The NY Philharmonic, in their newfound quest to be “hip and with it”, continues to hand out comps to anything resembling a blogger, so here I am, blogging. Chris and I had high hopes for last night’s CONTACT! show at SymphonySpace; we were particularly excited to hear Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, a huge song cycle written just before his death in 1998. Grisey’s music isn’t played very often here in New York, I assume because of the daunting demands it places on musicians, audiences, and stage managers alike; his language incorporates microtones (gradations of pitch outside the 12-note chromatic scale) as well as about half an acre of differently-sized gongs.

I’ll take a paragraph now to address the NY Phil’s PR department directly: “live-tweeting” Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil is bathetic on the level of “photo-blogging” your meal at Alinea; it speaks only of the tweeter himself. Take a step back and think, now; what does one hope to achieve by contributing 160 trenchant characters to the #nyphilcontact bucket? Nothing beyond “concert good” or “concert bad” means much to someone who wasn’t also present, experiencing the same sounds and images. A composer I vaguely recognized was sitting alone across the aisle from me, face perpetually bathed in his iPhone’s glow; was his twitter feed a stand-in for an absent companion? Here’s the other thing. Arts institutions are all about introducing technological gimmicks in the name of “outreach” and “embracing new audiences”, but what audience do we see contributing to the aforementioned bucket? Composers, PR people, hardcore new-music bloggers, the occasional “real critic”, i.e. the audience who would come to the concert anyway, and pay for it happily, too.

But I’m being mean and negative, and the Grisey was truly, spectacularly good. Chris and I agreed that the piece conforms to our rules for How to Not Be Boring. Namely:

1. use sharply defined, instantly recognizable musical materials;
2. structure your materials in a way that is audible;
3. don’t use too much, or extraneous material.

If you, too want to write a 50-minute microtonal rumination on the transience of life, civilization, and the human race, then you should probably follow these rules. Incidentally, Not Being Boring should be the absolute bare minimum, and beside its value as virtuosic spectacle, I found Quatre chants quite moving; La Mort de la Civilisation was particularly beautiful, a glacial, methodic reading of partially destroyed inscriptions on Egyptian sarcophagi.

Of course, it also helped that Alan Gilbert, the small group of NY Phil musicians, and most of all, Barbara Hannigan (a soprano/total fox) gave a committed and riveting performance. It takes the charisma of a great stage actor to hold an audience’s attention for 50 minutes, especially while remaining still and silent during, say, a five-minute drum interlude; anyone who saw Le Grand Macabre last spring (or, as I did, watched the videos on YouTube) knew that Hannigan would be up to the task:

Seems likely she’ll become a regular at Gilbert’s Philharmonic, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks for the beers, Phil, and until next time.

I added a couple of recent concerts to the piano section. They are the stellated ones, up top. Some Schumann, some regurgitated Mozart.

Post post-apocalyptic Sufjan, pre twee Sufjan.

Happy to have been Gabe’s last-minute +1 for yesterday’s Sufjan Stevens show at the Beacon. I’ve been listening to The Age of Adz for the past several weeks and have grown pretty accustomed to its strangeness— a kind of campy, DIY electro-futurism seemingly calculated to flummox fans of the precious, idealized-campfire-singalong Sufjan. During the first half of the performance, which was mostly new material, the audience seemed almost cowed; it wasn’t until after the 25-minute epic Impossible Soul and the band played the inevitable Chicago that we heard girls screaming “Sufjan, you changed my life!”

When I listen to the record, Impossible Soul seems like about five separate songs roughly stitched together, but live, it was unaccountably satisfying. It’s the same kind of sense one has trying to understand the last movement of Mahler’s 2nd symphony; if you’re not almost bodily involved in the music, it can sound episodic, or even nonsensical (but then, Mahler doesn’t have mid-movement dance parties, or release balloons from the ceiling). It makes me so, so happy to see a “pop” composer experimenting with large-scale forms, and even happier to hear them work so well. I can’t exactly even say why it works, but it has something to do with its place on the album, and in the show, and the thinning and thickening of textures, and the pacing of events. I suppose those qualities decide why most music succeeds or fails.

After which the “encore” section of the show felt like a completely different set— mostly consisting of material from Illinois, with only light contributions from the band (by the way, yeah! that was Alex Sopp up there!). Chris Thile’s quip about Arcade Fire— “ten people doing the work of four”— felt apropos here. Sufjan ended the night with the ultimate downer, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., almost whispered— you could feel the entire theater collectively holding its breath.

