| UP |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|12:54 am] |
While I've somehow managed to not see a new movie for some months now, I surprisingly wound up at a 3-D screening of UP last weekend. Having not seen one of these new 3-D films (except in a Disney theme park for a short novelty film a few years ago), I was rather amazed at how well it all works, how sharply everything is in focus with the glasses, how your eyes don't get tired out, etc. It was a total pleasure to watch it in 3-D, to a degree I wouldn't have really expected. (I hear the film is similarly wonderful in "flat" 2-D as well).
Ironically, before UP began, we were bombarded with a half-dozen 3-D trailers for other upcoming animated 3-D features, all of which were quite manic, loud and frenetic (some looked potentially entertaining, albeit in a much more garish and juvenile way). Then, finally, we got to Pixar's feature, which was prefaced by a lovely little short (scored delightfully by Mr. Giacchino) about storks delivering babies and one stork's difficulties with the types of babies he was getting to deliver...(hearkening back to DUMBO on some level!).
Then, finally, the feature started, and I can honestly say that I've seen no American film in quite a long time with as much sensitive, warm, compassionately human story-telling within a subtle, expressive, wise, intelligent visual framework as the first 15 minutes or so of UP. I was quite knocked-out by WALL-E's first act as well, last year, though that was on a different, more epic scale and with different goals. UP is quieter, its scope is smaller, and it has none of the "politics" of WALL-E. Instead it is a sweetly understated study of the fragility and resilience of the human heart. It explores how we have a hard time assessing the value of what we have, how we struggle with loss and change, and how perhaps it is always even a greater struggle to grow and be "open" and move on.
The real beauty of UP, it seems to me, was how it tells this relatively simple story of one man's journey from childhood awkwardness through young love through loss and grief and growth-after-loss in such an uncluttered, intimate and touching way, using the expressiveness of Karl's face and all the genuine, moving small details of how we experience our surroundings, our feelings, our longings, our pain, our mixed feelings, the weariness, the indecisiveness about reaching out to others, the fear of change, the need for insularity, and examines all of these things with great compassion and subtlety.
The film is not afraid to enter the realm of genuine sentiment -- you see those pictures of the wife, the "adventure book," Karl's face, and it all seems real and compassionate on the part of the filmmakers. It allows there to be moments of great quiet, and repose. It treats the animated version of Karl like an actor in a John Ford film: you see his expressions when he doesn't say anything, and you often must decide what he's thinking for yourself. Perhaps it sounds silly to compare this animated feature to a director like Ford, but this film has that same wise sense that Ford had of honoring the basic humanity in the relationships between everyday people and letting many things about their feelings and essential dignity be communicated through the visual. See a shot like Karl, Russell, Kevin walking along the horizon with the house above them and see if it doesn't equate with hundreds of moments in Ford films.
Yet it's funny, delightful, touching, entertaining. If you love dogs, you will have another reason to love this film, because it treats dogs with a kind of gentle appreciative understanding of their personalities, from the most dignified to the most absurd.
And the character of the little boy, which could easily have been a cariacature in many other animated or live-action films, turns out to be more richly layered than I would have expected when he first appears. Just as Karl reminds us of ourselves or some aging person we know well or care about, so does the boy gradually become three-dimensional -- we see his innate intelligence, we see that he has real dreams and enthusiasms. He is not just a buffoon but another vulnerable human being in his own way. He is as geekily awkward as Karl was as a kid, but also shares some of the zeal and intelligence and capacity for optimism that Karl's wife had as a girl. There is a lot going on in this movie on the level of characterization and rather wise observations of what it is to be human. This is the triumph of UP. The story unfolds quietly under the surface like a fable -- even as on the surface it's entertaining and well-paced. But what is really special about this movie is its sensitivity to the vulnerability of being human. It delivers that perception of humanity to a degree that sadly reminds us how rare that level of simple poetic honesty is in films today.
Early on in this film, watching the house's first flight into the city skies, I couldn't help but compare the sensibilities to those of the only other animated filmmaker of our time who has achieved such a deep and rich sense of humanity in his films: Hayao Miyazaki. Both Pixar and Studio Ghibli seem to be aiming for (and achieving) a new level of deeply effective, metaphorical fables for our time, allowing animated features to have moments of quiet, moments of great poetical imagery, moments of ambitious classic filmmaking. Both studios are unafraid of sentiment and visual statements that have a classical resonance -- they do not fear to be seen as "cliched" or maudlin. These filmmakers trust that if you try to address the deep dignities and joys of what being human is all about, the underlying apprehensions and triumphs and fears and delights and quiet beauties of life, and you do it sincerely and with artistry, that people will respond. Since this approach seems rarer and rarer and rarer in our contemporary culture, these goals are to be celebrated, especially when they are achieved as successfully and unapologetically and sweetly and intelligently as they are in films like UP. |
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| Vienna Teng. Alex Wong. Lincoln Theater. Raleigh N.C. |
[May. 14th, 2009|01:25 am] |
Every so often as a musician, you need to see performances that rejuvenate you, that remind you why music matters to you, inspires you, keeps you going. I had one of these experiences on Monday night, a gentle, understated version of the experience, but nourishing just the same. It was a concert by Vienna Teng, performing with Alex Wong (who arranged and produced her new CD, surely her best yet) and cellist/guitarist Ward Williams (formerly of "Jump Little Children").
I have enjoyed Miss Teng's music for a few years now, but when I heard her brand new CD ("Inland Territory") about two weeks ago, I was aware of something very different about this album from any others I've heard of hers before -- and the source the many differences was clearly Alex Wong. Not surprisingly, my sense of inspiration on Monday night was as much due to Alex as it was to Ms. Teng.
Which is no criticism of her. Rather it is somehow as though by their collaboration, something special has happened which is noticeably greater than the sum of their individual creative parts, which are impressive enough. But the whole experience of her songs has been deepened, enhanced, transformed by the taste, talent and innate musical sensibilities and contributions of this young man. While he is most prominently a percussionist, in the concert he also played acoustic guitar and piano and on the album itself he did all the arranging/orchestrating and built all the tracks.
The result was a very rich and musically nuanced album. It couldn't necessarily be reproduced in concert with only the three of them but even live, there was also a rich sense of the music blossoming between perfectly-suited collaborators. With the support of Ward Williams, Alex & Vienna displayed all evening the kind of affinity which helps the right collaborators nurture musical ideas to satisfying fruition. Calmly, almost dispassionately, they quietly "nailed" this music in song after song of deceptively effortless rhythmic intricacy and understated virtuosity.
Vienna's older songs took on a new propulsiveness and urgency, having evolved in the months of this tour with the other two musicians. Her new songs soar with confidence and richness of texture. Given the underpinning of Alex's ideas and rhythms, her songs have reached a new multilayered level. In Alex Wong, Vienna Teng seems to have found her ideal collaborator. For me as a musician, being in the audience and seeing this magical evening (in which she performed for nearly two hours straight, with the two guys only leaving stage for one number) gave me an undiluted shot of just the kind of inspiration any musician constantly seeks.
