Month: April 2005

Peter Rolufs, our friend in Tokyo, writes to propose, only half in
jest, that an American orchestra commission an Ivory-billed Woodpecker
Symphony. He sends a link to the captivating song of the Ivory-bill, which starts off sounding a bit like Giacinto Scelsi and then morphs into pure Louis Armstrong.

By way of addendum, Benjamin Weiss of Cambridge, MA writes: "As it happens, there already is a piece built around a recording of the song of the Ivory-bill Woodpecker. Lee Hyla’s ‘Wilson’s Ivory-bill,’ for baritone, piano, and tape, intersperses the recording, original composition, and bits of text from Alexander Wilson’s American Ornithology, in which Wilson discusses the havoc wreaked on his hotel room by a captive Ivory-bill." Did not know. You can hear the piece here.

Watch out for those hotel phone charges!

Having frittered away much of Good Friday listening to Dylan MP3s, I spent much of the late evening in the agreeable company of Moistworks, a new, yet not new, MP3 blog. In between, I heard Gidon Kremer play the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto, with the Baltimore Symphony at Carnegie. No words adequate to the experience immediately come to mind. A line of Yeats, maybe: "Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare rides upon sleep."

Bob Dylan is attempting a career-summarizing tour-de-force in his current run of shows at the Beacon Theatre. Songs that he’s played over three nights so far: "To Be Alone With You," "I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight," "It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)," "Visions Of Johanna," "Cold Irons Bound," "Moonlight," "Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again," "High Water (For Charley Patton)," "Summer Days," "Standing In The Doorway," "Highway 61 Revisited," "Desolation Row," "Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues," "Tombstone Blues," Love Minus Zero/No Limit," "Lonesome Day Blues," "This Wheel’s On Fire," "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," "John Brown," "Under The Red Sky," "Bye And Bye," "Shooting Star," "Honest With Me," "Masters Of War," "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right," "Drifter’s Escape," "Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power)," "Down Along The Cove," "Girl Of The North Country," "I’ll Remember You," "Tangled Up In Blue," "Tough Mama," "Floater (Too Much To Ask)," "Blind Willie McTell," "Honest With Me," "A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall," and "Mississippi." Of these, only "High Water," "Highway 61," and "Watchtower" have been repeated.

I caught Monday’s show, avec Pack, and was impressed by the power of the current band. New lead guitarist Stu Kimball plays crisp, incisive melodies, often preserving the ghost of old vocal lines that the Meister, in his urge to recompose even his most recent songs, has suppressed. After several comparatively straight-ahead years, the singing has entered another mannered phase. "Visions of Johanna" was essentially sung on two notes, the first and fifth of the scale, like "Rock Me Amadeus." Maybe Dylan is stripping down the melodies so the words come through more clearly, although I have to admit I kind of see where Sasha is coming from in terms of the whole issue of comprehensibility. I listened to the first verse of "Visions" under the impression it was "Desolation Row." But, you know, I really don’t care. Judge for yourself by listening to an MP3 at bobdylan.com. Scroll down for great 2001 versions of "Standing in the Doorway" and "Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum," a rocking 2002 "High Water," and a gorgeous 1998 "Born in Time."

Merle Haggard’s show was high-grade pleasure — effortless give-and-take between him and his band, music as smart, relaxed conversation. Kind of like Jordi Savall. I have a half-baked theory about how there are two kinds of music: 1) Marching in Lockstep, where everything’s governed by notation or electronic arrangement (orchestral classical, hip-hop, arena rock); and 2) Shuffling Along, where musicians play freely over given chords (old-school country, jazz, early-music classical). The theory needs some work, but it nicely busts up the usual pop/classical and racial divides.

Justin Davidson of Newsday goes to town on the Met’s inane new production of Faust.

On Tuesday I appeared on WNYC’s beloved Soundcheck show, alongside author and radio personality William Berger, to discuss the new Pope’s musical policies. Will, as it happens, knows a huge amount about music and the Vatican. He even quoted profusely from then-Cardinal Ratzinger’s musical writings in his book Puccini Without Excuses, which will be out in the fall. (What the Vatican has to do with Puccini is something you’ll have to read the book to find out.) In my post the other day, I offered a paraphrase of the Pope’s chapter on music in his book The Spirit of the Liturgy. Will has found the full text, and it’s fascinating stuff. I was joking when I said the Pope sounded like Adorno, but the use of phrases like "century of self-emancipating subjectivity" suggest that he may well have Minima Moralia and a few other titles on his shelves. Here’s the money graph, if one may speak of the Pope’s writings that way:

There are two developments in music itself that have their origins primarily in the West but that for a long time have affected the whole of mankind in the world culture that is being formed. Modern so-called "classical" music has maneuvered itself, with some exceptions, into an elitist ghetto, which only specialists may enter — and even they do so with what may sometimes be mixed feelings. The music of the masses has broken loose from this and treads a very different path. On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient sense (populus). It is aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. "Rock," on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumes a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments. What is to be done?

