Month: January 2017

Dec. 10, 2016; noon matinee.

A big part of the reason I started listening to 20th Century classical music two years ago was a conscious attempt to regain or at least retain what’s left of my attention span. Listening to pieces that run upwards of 20 or 30 minutes – where time is pretty much a natural entity and not a restraint – is not easy for me. I am used to three minute songs – Motown, the Ramones, the Beatles – with occasional 8-minute arty numbers. Sometimes it is easy to follow a longer piece over the course of its voyage – rarely returning to anything familiar that isn’t at least disguised or transmogrified. Sometimes it isn’t. I’m afraid that that may go for the writing on this blog. My good-as-I-can seems half-assed to me now, at least relative to what I wrote, or how I approached writing, when I was a young man. Unlike people in my kids’ age range – twenty-somethings who grew up in the Ninja Turtle/Hanna Montana milieu – people my age once knew how to pay attention.

At some point in the late ’90s to mid aughts my attention span was violently assaulted, anally raped while its head was slammed repeatedly into a cement curb, and then left to lie there shattered, barely alive, slipping in and out of consciousness. Maybe the exact date was 9-11. Or maybe it was the day that Kanye swiped that award out of Taylor Swift’s hands. It was definitely gone long before Obama created – literally, created – ISIS. Finally, pieced together like a toppled vase and “returned to action”, my current attention span functions in a cloddish diminished fashion, not even a shadow of its old self. My attention span used to read books for an hour or two at a time, for fuck’s sake, and spend entire nights just listening to records. Now, it works the gears into a burned-oil smell to focus on anything for longer than two minutes. It would have been better, I sometimes think, to have grown up without an attention span at all, like people my kids’ age.

Do you know what I mean?

I should say the Trump election has not helped my ability to focus on anything. Trump’s approach, to OVERWHELM – with volume, with audacity, with utter amorality and utter lack of coherence – is TOO MUCH AT ONCE. I feel drugged or beaten on a symbolic level when I visit news sites since the election. It’s not Trump himself but what he means that is disorienting. The president is only a symbol – I understand that. This is a country that carpet-bombed Vietnam, there’s nothing benign about it. Trump’s election, I suppose, merely removes any illusion of a kind or wise Uncle Sam in the picture, a set of ideals to aspire to. Obliterates the illusion. My one solace is that it’s ultimately good to shatter illusions. At least I know I, personally, am better off not believing in Santa Claus, or God*. Though it is fun to remember what the illusion felt like.

I mention Trump because he had been president-elect for almost exactly one month when I went to the cineplex on the five-lane highway ten miles south of downtown to see L’Amour de loin, Kaija Saariaho’s 2000 opera. (When my daughter heard that I was going to watch an opera at a movie theater, her first thought was senior citizen… which I embrace), and the election has colored everything that I have thought about since. I certainly had not left the shadow of November 9 (another 9-11 if you write your dates the Euro way!) a mere month later, I guarantee you, so it was inside my head as I watched and listened. My bullshit detector goes off at the slightest stirring these days. It goes off for imagined things, sounds in parallel dimensions even.

And I mention attention span because L’Amour de loin, I knew going in, was three hours long and had just three characters and a single set – dozens of parallel rows of LED lights and a robotic crane.  I was not sure I could handle it. I struggle to read books anymore but still do, in fits and starts, and I’ve pretty much quit watching movies because I can’t do 90 minutes. I should note, too, that the stakes were somewhat high: It cost $25 to get in (though I had a $5 off gift card from donating blood), which is about a tenth of my weekly income if things are going well. It was not the sort of challenge I would have issued a younger version of myself, when I skydove and walked on building ledges in self-dares, but I am an old man now – 18 months from the senior citizen discount for real – and this seemed like a challenge I’d survive.

Kaija Saariaho is a Finnish composer I play on my Orchestral Maneuvers radio show all the time. She will be all over CC Mixtape #4, by the way, which will draw from Scandinavia. It seems most people who closely follow this sort of music would agree that if she’s not the greatest living producing composer at this point, she’s at least in the top 2 or 3. As a young woman in the ’70s, she had been among a circle of brash and experimental Finns – composers and conductors who pushed boundaries and wove electronics and tapes into their music . Sort of as with David Bowie’s work as he aged, you still hear very noticeably the aesthetic vigor in Saariaho’s present-century work (despite contradictory claims by some detractors who feel she’s gotten predictable…) I’ve come to love her music in much the same way I love the music of her countryman Einojuhani Rautavaara (RIP, 2016) and the Hungarian Gyorgy Ligeti – it’s capable of violent jolts and intense beauty at the same time, ideas sometimes going off like unexpected fireworks in a house fire.  L’Amour de loin (“Love From Afar” is the the translation – despite four years of French in high school, my first thought was it was about a lion and would involve animal costumes) made its Metropolitan Opera debut on December 1, 2016. On Dec. 10 it was broadcast live via closed circuit stream to movie theaters around the world. It was a significant event in its own right – a still fairly vital (born ’52) composer getting the big stage – but significant also due to the fact it was the first opera written by a woman to be performed at the Met in over a century (1903, and then as one-half of a double bill.) And Saariaho’s opera was conducted by a woman, Susanna Mälkki, likewise a Finn and recently established music director of the formidable Helsinki PO. All that’s cool. I like women.