I met both Vienna and Alex afterwards, and they couldn't have been more gracious. I was able to share with them my appreciation/enthusiasm for the evening, the specialness of their collaboration and the new album. But that post-performance interaction only made slightly more special an evening that, purely on musical grounds, had already been full and joyously satisfying even without the additional privilege of meeting them both.
Best of all, it all took place in a lovely venue: a converted movie house, the Lincoln Theater, in downtown Raleigh, which turned out to be an ideal place to see this kind of concert. There seemed to be a couple of hundred people present (so it wasn't crowded, yet wasn't too sparse either), which allowed me to sit in the 5th row in a perfect seat.
This became a night to add to my inner list of those rare concerts that help keep life and music alive and meaningful for me.... |
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| new song from Regina |
[May. 8th, 2009|08:29 pm] |
Anyone who has ever read my LJ will know that there was a period in my life (a few years of it, in fact!) when the music of Regina Spektor was really part of the most defining and sustaining music in my everyday existence. I had a genuine epiphany when I first heard her modestly self-produced (piano and voice only) and self-released SONGS album and there was no turning back.
In the past year and a half, my enthusiasm gradually waned during the very long touring period which followed the release of BEGIN TO HOPE, a CD which effectively was able to mainstream Regina into a much bigger audience (and who can really complain about that) though slightly at the expense of her foreground reliable quirkiness and individuality. I've had cause to wonder many times whether perhaps her conviction to confidently write new songs her way (and not to think that her songwriting should become MORE conventional) might be somewhat lost because she now wanted to write more mainstream songs and be "safer."
I was also disappointed at how "primitive" the production style of BEGIN TO HOPE, her first album financed by a label and hence expected to be more rather than less detailed in production style, was. Her previous self-produced album, SOVIET KITSCH was very ambitious in texture, from rather rocked-out rhythm section to prominent solo cello in two extraordinary ballads (including "Ode to Divorce") and of course the lively and aggressive string-quartet which makes "Us" so distinctive). By contrast, BEGIN TO HOPE was just.. um.... rather simple and sterile. Great microphone on Regina -- probably the best her vocals had ever sounded. The piano sounds great. but somehow the album just seemed...unambitious (in terms of her musical personality) and safe to the point of dullness, production-wise. (Most of the songs were very good, it was just, somehow, overall very bland production-wise).
Still, during this loooooonnnnnng period since the last album, she was at least floating some new songs occasionally while on tour, and some of them were quite beautiful. I at least was reassured that she was still writing, and writing well. But I went to at least once concert of hers which I found totally unengaging, at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC (a HUGE venue), and after that concert I felt myself definitely "moving away" somewhat from my fandom. Of course I still thought she had all the inner ingredients of the same great and amazing artist she had always seemed to be, but I wasn't sure that she was heading in a direction that would ever matter to me so much any more. I had felt a kind of personal loss, and had kind of moved on.
But in recent weeks I have read a number of articles and interviews about her upcoming new album,and I'd already been feeling (since almost a month ago) that this new CD is going to be tremendously good, that she is finally going to catch up (in terms of using the studio and sophisticated, creative production approaches to showcase her songs in a different way than they would be merely as a soloist with piano) with the potential that went unexplored in BEGIN TO HOPE. She has four producers, including the rampantly creative Jeff Lynne (formerly of ELO), and from all reports she has definitely adopted a collaborative approach to this album, "letting in" other instruments and other arranging ideas.
The more I read, the more I've begun to feel an excitement about this album, as though I was "going to get Regina back" from that blander, less vividly unique place she seemed to have been dwelling in the last couple of years.
And today - I've finally heard the first song to be "leaked" (officially) from the album, a beautiful, provocative song about we human beings and our faith, called "Laughing with.."
Everything about it confirms what I've been reading. The "old Regina" is represented by the kind of repetitiveness in the lyric which also manages to contain a variety of interpretations. The lyric unfolds organically with the music in a way which far exceeds merely the sum of music + lyric. You listen to it once and think you know what she's saying, but then you're not quite sure. There's irony, there's compassion, there's subtlety. She is observing our human behavior with the kind of personal curiosity has always the hallmark of many of her best songs.
The musical language of the song is also fairly straightforward, and yet sometimes the melody "speeds up" to cascade around a lyric which packs a lot of extra syllables in and yet still manages to find internal rhymes which land at the right time. It is a song which she must have thought about, and tinkered with, and thought about some more. It is classic Regina.
The track itself is built subtly and intelligently around a 'basic track' piano part which is simpler than what Regina would normally play. She clearly trusted a producer here, allowing the piano to become a part of a greater whole, and to let the pulse settle into what seems like "just the right tempo" for the song. Then when the percussion comes in, while it is minimalist as much of the drumset playing was in BEGIN TO HOPE, still, it is "exactly right" for the song, leaving space for the element that is (for me), perhaps most rewarding of all: Regina has finally (one album too late, for my tastes) returned to having the power of subtle, tasteful chamber strings commenting on the emotional subtext of the song and filling out the texture expressively and eloquently. There is more and more of this in the best singer-songwriter music today (from Ane Brun to Rachael Yamagata et al), and Regina's music not only deserves it, it revels in it. Whoever did these string arrangements did exactly the right thing by Regina.
Not a thing is out of place. This track is EXACTLY what I hoped she'd be doing.
So it's very strange, this afternoon/evening, to feel that that little door I'd closed off in my heart opening again. It's kind of a relief, even a blessing, to feel the importance and power of Regina Spektor's music-making about to return to a place where I can fully support it again. (And know that on some spiritual/musical/emotional level it's going to support me back, as it used to).
So I'm kind of excited. :) It's gonna be great to have Regina back! |
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| sawdust & diamonds |
[Mar. 28th, 2009|02:29 am] |
never heard it? check it out here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=2JNTUSRP
even without Joanna's haunting music, the poetry of her lyrics is powerful enough:
sawdust & diamonds
(joanna newsom)
from the top of the flight
of the wide, white stairs
through the rest of my life
do you wait for me there?
there's a bell in my ears
there's a wide white roar
drop a bell down the stairs
hear it fall forevermore
drop a bell off of the dock
blot it out in the sea
drowning mute as a rock
and sounding mutiny
there's a light in the wings
hits a system of strings
from the side while they swing
see the wires, the wires, the wires
and the articulation
in our elbows and knees
makes us buckle
and we couple in endless increase
as the audience admires
and the little white dove
made with love, made with love:
made with glue, and a glove, and some pliers
swings a low sickle arc
from its perch in the dark:
settle down
settle down my desire
and the moment I slept I was swept up in a terrible tremor
though no longer bereft, how I shook!
and I couldn't remember
then the furthermost shake drove a murdering stake in
and cleft me right down through my center
and I shouldn't say so, but I know that it was then, or never
push me back into a tree
bind my buttons with salt
and fill my long ears with bees
praying: please, please, please
love, you ought not!
no you ought not!
