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.Â
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 […]
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 […]
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?Â
"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
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 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.