing LOVE springtime. Tulips, fruit tree blossoms, spring training baseball, pretty much everything except the income tax ritual.
March 20 was the first day of spring, and it was also the only performance of this concert, the 14th annual “Celebrate Asia” event, so it was all set up to be a wonderful day, and that is how it played out.
The concert featured works by three living composers (one Japanese, one Chinese, and one Indian-American (in collaboration with an Indian virtuoso) I’m interested in, and a dead one who’s always worth hearing live but probably should not have been on this bill…
The Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa (b. 1955) is “full-avant garde”, with much of his discography on Wergo and Kairos. I’ve liked a lot of his music that I’ve heard, and this piece was fine, but not particularly engaging. Its subject was 3.11, which is how the Japanese refer to the tsunami that devastated Fukashima and its nuclear power plant. It used some isolated timpani to arresting effect, but the overall vibe was, as the title would suggest, vaguely eerie and chill. The earth thudded but at no point did the wave crash into the shore. Not super memorable but an OK table-setter. Kahchun Wong’s left hand was the most entertaining element of the performance.
Tan Dun (b. 1957) is probably the most successful composer – in terms of sales and visibility, with most of his releases on majors like Sony – to be routinely left out of conversations about important living composers. That no doubt owes to the fact that his music sounds immediately Chinese. Not chintzy or gimmicky but unmistakably. And to the fact he is best-known for “rousing” film scores, like his Oscar-winner for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. But his serious work is performed by upper echelon artists, like the Kronos Quartet, who do not pander. All of that said, I was not really looking forward to this piece, as I had my doubts about the trombone’s capacity for profundity, and “Video Game” in the title, to me, suggested “Game Over” before I’d found my seat…
However. I can say without hesitation the concerto – a joint commission from the Seattle Symphony and Royal Concertgebouw trombonist Jorgen van Rijen, was a friggin’ BLAST. My reservations were obliterated almost immediately, blown to bits like a lumbering Round 1 asteroid. The trombone is indeed a concerto-worthy instrument. Tan Dun’s concerto showed off its expressive range, from almost tuba-like oomph to trumpet-like rat-a-tat. Its ability to slide and swoop between tones was exploited throughout. Because we in the West tend to associate such shenanigans with slapstick humor, I found myself on the cusp of a chortle from time to time, catching myself just as the slide resolved on a note of real weight. As conductor Wong pointed out after the intermission, Tan Dun was mimicking the four different intonations employed by Mandarin speakers throughout.
As for the video game business, I heard nothing. But then I have not played a video game since NBA 2K was new.
And soloist Ko-ichiro Yamamoto, Principal Trombonist of the Seattle Symphony, totally sold it. A powerfully built fireplug of a man – his picture in the concert program showed him in downhill ski gear – he brought buoyant energy to the stage without having to try. In smartly tapered trousers and snug blazer, he called to mind a swing orchestra soloist, bouncing on his feet, itching to blare. And blare he did, over a spacious tableau that – in terms of film music, which it frequently suggested – suggested Shostakovich as much as John Williams. Really, the overall effect was more in the Ennio Morricone vein than anything else. Which is to say, tightly paced and liberally peppered with quirky sounds and ridiculously catchy melodies. I would venture that if orchestras presented more stuff like this, they might find their audience demographics tilting younger…
Not til she was in her late twenties did Chicago-born Reena Esmail (b. 1983) commence exploring Hindustani (or Northern Indian) classical music. Since receiving a Fulbright-Nehru fellowship that allowed her to study in New Delhi with the renowned sitarist Gaurav Mumzadar in 2011-12, Esmail has worked to bridge the cultures in an artistically satisfying manner. Which is easier said than done – witness the less-than-satisfying sitar concertos Ravi Shankar recorded in the ’70s. The phrase “Indian classical music”, which suggests affinities with the Western brand, but Indian classical music refers to the traditional music of the subcontinent and is almost entirely improvisational and is played by small ensembles. It is a wide gulf, then, but the concerto for Hindustani violin that Esmail co-authored with soloist Kala Ramnath (b. 1967) would seem to suggest that Esmail’s bridge is now safe for traffic.
