So here is Anthony Tommasini’s review of Thursday night’s CONTACT! concert. I notice he forgot to italicize the concert title, in brazen neglect of the NY Phil’s style guidelines. He also forgot to mention how charming Magnus Lindberg’s Finnish accent is, which was a major highlight of the evening! Lindberg takes mellifluous liberties with English pronunciation; his words elide in the most disarming combinations, yet they remain strangely intelligible. When he was interviewing Marc-André Dalbavie, there was almost a charming accent critical mass.

Dalbavie’s Melodia was also my favorite piece on the bill. It began as a measured series of seemingly unconnected gestures, which gradually morphed into longer ideas, based on pentatonic Gregorian chant. Each gesture was incredibly “perfect”, in that inimitable way of French composers; fresh harmonies, beautifully inventive orchestration, just the right number of repetitions. It couldn’t have made a more stark contrast to the piece that followed (and I’m using the term “piece” in its loosest sense here), Arthur Kampela’s Macunaíma. Everyone always brings up Ives when there’s a piece with lots of activity, marching band music, funny quotes, grinding dissonance, etc. Oh, he’s a “Brazilian Charles Ives”. Actually, Macunaíma was more of a “party piece”, like Rzewski’s Les Moutons de Panurge, though without any of the interest provided by having an audible process (or, you know, any coherent structure whatsoever). It provided exactly the sensation when you throw a party, and it reaches a certain point in the evening, and you wish everyone would leave your house so you can go to bed, but you get this sinking feeling that they actually have another few hours left in them. Just like that.

Nonetheless, It was kind of fun to see the NY Phil let loose for awhile (I almost forgot I was watching the NY Phil) because the first half of the program didn’t really afford them the chance. Glenn Dicterow looked downright skittish during Arlene Sierra’s Game of Attrition; I doubt if he ever had to work so hard simply to hold his section together during the entire Maazel era. It gave the proceedings that all-too-familiar air of a student new-music concert, where everyone’s half-learned their part in dress rehearsal. Symphony Space’s unforgiving acoustic did them no favors here; the violins sounded as if they were playing in the next room. Lei Liang’s Verge faired better; he’d arranged his string orchestra as a series of stereophonic quartets, Bartók-style. This helped with sound distribution a great deal, though the opening would have sounded beautiful with a little reverb.

It’s too bad about the acoustics, because Symphony Space is a nice-sized venue for this sort of concert, and it’s informal and comfortable. They even served up a cough syrup-like booze potion afterwards. These guys are really working hard, I thought. As well they should. And though the concert was a mixed success, it’s gratifying to see the Philharmonic taking risks that would have seemed unthinkable a year ago.

Apparently it is the season of new orchestral music. Tonight I’m returning to my old stomping grounds, New Haven, to hear what the second-year MM students have come up with for the annual New Music New Haven vs. Philharmonia smackdown. Expectations are running high. You can listen to the live stream here.

Friday Thursday night, the New York Philharmonic inaugurates its new music series, CONTACT! (yes, you have to write it that way). And it’s conveniently at SymphonySpace, right in my neighborhood. I haven’t heard any of the composers on the program except for Dalbavie. All the more reason to check it out. I’ll probably write little reactions to both of these concerts; stay peeled/keep your eyes tuned.

The cap it all off, I’m in the final throes of writing an orchestra piece, the last one for a little while (I hope. Writing for orchestra is slow and exhausting). This particular piece is a concerto for violinist/violist Owen Dalby and the Albany Symphony, so, top-notch all around. It will be premièred in March.

I’ve been on extended Thanksgiving holiday in Houston for the past week. We confirmed what I had always suspected, which is that Peking duck should replace turkey as the fowl of choice. Not only is it incomparably more delicious, but the remnants are much more fun. I rendered extra fat out of the leftover skin scraps and made a rich stock out of the carcasses, in which I cooked some spätzle. I bet the Pekinese never saw that coming.

A couple days ago D. and I drove to Austin to hear the UT Contemporary Ensemble play Some Connecticut Gospel. I was a little nervous going in, because I couldn’t hear the dress rehearsal; it was a total blind date. My fears were quickly assuaged when I saw that my old flutist friend from Yale, François Minaux, was playing. He nailed that solo near the end with incredible élan (I’ve been told it is a Bitch), matched by the other players. This is the first time I’ve had the piece conducted, and I think it’s a good idea; Damon Talley held the middle hocketing section together more precisely than I’ve ever heard it.

We caught my friend Mingzhe Wang yesterday playing a short and sweet clarinet concert back in Houston, including a new piece written for him by Marcus Maroney, which had an œ ligature in the title (Chamœleon). I remembered Marcus from his intermittent but very entertaining blog, and also from his days as a teaching assistant at Yale (the girls thought he was adorable)! I found out that he also has a knack for choosing the right notes. It’s funny to think about, because it’s not really something composers discuss, but it all comes down to choosing the right notes. And these were they. The piece itself was pretty spastic, and reminded me a bit of André Previn (of all things. Though he can’t be bothered with the notes, just the spastic.) It was great to hear Ming, I don’t get to hear him play too often now that he lives in Tennessee. He is as natural and nimble a musician as you will ever find. All in all, I concur with this insightful statement from ratemyprofessors.com:

He is very passionate about what he teaches and is sometimes funny. he is a really nice person and definately not bad to look at.

