In what must surely be the most impor­tant career devel­op­ment of 2015, I have made my cooking show début. Thanks to Adrienne Stortz for the video.

The yMusic album “Balance Problems” is out, and contains the piece I wrote for them last year, Safe Travels.

The album is a little differ­ent from your typical composer-compi­la­tion, which is a good thing. I’d say it’s more of an inter­pre­tive album, albeit of music that all happens to have been written for the group. But it’s not weighed down trying to be the defin­i­tive version of any of these pieces, a burden which can some­times lead to dutiful, bland record­ings. This is largely a factor of the sheen of futur­is­tic studio produc­tion provided by Ryan Lott (a.k.a Son Lux). 

It also helps that the music is so good and varied throughout—I’m chuffed to be sharing space with Marcos Balter, Andrew Norman, Mark Dancigers, Nico Muhly, Sufjan Stevens, and Jeremy Turner. 

And yes, if it wasn’t already evident, we live in the age of the Insta­gram Album Cover.

yMusic plays live in NYC on Oct. 10, at Rockwood Music Hall.

I figure if anything goes up here, it’s this photo. Tweets are fleeting, blog posts are forever, or some­thing like that.

David Cossin (center) anchors our perfor­mance of Steve Reich’s Four Organs last night at BAM, with Philip Glass, Nico Muhly, Mr. Reich, and yours truly. You can see Nico & me engaging in some subtle conduct­ing. Photo by Stephanie Berger.

Here is a liner note I wrote to accom­pany the CD/DVD release of Louis Andriessen’s La Commedia in 2014.

—

Louis Andriessen initially found noto­ri­ety as some­thing of a provo­ca­teur, a composer whose noisy, auda­cious jugger­nauts combined mini­mal­ism, leftist politics, and his char­ac­ter­is­tic “terri­fy­ing twenty-first century orches­tra.” La Commedia is his fourth “opera”, really a cycle of five mini-cantatas—not exactly an adap­ta­tion of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but a wide-ranging setting of parts of it. But what happens when Andriessen—at 75, still some­thing of an iconoclast—decides to tackle one of the monu­ments of western thought? And is he doing so with a straight face, or being a bit of a prankster?

The first tableau, The City of Dis or: The Ship of Fools opens with a busy surround-sound collage: car horns, bicycle bells, jack­ham­mers, sirens, and motor­cy­cles blend with lightly unpre­dictable mini­mal­ist urbanity. It sounds familiar, appear­ing nonthreatening—the sound­scape is of Andriessen’s native Amsterdam—but the city’s earthly appear­ance masks what truly happens in Dis. Its world mirrors our own, but not every­thing is as it seems. Though it resem­bles a typical city, with its frenzy of activity and profu­sion of archi­tec­tural styles (includ­ing Jewish and Islamic ones—heretical, after all), Dis is essen­tially a huge, hot torture chamber. A rowdy men’s chorus sings a passage from “The Blue Barge”, a common Renais­sance version of the “Ship of Fools” allegory; crewed by vari­ously inept and sinful char­ac­ters, the barge is a symbol of the unknow­ing and uncaring damned. In fact, we are already deep inside the pit of Dante’s Hell. Dis (a name given to the Devil as well as a city he some­times occupies) encom­passes the sixth through ninth circles of “Nether Hell”, and it is here that the most mali­cious crim­i­nals are punished. 

Though La Commedia calls for a mish-mash of vocal styles, the default Louis Andriessen affect is close to that of early music singing. Much of the expo­si­tion of the piece is in dense Bach-ian chorale, but notes and words remain intel­li­gi­ble thanks to minimal use of vibrato. Falling, melting gestures char­ac­ter­ize much of the vocal writing of the first three parts of La Commedia, denoting both physical downward motion and keening lamen­ta­tion. Chords take on an over­whelm­ing gravity; normal major and minor triads have been larded with tritones and seconds, and can do nothing but descend.

Of course, there is nothing partic­u­larly unique about word-painting or “madri­gal­ism”, a device which has been used in text setting since at least the 16^th century; what makes Andriessen’s use notable is its integrity within his style. Perhaps because there is some­thing cartoon­ish, or Pop Art, in his music already, he is able to make choices which in another composer’s work would come off as overly literal, out of place. Alluring and distanc­ing at the same time, these musical quota­tion marks frame La Commedia with a cool objec­tiv­ity even in its most impas­sioned moments. It’s a canny way to take a massive work like the Divine Comedy and capture it in a series of emblem­atic portraits.