Of course, the success in bridging East and West that Esmail and Ramnath’s concerto evinced – in fairness to Shankar – undoubtedly owes in large part to the instrument. While, to Western sensibilities, the sitar is as thoroughly foreign a conception of a musical instrument as anything that might be fashioned from wood and wire, the Hindustani violin is, in essence, a Western violin. Indian violins tend to be constructed from denser wood than Western ones, but aside from that it is the differences in tuning (very different) and the manner in which it is played – seated, with the instrument pointed downward, the scroll resting on the crossed legs of the performer – that defines a “Hindustani violin.” The effect of the tuning and posture is – no surprise – considerably more nasal in tone, with a drone implied if not in effect at all times. It sounds, in short, far more like a human voice – or a slide guitar – than a violin in Western classical music. Ramnath, who lives in California these days, occupies Shankar-like status in today’s Hindustani music world and her playing flows like a stream. Eerily calm (at least to my perpetually agitated Western soul) and smiling beatifically, she sat on a low platform immediately to the left of Wong and focused her attention on his conducting when she wasn’t inwardly focused. The concerto stressed repetitive phrases and the orchestra locked into grooves for extended periods, but followed a more Westernized sense of progress than a raga. It was divided into five short-ish movements, one for each of the principal elements in the Hindu worldview (fire, water, earth, air and space), and within each was an examination of that element in a world out of balance and then in harmony with the others. (Esmail explained this in a helpful introduction to the piece.)
This piece was more on the sublime side than the Tan Dun concerto but just as moving. My verdict, for whatever it’s worth: There need to be more concertos written for Hindustani violin.
Esmail and Ramnaths’s concerto would have been a perfect concert closer. A two-minute standing ovation (seemed longer), two curtain calls… It put Debussy in a somewhat awkward position.
It was left to conductor Wong to explain the presence of La Mer on an otherwise all-Asian program, which he did as Ramnath’s platform was disassembled and offloaded. He pointed out Debussy’s fondness for Japanese woodblock prints and his use of the 1836 Hokusai woodblock print “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (-you know, “The Scream” of woodblock prints) on the 1905 sheet music for La Mer. (Kahchun pointed out that he and his wife currently reside in Kanagawa, where he is often reminded of the print, which certainly represents both a coincidence and a reach…)
Of course, Debussy’s ties to Asia were of course more substantial than a woodblock print (and definitely more tangible than Tchaikovsky’s…) Debussy had been enthralled by gamelan music at the Javanese pavilion at the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle and by the time he began La Mer fourteen years later, the East was in his bloodstream. (1903 was also the year he wrote Pagodes, his attempt to capture the nuances of the gamelan on a Western piano.) Kahchun led a sprightly rendition, and it fit fine.
The fact of the matter, though, is Debussy wrote La Mer about the Mediterranean, and he is 100 years older, 100% more European, and 100% deader than the other composers on the program. The audience for this show, meanwhile, was about 70% Asian and 100% alive. I wonder if it would be viable for the Seattle Symphony at some time in the near future to present two distinct concert series and scotch the hybrid action. One series, twelve or so concerts, that followed the present S.O.P., with European “masterworks” serving as the crux and more offbeat works as first-half table-setters; and then a second, shorter series of concerts, six or so, that consciously catered to Seattle’s demographic and highlighted living Asian, American (including South and Central), and female composers… It might be worth a thought.