then the system of strings tugs on the tip of my wings
(cut from cardboard and old magazines)
makes me warble and rise like a sparrow
and in the place where I stood, there is a circle of wood
a cord or two, which you chop and you stack in your barrow
and it is terribly good to carry water and chop wood
streaked with soot, heavy booted and wild-eyed
as I crash through the rafters
and the ropes and pulleys trail after
and the holiest belfry burns sky-high
then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision
while, somewhere, with your pliers and glue you make your first incision
and in a moment of almost-unbearable vision
doubled over with the hunger of lions
"hold me close," cooed the dove
who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds
I wanted to say: why the long face?
sparrow, perch and play songs of long face
burro, buck and bray songs of long face!
sing: I will swallow your sadness and eat your cold clay
just to lift your long face
and though it may be madness,
I will take to the grave
your precious longface
and though our bones they may break,
and our souls separate
- why the long face?
and though our bodies recoil
from the grip of the soil
- why the long face?
in the trough of the waves
which are pawing like dogs
pitch we, pale-faced and grave
as I write in my log
then I hear a noise from the hull
seven days out to sea
and it is the damnable bell!
and it tolls -
well, I believe, that it tolls -
it tolls for me!
it tolls for me!
though my wrists and my waist seemed so easy to break
still, my dear, I would have walked you to the edge of the water
and they will recognise all the lines of your face
in the face of the daughter of the daughter of my daughter
darling, we will be fine, but what was yours and mine
appears to be a sandcastle that the gibbering wave takes
but if it's all just the same, then will you say my name:
say my name in the morning, so that I know when the wave breaks?
I wasn't born of a whistle or milked from a thistle at twilight
no, I was all horns and thorns, sprung out fully formed, knock-kneed and upright
so: enough of this terror
we deserve to know light
and grow evermore lighter and lighter
you would have seen me through
but I could not undo that desire
oh, desire...
oh, desire...
from the top of the flight
of the wide, white stairs
through the rest of my life
do you wait for me there? |
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| Dance at Juilliard |
[Mar. 26th, 2009|01:53 am] |
Just got home from this year's annual Spring Performance by the Juilliard Dance Division, which was unusually long and substantial, with 4 pieces, three drawn from repertoire from the 70s and 80s and one brand new work created on them (although technically adapted from other material by the same choreographer).
The three "silver age" classics were GLORIA by Mark Morris/Vivaldi, NORTH STAR by Lubovitch/Glass and FUGUE by Twyla Tharp with no music. Of these first three, the biggest "success" in terms of performance was the Lubovitch. This particular small group of students had learned this work last fall for their participation in a Lubovitch retrospective at City Center, and apparently they've also performed it on tour somewhere as well, in the meantime. While the piece is choreographed to Glass music from so long ago (sometime in the mid-70s I'd say, I vaguely remember when it came out) that it makes the proceedings feel slightly dated by virtue of the context of the music, the choreography itself is quite satisfying. It consists primarily of joyous and flowing movement by dancers interconnected, either interlacing themselves while part of lines twisting through each other, or moving like some large & ecstatic amoebae across the stage (especially in the first movement and the return of that choreography at the very end of the piece). But there are also a pair of intense solos in the final third of it, before the full ensemble returns for the finale. The lighting design was creative and the costumes effective, but best of all, perhaps because the students had been able to spend so much time with this work, performing it several times over the past 8 months, they looked supremely "at home" in it, really making it their own. It was the first real highlight of the evening, although it was the third of the four pieces.
Immediately preceding it was another work from the 70s, Twyla's FUGUE, in this version danced by three men, who did a wonderfully impressive job with it. Still, I got a bit impatient long before it was over, perhaps in part because it had no music, but also because it really didn't seem interesting enough to sustain the rather substantial length. But I suppose it's a document of its time, and was a significant bellwether in Twyla's early career. Of the older pieces, it certainly felt the least immediate and relevant in a contemporary way -- it played out more like an curious, interesting artifact of the 70s than as a dynamic comtemporary classic. But any sense of disappointment I had was very much linked to the choreography itself, definitely not in reaction to the very fine young men who performed it strikingly. And admittedly, this kind of program seems like an appropriate place to see a work like this.
Opening the evening was a Mark Morris classic, and a work I'll always feel close to, since it was essentially the work which, when I first saw it somewhere around 1988, turned me into a Mark Morris fan: GLORIA. The most recent time I'd seen it was a few years ago at Lincoln Center during the Mostly Mozart festival, at which time I thought the tempos were ridiculously fast at times, which I said to Mark afterwards, to which he replied "well, you're WRONG."
Tempi were all very civilized tonight, and yet the work didn't quite come off, and so, it has to be said, it was the least successful piece on the program, at least on its own terms. It's a much more interesting work, by far, than the Twyla, and yet I'm assuming that the version of the Twyla we saw tonight did indeed "look like the piece."
By contrast, I felt that the GLORIA didn't really look so much like the piece I remember and know. The choreography was, so far as I could tell, all there, but somehow the whole physical vocabulary didn't "look like Mark Morris" to me. Part of this seemed to be because the whole overall alignment of a Mark Morris dancer (grounded, kinesiologically "balanced" and with very clear planes of body line which always look simple and clear) could not be assimilated/duplicated in this kind of short time by the students (and I have no idea to what extent they were coached in this). Another reason was probably because the type of musicality that tends to develop within MMDG dancers is so comprehensive and prioritized that it makes them seem instinctively "on" the music at all times.
I should point out that it was not that the Juilliard students were unmusical (they're not), but more that there is a particular TYPE of musicality that one associates with the MMDG, and I can't imagine it could be taught within the narrow parameters of the available rehearsal time for learning the whole piece. But clearly everyone involved did their best to conquer it.
Some moments (and movements) were more convincing than others, and overall I'd say the most successful portion of tonight's performance of GLORIA was the "Propter magnam gloria... " section, which definitely felt genuinely satisfying, as though some extra synapse had been jumped and suddenly everyone on stage looked like they were really collectively and fully occupying a Mark Morris physical language.
It was a curious experience for me, though. I am very familiar with these Juilliard kids (and am very much in their corner), and yet, not only am I a huge partisan where Mark Morris is concerned, but I'm very invested personally in his choreography and the inspiring efforts of his dancers. I feel very close to (and deeply affected by) Mark's work, and so perhaps I can't really be objective, but neither could I help feeling a little "let down" by this Juilliard version of GLORIA.
Closing the program was a "new work" by Ohad Naharin, created on the students themselves during what was essentially a 'gaga workshop' experience led by Ohad. It was based on material from some other recent work of his, but the process of creating it made it "belong" to the dancers who helped create it during the rehearsal process, so it's a distinctively separate piece from his other works.
It was quite a triumph, and was easily the most fascinating and impressive achievement of the evening. It was filled with the kind of group unisons and other gestures which we've come to associate with Ohad over the past decade or so (some spoken words, some humor, richly complex movement over either fiercely aggressive or quiet, quasi-ambient music and eventually even the recent trademark of three converging lines of dancers taking turns, essentially three at a time, to solo, either with "assigned" movements or things it looks like the individuals may have improvised).
