Here are nine discs featuring contemporary (1900 and up) compositions that made 2016 somewhat less
miserable. I am not ranking them – that would be ridiculous, especially since I didn’t get all that many brand new releases. I don’t really have any qualms about saying what I think is really cool even though I entered through a side window – an attic side window – and know none of the technical aspects of music. It’s intriguing to read about technicalities and techniques to me if it’s written well, or for “laymen” (a submissive-sounding adjective I’m not thrilled with, though “novice” sounds like you’re 11) – Alex Ross of the New Yorker, whom I’ll discuss in the next blog post, can write about music’s technical aspects without boring me overtly. I think I like hearing people – composers, conductors, players – speak their interpretations of works, like on radio broadcasts. Hearing them spoken, it’s easier to understand the effects the speaker is employing and/or hoping to achieve. For me, at least.
I do have a good ear for the music, I think, because it is, quite simply, music on a level I didn’t know existed, which means I listen closely (when I can) and repeatedly. I knew something about classical, and modern classical, music before starting my radio show but I don’t think it’s necessary to know anything before you start listening if you can approach it with an open mind.
What I did know about going in, it might be worth noting since this is a solo project as of now, owed mostly to the fact I worked in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s ticket office when I was in college and got to watch one of the two or three best orchestras in the world (under Georg Solit, as they were then) pretty much whenever I felt like it. Seeing the Ike and Tina Turner Review at the Ohio State Fair in ’70, walking into a Cramps and Contortions double bill at CBGBs on my first trip to NYC in ’78, and seeing Odetta at Weinland Park Rec Center in ’89, and getting that Chicago Symphony job may have been the luckiest events in my music listening life, which has been long and incredibly rewarding. (There was a HELP WANTED sign taped on the ticket window when I was walking home!)
Also, while at that ticket office job I became increasingly insomniac owing to an Irish coffee habit, at one point going two weeks without more than an hour of sleep in a night. (To me, insomnia is only behind claustrophobia in terms of fucking up my mind…) But I would listen to the radio all night. One or both of the all-day classical music stations in Chicago back then had overnight shows with few or no commercials that I can recall, just the music and the DJ’s talking. The DJs clearly got to pick the stuff they were playing and they got into the sorts of music – Ligeti and Schnittke (or stuff like it, I don’t recall the names), but also David del Tredici and Steve Reich who were sort of popular then. The purpose of this blog is only to function like that overnight radio station.
From my time as an insomniac (I should note that eventually I got some sleeping pills from a doctor who had been caught by a TV crew dispensing sleeping pills like candy to non-prescription holders the week before and that cured the insomnia) ticket office worker in Chicago, I knew that, ultimately, oblique classical music was the best late night music that existed or ever would exist. I also took a college class with a great music professor at Ohio Wesleyan, who was a John Cage disciple or at least devotee as I recall; I sometimes think about it and wish I had that class’s textbook.
The reason I get few CDs, then, is not to avoid looking foolish (as I’m at that uncomfortable phase of life where I don’t care and probably couldn’t tell anyway) but because I live on an income people actually laugh at. A high school friend, in fact, just last fall. I don’t buy anything unless I have to. I won’t buy a CD unless – like the Ben Johnston Quartets (and I will attach a link to to a great NPR story on Johnston at 90 – it’s a very enjoyable six minutes, radio-wise) when I know it’s going to be great – in Johnston’s case from a review I read on-line and from my love of similar-sounding music (Latin American microtonal composers and Gyorgy Ligeti – the microtonal shit is the BOMB.)
(For me at least.)