I got into classical music deeply in 2015 and deeper still in 2016, largely in response to the times. By “the times”, I mean the descent of Western civilization into a bleak and miserable oblivion. There was simply no way for me to tune out the sound of the plummet, and it’s only gotten louder and more gnashing. Classical music, which requires concentration to appreciate, was my solution to that problem – the sound of the descent, not the descent itself – and it still is. I do this blog that has no readers and the radio show, which has few listeners (and heartfelt thanks to all who do!), purely to share what I think is an effective strategy for coping with this shitstorm with anyone out there who might be receptive. This blog and the show are messages in bottles, effectively – almost but not quite pointless.
That said, this year was a hard one, both personally (which is not worth sharing, beyond the September 6 show dedicated to my mom) and on the macro level.
On the personal level, one of very few highlights of 2021 was getting to see some live music again. While visiting family in Seattle, I got to see, first, the Danish String Quartet at the University of Washington, and then the Seattle Symphony under Ludovic Morlot doing Shostakovich’s 11th (my favorite of his instrumental symphonies and one that is seldom programmed) in the acoustic marvel of Benaroya Hall, pictured above. Both shows were brilliant and served to remind me how much I rely on live music for my mental well-being. I did not need the reminders, but I did need the shows.
On that macro level, 2021 seemed at the time, and still seems in retrospect, not so much a year as a lonely buoy we could hang onto for a while. We’re still lost at sea, with no boat within a hundred miles and no sense where the nearest shore may be, but at least we didn’t drown this year. (I am using “we” collectively and in the most abstract sense. Many people did drown, of course, but they are dead and not, as a result, part of any “we” that I know of.)
And it seems we’re being asked to prepare for an utterly miserable 2022. Which is why it seems appropriate to begin this look back at 2021 with Rued Langaard’s “Music at the Abyss”, in an arrangement for chamber orchestra that represented one of my favorite new releases from 2021.
So 2021 was, in the macro, a soul-sapper. As far as OM goes, that manifested in several forms. For example, a resolution back in January was to air all 16 of Allan Pettersson’s symphonies over the course of 2021; I think I got in three. I could not muster the energy to do more than a couple blog posts. Also, my composer-of-the-month agenda faltered – six months had no composer programs (though February had two). Nevertheless, and as always, the featured composers this year are all people I feel rewarded to have met (in most cases) or gotten to know better. They were:
– Jon Leifs, the father of Icelandic earthquake music (March 7 ) – the etherial Russian birdsong devotee Ekaterina Kozhevnikova (Feb. 14) – the criminally underrated Russian Alexander Tcherepnin (June 16) – Claude Vivier, Canuck author of entertaining avant-garde music (June 28) – the Azerbaijani hippie and Parajanov collaborator Javanshir Guliyev (July 26) – Karl Rathaus, another unlucky victim of historical circumstance (Nov. 8) – Osvaldas Balakauskas, fun-loving Lithuanian serialist (Dec. 20)
Likewise the region-of-the-month itinerary had too many gaps. That said, those I did do were all packed with great music, as usual:
So, on to the mixtape. In past years I’ve done two at year’s end – one of new releases and one of stuff that I discovered NOT on new releases. This year’s is a hybrid. The new releases are the tracks with record jackets on the playlist below. But there were a couple dozen new releases I would rate as excellent, if not essential. I did a bunch of shows of new releases in the autumn of 2021, and those can be heard on Mixcloud as well. That said, here are some of my favorite things from 2021.
0:00:00 Rued Langaard (Denmark, 1893-1952): Music of the Abyss (transcribed for chamber orchestra by Allan Gravgaard Madsen) I. Inflessibile mostruoso – Maestoso rigoglioso Esbjerg Ensemble Langaard – Music of the Abyss (Dacapo, 2021)
0:07:34 Olivier Messiaen (France, 1908-1992): Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus: No. 1, Regard du Père Joanna MacGregor Messiaen – Vingt regards sur l’enfant Jésus (Collins)
0:20:00 Victoria Poleva (Ukraine, 1962- ): Molenie Teploe for soprano and female choir (2007) Oksana Nikitjuk (soprano) w/ the Girls Chamber Choir orf Kiev (?)