The overall large-scale structure, linking together several complete and separate episodes of movement, each with effective variants and contrasts within it, was pure Ohad. Perhaps wittiest of all was a long sequence involving a digitally enhanced recording of a voice (which sounded like Ohad to me, so I assume it was) counting to 10 in a gradually successive way (i.e.: "1, 1-2, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, etc, except in another language -- Hebrew?) in each case with some person or persons doing a series of movements for each number which would accumulate and get more difficult to chain together as the number increased (a bit like "The 12 Days of Christmas" or "Old McDonald Had a Farm" if I might be allowed that ludicrous but not entirely inapt comparison).
During Ohad's piece, I felt the most proud of these students -- not only were there an incredible large number of them in the piece, but they seemed to really capture the essence of the kind of sensibility and fearlessness that we've all grown to admire in Batsheva, as well as the in other Ohad classics. Perhaps someday Ohad's vocabulary will grow to seem as dated as the Twyla work seemed to me tonight. But as for now, his work, language and structural sensibility all seem like one of the most vivid and exciting tributaries of modern dance, and by interacting so strongly and spectacularly with the world of Ohad and gaga, the students fiercely transformed their months of hard work into a hugely impressive triumph.
They managed to close their program with a truly exciting, intense new dance piece by one of the worlds most significant and provocative contemporary choreographers. Kudos all around. |
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| my little taste-o-immortality |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|08:42 pm] |
While I didn't quite make it into the New York Times (at least not since around 1994 when a ballet score of mine was reviewed), I've achieved my 15 seconds of fame on John Tierney's Times-based blog, here:
http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/1 1/self-control-awards/
Thanks to a comment I made in this blog way back on the afternoon of New Year's Eve of last year, I finally became, yesterday, one of the two winners of "best comments" on the topic. My prize? A copy of Miami-based psychologist Michael McCullough's book about the correlations between religious faith and what McCullough calls "self-control" in behavior. Though in most ways I wasn't really too convinced by McCullough's findings, I'm only too glad to receive a copy of the book. :)
Here below, for your extreme edification, is my fabulous "prize-winning comment." Please hold your applause until the speaker has finished. :D
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At the core of this issue, I tend to believe that the kind of self-control this article discusses (which we might better call self-discipline) is related to the sense, in an individual, that there is some greater goal or greater good that the person feels he or she should be working towards or supporting. Hence you could choose to help others externally or you could make choices that make you as an individual better suited toward helping achieve this larger good.
I can’t imagine that it takes religion to achieve this. But I’m willing to believe that perhaps the repetition of tenets of a particular kind of moral structure, combined with a community-based sense that there are others who are watching you (in your congregation for example) so that you are not operating in a vacuum, might tend to encourage you to more often make the choices that match your sense of that common good. And religion can help give you that, though it’s not the only source of finding a morally-reinforcing community.
The difference between having personal beliefs of a spiritual unity or belonging to a religious congretation of some kind must account for the alleged difference in measured self-control (in this report) between people who belong to a religion and people who merely believe in a higher power and a unifying larger force. What else could account for the greater success-from-lapses rate except knowing that there are other like-minded peers who are connected to your belief system to watch you, keep you in line and to support the positive behavior? That peer review component (similar to AA, one could say) might well be the one factor against more backsliding with regard to one’s self-control convictions.
An interesting topic, and one that’s led to a lot of intelligent and fascinating responses here. I guess I for one am not really buying the premise — I can’t imagine that there can be much of a ‘control factor’ for this kind of study, though that bit about certain parts of the brain sharing a response to both self-control and religious beliefs seems worth further investigation.
— Michael in NYC |
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| from MST3K |
[Mar. 1st, 2009|10:11 am] |
Just heard on a really early episode of Mystery Science Theater ("The Crawling Hand"):
Crow: He looks like a cross between Jerry Mathers and James Dean.
Tom Servo: Beaver Without A Cause! |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 28th, 2009|07:43 pm] |
I find myself thinking today about that delicate balance, in composing music, between the intellectual and the spiritual. The intellectual aspects of crafting a piece of music are what give a piece of music its ability to exist as a larger form, to have structure and contain details which invite us to dig deeper into the texture of a work, to help a piece of music weave a more complex fabric which "organizes" it into the kind of architecture which supports our deepest journeys into music while leaving spaces for reflection and illumination as well as emphatic articulations which can be our signposts and compass points. The intellectual process of composition helps direct our experience of large-scale music into a (hopefully) balanced exploration of ebb and flow, yin and yang, peak and valley, consonance and dissonance, the whole range of organized contrasts within both small moments and details and larger, more elaborate sections. These aspects of composition can be analyzed and taught, admired and imitated, studied and evaluated in a fairly objective fashion. Most of the great Western art music contains particularly inspired examples of this kind of craft.
And yet, for me, the underlying principle of music is undeniably its spiritual dimension, and there is where we enter into the ineffable. How does the composer access whatever archetypal or spiritual reserve seems to exist at the heart of all music? There is no objective approach to that. You can't study it in college. You can't evaluate and "grade" a student composer's ability to recognize that the physical world is somehow shimmering with the presence of the divine in every moment, and that somehow you have to shut out the limitations of the five senses and try to glimpse a certain harmonious ideal in the overall ebb and flow of musical materials.
There is something ancient and insistent about some aspects of music, from the simplest of folksongs to the most complex of ragas or the illuminating counterpoint of Bach. There is a danger, when composing from a place of "intellectually defensible" processes, of completely forgetting the essential communicative soul of music. The second half of the history of 20th Century "serious art music" was fraught with a struggle between the need to innovate, to elude expectations, to render more and more complex the textures and structures of 'organized' art music (on one hand), and to communicate directly as all real music must (on the other). As we got closer to the end of the century, the struggle eased somewhat, and more and more composers stopped being "afraid" of melody and tonality and consonance, stopped treating it as an enemy or as a tired symbol of complacence and sloth and 'old-fashioned' naivete and began to realize that any music, in order to be sustainable over the course of a larger form, must embrace the power of a sustained open fifth and the pull of an implied root as much as it does the concept of dissonance and tension flow.
These days there are all kinds of music out there, and it's still very confusing, as a composer who takes pencil to paper to try to write a large-scale work, to know how to let something innate and true and honest and expressive and HUMAN about music come through one's attempts to construct a larger and intellectually organized structure that does not seem irrelevant to our time. There's no yardstick with which to measure whether you've let "real music" into your piece or not. You can't step back and analyze it and say "oh it needs a little more spiritual truth right there." We're not given that ability (or at least very few of us are) any more than we can say for sure what God is or where to find him/her/it.