I did a little experiment over the past week, to try and cultivate an association between a particular place or experience and a piece of music. I downloaded Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion, to which I then proceeded to listen nonstop— in the car, at home, on my iPhone, etc.— just intentionally overdosed on it. Now I’m going to wait a few months before I listen again, the idea being that I will have created an associative memory. I already have many accidental ones, and I’m sure anyone who listens to music regularly does as well— but I like the idea of creating an intentional link. It’s like taking photographs or writing postcards, only a bit more ethereal.

In anticipation of my third and last move this year, I was doing some thinking about my worldly possessions. I came to the conclusion that I own and love many vessels: bottles, flasks, beakers, boxes (wooden, metal, and paper), cups, satchels, etc. that serve no purpose other than to contain other objects and substances. Unfortunately none yet of the oceangoing variety.

I had a similar realization a few summers ago, when I had a job organizing the toolchests of the Yale recording studio: the majority of them were filled with things that served as attachments, that is, something you can use to attach one thing to another. Recording engineers are obsessed with finding clever and elegant ways to do this. The primary situation is mounting microphones, which sounds simple until you ask a recording engineer to do it.

Objects are more meaningful when we can sort and group them, and use them in conjunction with each other.

Image by the wonderful iconwerk.de via Flickr.

The rumors are true, I am become swine. Terrible timing; I had to pull out of a concert and a recording session with this lady, and also miss last night’s Metropolis Ensemble show at LPR and Julie Wolfe’s big piece tonight at Zankel. Thanks to Yale’s very cutting-edge new website, I was able to listen to the live stream of Thursday’s New Music New Haven concert from the comfort of my bed. The highlight was a big chunk of Chris Cerrone’s opera-in-progress, Invisible Cities— a piece I’ve watched grow and develop first hand, accompanying dozens of rehearsals over the past year. It was thrilling to hear it realized with a full orchestra.

The Food Issue of the New Yorker arrived a few days ago, and while my appetite is diminished, my capacity for reading about food (and watching Top Chef) is not. I’ve felt a secret kinship with Calvin Trillin ever since I learned we share the same favorite dish, spaghetti carbonara. This week he writes about poutine, a dish which has always struck me as ostentatiously vile (though I would probably try the foie-gras poutine). What made me smile, though, was the following anecdote:

Cautiously, I tasted the Afghan’s poutine, which was the basic fries-curds-and-gravy dish without embellishments. My response was similar to the response I’d had some years ago when the composer Ezra Laderman, despite knowing full well that few euphonious sounds had ever been coaxed out of a shofar, wrote a fanfare for shofars that I heard played at the dedication of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale: “surprisingly inoffensive.”

For the past week or so I’ve been blogging (professionally!) for the Metropolis Ensemble by way of introducing the four young(ish) composers on their upcoming concert, REVERB. Should be a pretty fresh show. I’m especially excited to see Erin Gee’s Mouthpiece X, because, seriously, can one person actually make all those noises?

Read the blog entries here.

Saw Colin Currie and St. Louis Symphony do Tan Dun’s Water Concerto at Carnegie tonight. Tan Dun’s not a composer I’ve paid much attention to, which I guess is strange, considering he represents pretty much the epitome of success in my profession.

The Concerto owes a big debt to Cage’s Water Walk— both are pieces that you really have to watch in order to experience, involving people looking quite serious while doing hilarious stuff. I also thought there was a bit of Harpo Marx in there, like one of those musical “interludes” in the movies that feel like they last for half an hour (come to think of it, this piece actually did last half an hour). The entire thing was organized like a Vaudeville— no innate logic other than a general progression of spectacle, and the more ridiculous, the better— but generally entertaining nonetheless. And there were some timbres in there I can truly say I’d never heard before. I’m trying really hard right now to convince myself I liked the piece. And yet…

I think what I’m trying to say is, I see almost no kinship between what I do and what Tan does, even though we’re in this miniscule world of “composers”. That can only be a good thing for both of us.

I was reading in Jonathan Cott’s Conversations with Glenn Gould on the subway the other day, and was intrigued by Gould’s description of a studio technique devised for his recording of Scriabin’s 5th sonata. The opening of the piece is a long trill from the bottom to the top of the keyboard, pianissimo to fortissimo, during which the engineers adjusted the source from far to near. Esentially, they created an audio “zoom lens”, using four ranks of mics placed at intervals starting from the furthest edge of the room on up to the inside of the treble register of the piano.

Using the studio as an artistic tool is old news, but not for classical production, and certainly not for a solo piano recording. I had no idea Gould’s recordings were manipulated to this extent— but it makes me want to try a “mic zoom” myself. Too bad I only own two mics.

Anyway, here is the aformentioned passage. The effect is pretty subtle but totally gripping:

Scriabin: Piano Sonata no. 5, introduction

A moment of silence for the passing of The Rest is Noise (har har).

Reading Alex’s blog was my introduction to thinking about and discussing music as a vital, current thing. This personal essay from 2004 (when I was a freshman in college), while not a work of bloggage, encapsulates many of the reasons to be thankful there is an Alex Ross. Even now, re-reading that article feels like having a friend pat me on the back and say “Everything’s going to turn out OK”. Also, critical facilities aside, the guy is one hell of a prose stylist. I’m looking forward to following his new, officially-sanctioned Unquiet Thoughts.

Brief concert plug: I saw the dress rehearsal for the new Bryan Senti/MacArthur Dance Project Ballet at Brooklyn Lyceum last night. There are two more performances; go. It is ambitious and sensorily delightful.

Image courtesy of The Big Picture.

Here’s another cover I did last weekend:

Hymn of the Big Wheel