0:24:11 Claude Vivier (Canada, 1948-1983): Glaubst du an de Unsterblichkeit der Steele? for voices, narrator, 3 synthesizers and two percussion Johan Leysen (narrator) & Susan Narucki (sop) w/ Reinbert de Leeuw: Asko Schoenberg Ensemble
0:32:45 Alexander Tcherepnin (Russia/U.S., 1899-1977): Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 26 (1923) Noriko Ogawa w/ Lan Shui: Singapore SO Tcherepnin Piano Concertos 2 & 4, etc. (BIS, 2003)
1:06:47 Thomas Larcher (Austria, 1962- ): Die Nacht der Verlorenen; No. 1. Alles verloren Hannu Lintu: Finnish Radio SO Larcher – Symphony No. 2 & Die Nacht der Verlorenen(Ondine, 2021)
1:13:31 Herman Galynin (USSR, 1922-1962): Piano Trio in D minor (1948) Borodin Trio (Rostislav Dubinsky (v), Luba Edlina (p) & Yuli Turovsky (c))
1:32:53 Paul Arma (Hungary/France, 1905-1987): Violin Sonata; I. Lento Judith Ingolfsson (v) & Vladimir Stoupel (p) Rathaus Tiessen & Arma Sonatas for Violin & Piano (Oehms Classics, 2021)
2:03:28 Beyza Yagzin Ulvi Cemal Erkin (1906-1972): Duyuslar (Impressions); No. 2. Küçük çoban (The Little Shepherd) To Anatolia – Selections from the Turkish Five (Bridge, 2021)
2:04:58 Rued Langaard (Denmark, 1893-1952): Music of the Abyss II. Frenetico, quasi rondo
2:11:03 Ekaterina Kozhevnikova (Russia, 1954- ): Farewell for string orchestra, flute & harpsichord Konstantin Krimets: unknown orchestra
A Sound Mind:How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and decided to rewrite its entire history)
by Paul Morley Bloomsbury Publishing (2020), 599 pages
Paul Morley was one of the best writers covering the U.K. punk and post punk scenes for the NME back in the day. Now a geezer, it seems he started exploring classical music right around the same time I did. He writes (and writes, and writes) about taking on classical late in life in this 600-page behemoth. You can read my review of the book below. The playlist is below that.
The mix here is culled from a playlist Morley annotates, all 20th and 21st C. stuff, of course. Almost everything on here is stuff I hadn’t heard before or given enough time to. Composers include Debussy, Stravinsky, Xenakis, Birtwistle, Shostakovich, Varèse, Unsuk Chin, Earle Brown, Nancarrow, Penderecki and Cage.
A Sound Mind is a book by an aged-out and fiercely intelligent rock journalist which discusses his post-menopausal embrace of classical music. It was published in 2020. As a fan of said journalist’s punk-era (’76-’81) jottings and as a person who also turned to classical music after a life devoted to fringe music, I felt compelled to read A Sound Mind and stuck with it far longer than most people, I suspect, as a result of the aforementioned affinities. The book’s strengths do not necessarily balance out its weaknesses, but the fact is this is the only book I’m aware of that describes transitioning to classical music late in life, once pop has ceased to hold much, if any, interest.
For those unfamiliar, Paul Morley was one of the very best journalists covering the punk and postpunk scenes in the U.K. in the ’70s and early ’80s. His articles and reviews for the weekly newsprint New Musical Express were something people (in my circle/niche, at any rate) looked forward to almost as much as the records that were being written about. He was younger than the other writers covering the punk scene for NME, people like Nick Kent and Charles Schaar Murray, and more brash. More punk. He cut his teeth at a time (the mid/late-’70s) when rock writers on both sides of the Atlantic regularly alluded to – and sometimes delved into – subjects remote from rock and roll – philosophy, lit, history, sports, you name it – with the assumption that there were people reading who could follow or at least were amenable to going along for the ride. It was a time when popular music criticism aspired to literature, even if it seldom reached it.
