Rene Spencer Saller

Some admiring words about Maria Zofia Olga Zenajda Godebska, better known as Misia Sert, a muse who might have been an art monster if she hadn't decided to marry (and marry and marry) instead. Who knows, though? She certainly left her mark.

In which I vaguely allude to my weird work in progress and share some notes I wrote five years ago about Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, which was dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, whose Wikipedia entry lists her occupation as Muse. Some gig, huh? Berg called her an angel, and Canetti called her a gazelle, and her polarizing mother pawned her off on Austrofascists. Kid never stood a chance.

A review of Christophe Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, in a 1984 production by OTSL. I wrote this at age 18 for the punk rock fanzine Jet Lag, the first place to publish my music writing (or any other writing, for that matter).

Verdi responded to the Latin text by locating its emotional core, the dramatic significance of each singer's moral confession. He offers no comforting lies, no confident speculation. Let other composers traffic in the theological; Verdi's heart is with the human: the soprano, pleading in terror for her salvation, sinful but shining, shining. The tenor, the mezzo, the bass-baritone: all kissed by the holy, implicated and yet innocent. 

"Everywhere and forever the luminous blue of the horizon... Forever… forever…"

Lots and lots of photos of the night-blooming cereus (four open blossoms on the patio tonight), along with one photo of the funny Phyllis Dilleresque Passiflora incarnata.

Approximately 10 minutes long, Reena Esmail's Black Iris is performed on Western instruments and notated according to Western conventions, but many of the melodies involve quicksilver microtonal shifts, subtle shadings of notes that slip between the lines and spaces of the staff or the steps on the scale. As any fan of Hindustani ragas or Delta blues or early Sonic Youth will attest, these liminal spaces contain vast stores of power and pleasure. Rather than “resolve” any harmonic ambiguities, Esmail delights in them.

In recognition of Juneteenth tomorrow, here is a program I wrote about a couple of years ago for the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. I don’t think I ever uploaded it to the blog, and if I did, the link is surely dead by now, so it seems worth reposting. Juneteenth is an especially significant holiday for […]

Some photos I took of our night-blooming cereus in bloom, along with some links to follow along with my fitful enthusiasms.

In memory of Lisa, on what should have been her 57th birthday.

I just learned that the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho died today, at 70, as a result of brain cancer. If you’re not familiar with her strange and seductive sound world, you might start with Laterna Magica. I wrote about it for the Dallas Symphony (the 19-20 concert season), but I don’t believe I ever […]

György Ligeti's influence is incalculable, but it often goes unnoticed, possibly because his style never stagnated over the many decades of his career, and it touched so many people who don't attend conservatories or engage with traditional concert culture, from aging punk rockers to Gen Z–ish aspiring cinéastes encountering Kubrick and Ligeti for the first time in college film classes. 

Who among us hasn't whiled away a summer afternoon pretending to be Tina Turner, baring those famous golden thighs, shaking an imaginary shock of coppery hair, screaming and sighing and strutting and signifying like a sex-starved Pentecostal? Who else could sing like that, each phrase razor-blade bright and so sharp it doesn't even hurt at first when it slices your heart in two? 

"The birds are the opposite of time. They represent our longing for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant song." Olivier Messiaen, avian champion

Rest easy, lovely Rita, Rita Lee

The late musicologist and critic Richard Taruskin rejected the art-for-art's-sake argument that music is essentially innocent, pointing out that questions about Orff's intentions—specifically regarding the use of his music by the Nazis—are irrelevant because "[t]hey allow the deflection of any criticism of his work into irrelevant questions of rights: Orff's right to compose his music, our right to perform and listen to it. Without questioning either, one may still regard his music as toxic, whether it does its animalizing work at Nazi rallies, in school auditoriums, at rock concerts, in films, in the soundtracks that accompany commercials, or in [the concert hall]." (With no disrespect toward Taruskin's memory, I'd be astonished if you leave the Meyerson tonight any more animalized than you were upon entering it.)

In previous versions of the Faust story, including Goethe's, the particulars changed, but not the broad outlines. In Berlioz's Faust, the hero goes to Hell, eternally damned. On one level, he sacrifices himself because he wants to save his beloved Marguerite. On the other, less noble level, he winds up in Hell because he, like so many of us, neglected to read the fine print of a contract. Yes, he should have been more suspicious—the spooky-looking stranger is named Méphistophélès, for pity's sake—but then again, you'd think a heroine worthy of music as sublime as Marguerite's two arias wouldn't be so idiotic as to accidentally poison her mother. It's better not to delve too deeply into these logical inconsistencies. As W. H. Auden famously noted, “No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”

Angélica Negrón's distinctive style filters an eclectic range of influences—Arvo Pärt, Björk, Juana Molina, Meredith Monk, John Cage, and former DSO composer in residence Julia Wolfe, among others—through her unique and wildly fertile imagination.  Arquitecta, a song that features Colombian Canadian vocalist Lido Pimienta, was co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Bravo! Vail. Although Negrón has written several other major vocal works, both for chorus and solo voice, this is her first composition for voice and full orchestra. Augmenting Pimienta's live singing are sampled voices, an essential part of Arquitecta's sound world.  [...] Negrón explained that the sampled voices are "mostly in Spanish" or singing something that more closely resembles "sound and gesture than language," sourced from "the actual recorded voices of women I love and admire who have shaped in some way or another my life—family and friends."

In 1948, five years after its premiere, the Eighth Symphony still managed to make trouble for Shostakovich. Andrei Zhdanov, the Soviet Minister of Culture and Shostakovich's most powerful nemesis, yanked it from obscurity just so he could denounce it at length. Another member of the panel, Vladimir Zakharov, a Soviet functionary and a minor composer, described it as "not a musical work at all" and "repulsive and ultra-individualistic," similar in sound to "a piercing dentist’s drill, a musical gas chamber, the sort the Gestapo used." Shostakovich was also condemned for the "pessimism, unhealthy individualism, extreme subjectivism, and willful complexity" of his symphony. Zhdanov ordered that all copies of the score be recycled and all recordings destroyed. I, on the other hand, have much nicer things to say about it.

Composed in 2022, whisper concerto is true to Balch's style in that it sounds at once perfectly idiomatic and utterly strange. Beautiful—sometimes even conventionally tonal—melodies commune lovingly with shameless noise. Virtuosity gives way to entropy only to catch its breath and come back weirder and wilder, transformed by the volatile power of orchestral collaboration. Shards and fragments of free jazz mysteriously reassemble themselves, against all odds, into a peculiar chorale.