Speaking of songs about serial killers, I’m playing piano in Matt Marks’s The Adventures of Albert Fish on what looks to be a wholly crazy show at Galapagos on December 5th.

I made myself a new website and this is it. Take some looks around. I moved the entire thing over to WordPress, and it’s new from the very humblest line of code on up. The theme (which is WordPress-speak for the look and organization of the site) is custom, HTML5-ready, iOS compatible (not a lick of flash!), it’s called “Irksomecushion” in homage to my very first website, and no, you can’t use it. Moving to WordPress gives me nice things like RSS feeds and permalinks, as well as a content-management system that is quite smartly designed. I know, welcome to 2004!

Not everything is in place yet, in particular the Visuals section, because I haven’t thought of a satisfactory way to organize and display a gallery of pictures. (If anyone has any suggestions for a clean, customizable gallery framework, please leave a reply). That reminds me, comments! I’ve enabled them to start, even though I have mixed feelings about sites with comments. Out of the billions of comment threads on the internet, there are probably about 12 that have ever been interesting. Also I’ve heard that comment spam is a thing these days; we’ll see if WordPress’s filters are up to the task. Not only can you reply to posts on this blog, but you can comment on individual pieces in the Works section, and concerts in the Piano section, which I may live to regret. Be nice, everybody!

Also, if you’re reading this, it means you’re an unwitting beta-tester! That’s what the little “beta” up top means—it’s an easy way for me to launch a new website that still might have lots of errors in it, and have them not be my fault. But truly, if you come across anything on this new site that you think is a mistake or bug, please get in touch; I would be most grateful. I’m also grateful to many pseudonyméd people over at the WordPress community for answering my questions and generally making life easier, and to Panic (shockingly good Mac software™) for making the wonderful Coda and Transmit.

Last night was the Brad Mehldau Experience at Zankel Hall, which I’m happy to see got a rather good review in the Times. The concert was pretty much a straight run-through of his double album (more on this in a bit) Highway Rider, for a quintet of soloists and chamber orchestra. Matt Chamberlain’s drumming was particularly revelatory to me; I’m not a jazz connoisseur by any means, but it seemed to me that he was having an especially wonderful time on stage, foiling and delighting with every turn of phrase. Chamberlain doesn’t move the way I’ve seen other good drummers move; he doesn’t look loose or relaxed at all, rather more like a spring-loaded puppet with fewer joints than most humans. Whereas another drummer would flick his wrist, Chamberlain moves his entire arm, like a martial artist; it doesn’t look particularly comfortable to me, but I was enthralled by the visual effect of it, and by the incredibly complex layers of rhythm and timbre it produced.

Brad had let his grey hair grow out a bit, and also gotten thinner and put on a small velvet suit, which gave him a crazy-but-dapper professorial quality, a professor who was also possibly a charismatic and successful cult leader. His playing was characteristically inventive and virtuosic, including what sounded like an improvised fugue (!) somewhere in the last few movements (I don’t think it’s on the CD). I’m not even sure I remember how to write a fugue, much less improvise a completely natural and bad-ass sounding one, in a jazz piece. As good as it was, Highway Rider tested the limits of my concert-sitting abilities; six years of attending New Music New Haven has over-sensitized me to long concerts, and around the two hour mark I start to panic and wonder if my bike is still doing OK. Speaking of which, Carnegie Hall really needs some bike parking. It doesn’t have to be an eyesore; it could actually be an opportunity to class things up. Hire a blacksmith to do some wrought-iron grille work! Or hire David Byrne. Or teach David Byrne how to smith.

I opened the refrigerator today and found myself face to face with a large cauliflower, and nothing else. I’d picked it up at the Ft. Greene farmers’ market last weekend (which I like because it doesn’t overwhelm me). The main challenge with turning a cauliflower into an entire meal is that, frankly, it’s cauliflower. But this is a happy story, with a delicious ending, good enough in fact to post it up here.

Fig. 1: cooling on my balcony.

Roasted cauliflower

Take a head of cauliflower and hack it into medium bits. Toss it up with a fair bit of chopped garlic, smoked paprika, salt, olive oil, and (this is key) Moroccan preserved lemon. Spread it out on a baking sheet and roast at 425º for half an hour or so. While that’s happening, toast up some pecans in a skillet with a bit of chili powder. Once the cauliflower has browned parts (see fig. 1) take it out of the oven and put the pecans on top. Let the whole mess cool— it seems to get better and sweeter at room temperature.