concert review

[calimac]

If you were as naive as I was when I first started listening to classical music, you might think that a violin is a violin, but instruments differ, and performers differ even more. There are all kinds of different sounds performers can generate even while playing the same music, and Chee-Yun (she's Korean, and I guess goes by just a given name, like her old Juilliard classmate Midori) brings one of the roughest, most wooden sounds out of a violin that I've ever heard.

This was terrific for the opening piece, a thunderously dark Baroque Chaconne attributed to a composer named "Tomaso Vitalino" (who might be, but probably isn't, the same person as the known Tomaso Antonio Vitali), and as a chaconne consists of playing variant versions of the same short phrase over and over again ceaselessly*, I was impressed at her ability to shape the piece into a coherent flowing entity. But after that things started going downhill. Her rendition of de Falla's Suite Populaire Espagnole was good, but I was more impressed with the accompanying pianist, Wendy Chen (a very long, thin woman who had better get the heights of her keyboard and bench adjusted pretty soon, or else she's going to find herself hunched over like that permanently). A dull sonata by Gabriel Fauré followed (usually he's better than that), and by the time intermission came, I found myself - rather to my surprise - wishing that the violinist would go away and that we could just listen to the pianist for the rest of the afternoon. Nothing much happened after intermission to make me change that assessment.

I was at Dinky, my home-town chamber auditorium, to review this concert for SFCV, which I did in somewhat less vehement terms than this. This was one of those concerts for which my editor suddenly contacts me a few days before and asks if I can cover it. At least the new regime (there's been a turnover at both editorial positions since I started writing for this outfit) is able to make future assignments as well; the previous staff often seemed unwilling to think more than a week ahead. The new staff is better organized, but so far I get the impression they're more journalists than they are musicians: more attuned to deadlines and good writing than to purely musical issues. The old staff were needle-eyed on this and really kept me on my toes. I remember one review which generated a hurried exchange of e-mails among the three of us over whether we thought the cellist had been playing on pure gut or gut-wound metal strings. Questions like this probe the limits of my musical knowledge. In the end the editors just deleted the relevant sentence.

But I like this job and really think I'm getting the hang of it, on top of which compliments on my reliability and the quality of my work from every editor I've had are always pleasant. I just hope that, in trying to be fair, judicious, and more impersonal in my published reviews that I don't start writing too formally. It's easier to feel relaxed on LJ; nobody's paying me and fewer are reading it.

*Anyone who finds minimalism unprecedentedly repetitious has either never heard a chaconne to a ground, or is just prejudiced. So say I.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I thought about it, and there is a piece of minimalist music that I like immensely: Tom Johnson's "The Four Note Opera." At the moment, I'm supposed to take this water upstairs and then help Sarah fall asleep, so I'll leave it at that in the expectation of coming back later and fleshing it out somewhat.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Okay, mission accomplished. The opera is constructed from four notes of the scale. I have a score (a piano provides the accompaniment on stage; this is specified, and no changes are permitted), or I might never have realized that the accompaniment is often simple figures repeated with small changes. It never sounds limited in any way. The plot, such as it is, is that the singers are performing an opera. It's like being shown the skeleton that underlies all other operas, complete with the jealousies and concerns of the performers. Along the way, it explains a lot about what goes into an opera in a self-referential way. ("This is the echo duet." "This is the echo duet." "She has to sing what I sing." "I have to sing what she sings"...)

Nonetheless, to amplify on what I wrote up there, I don't think a chaconne is as repetitious as a minimalist piece. There's progress and development in a chaconne in a way that I haven't yet heard in most minimalist music. Maybe in a few years the minimalist field will be sorted out the way older classical music has been, and the chaff will have dropped out, and the better stuff will be apparent. I haven't been impressed yet with any of the Glass or Adams that I've heard, for instance.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The average chaconne does have more melodic and ornamental variation between adjacent repetitions than a typical minimalist cell piece, but this is made up for by the tremendous harmonic, rhythmic, and even dynamic development over the course of the minimalist works, as contrasted with the absolute doggedness of chaconnes, even those that change key. Steve Reich in particular is the minimalist master of developing rhythmic complexity. This music moves more slowly than a chaconne, but it travels much farther.

Not to mention that Glass gave up writing cell music about 1980, and Adams never wrote it at all. You can find post-1980 minimalist music to be thin of content (a lot of Augenmusik devotees say that of all post-modern tonal music), you can have been over-sensitized by 1960s academic minimalism into an allergy against brief small-scale repetitions (and some have, but you can find the same thing annoying in Bruckner, and some do), but you cannot fairly call such music repetitious the way a chaconne is repetitious.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Well, whatever it is, then, that Glass and Adams write, it invariably bores me. "The Chairman Dances," "Short Ride on a Fast Machine," movie music, movement from string quartet, whichever pieces I hear sound interesting for a couple of seconds, and then it sets in that this is all they have, except to repeat it with small variations that sound like transmission errors; variations that make no difference. Perhaps at the end it has traveled in some sense, but the journey does nothing for me except make me squirm in my seat.

I still haven't listened to any Bruckner. Kind of a hole in my education, I guess.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

One could criticize Beethoven's Fifth the same way: he has four notes, then he repeats them a tone lower. Within a couple of seconds it's evident that this is all he has, and it's going to go on this way for four or five minutes - about as long as Adams's "Short Ride."

Now, this would be a grossly unfair criticism, but my point is it's not the only one. The difference is not that Beethoven is doing more with his notes than Adams is doing with his, but that (assuming you like Beethoven) you groove on what he's trying to do but not on what Adams is trying to do.

That's reasonable. You don't have to like this stuff. Lots of music I don't get either. (90% of jazz is utterly opaque to me.) But it doesn't make it more repetitious than a chaconne. That's my point.

Adams's technique in the opening sections of both the pieces you mention is Reichian additive minimalism, which Reich indeed invented as a result of transmission errors. (Maybe you knew that.) Neither of them continue indefinitely that way, though: in some of his early pieces Reich does. Adams has transitions, middle sections, and so on, built out of different elements, same as any normal composer.

I don't expect you to engage in an educational course: I tend to consider it futile to spend time on art to which one has no native response, because there's so much else to do that's more rewarding. But there is a lot going on here (I just deleted a long section trying to explain it), and it's not more repetitious than a chaconne.

What I would suggest you try is some Philip Glass. It's tricky to find the right pieces: his early music is very cell-based, and his later work is often garrulous and not very good. Consider the Naxos recording of his Violin Concerto. (I think you can listen to all Naxos recordings on their web site.) First, be patient! Like all minimalism - and like Bruckner and Hovhaness - his work rewards what one might call "slow listening," a receptive state that breathes slowly and takes the music in larger gulps, but unlike Adams it's not Reichian at all. What Glass does is most akin to catchy pop songs with unvarying rhythm sections: he takes tiny repeating patterns and lays them down as foundation, but unlike Adams here he:
1) is very harmonically active
2) doesn't let any one pattern run for more than about 90 seconds, not an unusual length of time for foundation patterns in pre-minimalist music
3) puts on top not additives but a combination of lyric phrases of as fine a beauty as you'll find in any older music, and the kind of tiny cellular note-spinning you find in the virtuoso sections of every violin concerto in the repertoire. To me that's the true brilliance of Glass's work here: by connecting the two he showed me the minimalist in composers like Mendelssohn, but put that into a context where it finally made sense.