It just seemed to me, as I thought about it today, that the peculiar tightrope walk of composing serious music comes down to this: you have to try to start from an innate and enormous respect for the spiritual power of music at its simplest and most essential, basic level, and then strive to weave those elements into the most successfully-structured piece you can. To some extent, you can utilize whatever you've "learned" to make sure the piece is constructed with craft and intelligence. But the most essential element won't be delivered via your intellect -- instead it will have to come from your sense of what beauty is, what being human is, what pain or love or loss or joy is, what a few notes heard in conjuction with or proximity to a few others can mean on a more profound level.
And you have to try to look for the same kind of innate harmony that exists in a leaf or a spider's web or the prismatic expansion of light into its primary elements -- all that is already "in" music -- we have to find that strange gossamer path to manipulating those materials of music, as human beings with intelligence, without at the same time allowing what is precious in those materials to disintegrate through our heavy-handedness or blindness or selfishness. Whatever God is, God is already in music before you ever touch a note of it -- so, it seems to me, it would be best to honor that at least as much as (or perhaps more than) one honors the intellectual processes which surround the compositional process. |
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| MMDG at Princeton University |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|07:57 pm] |
I've been a fan of Mark Morris' choreography since roughly 1989, or whenever it was that I first saw his GLORIA on "Dance in America" and said "here is a choreographer with a vivid, creative relationship to music, both on an intellectual and a directly instinctual level, and a physical choreographic vocabulary of both wit and expressive elegance." (Or something like that). It's been about 20 years since then, and in the meantime I've seen a lot more Mark Morris choreography and, I'm honored to say, developed a meaningful musical relationship with Mark and his endearing company over the past 7 years or so. I've played a couple of rehearsals for them (for Walton's FACADE, a few years back), but for the most part my ongoing interaction with them has involved playing company class for them, along with a few summers where I played for their summer program. I feel a connection to this company, to its dancers and to Mark. I've played there long enough that certain people have moved on and new dancers have taken their place, and yet at any given point I still feel a direct kinship with the dancers in whatever configuration. I don't get to play class for them very often these days, because of my Juilliard gig, but when I started working at Juilliard I deliberately left one weekday morning free in order to still have the chance to play for MMDG on nearly any Tuesday when they are not on tour and so having class at their home in Brooklyn.
In the past 18 months or so, in theatrical performance I've actually only seen the company do large-scale productions of projects which, while very much Mark-driven choreographically, don't necessarily represent that essential hard-core, abstract repertory Mark which I most value and which affects me so deeply. One of these recent large excursions was his version of ROMEO & JULIET, in which he agreed to a set of nearly unacceptable parameters dictated by those whose agenda had to do with a first performance of a full "alternate original" version of Prokofiev's score rather than the work's viability as dance. This version he inherited was of a length that no modern choreographer, even in the traditional ballet world, would ever choose on their own to utilize without making cuts -- but because the main agenda was premiering THIS version of the music, he agreed to fill up the whole ungainfully long uncut score. Further, he had to follow the original scenario that Prokofiev helped develop.
The result was a fascinating behemoth in which Mark gamely fills up this extremely long and dramatically old-fashioned scenario. He did his job thoroughly -- after having accepted criteria which were hardly conducive to his own aesthetic, or tastes, or sense of either proportion or pacing, he totally delivered something that fulfilled that assignment. That the something is far afield from what any intelligent admirer of his would consider driven primarily by Mark's own tastes is fairly clear, and yet it had plenty of rewarding moments. Mark's gifts were certainly on display (and the company worked very hard to bring this production to life), even if forced into a kind of formal structure that was anything but representative of him. Ultimately it was an interesting, even noble experiment -- just perhaps not one that deserves to stay in active rep once its circuit of worldwide performances runs its course.
The other big unusual work of his I'd seen last year was his production of Purcell's KING ARTHUR at New York City Opera. This one I could embrace with more enthusiasm -- I had the chance to see it twice (once at an invited dress rehearsal and then again at a performance later in the run), and except for a curious sense of derailing that I experienced in the long final "winter" scene of Act One, it added up to something very much Mark. In fact after a more leisurely-unfolding (and more intentionally 'casually designed') first act, the work returned with a vengeance after the intermission and Act Two was awash with satisfying moments of both design and dance (the maypole dance alone was joyously complicated and exhilarating,yet only but one of the great moments of the second act). By the end you felt it was a triumphant success. Mark eliminated all vestiges of plot and dialogue, and the result was an unusual plotless "pageant" of fine music that featured both choreographic set pieces (some as rewarding and brilliant as anything he's done) and larger, overarching recurring vocabulary references which built/developed over the course of the piece (especially during much of Act One).
I describe all of the above though as a precursor to saying that what I HADN'T seen for a long time was a good ol'-fashioned Mark Morris rep evening, which is really the bread and butter of what I value and love so deeply about Mark's work. So I traveled to Princeton University last Tuesday in order to see what seemed to be one of their first mainstream rep programs in the New York area in quite a while.
The big draw for me was unquestionably "V" (set to the Schumann op. 44 quintet for strings and piano), which I consider one of Mark's unqualified masterpieces (along with things like "L'Allegro" and "Gloria") and which I haven't seen in performance for several years. And seeing it again was indeed all I could have hoped for, despite a small stage that prevented the kind of full expansion that the work has had on, say, the Benedum Center stage in Pittsburgh when I saw it there several years ago.
But the wonderful surprise for me was finally seeing one of Mark's three new dances to Mozart piano works which had premiered at Lincoln Center during the time I was away in Houston. I never saw any of them at the time of the premiere, and still hadn't since. On Tuesday's program the company presented just one of them on its own (without the other two around it) for the first time, and it was full-tilt, hard-core classic Mark Morris: beautiful, witty, moving, graceful, filled with recurrent details of movement related to specific motifs in the music but never literally repeated except when the music itself did an exact repeat. In terms of Mark's ability to "illustrate the structure of a piece of music," this was one of his many great achievements....but it went beyond that (as his best works always do) by having a physical and movement logic all its own, intimately tied up with the music but transcending it on its own terms as dance as well. If anything, the dance was better than the music on which it was based (though as Mozart works go, this one was fairly palatable -- anyone who knows me well knows that I am not a huge fan of 'generic' Mozart beyond the clear masterworks).
It was in all ways a delight. It felt like I was mainlining all that I've really most loved about Mark's work (and the company's dancing) because it was something brand new to me that contained all the elements that make me value his unique choreographic voice so highly. And my enjoyment of his choreography on the level of pure aesthetics is always heightened by my appreciation for the dancers themselves. This company is incredibly hard-working and one of THE most musical groups of dancers I know. While always a consortium of unique individuals, there is something collectively very inspiring and unified in spirit about the way they all meet on the common ground of Mark's preferences and an unusual group devotion to matching what the music is doing. I always feel proud of them, and so I did on Tuesday.
It's worth mentioning that going to Princeton offered the opportunity to see and hang out with my friend Lisa Wright as well. We communicate often online, and are very good friends indeed, but we don't really actually spend much time together "in real life," so that opportunity was a distinct and valuable additional perk to visiting Princeton. And this was only her second time seeing the MMDG, the first being KING ARTHUR, which, satisfying as it was, was not quite the same as seeing this company do the kind of rep for which it is justifiably celebrated and treasured. So it was gratifying to see how much she also enjoyed the performance, since she has had far less experience of not only Mark's work, but Modern Dance in general.