What is to be done, indeed? The Pope has one strong point. He’s saying that modern music is unnaturally divided between extremes of obscurantist complexity and extremes of mass-marketed simplicity, and he wants to see a healthy middle restored. He’s actually in a position to do something, by commissioning and cultivating works of sacred music that restore the old unity of "popular" and "classical" elements. But the discussion is framed by a drastic judgment on pop music, indeed on the "dictatorship of relativism" in modern society, and that itch to judge will make it harder for him to achieve anything positive. An irony attends on those who complain about rampant relativism, whether in music or anything else. They say that all values are being leveled. But by dividing music into "serious" and "commercial" realms, or any other simplistic binary scheme, they are leveling everything within those genres, limiting the expressive potential of each. They are relativizing like crazy, and suppressing the individual voice.

Via AC Douglas, a brilliant list on A Dog’s Life of other musical "effects," akin to the now discredited and never remotely believable "Mozart effect," which held that listening to Mozart makes you smarter. I lost 15 IQ points at a Gerard Schwarz Mostly Mozart concert in 1994, and I’m never getting them back, no matter how many episodes of Alias and 24 I watch.

Gidon Kremer, like Jordi Savall, is a performer whose gifts go far beyond simple mastery of his instrument. He creates an entire world — a vast repertory tilted toward the present; a style of performance that is at once engagingly casual and ferociously intense; programs that unfold like pages of a cryptic novel. The luminous Latvian is coming to Carnegie this week and the next. On Friday, he appears with the Baltimore Symphony, under Yuri Temirkanov, to play Giya Kancheli’s Lonesome and Shostakovich’s sublimely dark First Violin Concerto. Then, next Tuesday, he and his Kremerata ensemble present a new piece by Alexander Wustin and two more works of Shostakovich: the Viola Sonata, which the composer finished literally on his deathbed, and the Fifteenth Symphony, in an extraordinarily effective arrangement for piano trio and percussion. As I wrote last year on the blog, I heard Kremer play the "chamber Fifteenth" at the Lockenhaus Festival in 1995, and it was, as Merle Haggard sang last night, unforgettable.

“The King of Spain”

by Alex Ross

The New Yorker, May 2, 2005.

When the Catalan viol player Jordi Savall presented three concerts at the Metropolitan Museum earlier this month, one musical border after another melted away — borders between past and present, composition and improvisation, “popular” and “classical,” East and West. Centuries-old songs and dances glowed with sadness and jumped for joy. The sounds of a dozen different nations and three world religions consorted in a richly believable utopia. Savall’s first program opened with a trio of far-flung pieces: “Quantas Sabedes Amare,” a cantiga by the thirteenth-century Galician poet Martin Codax; “Nastaran,” an instrumental piece from Afghanistan in the naghma genre; and “Noumi, Noumi Yaldatii,” a Hebrew lullaby. Later in the performance, Savall pointed out that the music of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cultures often features similar or even identical melodic shapes. As he illustrated with a few phrases on his viola da gamba, a sentimental vision of global unity acquired heartbreaking force.

The Met called the series “Celebrating Jordi Savall,” and, amid the usual parade of famous, anonymous maestros, here, finally, was a man worth celebrating. Savall is not only a performer of genius but also a conductor, a scholar, a teacher, a concert impresario (he founded the Hespèrion XXI, Le Concert des Nations, and La Capella Reial de Catalunya ensembles, all of which accompanied him to New York), a record-label director (his is called Alia Vox), a minor film personality (he played on the soundtrack of the 1991 movie “Tous les Matins du Monde”), and the patriarch of a formidable musical family. He was born in Barcelona in 1941, and still lives in the area. With his wavy mane and courtly beard, he could pass for one of El Greco’s more debonair Spanish knights. Part of his mission is to restore the splendor of Iberian musical traditions, which have long been disparaged by the Teutonic mind-set of the classical world. Appropriately enough, Savall performed two of his concerts in the Medieval Sculpture Hall, in front of the great choir screen from Valladolid Cathedral, where King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were married, in 1469.

The ancestry of the viola da gamba, or viol, can be traced to Central Asia, where bowed string instruments were first observed in the tenth century. Viol-like instruments appeared in Moorish Spain not long afterward. (Perhaps this is why Savall placed a naghma piece at the beginning of his series.) The viol looks like an ancestor of the cello, but it has more in common with the guitar or the lute. It is much lighter in construction, so that even the softest tones resonate handsomely, and its strings lie flatter on the bridge, so that a single stroke of the bow can produce rich chords. On the debit side, the viol has a hard time making itself heard in a large ensemble, which is why the more muscular cello began to supersede it in the Baroque period.