Morely’s NME writing was consistently excellent; there are reviews he wrote 40 years ago that I still remember lines from, and my memory is shit. I would go so far as to say Morley, along with Byron Coley in the U.S (who still writes a column for WIRE), was among the last great rock writers. Like Coley, he mastered the art of saying a lot in the tight spaces editors allotted, and saying it with panache.
As punk and post-punk waned, Morley pushed through the fourth wall and got into managing bands; Malcolm McLaren (naturally) was a role model – even if the bands Morley worked with were more Bow Wow Wow than Sex Pistols. Morely was the fifth (or however many) Frankie Goes to Hollywood-er and he worked with Art of Noise, one of the first British art bands to adopt sampling and other hip hop techniques in the mid-’80s, when American hip hop was fomenting what was arguably the last “shock of the new” that pop music would ever offer. (If Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Art of Noise ring no bells, or ring them faintly, don’t worry – Morley is happy to tell you about them.)
Time – which is to say the ’80s – was not on the side of intellectual rock writers, however. As the ’80s morphed into the ’90s (I would argue the ’80s have been going on for forty years now…) and post punk devolved into affectation masking the emptiness of soft dance music, Morley found less and less to get excited about. It is no surprise that he turned to writing books, penning post-facto tomes on Bowie, Joy Division, Dylan and Grace Jones as well as a bunch of books whose titles belie nothing of their subject matter. (For the record, I have read none of them, though I might read the Joy Division one some day, where Morley’s Northerner perspective likely provides worthwhile insight.)
These days, Morley is a public intellectual who gets to opine on any aspect of culture that stirs him. His essays appear in high-profile places like The Guardian. The celebrity culture critic is a British thing, going back to Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. (While people like Susan Sontag, Greil Marcus and Greg Tate fit that bill back in the day, there is no equivalent in 2021 America. Aside from Noam Chomsky and Chris Hedges, who both write about world affairs and human rights, there are no public intellectuals in the U.S. that I’m aware of, and they are nigh on invisible anyway.) Adrift in this miserable century, Morley got an itch to explore the world of classical music, a subject he knew little about. Besides ennui, his principal motivation for this enterprise seems to have been a gimmick: Morley is enough of a celebrity in the UK that the BBC offered to send him to the Royal Academy of Music to study composition if it could monitor and broadcast the shenanigans. This book is the inevitable by-product. Inevitable, I say, because it seems Morley is deeply motivated to document every moment of his life. This book is less about classical music than it is about Morley’s efforts to understand it.
Morley
It needs to be said: the writing that endeared Morley to me back in the punk rock days was, as I suggested, terse. Newspapers impose tight length constraints. If an editor says a review needs to be 600 words, that’s that. If a writer goes 25 words over, then he or she knows the editor will parse 25. Books do not have tight length limits, however, and it seems some – like this one – do not even have editors. Without mincing words, then, it is impossible to dispute the opinion of several on-line reviewers that A Sound Mind is word vomit. I doubt Morley would disagree. He admits somewhere or other in these pages to having written “millions of words” about himself. Word vomit is his shtick. He is still insightful, funny and challenging, but A Sound Mind is absurdly excessive, and you have to sift through some surprisingly pedestrian writing to get the good stuff. We all love and need water, but this is a 1600psi firehose.
A reader/reviewer on Goodreads, rather than offering her own critique of Morley’s Bowie book, simply reproduces, in its entirety, a 700-word sentence from it that is, in three tries, impossible for me to get through. I felt like Shelly Winters in the underwater swim sequence of The Poseiden Adventure trying to make it to the end of that sentence. Which is to say, I didn’t make it.
The excess verbiage, the self love, and the book’s spastically incoherent structure conceals the fact that there are ample swaths of excellent essay scattered throughout A Sound Mind‘s 600 pages. There is an excellent 350 page book – of short pieces, ideally – lost in this phonebook.
