I got my first bad review a few days ago, of Shy and Mighty. My reaction was initially one of outrage: “how could this guy I’ve never heard of not like my music?” To make matters worse, the one track he singled out as worth­while— Flir­ta­tion Avenue— is the one that‘s kind of purposely “bad”. (No account­ing for taste, I suppose.) After receiv­ing a few condo­lences from friends who’d seen the writeup, I began to see the issue more philo­soph­i­cally. In fact, why would I want entirely good reviews? If one’s music is a little bit polar­iz­ing, isn’t that a good thing? My god, I have friends who don’t even like Brahms, so what hope do I have?

Happy second-to-longest day of the year, everyone. Life’s entirely downhill from tomorrow on out. 

In the waxing crepus­cu­lar hours, you may as well peruse Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s new website for Project 440. Come then, look beyond the clip-arty logo, listen to five-minute musical excerpts from each of 60 nomi­nated composers, and leave friendly comments about your favorites (I think that was pretty subtle). 

Fig. 1: Top 10 Hottest Cartoon Char­ac­ters, no. 10.

Fans of The Books will no doubt recog­nize the lyric “I can’t find the books/ They must be in La Jolla”. I always assumed it was no more than a passing refer­ence to the group’s name, perhaps from an old movie or TV show. In the car yester­day on the way from New Haven to New York, I caught part of a This American Life program, rebroad­cast from 2002, that revealed the line to be so much more. Turns out it is excerpted from a “viral voice­mail” (people had to amuse them­selves somehow before YouTube) that was circu­lated around the Columbia campus during the early 1990’s (perhaps around the time Paul de Jong was working as an assis­tant to Otto Luening). All these little unex­pected connec­tions between things; the line now takes on a completely differ­ent meaning, which I think is just the kind of cultural archæol­ogy The Books love. I won’t spoil the episode by reveal­ing the content of said voice­mail, but you can listen to the entire episode, which is excel­lent, here.

Both of my Sunday concerts (at Yale and LPR) went swim­mingly; Wendy’s concert was a heart­warm­ing, family affair, which can happen when you come from a family of string players. I’ve already got a solid record­ing of Clamber Music up for you to hear (thanks, Fred Plaut Record­ing Studio!). LPR was also a pretty emotional scene, because it was the last Ensemble ACJW concert of the season, and lots of its members are “grad­u­at­ing”; scary, to be cast out into the open sea of New York Musi­cians with no nour­ish­ing mother to get you gigs and order you around.

Tangen­tially related: Why is Carnegie Hall‘s website so terrible? I feel like it’s 1998 and I’m loading it on my G3 Power­book in Internet Explorer 4. Half the thing doesn’t even show up on my iPhone/iPad. You’d think mobile devices would be one of their primary targets (imagine you‘re out and about and wonder what’s on tonight. Just try pulling up the site on your iPhone; the calendar won’t load. You could always go to the very user-friendly text only version). The design is a weird mishmash of fonts and colors jammed together into one hideous mosaic. To round it all out, there’s a huge, empty black footer. Carnegie Hall, you’re so wonder­ful in so many ways; your web presence is not one of them, and it doesn’t do you justice.

Fig. 1: The grandiose diva.

So proud of this woman I could prac­ti­cally burst: my grand­mother, Marian Seldes, is getting a “lifetime achieve­ment” Tony award tomorrow (which is not for her work on the Lifetime Channel).

Here is an article in this week’s New York Times Magazine about her; I recom­mend you read all the way to the end for a vivid descrip­tion of the smell of Le Poisson Rouge’s dressing room.

Off to New Haven right now to rehearse my new piece for Wendy Sharp and Tema Watstein, Clamber Music. The concert is this coming Sunday, the 13^th, at 2 o’ clock in Sprague Hall; post-concert I will jump back on Metro-North to catch Ensemble ACJW at Le Poisson Rouge playing their new collab­o­ra­tive dance suite, includ­ing my own contri­bu­tion, How to Pop and Lock in Thirteen Steps. It’s just a Metro-North kind of weekend.

What with the frenetic activ­i­ties of last month begin­ning to wind down (last night I submit­ted a new piece with minutes to spare, but only because I’m currently on Central time), it looks as if I may have time to post actual blog entries from time to time.