Racconto dell’Inferno is intro­duced by those same chorale chords from Dis, heard in stark, percus­sive unison. An agoniz­ing descent intro­duces the body of the piece, which tells of Dante’s descent into the tar pit (György Ligeti’s Devil’s Stair­case étude, perhaps, borne down by heavy goo?) and of the demons and devils he encoun­ters there. Bass clar­inets and pianos scurry unpre­dictably in and out of muddy orches­tral timbres; the music describes hideous crea­tures, half-human, half-reptile, tortur­ing sinners and each other. Dante’s narra­tion is sung by a contralto, in lilting, discon­nected chant-like bits—the 14^th-century Italian lowering himself into an ageless, culture-less pit. 

Though intensely refer­en­tial, La Commedia is far from rever­en­tial. This is typical of Andriessen’s music, which has codified awkward juxta­po­si­tions into a style of surpris­ing power. Chunks that sound wildly differ­ent from each other are mashed together haphaz­ardly, or adul­ter­ated; the sacred becomes profane. Debussy and Ravel make appear­ances in cartoon­ish form, as visitors from the ‘easy listen­ing’ Clas­si­cal bin. Granitic chunks of music allude to the cere­mo­nial modu­lar­ity of Stravin­sky, Messiaen, and Bach. And espe­cially in the second half of the piece, popular styles pervade, ranging from Floren­tine folk music to bebop, rock, and musical theater, often swerving reck­lessly from one to the next in the span of a few minutes. 

It is perhaps not music at all, but the spirit of Hierony­mus Bosch which most strongly pervades La Commedia—partic­u­larly his triptych “Garden of Earthly Delights”. Like Bosch, Andriessen crams a huge amount of detail into what is essen­tially a flat plane; one has the sense that the work could very well expand ad infini­tum in either musical time or visual space. Bosch gives us a birds’-eye sliver of enormous worlds, and Andriessen only emblem­atic moments of Dante. Both revel in the bizarre, the obscene, and the grotesque (it’s no coin­ci­dence that both Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights” and Andriessen’s Racconto dell’Inferno include somebody making “a trumpet out of his ass”). Andriessen’s music is some­thing of a Boschian creature itself, its own peculiar form assem­bled from the “wrong” parts of other music. 

Most vividly picto­r­ial is Andriessen’s portrait of the Devil himself in Lucifer. This is truly beastly, physical music. A long intro­duc­tory section broods and thrashes around in the depths of the orches­tra, chewing on the same material for eight minutes, as if unable to look away, before any voices enter. The orches­tra­tion here is will­fully dense; thick, repeated chords in snarling winds and cimbalom, attack after down-bow attack in the strings, and an elec­tronic borbo­ryg­mus of crack­ling embers and thunder. Andriessen’s famously stubborn brand of repe­ti­tion becomes program­matic here; neither musical nor polit­i­cal state­ment, it is instead telling a story of obses­sive, unending destruc­tion: Lucifer’s planned revenge on God and Humans. Male chorus narrates this story over an ostinato of bass guitar, cimbalom and drumset, sounding like nothing so much as Andriessen-ized death metal—which makes perfect sense, given that genre’s preoc­cu­pa­tion with all things Hellish. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights is the most frag­men­tary movement, contain­ing passages that are both uproar­i­ously funny and surpris­ingly heart­felt. Styl­is­tic plural­ism reigns here; the musi­cians are instructed to swing eighth notes, like an old-fash­ioned jazz band. The music never quite coheres, though, before moving on to the next thing. Andriessen, like Bosch, encour­ages the eye (or the ear) to wander. There is such a lot to take in, so much beau­ti­ful absur­dity, it seems to say—unthinkable to linger in any one place for too long. The jazz licks turn a sharp corner into Ital­ianate folk ballad—actually a poem from Dante’s Convivio, sung here by his friend Casella, and harmo­nized with a Stravin­skian tang; next, a banal fanfare bursting out of nowhere, trumpets and strings glee­fully out of sync. 

In the center of the Garden, Dante sees two angels swoop down to attack a snake (“the same perhaps that offered Eve the bitter fruit”). Sinuous, chro­matic lines depict the serpent as liter­ally as any Renais­sance madrigal; when the angels drive it off, the music turns leering, burlesque, decid­edly secular—some pageantry put on for the benefit of our tourist-hero, perhaps. The movement closes with an excerpt from the Song of Songs, set to rich harmonies straight from a Nino Rota film score—a swoon­ingly Romantic conver­gence of text and music in relief from the mostly Apol­lon­ian canvas. The moment passes quickly, though, and Garden of Earthly Delights ends equiv­o­cally with a series of softly clashing octa­tonic chords. 