Anyway, I guess that ends my reportage....as the last few days have gone by, I just felt that Tuesday was a significantly rewarding enough day (in terms of the kind of art that truly nourishes me and which helps to keep me believing against all odds that art still matters in this cockamamie culture we live in) that I shouldn't let it slip by without a few words of appreciation and celebration in its honor.
:)
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| my new favorite smile. |
[Feb. 27th, 2009|10:27 am] |
I just heard this podcast for the first time yesterday:
http://www.budacast.hu/shows/bea_palya_hungarian_singer.mp3
It's from a young American who podcasts from Budapest, and he had Bea on as a guest a few months back, in November. It's the only substantial interview with Bea in English online, and it really captures her personality very well. I know I'm hopelessly biased, but I think it's both rather a fascinating and extensive conversation in which she shares quite a bit of herself, AND incredibly endearing.
After hearing this, you'll feel a bit like you know her. |
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| "And I miss your precious heart...." |
[Feb. 23rd, 2009|08:32 pm] |
"Beneath the porch light we've all been circling
Beat our dust hearts, singe our flour wings
But in the corner, something is happening
Wild Cosmia, what have you seen?"
-Joanna Newsom
I've been listening to "Cosmia" quite a lot lately. What a little masterpiece it is. :)
My favorite song on the "Ys" album is definitely "Sawdust & Diamonds," but Cosmia comes a close second for me.
I made a very eclectic compilation for someone the other day and "Cosmia" is on it, and it's strange how, in the midst of all this other music, when Joanna's song starts, you suddenly feel like you're in another world of intelligence and magic and poetry. It's interesting how, in just the last few years, it's gotten so that her own personality seems much more accessible and warm and comfortable in interviews and public appearances, while at the same time if anything her music is getting deeper and better and her singing richer and more rewarding to listen to. She's one of the greatest and most distinctive/uncompromising singer-songwriters of her generation, and deserves whatever greater fame she is finding. She seems to know exactly what she's doing, she does it with conviction and individuality and total commitment and rare artistry. Her musicianship is fierce, her harp playing phenomenal. It's really kind of inspiring to hear her these days -- no longer the awkward squeaky-voiced fringe figure in folk music, she is now one of America's finest poet-musicians. There's no-one quite like her, and she just seems to keep getting better and better. |
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| ABT & me. |
[Feb. 19th, 2009|06:00 pm] |
A few words (or, knowing me, a lot of words) are probably in order to acknowledge the rare and rewarding nature of my few recent weeks of being a rehearsal pianist at American Ballet Theatre.
( Read more... )
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| an astonishing video comes my way |
[Feb. 17th, 2009|02:26 am] |
For those of you to whom I'm not connected on Facebook, I uploaded today this video which was sent to me by someone on Beáta Palya's fan forum.
To see what I find so magical about it, and why it is so dear and valuable to me to have this (I never actually thought I'd even SEE this, though of course I was aware eventually that there was a camera around), let it load for a moment and then drag the little grey cursor to around 7:40.
If the above video doesn't work for you for some reason, try linking to it here:
http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=50859856748
I should also mention that the song that she sings for just a moment is the one I wrote for her. |
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| FOCA |
[Jan. 29th, 2009|08:02 pm] |
For those who are attempting to project a lot of sinister accusations about the Freedom of Choice Act (which Obama has said he will champion), here is the Congressional Summary of the legislation:
H.R.1964
Title: To protect, consistent with Roe v. Wade, a woman's freedom to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes.
Sponsor: Rep Nadler, Jerrold [NY-8] (introduced 4/19/2007) Cosponsors (109)
Related Bills: S.1173
Latest Major Action: 5/4/2007 Referred to House subcommittee. Status: Referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties.SUMMARY AS OF:
4/19/2007--Introduced.
Freedom of Choice Act - Declares that it is the policy of the United States that every woman has the fundamental right to choose to: (1) bear a child; (2) terminate a pregnancy prior to fetal viability; or (3) terminate a pregnancy after fetal viability when necessary to protect her life or her health.
Prohibits a federal, state, or local governmental entity from: (1) denying or interfering with a woman's right to exercise such choices; or (2) discriminating against the exercise of those rights in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information. Provides that such prohibition shall apply retroactively.
Authorizes an individual aggrieved by a violation of this Act to obtain appropriate relief, including relief against a governmental entity, in a civil action.
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If that's not clear enough, here is the present version of the bill itself:
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.1964:
There it is. Not the slippery slope some people are claiming it is -- and it fact it was sponsored by Nadler as a safeguard against the slippery slope AWAY from Roe v. Wade protections already affected by the Roberts/Alito opinions in two Supreme Court decisions. |
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| A Great Day to be an American..... |
[Jan. 20th, 2009|08:19 pm] |
(..for a change!)
Like millions of other people, I watched today's inauguration as it happened. In my case I was watching in a large group of people in the arts. I had played company class for the Mark Morris Dance Group this morning (a company of whom I'm quite fond) and they had set up their day specially to leave the time of the inauguration ceremony free so all the dancers and staff could watch it together on a large monitor in the office area. So I lingered in Brooklyn to watch it with that group of colleagues, which made it even more meaningful.
Back when I had watched the acceptance speech on election night, it had been in another group, at choreographer Warren Adams' party on 46th street. Warren is a South African whose enthusiasm for Obama knew no bounds during the entire year of primaries. His election night party was made up of quite an eclectic and fascinating collection of people of various backgrounds and races -- it felt strangely meaningful to hear Obama's acceptance speech while among such a varied group of people whose expectations and hopes for what Obama's presidency could mean were each so different from one another's. We each had different agendas about why Obama had so fiercely been "our candidate," but what struck me that night was how who Obama was and what he represented was large and complex enough to inspire all the different brands of hope and idealism that so many different people brought to that election.
How similarly inspiring today to see him "take the reins" and to realize that this country is now finally being led by someone with the intelligence, sensitivity, curiosity, integrity and genuine ideals to make us proud of this country again, and no longer embarassed by not only what our government does, but the way the president presents himself to the world. For too long we've been "presided over" by a man not only incompetent to be a president or a statesman, but incapable of complex thought or action, with the result that he has not only severely injured the country by his policies but hugely embarassed us abroad, during a time when we couldn't afford to lose our integrity and to cease being a respectable beacon of enlightenment and values.
Today Obama spoke to us like we are not only citizens of the USA but citizens of the world. He referenced all the things we need to re-visit to make ourselves a better people collectively, and if he is able to achieve even a third of all those goals over the next four years, we'll be lucky. I had despaired a bit of this country when Bush got re-elected (because it was so clear by then what a dangerous and anti-American force for destruction he was, to our constitution and ideals, to our sense of justice and individual rights, and of course to the country of Iraq and to our reputation around the world) but if this country is going to turn around and become a thinking, compassionate place again, where the ideals of justice for all and the nobility of the common good are to be reborn and equal respect given to the rich AND poor of the nation, this is surely the guy to talk us into it persuasively. If part of his stated goal today was have America inspire people elsewhere by example, then similarly Obama himself might help remind Americans of what it means to be an American.