Still, I had my doubts regarding my attention span. I was, moreover, unsure as to whether or not I should smoke marijuana before I went in, in case the idea of sitting among a bunch of white-haired people on a sunny Saturday morning might prompt a quiet, self-contained hysteria once I was in my seat… I took one small puff finally, which was good. I was not bored for one second once the show got going. In fact I was surprised the intermission and end came as soon as they seemed to have.

The whole story aspect of the opera takes place either in a boat crossing the Mediterranean or on balconies overlooking the Mediterranean. The lights were constantly shifting, often to create the illusion of moon- or sunlight, or the reflection of a nighttime port, on water. They achieved a sort of an uncanny super-reality in this respect. It felt like three hours on the sea. But for significant stretches, too, the lights were abstract arrangements of carefully-programmed and shimmering colors – blurs and smears of screeching pink, black-light-poster deep indigo and glowing yellows. The effect of the LED lights in combination with the obliquely beautiful and iridescent shrouds of sound Kaariajo has come to perfect represented the best light show I have ever seen (and I did see the Led Zeppelin laser show at the Columbus Museum of Science and Industry).

The plot itself (the libretto is by Amin Maalouf) is a love story reduced to its barest essence, really, with two strangers and an intermediary, a voyage and a death. The story could be told effectively on stage in a half hour, so the action was not packed and there was a lot of repeated dialogue, a lot of repeated ideas. A lot of repeated dialogue. And a lot of repeated ideas. This contributed to the sort of hypnotic effect the set design and music already achieved. Ultimately, the whole of the production felt like a James Turrell installation, at least what I’d imagine one to feel like based upon pictures in magazines.

All three actors/singers were staggeringly good, and despite my praise for Robert Lepage’s direction and Michael Curry’s set design, that’s the main reason L’Amour de loin was brilliant when all was said and done. No matter what the set looks like or the music sounds like, a weak character in a three-person cast would have sunk it like a cinder block in a diving pool. (There was a sort of Greek chorus that popped up out of the waves from time to time, but they did not constitute a character.) The princess was played by a woman, Susanna Gilbert, who escaped from Alabama and had attended the premiere of the opera in Salzburg with her Mississippian grandmother, and she brought genuine young woman sensuality to the role, sort of in a Kate Bush way. The boatsman was an androgynous character, played here by a woman, who looked sort of like Isabella Rosselini in Blue Velvet. I Google-Imaged her – Tamara Mumford – to see what she looks like normally and it is nothing like her character. The male lead, Eric Owens, suggested an African American Bert Lahr, and he totally sold his character’s foolish – and fatal – longing for a woman he’s only heard of. The brilliant acting of these three – both full-body and facial, owing to the closeup cameras – while simultaneously singing the ridiculously complicated parts seemed, as this music so often does, like a feat of magic to me.

Over the three hours I was periodically reminded it was a live event, experiencing a mild vertiginous awareness each time. The closed circuit cameras used for the broadcast went out every fifteen minutes or so, digitally evaporating into a gray screen with a dot matrix message in the corner, and this reinforced the live event factor in a tension-building way, since you could never be certain if the whole program would cut out.

The theater I saw it in, moreover, was the kind of suburban cineplex where you can see three or four sloshed soft drinks stained onto the screen when a solid color is projected, which continually reminded me I was in a cineplex in North Carolina.

The live factor and the size of the screen (as opposed to that of a laptop, which is how I’d have seen it otherwise) made the price of admission worthwhile. I don’t know if I’ll ever go to another Metropolitan Opera simulcast, mainly because they do not do modern-period works as a rule. There are some 20th C. operas I would pay $25 to see – Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Janacek’s House of the Dead, and Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtensk come immediately to mind – but the Met usually sticks with the stand-by’s, at least if this year’s schedule is indicative of the near future. I don’t really like the music in, say, Wagner or Rossini or Verdi operas too much, just as I don’t really enjoy 19th century and prior symphonic music. But this was $25 well spent.