The final tableau of La Commedia may be the only Lux Aeterna ever written in irony. Harp and children’s choir (winking clichés) intro­duce the movement in archaic-sounding Dorian mode. But the angelic timbres are soon under­mined by quietly disso­nant tutti chords—the same that accom­pa­nied our journey through Hell—alongside echoes of Dante’s narra­tive chants from Racconto. Even though we are now in Heaven, the music is coloured by Dante’s expe­ri­ence in Hell; as bard and histo­rian, it’s his duty to remember these things, Andriessen’s music seems to say, by rote. 

Though La Commedia is mostly not an explic­itly polit­i­cal work, Andriessen and Dante align polit­i­cally in the perversely contrast­ing middle section of Luce Etterna. Here is an extended encounter with Dante’s great-great-grand­fa­ther, Cacciaguida, bitterly lament­ing the degra­da­tion of Floren­tine society and the corrup­tion of its nobility. But rather than Dante’s Italian, Andriessen uses a contem­po­rary Dutch trans­la­tion, and treats the entire passage as a kind of extended rap verse—spoken over insis­tent percus­sion. Andriessen himself invites us to read into this musical decision in his program note for Die Staat (The Republic), a seminal work of 1970’s mini­mal­ist agitprop: 

How you arrange your musical material, the tech­niques you use and the instru­ments you score for, are largely deter­mined by your own social circum­stances and listen­ing experience…the moment the musical material is ordered it becomes culture and hence a social entity.

Cacciaguida’s speech is lifted from 1100’s Florence into Andriessen’s contem­po­rary Europe. But both the speech and the setting artic­u­late the same thing—an oppo­si­tion to the conspic­u­ously “high culture”, and a longing for a more demo­c­ra­tic society. By refer­enc­ing a musical style that has wide popu­lar­ity yet little accep­tance from the gate­keep­ers of the “high art” orches­tral world, Andriessen uses Cacciaguida’s mono­logue to subtly jab modern-day elitism. 

A brief finale serves as some­thing like a punch line to the entire drama. The opening harps of Luce Etterna are recast as one of Andriessen’s ragged fanfares, over which, in sing-song Dutch, the children’s choir recites an impudent moral: 

These are all my notes for you, and if you do not get it, you won’t get the Last Judge­ment you will never get it, ever.

In Dante’s Paradiso, this passage is a solemn warning spoken by a divine eagle. Andriessen trans­forms it into a kind of self-refer­en­tial gag. After close to two hours of dense, eventful music, a bunch of unruly kids break down the fourth wall, teasing the audience: if that was too much for you, well, you’re beyond help. It’s just a comedy, they seem to be saying—there’s nothing partic­u­larly divine about it.

Just a quick note to say that I’ve put up a provi­sional 2014–15 season calendar. Lots of exciting things happen­ing, and of course more will be added as they’re announced. 

In scraping infor­ma­tion from lots of presen­ter’s web site calen­dars, I’ve noticed that many of them are astound­ingly unusable. I don’t think I’ve solved the calendar problem too well myself, and I don’t even have much data to present. The best I’ve seen is probably Lincoln Center’s master calendar, though it links to a bewil­der­ing assort­ment of sub-sites, not all of which are as good. Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic’s calendar is rather attrac­tive, and they include a nice archive of past seasons going back to 1934 (!).

Here’s a nice video of Chris Cerrone’s I Will Learn To Love a Person, which I performed back in March with Mellissa Hughes, Christa van Alstine, and Ian Rosen­baum. All micro­tones absolutely intentional.

I also wrote a little “editor’s note” about the piece, to preface its imminent publication: 

I’ve been immersed in Christo­pher Cerrone’s music for several years—performing, discussing, observ­ing the process, and occa­sion­ally offering advice—and I’ve come to think of it all as “vocal music”, even in its purely instru­men­tal moments. In his Invis­i­ble Overture, one of the earliest pieces I heard, an arching woodwind melody emerges from violent string gestures, a premo­ni­tion of the elegiac opera to follow (Invis­i­ble Cities). It’s a recur­ring setup in his music: relent­less devel­op­ment of a single musical point, until it is almost forced to become a song.