I’ve been thinking about the past couple of shows I was involved in (the Shy and Mighty release and the two Metrop­o­lis Ensemble concerts), and I have to say, they were some of the most artis­ti­cally and profes­sion­ally satis­fy­ing expe­ri­ences I’ve had in my life. I think this was partly because they were truly collaborative—composer, perform­ers, and presen­ters all with fresh and ambi­tious ideas about what we do.

That said, the follow­ing video of Metrop­o­lis Ensemble perform­ing at Trinity Wall St. is maybe not the most exciting thing to watch, but the perfor­mances them­selves are top-notch. This was our “trial run” before that evening’s show at Angel Orensanz. The music doesn‘t start until about five minutes in; there‘s some pontif­i­cat­ing (we’re talking about a giant cathe­dral, after all, pontif­i­ca­tion is the mandate). There­after, the program is my Para­phrase on Themes of Brian Eno; Andrew Norman’s Grand Turismo; Anna Clyne’s Within Her Arms; and finally Home Stretch.

Fig. 1: 8‑eyes.

Tomorrow (Monday, May 17) my co-pianist David Kaplan and I take to the stage at Le Poisson Rouge to cele­brate the release of Shy and Mighty on Nonesuch. We will also be releas­ing a live tiger; please bring hamburger meat.

Doors open at 6:30; we go on at 7:30. There will be plenty of CD’s there, as well as much merriment.

Also I was thrilled to see Dan Johnson’s lovely review in my old hometown rag, the New Haven Advocate. If you’re not reading him, you should be; he speaks truth. Happy Sunday everybody.

Fig. 1: The FedEx man brought me this today.

Shy and Mighty’s long-awaited release from captiv­ity approaches. Next week Dave gets into town and we start rehears­ing for the May 17^th show. In the meantime, some pœple had some very nice things to say about the album. Quoth Alex Ross:

…the music achieves an unhur­ried grandeur that has rarely been felt in American music since John Adams came on the scene. The language is essen­tially Romantic, but progres­sions such as you might find in Chopin and Brahms are slowed down and elon­gated; it’s as if the contents of an imperial drawing room had been strewn along the side of a desert highway. Nothing is harder for a young composer than to find an indi­vid­ual voice. Andres is on his way: more mighty than shy, he sounds like himself.

Well I don’t know what to say! I’m blushing.

Then John Jurgensen at the Wall Street Journal examined my stoner-music influ­ences.

Le Poißon Rouge is doing a package deal where you can buy a ticket to the album release concert and the CD all-in-one and save, I don’t know, $5. Enough for ⅚ of a beer.

Epic photo of Owen Dalby playing Look Around You with Albany Symphony. Seen here switch­ing from viola to violin (in the space of one and a half bars). There are more photos from the show over at the Symphony’s Flickr page.

I hope to post an audio excerpt of the piece soon; in the meantime, you can hear the première of Crashing Through Fences with Ian Rosen­baum and Mindy Heinsohn playing glock­en­spiel, piccolo, and kick­drums. Over here now.

The NY Phil­har­monic hosted another “blogger night” for its new contem­po­rary music series, CONTACT!, on Friday. I was espe­cially eager to go for a few reasons. I knew two of the composers person­ally (Sean and Nico) and was eager to see what they‘d come up with for the Phil­har­monic; I‘m also just inter­ested to watch the evolu­tion of the series, the exis­tence of which would have been unthink­able even a couple of years ago. (You can read some of my thoughts on the first CONTACT! show here.) I‘d never seen Alan Gilbert conduct before, embar­rass­ingly enough. And lastly, who am I to turn down free tickets from the NY Phil­har­monic? Just a composer who dearly hopes he might be commis­sioned someday, too! (I think was subtle. Was that subtle?)

So I met my dear friend Ted up at Symphony Space. That place still needs to get more legroom. And less carpet­ing. But other than that, it‘s a nice venue for a new music concert, and it was pretty packed on Friday, which was great to see (I wonder if the second show, at the Met museum, where they didn‘t hand out massive numbers of free tickets, was as full). I was looking forward to hearing some music, but CONTACT! wants to be all up in your face about it before­hand, which is probably why they named it that. I‘m all for putting composers in the spot­light and making them talk. But there was So Much Pontif­i­cat­ing. Alan Gilbert, John Schæfer, Magnus Lindberg PLUS Sean, Nico, and Matthias Pintscher; all smart, charis­matic, and artic­u­late people, but just too many voices. They could have cut down the talking and added a fourth piece to the program.