There is no CD of the L’Amour de loin available for sale, though there is one from Harmonia Mundi available by downloading… 30 tracks at $.89 each or $17.49 for the whole LP on Amazon… I don’t THINK so. I hope someone has the clarity of mind to release this Met production. A live recording would be fine. You can watch a performance on DVD, issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 2005, which features disco-looking sets by Peter Sellars, but I would say, after seeing the Met version, DON’T. You can probably watch the version I saw on the Met site somewhere or other.

One final note: A friend pointed out to me that Saariaho is married to Jean-Baptiste Barriere, a radical electronic composer who began releasing records in the late ’70s and scored a “props opera” by Peter Greenway in ’97. I am listening to an album of his on Youtube right now and it is insane. He and Saariaho have two kids, who must be among the coolest people in the room at any given moment. Youtube, as I often say on my radio show, is a fantastic way to listen to obscure music. It represents the best aspects of the internet, I think. It’s a good way to hear music from Saariaho as well, much of which is out of print or rare and very expensive on Amazon.

I will include links to Alex Ross’s review of the opera from the New Yorker and to the New York Times’ preview of the production, which has information on all the principals.

_______________________________

* It would be good to have a God to believe in if only to shunt some blame His way. As in, “God really fucked up with the opposable thumbs.” Which is true, but where God really fucked up, two major ways, is this: he made reproduction pleasurable – more pleasurable than any other sensation for most people – AND he made our brains too big, to where we understand that we were going to die. What in the F*** was He/She/It (say it fast) thinking on those?!?

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/31/the-oceanic-music-of-kaija-saariaho

00:00:50
Galina Ustvolskaya (USSR, 1919-2006) : Grand Duet for Cello and Piano (1959), 1^st movement
Performers: Mistislav Rostropovich (cello) and Alexei Lubimov (piano)
      from Rostropovich: EMI Recordings (box set)

00:03:51
Introduction
Erik Satie (France, 1866-1925) : 42 Vexations (1893)
Performer: Stephane Ginsburgh
      from Erik Satie: 42 Vexations (Sub Rosa, 2009)

00:10:00
Dobrinka Tabakova (Bulgaria/U.K., 1980 – ) : Insight (2002)
Performers: Roman Mints (violin), Maxim Rysanov (viola) and Kristina Blaumane (cello)
      from Dobrinka Tabakova: String Paths (ECM New Series, 2013)

00:19:46
Maurice Ravel (France, 1875-1937) : Piano Trio in A minor (1914), III. Passacaille.
Performers: Borodin Trio
      from Ravel: Trio/Debussy: Sonatas (Chandos, 1986)

00:27:50
Bela Bartok (Hungary, 1881-1945) : Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926), 2^nd movement
Performers: Zoltan Kocsis (piano) with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Ivan Fischer conducting
      from Bartok: Piano Concerto No. 1 and Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (Philips, 1985)

00:35:20
Dmitri Shostakovich (USSR, 1906-1975): Piano Trio No. 2 in E, Opus 8 (1944)
Performers: Florestan Trio
from Shostakovich: Piano Trios 1& 2, Seven Romances (Hyperion, 2011)

00:40:53
Alfred Schnittke (USSR, 1934-1998) : String Quartet No. 3 (1983), 1^st movement
Performers: Kronos Quartet
      from Schnittke: The Complete String Quartets (Nonesuch, 1998)

00:47:29
Gyorgi Ligeti (Hungary, 1923– 2006): Chamber Concerto for 13 Instruments (1969), 3^rd movement
Performers: Schonberg Ensemble conducted by Reinbert de Leeuw
      from: The Ligeti Project I (Alliance, 2001)

00:51:15
Jon Leifs (Iceland, 1899-1968) : String Quartet No. 2, Vita et Mors (1948-51)
Performers: Yggdrasil Quartet
      from: Jon Leifs: The Three String Quartets (BIS, 1994)

01:23:16
Rebecca Clarke (UK, 1886-1979) : “The Donkey” (words by G.K. Chesterton)
Performers: Patricia Wright (soprano) and Kathron Sturrock (piano)
from Cloths of Heaven: Songs & Chamber Works (Guild, 2005)

01:26:32
Pavel Haas (Moravia, 1899-1944) : String Quartet No. 2, “From the Monkey Mountains” (1925)
Performers: Pavel Haas String Quartet, with Colin Currie, percussion
      from Janáček: Intimate Letters/Haas: String Quartet #2 (Supraphon, 2007)

The aim of Concentration Camp is to be a site where people who are interested in 20th and 21st century “classical” music (a problematic term I’ll discuss later) can read, hear and share things that might be interesting and perhaps even moving to them…

Along with the Mixcloud site of the same name, the hope is to expose as many people as possible to music they might not otherwise get to hear, since most “classical” radio stations rarely play anything beyond a very finite set of modern pieces – “Appalachian Spring,” for example, or Gorecki’s third symphony, much like “classic rock” stations do.  Most orchestras and chamber groups, likewise, shy away from 20th century and 21st century music for their concert programs; typically, modern pieces, if they are played at all, are given the short opening slot on a three-piece bill. As in, “Whew, that’s over, now let’s get to the Mozart.” It’s understandable – most people (or, consumers) have finite storage for music and a finite capacity for dealing with confrontational ideas.