A 4-part essay on the string quartet in the book’s midsection is definitely worth reading. This is clearly one place where Morely has focused his passion – he tried to write a string quartet at the Royal Academy – and is on firm footing. He very convincingly describes the power that a string quartet possesses in live performance, for example, likening the command a great string quartet has over a concert hall to the sway a cool rock act had (and perhaps somewhere still has) in an electrified rock club. I am biased here, because I have felt exactly what he is describing and have attempted to describe it myself on previous blog posts here after attending performances by the fine string quartets (Kronos, Brooklyn Rider, Tesla) who passed through Asheville in those pre-COVID years of yore. (In fact, watching the Tesla Quartet from 2 feet away, in the front row in a packed Black Mountain College Museum gallery was exactly like rock music.
Then there are profiles, including transcriptions of interviews he conducted with them, of musicans like Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Harrison Birtwistle, John (of no middle name) Adams and others. These are valuable, and not just for the fact that each profile presents information and insight on important artists who do not get a lot of ink. These sections are filled with self-deprecating humor — an “I’m-not-worthy”-ness, or at least an “I-better-do-my-homework”-ness — that might have made the rest of the book less grating.
An essay about four days he spent at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2013, 35 years after its inception, raises points about confrontational music having lost its teeth in the 21st century that I have not seen so well articulated anywhere else. The “shock of the new” simply isn’t possible any longer, in pop OR classical music. (And so what, exactly, do we do now? We are all addicted to “new”…) And along these lines, Morley confronts – glancingly, for the most part – perceptions of classical music and the state of classical music in this disjointed world that, perhaps, only an outsider can address properly (at least when writing for other outsiders…)
Morley’s got playlists all through the book, which makes sense for an NME writer from the ’70s – the British music weeklies of the day all devoted a page or two each issue to an eclectic selection of record charts. Morley has fun with these, some of which are quite useful (for me, at any rate), some of which border on insane, and some of which should have been left out. In the first category are two playlists of Morley-recommended works by Debussy and Ravel (the latter of which spins off from the former, in true ADD fashion), which – because Morley has correctly sussed the significance of Debussy and, as with the string quartet, he has spent some time there – I intend to pursue. In the second category is a playlist of experimental classical music and outre rock music from the year 1973 (which Morley used in a lecture to composition students at the Royal Academy that I’d like to see a vid of…), where Iggy and the Stooges bump up against Glenn Gould. An oblique conceit, but fascinating reading. The Bolero versions (?!!) playlist (which spins off the Ravel playlist before that playlist even starts) falls into the third category, but then while I loves me some Ravel, I hates me some Bolero.
The book’s principal playlist (which is expanded upon in a 3-page appendix), is titled “A Few of My Favourite Things” and, like any well-annotated playlist, is fun to read. I have to say, this playlist, and the book in general, introduced me to a lot of compositions I was unaware of and got me to listen to some composers I’d not made time for before (Varese) to or hadn’t heard of at all (Earle Brown).
Now to the question, “How can someone learn enough about classical music in five years to write a 600-page book?”
In a punk rock move to echo the dust jacket’s Never Mind the Bollocks graphics, Morely opted for a flippant and absurd subtitle (“and decided to rewrite its entire history”), but unfortunately that only shines light on the fact Morely bit off WAY more than he can chew. The holes here are canyons. For example, he barely mentions a composer who many regard as the most significant composer of the last 50 years, Alfred Schnittke. Schnittke is mentioned in passing on exactly four occasions in the course of Morley’s 600 pages. And Morely can not hide the fact that he doesn’t know the century’s greatest composer – Shostakovich, duh – from Adam. It is not a primer, not by any stretch. (For those interested in a really good primer, I would HIGHLY recommend The Classical Music Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, an adult-oriented guidebook published by DK in England. I need to update my post on classical music books for the just-starting…)
Nor does A Sound Mind offer much in the way of guidance to novices confronting the almost impossibly vast world of classical music cold. Morley, as he makes plain right off, is writing about Paul Morley’s relationship with classical music. Drawn to American avant-garde counterculture figures like John Cage, Terry Riley and Lamonte Young early on, Morley’s approach to classical music was not along a well-trod path: His pitch that it is not such a great leap from listening to Eno (or Can, or Autechre) to listening to John Cage won’t be much of an assist for readers who don’t like their hi-jinks quite so abstract or ephemeral as Eno, or Can, or John Cage. Which is to say, 99% of music listeners.