No one plays this eccentric, eloquent instrument more beautifully than Savall. Minute details of phrasing, dynamics, and timbre join together in an endlessly varied singing line. The constant interweaving of melody and chords has a pronounced hypnotic effect, as Savall and friends prove on classic recordings of such masterworks as John Dowland’s “Lachrimae,” William Lawes’s Consort Sets, and the Pièces de Viole by Marin Marais and his teacher, Sainte Colombe (the lead characters in “Tous les Matins du Monde”). Anyone who thinks that the music of several centuries ago is less emotionally immediate than the modern product needs to hear a few of these disks. The Dowland, in particular, should have been packaged with appropriate medication: “Lachrimae” was published in the same year as the Second Quarto of “Hamlet,” and it goes to the brink of the same abyss.

Savall has recaptured, as far as anyone can tell, not just the technique but also the artistic spirit of the Renaissance musicians who made the viol the center of their world. One of his guiding lights is a treatise published in 1553 by Diego Ortiz, a composer-performer from Toledo, which shows the novice gambist how to embroider a given melody or chord progression with ornaments, variations, and outright inventions. It is an art of controlled improvisation, closer to jazz than to modern classical composition. Richard Taruskin, in his monumental new history of music, describes such instructional treatises as glimpses of a “great submerged iceberg of sound”—everything about the musical past that dots and lines on parchment do not preserve.

From the beginning, Savall has been lucky to find musicians who share the disciplined freedom of his style. His most important collaborator is the soprano Montserrat Figueras, to whom he has been married for thirty-seven years. She, too, looks beyond the cold facts of notation to grasp the spirit of the age: her smoky, penetrating, flatly expressive voice falls somewhere between grand opera and rural folksinging, and combines the best aspects of both. The other dominant presence in Savall’s smaller ensembles is the percussionist Pedro Estevan, whose technique runs the gamut from traditional Spanish folk music to Senegalese drumming and the European avant-garde. A heavily bearded man who slightly resembles Professor Dumbledore in “Harry Potter,” he contributes pattering polyrhythms, swaggering martial beats, and crisp splashes of tambourine. Whether anything like this racily smooth, head-nodding sound was heard in the background of Renaissance songs and dances is anyone’s guess, but the earthiness of Estevan’s approach rings historically true: even the courtliest European music of the Renaissance and the Baroque overlapped at every turn with the music of the streets.

Savall’s two concerts in the Medieval Sculpture Hall provided a rough map of his world. One, with the players of Le Concert des Nations, presented a sumptuous portrait of court music of the Baroque: the ballet given for Louis XIII in 1627, excerpts from Purcell’s “Fairy Queen,” Rameau’s “Les Indes Galantes.” The other was an almost purely domestic affair, with Savall and Figueras joined by their children Arianna and Ferran. Arianna plays the harp and sings in a light, pure voice; she has released a record under her own name. Ferran has studied the theorbo, or bass lute, and has also taken up singing, not in early-music circles but in jazz clubs around Barcelona. With the addition of Arianna and Ferran’s pop-inflected songs to the music of Spain, Greece, Israel, Afghanistan, and so on, the program became mentally hard to navigate; as a friend commented, the border between early music and smooth jazz is one that should perhaps remain intact. But it was a thrill to watch this extraordinary family making music together. During the slower stretches, I imagined a Savall Family sitcom: “But, Dad, I don’t want to play theorbo!”

The final event in the series, with the players of Le Concert des Nations and the singers of La Capella Reial, was an overwhelming experience, the concert of the year. It took place at the Temple of Dendur, where the Met presents music several times each season. Savall chose the theme “Music and Songs of War and Love,” with vocal works by Monteverdi predominating: the mini-opera “Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda,” in which the baritone Furio Zanasi gave a happily blood-curdling performance; “Tirsi e Clori,” with Arianna Savall again; and, the ne plus ultra, Monteverdi’s time-stopping madrigal “Lamento della Ninfa,” with instrumentals by Marini and Rossi providing a sombre frame. Figueras drenched the vocal line with her wine-dark tone; Andrew Lawrence-King offered piercing embroidery on the harp; and Savall somehow remained the master of the scene even as he confined himself to four repeating notes. That one quarter hour of music was as good as it gets, and I became downcast in the middle, because I realized that it had to end.

Even amid the prevailing gloom, the spirit of the dance was present throughout. By finishing up with Juan Arañés’s 1624 chacona “A La Vida Bona,” which can be heard on Alia Vox’s unofficial dance-party CD, “Villancicos y Danzas Criollas,” Savall reminded us that certain of Monteverdi’s gravely expressive bass lines echoed the sensual dances that the conquistadores brought back from the New World. Estevan banged out fat beats on his big green drum, and the circle of Savall’s world was complete.