At that election night party, as I looked around me at all the people who had voted for Obama for different reasons, I noted that my agenda had been intelligence and the common sense to listen and understand different cultures -- but most of all intelligence. From even before the primaries began, Obama was my candidate because he exuded the kind of intellectual curiosity to learn not just facts but their context, to pay attention to other people and cultures and to understand their differences but see the interconnectedness between all of us, and to rise above partisan pettyness. As the year unfolded, we learned more about him -- we saw that he was also a good politician, and that he had all the ingredients of leadership and statesmanship. We've seen him back up his promises even before assuming office by inviting people of different stripes into the administration and inaugural process, even when some of those choices have annoyed or unnerved us.
Now the job begins, and it definitely seems one that can only be a struggle. As some commentator said on NPR yesterday, "we love a party" but we don't necessarily like to be confronted with change and sacrifice and being asked to face our lives and world differently. President Bush took the defining, uniting moment of 9/11 and squandered it without helping us all to renegotiate and re-define our roles as Americans. Now, 7 years later, finally there is a president who believes at the core that the secret of making America great again, and great citizens of not only our own country but the world, is to tap into all of our own individual capacities for compassion, creativity, generosity, dedication and love of fellow man and country. Almost 5 decades since JFK boldly told us to "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country," Obama has returned to this spirit with his inaugural speech today.
We're probably not going to be easily convinced. Old habits die hard, and we're hardly in the economic situation to feel safe with doing more than hunkering down and protecting what little is left us. But if President Obama can not only gradually convince us to see ourselves and our country in a new way, but to inspire us to make those changes ourselves AND FORCE OUR OTHER ELECTED OFFICIALS to see the changes and legislate accordingly, something revolutionary COULD happen in this country.
Time will have to tell. Are we up to the challenge? With so many institutions gravely flawed, and so much media cowed and unused to seeking and reporting the truth and encouraging the ideals of enlightened common ground, the delivery systems of change are hardly in good shape. So it must come from us.
And with Obama in the White House, we at least have an example to follow that we won't have to feel confused or embarassed by. And maybe, just maybe, President Obama is going to finally make it "cool" again to be intelligent. ;) |
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| Race for the hills!! It's Dance Purgatory!!! |
[Dec. 17th, 2008|11:55 pm] |
Tonight I spent one of the most pointless evenings of dance I've endured for a long time, possibly many many years. It was "Bamboo Blues," choreographed by Pina Bausch and performed by her company at BAM, where we are in the early stages of the SECOND week of a two-week run of this thoroughly meaningless two-hours-plus of random dance.
Let me clearly say at the outset that if the evening had ONE saving grace, it was that the dancers were tremendously talented, intense, fiercely committed and impressive. And, admittedly, the physical vocabulary at any given point seemed strong enough, as though indeed Ms. Bausch does know how to create passionate and authentic movement for modern dance.
But oh dear Lord in heaven, that's all you can say about a REALLY long evening of dance which consisted, literally, of an endless stream of unrelated solos, duets and occasional moments of a handful of dancers, all set to excerpts from equally unrelated pieces of music that never began or ended but merely dissolved from one into another, presumably whenever Ms. Bausch tired of one solo or another.
Except for a slight nod to a tiny bit of "arch-form" structure (in which certain images and gestures from near the beginning of the piece, and one piece of music, came back to revisit two excruciating hours later), the piece seemed to wander aimlessly for HOURS ON END with no sense that it made any difference what would happen next. Indeed, certainly we in the audience were not expected to make any structural sense out of this hodgepodge, because there was none in it.
I was a little bored by intermission, but still trying to absorb it on its own terms, which seemed to be merely about stringing one dance to another without even the sense of proportion that any artisan might use to string a necklace (even Indra's necklace, which might have at least been considered in this ostensibly Indian-influenced piece). A few things broke the mounting monotony: some very effective use of projected video on scrims (behind which there was live dance) and very rare occasional little "magic tricks" or theatrical effects done for humor or, um...novelty I suppose. But they lost any sense of specialness when they were not attached to any semblance of a point.
So while at intermission I was only weary of the piece, by early on in "Act Two" I started resenting the work on a very deep level. It was just more of the same, and when in the eleventh hour there was a parade of flailing solos (all difficult and expertly danced, but thoroughly unwelcome and meaningless by that point in this thoroughly meaningless evening) I was ready to walk out of the theater, if it hadn't have meant disrupting several patrons between myself and the aisle.
Indeed by the end I had the strong impulse to "boo" loudly, but my respect for the very high quality of the dancers themselves held me back. Still, I could not bring myself to applaud, because it was as big a load of crap as I'd ever seen from a supposedly major creative artist. If the dancers, in their curtain call, had brought Ms. Bausch onstage, then I would have booed. But she was nowhere to be seen.
I am such an innate structuralist (and respond so well to it even when hidden) that I feel confident that if there had been any structure, any sense, any point to this annoying and endless work, I would have found it. But there was nary a glimmer.
In fact, you could easily have taken each individual component piece and moved it to any other place in the show. You could have shuffled the deck and performed them in any order. You could have removed a third of them and not noticed any difference. They were modular, had no context and no cumulative meaning. I felt sorry for the dancers, because they were magnificent, and were working hard, but the evening added up to nothing more than a feeling that I was watching a big dance recital from some dance school with a lot of money and some killer dancers. But it was an endless stream of unrelated works which droned on for so long that eventually all heart and mind and soul were numbed.
It was not that any one of these pieces were bad. All were professional and showed a certain amount of creativity and professionalism. And they were each danced excellently.
But to be in a theater for over two and a half hours, and sit through those hours with not the BAREST HINT of any kind of organizing thread is just bad art. Knowing how to make a solo or duet is only part of what is required to make a meaningful evening. I've been going to evenings of dance for decades. I've seen bad choreography. I've seen interesting choroegraphy that ran out of interest long before the piece was over. I've seen evenings which combined sublimely successful repertoire with frustratingly disappointing or even embarassing rep.
But tonight was a kind of first: a choreographer who obviously knows what she's doing seemingly becoming afflicted with ADD and rendered incapable of building any kind of coherent, organized or meaningful mosaic out of the unrelated shards of individual dances.
To quote an oft-stated view most recently relayed to me by my friend Nichole: "this was two and a half hours of my life I'm never gonna get back."
ACK!!! |
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| JO at CH. |
[Dec. 12th, 2008|11:20 pm] |
I'm scratchin' my head, at a loss how to evaluate tonight's concert by the Juilliard Orchestra at Carnegie Hall.
