John Adams, part 2 of 3
Dec. 9th, 2010 12:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacOn a soggy Wednesday in the City, MTT conducted the SFS in music by John Adams, whom he likes to consider a modern "American Maverick," Henry Cowell, an American maverick of an earlier generation, and Mozart, who was not an American maverick.
I cannot figure out what Mozart was doing in there, save that Gil Shaham played his Violin Concerto No. 5 with a stunning blend of sweetness and strength, and in the cadenza (by Joseph Joachim, the 19th century violinist) the most beautifully consonant double-stops of all time.
Cowell's offering was Synchrony, a piece which starts with a quiet trumpet solo and then gets kind of noisy and chaotic. It still sounds recognizably like the later, tamer Cowell, however.
For Adams, his huge orchestral work Harmonielehre. I've heard this here before, and what attracted me about it was the huge resonance of overtones it builds up, something 16 or however many bits there are in digital recording can't quite capture. It has to be heard in concert. For some reason, this performance seemed shriller, choppier, and spikier than my previous encounters, until the second half of the last movement, when the concluding shining E-flat tonality begins to emerge out of the previous polytonal chaos. An awesome buildup most lovely to hear.
Pre-concert talk was by Scott Fogelsong, a lecturer even more eccentric than Robert Greenberg, but fortunately I haven't had to listen to him as often. He talked purely about the Adams, and not even much about that, preferring to give us a short history lesson in how minimalism and postminimalism arose as a reaction to the serialist hegemony. I know there are still people who deny that hegemony existed, so it was gratifying to hear Fogelsong talk about it, illustrating the clash between academically-imposed Webernism on the one hand and the vernacular music of the time on the other with recorded examples (though I have to say the bit of modern jazz he offered sounded a lot more like Webern than it did like the musical theatre or fifties rock).
Yet I left the talk muttering "Yes, but ..." to myself a lot. Fogelsong repeatedly emphasized the minimalists' return of pattern and repetition to music, but said nothing about consonance. He conflated LaMonte Young's early Cagean experimentalism with the minimalism that developed from it. And he fudged the distinction between strict minimalism and postminimalism, saying - when he got to the Adams - that no minimalist would have put a long lyrical melody in his work as Adams did, forcing the conclusion that either Philip Glass ceased being a minimalist over thirty years ago or (considering that I don't think Fogelsong mentioned Glass by name at all) that he doesn't know anything about Glass's music, the latter a phenomenon I've found frequently in people far more dogmatic about the subject than Fogelsong was.
I cannot figure out what Mozart was doing in there, save that Gil Shaham played his Violin Concerto No. 5 with a stunning blend of sweetness and strength, and in the cadenza (by Joseph Joachim, the 19th century violinist) the most beautifully consonant double-stops of all time.
Cowell's offering was Synchrony, a piece which starts with a quiet trumpet solo and then gets kind of noisy and chaotic. It still sounds recognizably like the later, tamer Cowell, however.
For Adams, his huge orchestral work Harmonielehre. I've heard this here before, and what attracted me about it was the huge resonance of overtones it builds up, something 16 or however many bits there are in digital recording can't quite capture. It has to be heard in concert. For some reason, this performance seemed shriller, choppier, and spikier than my previous encounters, until the second half of the last movement, when the concluding shining E-flat tonality begins to emerge out of the previous polytonal chaos. An awesome buildup most lovely to hear.
Pre-concert talk was by Scott Fogelsong, a lecturer even more eccentric than Robert Greenberg, but fortunately I haven't had to listen to him as often. He talked purely about the Adams, and not even much about that, preferring to give us a short history lesson in how minimalism and postminimalism arose as a reaction to the serialist hegemony. I know there are still people who deny that hegemony existed, so it was gratifying to hear Fogelsong talk about it, illustrating the clash between academically-imposed Webernism on the one hand and the vernacular music of the time on the other with recorded examples (though I have to say the bit of modern jazz he offered sounded a lot more like Webern than it did like the musical theatre or fifties rock).
Yet I left the talk muttering "Yes, but ..." to myself a lot. Fogelsong repeatedly emphasized the minimalists' return of pattern and repetition to music, but said nothing about consonance. He conflated LaMonte Young's early Cagean experimentalism with the minimalism that developed from it. And he fudged the distinction between strict minimalism and postminimalism, saying - when he got to the Adams - that no minimalist would have put a long lyrical melody in his work as Adams did, forcing the conclusion that either Philip Glass ceased being a minimalist over thirty years ago or (considering that I don't think Fogelsong mentioned Glass by name at all) that he doesn't know anything about Glass's music, the latter a phenomenon I've found frequently in people far more dogmatic about the subject than Fogelsong was.
