cultural evolutionary comment of the week

"In a big city, people can choose peers who share their interests, just as Monet and Cezanne found each other in nineteenth-century Paris, or Belushi and Aykroyd found each other in twentieth-century Chicago." - Edward Glaeser, quoted in "Get Out of Town", an article on urban environmental/cultural planning by Nicholas Lemann, NYer, 6/27

concert review: Garden of Memory

One reason I timed my trip when I did was so that I could get back in time for the annual Garden of Memory walk-through concert in Oakland on Tuesday. (For a full description of this, see the first time I went.) I'm glad I made the trouble; I'm used to the uniqueness of the event by now, but I've never had a better time.

Of course I made the time for "avant cabaret" artist Amy X Neuburg and her magical looping machine. She had a new repertoire item, a song in tribute to the alliterativeness of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she'd recently given a program. (Should suggest she try out the coffee at the Calvin Coolidge Community College campus cafeteria.) But rather than spending most of the evening settled down in the Middle Chapel to listen to her and Paul Dresher do alternating sets, as in previous years, I wandered around more than usual - encouraged, perhaps, by the sound of tubular bells which had been set up in the hallway outside this year, whose proprietor was encouraging passersby to try them out.

A lot of the ambient musicians particularly could have had me for the whole evening. G. of M. wouldn't be complete without at least a couple examples of people sitting cross-legged on the floor gently padding various notes off a large metal drum in the lap. This year the best of these was Laura Inserra, who was accompanied by a singer and a dancer. Lovely hypnotic stuff. The Cornelius Cardew Choir, moved this year out of the cramped maze culdesac where I first encountered them into the spaciousness of the main upper corridor, opted for a more consonant sound than usual; they spent most of the evening singing The Heart Chant by Pauline Oliveros, a work with, instead of a score, a set of instructions - instructions uncannily resembling those for singing heya from Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home, a work predating this one by a couple of decades. Le Guin was Oliveros' senior, and I guess she still is. As with the tubular bells woman, they were inviting passersby to join in, but the work requires long breath notes and I wasn't sure I'd be up to it.

Elsewhere above was the closest thing to a conventional classical ensemble, the Del Sol String Quartet (warning: music starts immediately on clicking link). They've gotten a new cellist since I last heard them, which seems to have improved their gumption immensely, though I'd have thought their problems more deeply seated than that. The Orchestra Nostalgico most effectively occupied the space out on the balcony sometimes reserved for more self-parodic ensembles; I enjoyed listening to them too.

And down in the main chapel, I got to sets by, first, another of my regular favorites, the William Winant Percussion Group, giving a righteously vigorous performance of Steve Reich's additive minimalist classic, Drumming, followed by my favorite discovery of the day, even better than Laura Inserra: an acappella women's chorus called Kitka doing wordless nasal minimalism by Meredith Monk. Piping and hooting of great good humor with winningly cute rhythmic tricks: just wonderful all around.

That was Tuesday; this is Friday. In between I've also made a day trip to Sacramento on a scouting expedition to be described later (hot, but unlike Memphis it's dry heat, which is both good and bad); had fun demolishing by e-mail a 9/11 conspiracy nut - a friend of my brother's, the flaky one - prone to making easily debunked claims like "the towers collapsed at free-fall speed" or "the trees around the Pentagon crash site weren't singed"; and started to look at a book I've been asked to index. Oh boy.