Chris’s I Will Learn to Love a Person is a piece about relationships—personal, romantic, harmonic, and timbral. Like all of his music, it obses­sively controls its limited musical mate­ri­als in service of big emotional catharses.

There are two contrast­ing “types” of song in I Will Learn to Love a Person. The first, third, and fifth songs emerge from extem­po­ra­ne­ous-sounding clouds of harmonies and words: call it text message recita­tive. The second and fourth songs are bright and motoric, with a candid humor that coun­ter­acts the extreme vulner­a­bil­ity of the slow move­ments. The five songs are master­fully sequenced in a harmonic palin­drome, with short inter­ludes of repeated E’s acting as pivot points. Harmonic changes are few, and withheld until they feel revelatory. 

The rela­tion­ship of text and music is no less painstak­ing. It’s a rare case in which a musical setting is more than the sum of its parts: Tao Lin’s poems, which can be diffi­cult to pin down on the page (are they sincere, or a bit glib?) and the music, so diaphanous at times it seems in danger of evaporating—powerfully concen­trate each other in combi­na­tion. Both elements sound simpler than they actually are. The pianist offhand­edly touches some notes, outlin­ing a harmony, over which the singer declaims what could be a series of self-pitying text messages: 

seen from a great enough distance i cannot be seen
 i feel this as an extremely distinct sensa­tion
 of feeling like shit

I Will Learn… requires a wide-ranging and nuanced dramatic perfor­mance in order to work correctly; perhaps more than a song cycle, it should be thought of as a self-analyt­i­cal monodrama. Its protag­o­nist is a preco­cious observer of the world and other people, but also immature and wildly heart­bro­ken; the process of the piece is the discov­ery that there is, of course, no set of rules that govern human relationships.

In last night’s dream I somehow placed Mozart’s rondo “alla Turca” within Schu­bert’s penul­ti­mate piano sonata (the big A major, D. 959). I’ve never under­stood why Schubert put a double scherzo in that sonata, I said to myself. Played it very loud and fast because I didn’t know what else to do, and it sounded all right.

We need a work song about working on Work Songs.

Begin­ning to realize that I dislike repeat signs, nota­tion­ally and concep­tu­ally. They are tiny worm­holes in music during which I seem to give up on anything inter­pre­tive; I don’t know what to do with them. 

I some­times feel a creeping dissat­is­fac­tion with my perfor­mances of the first section of Kreis­le­ri­ana (and yes, I realize my obses­sion with Kreis­le­ri­ana)—even when the phrases were phrased, the notes hit accu­rately, and the pedaling clean, the overall form had an inap­pro­pri­ately sing-song quality, the over-neatness of rhymed couplets. The relent­less modu­la­tions and impul­sive rhythms felt pinned down. 

The problem, I think, is with the little air-spaces between repeats—between achieve­ment of the high D and return to the initial A—during which the whole thing slackens and comes tumbling down; the visual disrup­tion of moving one’s eyes back­wards over a chunk of music becomes a few millisec­onds of help­less­ness. My theory is that this all could have been avoided by writing out the repeats, so the music was simply contin­u­ous, which of course is how it should sound.

Accord­ing to a global search of my iMessage database:

• you don’t have a laptop.
• you don’t have to justify your evils to me.
• you don’t have a printer?
• you don’t have to punish yourself :)
• you don’t have that problem
• you don’t have a performance?
• you don’t have this problem, do you?
• you don’t have my extra rugs, do you?
• you don’t have to fuck to be a fucker.
• you don’t have a score, do you?
• you don’t have to worry about how you stuff it in your pocket.
• you don’t have to drank.
• you don’t have to give me a comp.
• you don’t have 5 seconds to respond saying “sorry i’m busy”
• you don’t have an iPad
• you don’t have any interest in selling a tux, do you?
• you don’t have almonds?
• you don’t have an iPhone 5?
• you don’t have to say why.
• you don’t have a Japanese girlfriend
• you don’t have to come all the way here :)
• you don’t have to make your own quesadilla
• you don’t have to tell me
• you don’t have HIV
• you don’t have to kill them to get the feathers!
• you don’t have to thank John Adams.
• you don’t have to go to school tomorrow!
• you don’t have iOS 7 on your iPhone?
• you don’t have a toilet-side table?
• you don’t have your songs played on the radio
• you don’t have to wait an extra month
• you don’t have to get on a plane
• you don’t have a thermometer.
• you don’t have a big ego?
• you don’t have any money?
• you don’t have to write them out, but they’re confus­ing how you’ve got them