The late Mr. John Cage celebrates this Sunday his ninety-eighth birthday. Last year or the year before, someone on the Internet — was it The Standing Room? — had the excellent idea of marking the occasion by creating a 4'33" playlist on iTunes. I'll celebrate on Sunday with my own version: everything on my computer that's four minutes and thirty-three seconds long. Although Mozart is a little over-represented — the legacy of my 2006 slog through his complete music, Köchel by Köchel — and the intrusion of Donovan is potentially jarring, I like the look of it, particularly the idea of ending with Hans Hotter's Brahms and R. Nathaniel Dett. Click to enlarge.
Links
Let there be Haas
Sylvain Cambreling / Klangforum Wien; Kairos 1233.
The fiercely original Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas is at the center of a late-summer festival entitled Moving Sounds 2010, which unfolds over the next few days at the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Czech Center, and (Le) Poisson Rouge here in New York. The curator for the event is Michel Galante, director of the Argento Chamber Ensemble. The Austrian Forum and the Music Information Center Austria have provided assistance and kept ticket prices low; the suggested donation for most events is $5. The festival also includes work of Bernhard Lang, Edmund Campion, Christian Fennesz, Steven Takasugi, and the Austrian alternative singer/songwriter Soap&Skin.
A few years ago, I was knocked sideways by Haas's large-scale ensemble piece in vain, which I mentioned at the end of The Rest Is Noise as one of the great pieces of the new century. What I find especially compelling in Haas's music is its visceral feeling for the elemental ebb and flow of sound, as if the composer were translating into instrumental or vocal terms the aural storms and surges that you find in nature. He's like Xenakis in that respect, although the analogy with natural phenomena is perhaps even stronger. He makes constant use of the overtone series, moving from intervals of blazing simplicity to saturating microtonal clouds. Although he is certainly capable of confronting the listener with dark, abrasive sounds, he avoids late-modernist clichés, what might be called the "kitsch of the difficult." There are slow-burning continuities that make one think, though never in a nostalgic sense, of Wagner, Bruckner, or even Richard Strauss, whose Metamorphosen appears on one of Argento's programs. You sense an artist who has no interest in playing intellectual games but who instead has something absolutely essential to express. It is not music in competition with any other; it makes its own world.
Underscoring that point, Haas has asked that several of his pieces be performed in partial or total darkness; on Sunday night at the Austrian Forum, the JACK Quartet will reprise their famous pitch-black rendition of the Third Quartet. I've placed a bit of in vain above; you can listen to many more tantalizing fragments of Haas's music at the website of Universal Edition (go to the audio player on the left). Argento will reprise in vain at EMPAC in Troy, NY in November.
Hiatus
Excuse me while I disappear, at least until September.
James Levine v. Lotte Lenya
I've received advance copies of the Met's CDs and DVDs honoring James Levine. The first item I put on was the 1979 telecast of Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, with Teresa Stratas as Jenny and Astrid Varnay as the widow Begbick. In this production, which was directed by John Dexter, Varnay gave her final run of performances with the company, thirty-eight years after her electrifying stage debut, in Die Walküre. The great soprano talked about Mahagonny in her delightful and perceptive memoir, Fifty-five Years in Five Acts, which appeared in 2000. Much of her account is dominated by her dislike of Dexter, whom she refers to as "Foulmouth." She has much kinder words for Levine, whom she describes as "ultra-professional." One anecdote is very funny. Lotte Lenya was observing the rehearsals, and at one point she began berating Levine for conducting "O moon of Alabama" at too slow a tempo. Varnay relates: "Jimmy looked nonchalantly up at the stage and quietly said, 'Those hookers are very tired.'"
Listen to This update
I've sent off my final corrections, and the book is done. I'm now at work assembling the Audio Guide and also arranging musical samples for the audiobook version, which I read myself. On my book tour this fall, I'll give a lecture based on the second chapter, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues."
Photo by Tyondai Braxton.
Rachmaninov in Valhalla
On my way up to the Bard Music Festival last weekend, I stopped in at the Kensico Cemetery, in Valhalla, New York, to pay my respects to Sergei Rachmaninov. Árni Heimir Ingólfsson had told me about his recent visit to the grave, and I decided to make my own pilgrimage. Kensico is a vast, verdant burial ground a little north of the city; Lou Gehrig, Danny Kaye, Tommy Dorsey, David Sarnoff, and the New Yorker's Peter Arno are among the notables who reside there. Rachmaninov lies in a secluded grove with his wife, Natalie, and their daughter, Irina Wolkonsky. An Orthodox icon rests at the foot of the cross:
A thoughtful soul had recently deposited a bottle of Russian lager and two cigarettes:
According to Kensico's history, Valhalla, a little town just to the east of the cemetery, was so named in 1861, at the instigation of "the local postmaster's wife, a student of literature, mythology and Wagnerian operas." She must have been well up on her Wagner to have known about the role of Valhalla in the Ring cycle, none of which had been performed in 1861; Das Rheingold did not have its premiere until 1869. Here's a picture of the Valhalla fire department (insert your own jokes):
Previously: At the Grave of Zemlinsky, At the Grave of Schnittke, At the Grave of Fibich, At the Grave of X. Scharwenka, At the Grave of Enescu
