This past week has been spent rather hermetically. It’s spring break for Yale, which means New Haven is pleasant and empty (disrupted only by last weekend’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, a riotous city-wide, Guinness-fueled, verdure-clad affair, accompanied by much brawling). I’ve been working doggedly to finish Dave’s concerto, and though so far he’s been admirably patient with me, I’m setting next weekend as my personal deadline. We’ll see how that works out.

Otherwise, I’ve kept busy doing odd jobs around the recording studio, experimenting with new Thai noodle recipes, and raptly tracking the shipment of a new Macbook Pro (which seems to be taking the slow boat from Shanghai).

My friends at Cordarounds shipped me some beta pants yesterday, which I’ve been field-testing. I think they’re the best summer-weather trousers ever devised, and strongly recommend them to all eligible wearers (which, sadly, excludes all but the very brawniest of women). You can read all about the science behind the wales here.

The Times advertising supplement (sorry, T Design) has a feature on one of my favorite designers, Naoto Fukasawa. Like everything in the T magazines, it’s a little light on substance, more just an excuse for everyone to talk about how great he is. Even Dieter Rams has nothing but breathless praise, and he’s German! Somebody should straight away get to work importing those +/-0 products. Otherwise, I might just have to move to Tokyo.

I had the pleasure of hearing Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads live two and a half times last week: one and a half times in New Haven and again last night in New York. It’s an album-length oratorio, of sorts, which mixes instrumental numbers with vocal settings of primary-source texts taken from the week following Hurricane Katrina.

Music that tries to make a political point rarely convinces me— which is probably my personal failing, since the two seem to have gone together since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of politics. What makes Katrina Ballads surpass the category of political music is that its politics are almost beside the point; it feels more like a work about understanding than one about propaganda. If Dennis Hastert happens to come off as a cold-hearted lunatic, or George W. Bush as a stuttering blockhead, that’s because they actually did that week. Katrina Ballads has a message, certainly, but it’s given to us with admirable perspective and remarkable selflessness; I never once felt I was being preached to, or emotionally manipulated. (Incidentally, I wonder if the choice of the word “Ballads” has anything to do with Rzewski’s North American Ballads; the last piece of that set, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, is the only other politically-motivated work I can think of that is as successful and affecting.)

Perhaps another reason Katrina Ballads feels so different from other political music is that the music itself is always the first priority. I’ve always known Ted is a good composer, but what I hadn’t known is that he has the ability, chameleon-like, to blend his style into practically any musical genre that suits his purpose, and he makes them all work together as a consistent whole. He sets Barbara Bush’s infamous “This is working very well for them” quote (from an NPR interview—it’s still shocking to hear it) to easy-breezy but harmonically subversive ragtime, Kanye West’s impassioned tirade (from a live NBC telethon) to slowly-building gospel/R&B (though it’s not made explicit until the climactic line “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”), and Anderson Cooper’s blustering anger in high operatic style. Though most of this music is quite accessible, it never sounds cliché or facile. The instrumental writing is beautifully handled, skillfully employing more “new music-y” tricks (multiphonics, looping pedals, piano-drumming) to serve the greater dramatic purpose.

Of course, the piece wouldn’t be such a hit if the performers weren’t so intense and dedicated. Ted’s hand-picked band (including many Manhattan School new-music stalwarts) clearly love the music, and love playing together. The five singers are pitch-perfect, navigating Ted’s difficult passages and stylistic shifts with aplomb. Mezzo Abby Fischer was eerily, smarmily composed as Barbara Bush; soprano Allison Semmes was in turn preternaturally unflappable as Sen. Mary Landrieu, then vulnerable and affecting as flood victim Ashley Nelson. Tenor (maybe countertenor? that stuff was pretty high) Isaiah Robinson really stole the show in the Kanye West movement; the climax of the song was an almost joyful release of angry passion. Ted himself took a break from conducting to deliver the virtuosic “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a Nixon-esque disintegration of the president’s comment to former FEMA head Michael Brown. And baritone Anthony Turner, singing the text of another hurricane victim, conveyed utter desolation and despair in “My wife, I can’t find her body”.

I’m pretty much in awe of Ted right now. He’s expended a tremendous amount of time, effort, and money to bring all these people together and perform (and in a couple weeks, record) this huge, difficult piece, which he not only wrote, but also conducts and sings. I think Katrina Ballads has a great future, and I can’t think of anybody better to advocate it than Ted. I hope it makes him famous.

We filled Roulette to capacity for last Saturday’s IGIGI concert. Representatives of three generations of my family were there! The generation gap was definitely in attendance, too; Lainie’s Tongue of Thorns, a raucous four-axe homage to the Velvet Underground, provoked some ear-plugging by the over-50 crowd, while the 20-somethings grooved contentedly in their seats. It made me wonder how many composers’ parents listen to their progeny’s music on a regular basis; how many could even stand to? I loaded up some of my music on my Mom’s new iPod, so I’ll have to sneak a look at her play counts.

I think part of the reason for this new-music generation gap is that people my age have no real concept of what “New Music” is, or how to approach it. We’ve grown up exposed to a much wider variety of sounds than our parents, which both desensitizes our ears but also makes them open-minded. Our parents, on the other hand, were the last children to have been brought up with the ideal of the concert hall as Sacred Space, and its confluent Modernist notions of “pure music”. They expect music to operate at several different levels of activity, all at once, all the time: intellectual, narrative, and performative.

From this standpoint, a piece like Jen Stock’s Grainary doesn’t make sense as a concert work, because it creates an atmosphere with spare, repetitive sounds and video rather than a rigorously developed progression of musical “material”. For me, though, it evoked something my old teacher John Halle said in regard to Alvin Lucier’s music: “something that should be boring, but isn’t”. Large-scale mechanical/industrial processes are one of those things, and I think Jen hinted at this potential fascination in Grainary. I always love those terrible segments on the Food Network or the History Channel where they show the mesmerizing insides of a camera-lens factory, or the candy assembly line. Here’s a great photo essay of how Legos are made. I think why I love watching these and why I love listening to repetitive music stem from the same part of my brain.

Lainie’s music continues to enchant me in this regard. Her two new pieces, Tongue of Thorns and Do You? revealed an even stricter minimalist bent than her earlier music. I thought the melodica-clarinet-voice trio in Do You? was particularly cool, and I’m always a sucker for those insanely catchy fractured rhythms, though I think it could have been even better if the instruments were amplified and mixed to ensure proper balance (and boost the volume).

Alex’s new pieces mix his incredibly catholic tastes in surprising, intriguing, often quite funny ways. I actually LOLed during Slightly Less Awkward People, which I don’t do nearly enough of at concerts in general. I played The Last Resort Party Band with my Yale friends and composer-saxophonist Emilia Tamburri, which we recorded the next day— I’m eager to hear it— and then Alex performed his melodica/piano piece Inland himself. I’m really interested in the possibilities of this combination; the toy-like melodica holds up remarkably well.

I’m looking forward to more collaborations with these wonderful composers in the near future… stay tuned. I have lots more updates that might have to wait until next week.