Morely’s most compelling argument, intentional or not, for putting some effort into classical music is, simply enough, his enthusiasm. It takes some serious drive to generate 600 pages of text, I’m sorry, even for a word-vomiter. Morley unabashedly loves this stuff, just as much as I do and I think for most of the same reasons. Morley is an outsider writing about what amounts to a parallel universe, a universe in which no one particularly cares what he might think of things. Perhaps for Morley it’s liberating to be a novice again – I know I certainly feel that way. A sort of giddiness and a haywire energy pervade A Sound Mind, and god knows classical music can use some giddy, haywire energy. Again, I am perhaps projecting my own sense of things, but Morley seems like a kid in a candy store, agog at the shelves and shelves of brilliant music/candy, a lifetime’s supply – a dozen lifetimes’ supply – and all of it just right there… Just reach out and take it.
This mixtape is comprised (for the most part) of a few of my favorite things from Morley’s “A Few of My Favourite Things” playlist, as well as some other stuff he referenced. The mix here, like Morley’s playlist, is an ADD hodgepodge, leaping about the timeline like a flea on a hot skillet. It is stitched together with György Ligeti’s “Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes,” a tactic I’ve employed before, but it’s on Morley’s list and there’s all kinds of weird stuff that needs to be isolated on this mixtape, so what the hell. That’ll be the clacking, though: the metronomes.
0:00:03 Gustav Holst – Planets (excerpt) Simon Rattle: Philharmonia Orchestra
0:00: 23 György Ligeti: Poème Symphonique For 100 Metronomes (1962) (excerpt)
0:00:58 Claude Debussy – Préludes, Book 1, L. 117 (1910); No. 10. La cathédrale engloutie Marcelle Meyer
0:06:32 Igor Stravinsky: Pulcinella (1922); II. Serenata (excerpt) Gerard Schwartz: Seattle Symphony Orchestra
0:10:05 Harrison Birtwistle: Fantasia Upon All Notes for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet (2011) uncredited performers
0:19:21 Dmitri Shostakovich: The Gadfly Suite, Op. 97a (arr. L. Atovmyan) (1955); X. Nocturne Leonid Grin: Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra
0:23:30 Unsuk Chin: Xi for ensemble and electronics (1998), second movement David Roberts: Ensemble Intercontemporain
0:33:53 Galina Ustvolskaya: 12 Preludes for Piano; III. (1953) Natalia Andreeva
0:35:36 Krzysztof Penderecki: Largo from Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (2005) Arto Noras w/ Antoni Wit: Warsaw National PO
0:42:08 Elizabeth Maconchey: Ophelia’s Song (1926) Caroline MacPhie w/ Joseph Middleton
1:00:00 Conlon Nancarrow: Study for Player Piano 3a (1948-9)
1:03:06 Edgar Varese: Hyperprism (1923) Hans van Ronk: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
1:08:38 John Cage: In a Landscape Jeroen van Veen
1:18:00 Earle Brown: Times Five (1963) Govert Jurriaanse (flute), Arthur Moore (trombone), Teresia Tieu (harp), Jaring Walta (violin), Harro Ruijsenaars (cello), and four channels of tape sound.
1:35:16 Morton Feldman: The Viola in My Life 4, for viola & orchestra (1970) Marek Konstantynowicz w/ Christian Eggen: Norwegian Radio Orchestra
Concentration Camp 