2019 in Classical Music
I could cut and paste the opening line of my “Year in Review” posts, or at least the first half of it: 20__ SUCKED on the macro level, but…
…it was, nevertheless a good year for modern-era classical music.
Again, I spent the entire f’ing year in a sort of low-grade shock as I watched our racist, misogynist and imbecilic head of state thrash about incessantly, his motivations (his fanboy love of Putin, his never-checked egomania, and his brazen contempt for all those in the 99% who don’t support him) flashing in 50 ft.-high neon like the street-facing side of a 2-bit casino.
And again, three things kept me afloat: hiking in the woods, reading, and this music. About hiking nothing needs be said, although Scott Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning tree-centric novel The Overstory did enhance my already-deep appreciation for nature (which is boundless.) The other books I read of the non-musicological variety were mostly ones that chronicled the rise of fascism in mid-century Europe, just so the eerie parallels in our time would never stray too far from my consciousness. The music, like my hikes in the nearby national forest, is a mostly abstract experience, and I will say again that listening – or even trying to listen – to 10- or 15- or 30-minute pieces is restorative, a form of meditation. I feel incredibly lucky to have found this music.
So here are my favorite things from the past year.
1) Women.
I don’t agree with 2020 Obama on much, but I do agree with his recent assertion that women make, or at least would make, much better rulers than men, both temperamentally and intellectually.
I find myself, increasingly, gravitating to women composers these days. It no doubt reflects some deeper need in this age of trump. To be sure, I’ve sought out women composers since I got the slot – featured Composers-of-the-Month over the years have included Rebecca Clarke, Grazyna Bacewicz, Ustvolskaya (thrice), Gubaidulina, Gloria Coates (twice), Kaija Saariaho, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Johanna Beyer and Ruth Crawford, Nina C. Young, and Lera Auerbach. But now I’m sort of getting to where I ONLY want to hear women.
Luckily, women composers are no longer considered novelties, and artists and labels are working hard to rectify the neglect women composers of yore experienced and to present vital music by contemporary women composers. There were enough great releases by contemporary women last year, in fact, that I devoted an entire mixtape to them:
2) NMC Recordings
NMC is a “charity” or “co-op” label in England, which means they’re funded by grants. NMC promotes U.K. composers from all corners, including Australia. There are a lot of interesting composers active in England – it would seem to have the greatest concentration of young and younger talent of any place in the world, if you were to judge based on NMC’s back catalogue. It features avant-garde heavyweights like Birtwistle, Ferneyhough, Maconchy, and Lutyens but also young or younger composers like Joe Cutler and Joanna Bailie and a whole lot more… Maybe that’s just the sort of illusion a colorful, for-the-people label can create, but I think not. The website is nmcrec.co.uk and has some handy interactive tools for identifying composers you might like. I’d suggest starting with the music of Joanna Bailie or Joe Cutler. You can refer to this Mixtape and the playlist that goes with it:
3) German & Austrian Composers
I realized when I started this project of re-wiring my brain that I would have to limit the scope of my exploring because, quite simply, I am too old to take on the breadth of contemporary art music. I realized that four years ago, before I had any idea how much truly brilliant music is out there. There’s too much worth hearing.
So I set some parameters that I’ve followed generally, which exclude substantial chunks of what most would consider the essential repertoire of the “modern” period as I define it (1880-present). If one was to scroll through the four years of playlists for the radio show I do on WSFM in Asheville, she or her would notice a relative dearth of works by either German or American male composers. The reason for these exclusions is simple: the histories of the two countries across the time period I cover are despicable. (I generally exempt women from blame for past events, unless it’s, say, Hillary Clinton in 2016 not campaigning in Pennsylvania or Wisconsin.)
This year I finally got around to acknowledging the absurdity of that parameter. Artists are not responsible for their nations’ evil deeds. Should I hate Aaron Copland or Missy Mazzoli because they lived through decades of blatantly evil U.S. foreign policy?
For me, that meant I had to check out Schoenberg and cohorts. Part of my no-Kraut rule was that I’d never heard anything by the “Second Viennese School” that moved me. Four years of listening to complex music has apparently loosened me up. Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Wellesz – all of them wrote fantastic music.
Webern, I should add, apparently was pro-Nazi, and that took some rationalizing on my part, because I am so repelled by what I know of the Nazis (and I have read way too much), I would have voted to incinerate the country and all of its inhabitants after WWII. Without even thinking about it. Webern’s orchestral music, on a CD from Naxos with a Japanese conductor leading an Irish chamber orchestra (the sort of thing that makes Naxos so cool.) The record struck me as sharing a stark and dark vibe with Joy Division’s first album. Which is to say, it rocks.
The other German composers I listened to for the first time in 2019 and loved were two mid-century men – Karl Amadeus Hartmann and Bernd Alois Zimmermann – and then Karl Werner Henze, a radical Leftist (which meant something in the Baader-Meinhoff days…) who was writing great work at the same time the Russian Thaw composers were emerging in the U.S.S.R. I am just starting out with these guys, so I don’t feel comfortable saying much beyond the fact I heard pieces by all three I really liked last year.