((((((()))))))
“Sinking Ship” by David Dawson
So, no rankings on this list. I think I heard maybe twenty 2016 releases total and that’s not enough to make a Top Ten legit. The main reasons I don’t hear many new releases are A) because I’m broke, B) I have only been listening for two years so everything is effectively new for me, and C) I only really care about music from the modern era so there’s not all that many records in the first place. I will say the two discs from 2016 that I will be playing regularly for the rest of my life (which I hope isn’t unusually long from now) are Miranda Cuckson’s ECM New Series debut, with a rendition of the Bartok Sonata No. 2 which is raw and haunting – the music he wrote was haunting, of course, but I mean the playing and the production. There’s no melodramatic gloss to them, at least none I hear. Bartok was extremely enthusiastic – intellectually at least – by Hungarian and other deep mountain folk music, and, as Appalachians can attest, mountain folk music saws. Miranda Cuckson swipes and cuts at the melodies with sinewy arms and sweat and firm-jawed humor, giving her recording of Bartok a documentary vibe; at the same time, she and Blair McMillen (on piano, whose parts are way more expressive and involved than normal piano backing for a solo violin piece) are at ease with a subtlety, a sublimity, that is almost supernatural, like the dark tales about little girls and boys lost in the woods that the Hungarian peasants Bartok recorded on his wax cylinders told one another between takes of ancient folk songs, or while adjusting their strange costumes.
The other 2016 CD I will, for lack of a better word, worship for the rest of my life is the Kepler Quartet’s third and final installment in their 10-year project to record all ten string quartets by the Macon, Georgia-born microtonal composer Ben Johnston, who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2016. The Ben Johnston sound is simply the best sound ever made, when it’s really on, as it is in . Or so it osunds to me.
Finally, I thank ECM for sending me the downloads of the Cuckson and Danish String Quartet albums as .wav files… besides buying the Elena Langer and Ben Johnston discs, everything else on the list is from libraries – Worthington and Upper Arlington, Ohio’s kick ass and even the downtown Asheville, NC, branch had a lot of stuff that blew – or, blows – me away. You can build an awesome library and knowledge base using libraries and Youtube, I believe. (Probably 75% of what I hear comes from surfing on Youtube.) It’s good to have books, too, which is why I am going to present a useful library for exploring strange music in the next blog post.
Not just strange music. The greatest musical achievements of the 20th Century by white people.
00:31 Elena Langer: “Stop It”
Album: Elena Langer: Landscape With Three People
Performers: Anna Dennis (soprano), William Towers (tenor), Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
Label: Harmonia Mundi
07:40 Bela Bartok: Violin Sonata No. 2 (1922)
Album: Bartók /Schnittke/Lutoslawski
Performers: Miranda Cuckson (violin) & Blair McMillen (piano)
Label: EMI New Series
31:05 Alberto Ginastera: Harp Concerto, op. 25 (1956), 1st movement
Album: Ginastera: 100
Performers: Yolanda Kondonassis w/ Raphal Jiminez: Oberlin Orchestra
Label: Oberlin Conservatory
41:48 Michal Spisak: Andante and Allegro for Violin and Orchestra (1954)
Album: Polish Violin Concertos
Performers: Piotr Plawner (violin) w/ Jürgen Bruns: Kammersymphonie Berlin
Label: Naxos
53:12 Ben Johnston: String Quartet No. 7 (1984)
Album: Ben Johnston String Quartets No.
Performers: Kepler Quartet
Label: New World Records
1:19:21 Timo Andres: “Words Fail”
Album: Yevgeny Kutik: Words Fail
Performers: Yevgeny Kutik (violin) and Timo Andres (piano)
Label: Marquis (Canada)
1:30:55 Adès: Arcadiana for String Quartet, Op. 12 (1994)
Album: Danish String Quartet
Performers: Danish String Quartet
Label: ECM New Series
1:51:38 Michael van der Sloot: “shadow, echo, memory”
Album: Shadow, Echo, Memory
Performers: Northwstern University Cello Ensemble (Sono Luminus)
Label: Sono Luminus
2:03:48 Carolina Eyck: Noustaf/Needad
Album: Fantasias for Theremin
Performers: Carolina Eyck and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble
Label: Butterscotch
Concentration Camp 