The music on this show felt completely in place at a New York Phil­har­monic Concert; polished and inven­tive, but not too risky. Sean’s piece, These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, sounded ravish­ing— quite a feat in the bone-dry acoustic of Symphony Space. It struck me as cele­brat­ing a partic­u­lar kind of virtu­os­ity or craft, both compo­si­tional and instru­men­tal. The level of work­man­ship of the piece was so obvi­ously of the highest quality that the musi­cians responded by genuinely playing their best. Sean‘s musical language is very much an “embar­rass­ment of riches” kind of sound— beau­ti­ful details fly by at an alarming rate. I had the feeling of being at some sort of over­whelm­ing buffet and wanting to eat every­thing, but not being able to take it all in. The piece was struc­tured in seven or eight very short, contin­u­ous episodes, and I missed a logical thread connect­ing them, but mostly I was so amused by what was taking place at that very moment that it didn‘t bother me.

Nico joked before­hand that he wrote a piece without any detail, knowing it would be paired with Sean’s obses­sively detailed one. (Their titles, however, share a certain simi­lar­ity of tone; Nico’s is called Detailed Instruc­tions.) It actually was quite a stark change from Sean’s gesture-driven music to Nico’s, which is pulse-driven (even when he distorts the pulse with cæsuras and jump-cuts) and rigor­ously struc­tural. Here, I felt, a more flat­ter­ing acoustic would have done the music many favors; the orches­tra­tion was down­right arid, with the excep­tion of the middle section, which worked up a lovely, Brian Eno-esque soupi­ness. Overall, though, the piece felt a bit pale after Sean’s riot of color; maybe this had to do with Nico’s decision to cast out the violins in favor of more violas, which didn’t seem to adequately fill out the sound. It was as though an impor­tant frequency of the orches­tra had been EQ‘d into oblivion. Of course, this may have just been a factor of program order, and could have easily been fixed by swapping the first two pieces.

Matthias Pintscher’s songs from Solomon’s garden was clearly meant to be the “big piece” on the program, and it had a big star in it: Thomas Hampson. He looked earnest and a bit out of place in his New Music Concert­blax and avun­cu­lar reading specs. I think Hampson is a good singer, and his album of Mahler lieder saw me through high school, but I think he was a terrible choice for the Pintscher. I always have a hard time telling what pitch bari­tones are singing, much less in music that lacks any sort of tonal center, and here the vocal writing was very “generic New Music”: tritone here, minor second there, major seventh leap for a partic­u­larly expres­sive moment. I commented to Ted that I would have liked to hear a more pure-voiced singer like Theo Bleck­mann sing it; the more abstract the harmonic language, the more dead-on precise the singer’s pitch has to be.

Pintscher’s orches­tral writing was exquis­ite to a fault, but I didn’t under­stand how it related to the vocal line or the text (which was set in the original Hebrew). Every compo­si­tional decision seemed geared toward achiev­ing a partic­u­lar kind of æsthetic beauty, in a control-freak watch­maker sort of way, but as in These Partic­u­lar Circum­stances, I failed to grasp a narra­tive thread; the struc­ture of the piece seemed to be completely a function of the text. I guess I’m more of the David Lang school of text setting, where I like my words to wedge them­selves into a musical form, not vice versa. Music and text are struc­tured differ­ently for a reason; reading poetry takes place in the reader’s mind, at his own pace, while music exists in real time, meaning it can control the audience’s percep­tion of time passing. Why even bother setting text if you don’t have any of your own inter­pre­ta­tion to add? Other­wise you’re more of a glori­fied medieval trou­ba­dour, strum­ming your lute quietly along to a dramatic recita­tion. If that‘s the affect Pintscher was trying to achieve, that‘s fine, but in that case, he should have set the text in English, and made absolutely sure we could under­stand every word without follow­ing along in the program (which it was too dark to read, anyway); it would seem a safe assump­tion that Hebrew is not the primary language of New York Phil­har­monic concertgoers.

But the really impor­tant thing about this CONTACT! show: free beer instead of free flavoured vodka. Know your audience!