4.) Books by Peter Schmelz: Such Freedom (if only musical) and Alfred Schnittke’s
Concerto Grosso No. 1
Schmelz is a (soon-to-be full) professor of musicology at Arizona State. He has had two books published to date, both on Oxford University Press and both of them on a fascinating era of Soviet music, the period in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, when young composers like Schnittke, Part, Gubaidulina, Tishchenko, and Denisov (among others) were in Conservatories and suddenly freed to experiment. The period was and is referred to as the Thaw. To my way of listening, that Thaw period (which began icing back up in short order after Khruschev was succeeded by Breshnev as the head of government) ultimately represented the greatest concentration of genius the post-war music world has ever seen.
Schmelz’s first book is an overview of the Thaw, titled Such Freedom. Schmelz, in an email response to one I’d sent delineating my difficulty in locating a copy, suggested Such Freedom might be difficult for a non-academic and that his more recent book on Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 was directed at a broader audience, but I beg to differ. Schmelz is a good-enough writer (not super common in academe) that he can engage “lay” people like myself in addition to academics. Both books tell stories, for one thing, and are very easy to follow – even for those of us for whom pages of scores are, in effect, blank.
The way Schmelz tells it, the Soviet Thaw reminds me of jazz scenes I’d read about, like the Beboppers in the 1950s or the free jazz loft parties described in Leroi Jones/Amira Baraka’s books. Or even the rock scenes in mid-’70s NYC and the U.K. I will be devoting an OM show or two to the Thaw period this winter, including excerpts from an interview I did with Schmelz, who is a very gracious and affable guy. I found a copy of Such Freedom on Biblio for $25 so don’t despair like I did if you see prices three and four times that on amazon. F*** amazon, anyway!
The Schnittke book, which reminds me of that series of rock and roll books devoted to a single important album, in the way it weaves history and biography into a consideration of one piece. It is recent and available for cover price, at least.
I’m doing a Thaw CC Mixtape. It’ll give an idea of what was going on in Russia from ’55 to ’70 or so. Famous people and some I’d not encountered before.
5) Brick and mortar record stores.
Or, in my case, store, singular. I am the sort of person who hung out in record stores for many years, until I was around 40. It’s easy enough – even still – to find stores with most genres of music stocked to the gills, but there are not many stores, used or new, that maintain a good-sized classical inventory. I found one this year, and it reminded me of how much fun it is to dig through stacks and talk w/ proprietors who know their shit.
The store I found is Horizon Records in Greenville, SC. Ryan at Harvest here in Asheville (which has a small bin with a nice selection of new classical CDs, if you are in the area and looking for a gift) told me about Horizon. He said Horizon has a separate sound-proofed room for large classical and jazz sections. I drove down there a couple days later and it was beyond my expectations. I must have spent 6 or 7 hours combing the racks over that first and four repeat visits. I probably picked up a few dozen discs, nearly all of them ones I’d never have ordered over amazon, many by composers I’d not heard of, and nearly all of them winners/keepers. I would estimate the CD section has 5-600 discs and there are perhaps 1,000 LPs, many on offbeat labels and containing performances never issued on CD. The owner, Gene Berger, is a classical (and jazz) fan, as you’d expect, but luckily he goes for older stuff.
If you know of any stores w/ large used and/or new classical sections, in any part of the U.S., please email me at deafmix3@hotmail.com because I’m going to do some long-ass driving soon.
6) Local shows!
The Kronos Quartet at the Wortham Center; Trio Karenine and the ATOS trio at ACMS
It was great luck that I got to see the Kronos Quartet, whose appearance I hadn’t known about until two nights before, in September. A close call indeed. It could easily have been a lowlight, of which 2019 was rife.
I think I and many other people sort of take the KQ for granted. They have been so vital for so long that they seem safe. The Kronos Quartet’s contribution to the music world on behalf of contemporary composers is impossible to overestimate. They played a potpourri on this tour , most of it good to great. The show, in the beautiful and perfect-sounding Wortham Theater in downtown Asheville, was a good two hours worth of music; the ensemble’s lighting director used two “spotlights” projected on the curtained backdrop to maximum effect, complimenting the music perfectly. Below is a link to the “review” I wrote for my radio station.
https://www.ashevillefm.org/post/review-of-kronos-quartet-at-wortham-center-sep-17-2019/
The Asheville Chamber Music Society, meanwhile, holds most of its shows in a 1960s-golden brick Unitarian church, which somehow has great acoustics, and the lighting is more like a school gym’s, but they bring outstanding acts to town. There are so many great musicians around today, thanks to the many music schools cranking out technically superb players, that you can be fairly certain the European acts, especially, that the ACMS brings in will be top-tier. Seeing the ATOS Trio play Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67 this fall, and the Trio Karenine play Ravel’s Piano Trio last winter, were the best half-hours of my year. Reviews of those two shows can be found on this site.
Concentration Camp 