Chief among the unsolvable mysteries is how to gauge my reaction to the conductor, James de Priest. He has polio, and conducts from a wheelchair. But does being in a wheelchair necessarily account for how, um...dull and boring most of the evening seemed? There are other factors that might enter into it, but what a curiously unsatisfying performance it was overall. Here are some of the questions that come to mind:
1) I know that Juilliard divides its musicians into different orchestras who perform at different times. Was tonight's orchestra substantially different in personnel than the last two times I've heard them perform? Were these perhaps predominantly younger students?
2) Clearly Maestro de Priest has certain physical constraints which make it, on some level, rather a triumph that he is still conducting. But do those constraints account for (or excuse) a strange listlessness that translated to rather uninspiring renderings of Enesco's Romanian Rhapsody #2 (not all that great of a piece, admittedly, and one even wonders why they would program it with the Juilliard Orchestra) and the Prokofiev 2nd Violin Concerto? And is he really as difficult to follow as it seemed from my vantage point in the balcony>?
Let me be quick to add that nothing was done badly. They played "well." It was just (at least in the first half) one of those concerts that always make me nervous, because it's a concert of very professionally-played music with absolutely no fire or passion or sense of great intensity which make live orchestral performances still seem vivid and relevant to our time. As soon as an orchestral performance is lacking that certain spark of energy, I immediately start dwelling in the nervous mindset of worrying how the symphony orchestra will never survive in America if it's as, um....unexciting as the Enesco and Prokofiev performances were.
The Prokofiev even had a very fine soloist, about whom I have no complaint, no criticism. But he wasn't a particularly fiery performer either (not that he necessarily would have to be), but the combination of his kind of rather elegant playing and the almost tedious conducting certainly made the outer movements of the Prokofiev seem inconsequential. All fared better in the lovely slow movement, but even then I felt like that worked because that movement is so incredibly beautifully written that even a "professional" reading of it would still deliver some measure of its magic.
Similarly, John Corigliano's 1st Symphony "Of Rage and Remembrance" was also very powerful in the second half, but I find myself wondering how much of its effectiveness was because the piece itself is so intense and persuasive that a professional reading would in fact be all it needs to work.
And, assuredly, it got an extremely professional reading indeed -- it was clear that the piece had been meticulously and intelligently rehearsed by Mr. de Priest, and that he was handling all the frenetic challenges of its execution with a calm ultra-competence. And it's got to have been a draining, challenging, and intensely rewarding experience for these students to have to go through what must have been a very long and laborious process of working through this piece to this kind of performance level. So it worked, as a piece, on its own terms pretty well because all the trains were running on time, etc.
But to be honest, I suspect even the Corigliano would have been more intense, more dramatic, more 'living-on-the-edge' under a different conductor. It was by far the most successful performance of the evening, and I don't mean to take anything away from that....
But I can't seem to get around feeling like James de Priest was a rather pedantic, uninspired, uninspiring, passionless conductor. Can this really be the case? Or have I just been spoiled by seeing them perform so thrillingly, the last two times I've heard them, under James Conlon? |
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| Scott Alan at Barnes & Noble |
[Dec. 1st, 2008|08:45 pm] |
I stopped in tonight to hear the strange little in-store concert at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble connected to the release of Scott Alan's new CD. The real draw for me was the participation of Lisa Brescia, one of my very favorite Broadway singers of the current era.
Lisa sang beautifully and movingly, and the evening had a couple of other world-class vocal performances (by young Natalie Weiss and the powerhouse Katie Thompson), but while so many around me seemed to be in tears the whole time, I can't say that I really liked the songs that much. I didn't DISlike them -- they just didn't do much for me and there wasn't a single one that made me think "oh I'd like to hear that one again."
Since the evening was hosted by Mr. Alan, I got to see what his personality was like, and it's easy to see that he is probably an endearing colleague and friend to the various performers -- he had a rather adolescent-like exuberance, irreverence and over-the-top extrovert personality, rather like a gay Adam Sandler.
But the songs themselves, while having a surface attractiveness of contemporary language, seemed a bit too adolescent for me, too. They all seem to give singers an opportunity to riff or wail in a fairly range-y, pop singer-ish way, and no doubt that is rewarding to the singers involved (Lisa's performance was by far the most tasteful vocally, and the result was that the song wound up seeming the most 'mature,' though it may also have been in part because the persona within the song wasn't quite as one-dimensional as in some of the others).
But I couldn't connect in any strong way to the lyrics themselves. They all seem sincere enough -- one gets the impression that Mr. Alan is nothing if not very earnest and honest in his lyrics -- but they all felt like shallow monologues with little subtext or craft, and usually in a kind of non-rhyming free verse (not that I have anything against that, God knows, but the effect wasn't really all that effectively theatrical or even poetic -- the way some of Jeff Blumenkrantz's songs are, for example). They just seemed, um.....simple. Open-hearted, well-meaning, definitely, but a little too much like an earnest teenager with a limited emotional complexity had written them.
As I processed one after another of them, and it was clear that many young people in the audience seemed to be enjoying them, I readily admitted to myself that they might just "not be for me" in the way RENT was not for me, i.e.: they might speak directly to an 18-to-24 year old mindset, but I'm just too far away from that age to not need more than the (to me) lack of complexity or depth in the viewpoints of the personas whose lyrics these represent. Again, Lisa's song, which examined a relationship in which a person is somewhat afraid to fully open up in a relationship which is obviously nourishing, had one of the most "adult" perspectives. By contrast, the one about Scott's parents' divorce (which Natalie Weiss sang) didn't feel genuine at all in terms of what a real adult leaving a spouse might say -- but perhaps it is meant to be more a child's-eye view of what he would think the departing parent might say.
All evening long I thought of William Finn. The musical language of Scott Alan's songs seemed very akin to that kind of effortlessly direct use of a contemporary pop/theater language of chord progression, voicings emphasizing added seconds and ninths and occasional ostinato chords. While many contemporary composers of musical theater (including me, to the extent I am one) grapple with the challenge of which musical language to use, Mr. Alan seems very comfortable with the one he uses. I didn't hear an enormous amount of variety, but it all seemed to unfold from a place of ease and sincerity, which is admittedly a worthwhile boon to any new musical theater songs.
But where Mr. Alan was no William Finn was clearly in the lyrics. It's hard to describe exactly why they seemed so undernourishing to me (especially since I can't cite specifics and copy-paste any examples). But I do think that, all else being equal, if the lyrics had been better, I would have been more convinced by exactly these same songs.
I wish Scott Alan the best of luck, and I hope the album is successful for him. I see on cdbaby.com that he used considerable instrumentation, of which of course I always heartily approve, and which no doubt enhances these songs very much. The guy is obviously very sincere, and pretty prolific. He knows what he wants to do, and he's doing it. God bless him. And he knows and utilizes some pretty wonderful singers, who seem to really love him. So it's all good, within his own context.
I only felt that it didn't really speak to me much, and didn't achieve that level of satisfaction in this language that I've experienced with Jason Robert Brown, Adam Guettel or William Finn (among produced composers) or Jenny Giering or Joel Derfner or William Wade (among the ones not-produced). |
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