This site is an outgrowth of a radio show I started doing a couple years ago in my town of Asheville, NC. I was offered a two-hour slot and I picked classical as a challenge to myself, since I knew very little about it. I’ve learned a lot in two years, thanks to a lot of reading and listening, but I will remain a novice until the end, I’m afraid. But I have come to love composers like Shostakovich, Schnittke, Saariaho, Ligeti, Ustvolskaya and Ives and believe they should be heard, so I’m going to play them…

For the record, the name “Concentration Camp” is more double entendre than pun. While the historical term lines up neatly with time frame of music that’ll be presented and discussed – the British coined the term in 1901 to describe a tactic employed in the Boer War, where they rounded up and held the families of tenacious insurgents – and while the music I’ll play largely reflects the fact that the 20th C. was a nightmare, the show is as much about listening closely to – concentrating on – music that pays infinite dividends to close listeners. I used to be able to concentrate, but now I have to go to camp to work on it…

Which is too bad. I would suggest that by giving such short shrift to the groundbreaking and extremely fun-to-listen-to music of the 20th and 21st centuries, the classical music establishment writes its own death sentence. Classical music’s audience in the U.S., at least outside of major cities, is wrinkled of skin and silver of hair – a demographic that skews conservative and “safe”. If younger (and “younger” is relative here…) people heard the music from the modern and post-modern eras, I think, that audience might actually grow… Instead, discovering music from the last 120 years requires some work. It’s fun work. I’ll do it.

All anyone needs to know about me or my motivation here is that I was a history and literature teacher for 21 years (and so like the narratives involved in the music) and listening to music has always been the thing I loved best aside from spending time my family and my dogs. And I am a “lay person.” I didn’t start listening to classical music until my mid-50s (I’m 58 now) when I came into possession of two large classical CD collections from people who knew their shit. I sold a lot of the 19th century and prior stuff on Amazon – because, I will admit, it does little for me – but hung on to the modern stuff out of curiosity. And then I started hearing music that BLEW ME AWAY. Psychedelic (for lack of a better word) beyond what I knew possible, music where weird, sometimes subtle and sometimes sweeping melodies are free to take flight and where bludgeoning force and fragile wisps of sound might coexist in the same piece. I think it is the best music ever made by white people.

I think I say out loud at least once a day how lucky I am to have found this music. To consider that I almost passed through life without hearing Arnold Schnittke or Galina Ustvolskaya or Ben Johnston or Einojuhani Rautavaara is staggering to me. These and many other composers have given me a lot to think about at a time – not just in my own old age but within this hyper frantic consumer culture we’re all of us living in – when we need to make sure we keep thinking. The name “Concentration Camp” is a double entendre if that’s not obvious. While the historical term lines up neatly with time frame of music I’ll present – the British coined the term in 1901 to describe a tactic employed in the Boer War, where they rounded up and held the families of tenacious insurgents – the show is about listening closely to – concentrating on – music that pays infinite dividends to close listeners.

While I’m a novice and will undoubtedly make errors, I am trying to make myself an expert – or at least get to the point I can hang in conversations with people whose minds function far more forcefully than mine in these matters – and I will share some incredibly helpful book titles and websites in future posts. And I hope people might write in to, or for, this blog site, so that I might learn from them. I have had inestimable guidance in discovering new music from friends I’ve made via a radio show I do for WSFM 103.3 in Asheville, North Carolina, called “Orchestral Maneuvers” (I needed a name fast), which I also put on Mixcloud. The Concentration Camp mixtapes I’ll put on Mixcloud will be like those shows, only without ads and PSAs and, hopefully, as many mistakes…

A caveat for people who, like I did, approach classical music while rooted in various forms of pop or hook-and-beat driven music: sometimes it takes four or five or six listens to really appreciate or get a piece. It takes a lot more patience than we’re used to. But concentrating pays off. At least for me; hopefully, it will for you as well. hopefully for you, too.

If you want to write for the blog – record and performance reviews would be great! – feel free to contact me at deafmix3@hotmail. Yeah, I’m old.

                                                                                                           Don Howland; Asheville, NC; Jan. 1, 2017