Music Monday: Tansman: String Quartet No. 8

There are some composers who lurk in the background of one's awareness, never wholly forgotten, but not altogether present, either. For years, my only exposure to Alexandre Tansman was his Sonatine for bassoon and piano — I heard someone play it at a summer camp in high school, but I never worked on it myself and it didn't show up on any of the various bassoon CDs that I bought over the years, so while I remembered enjoying it, I couldn't produce much more than the opening gesture and an inaccurate version of the start of the finale. 

And then a little more than a week ago, I heard the LA Phil perform his Stelè in memoriam Igor Stravinsky, and my mind was blown.

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Inauthentic

This is probably not what Bach intended.

I'm going to be uploading the next movement of the third cello suite next Friday, and it's going to be . . . a little different. It'll still be very recognizably Bach, but I'm taking liberties with it, many more than I have in the other movements, and many more also than I'd take if I were playing the piece in an audition for judges who would doubtless know the score. Normally I'd just put it out there as-is with minimal comment, but this touches on a larger issue that I have a lot of thoughts about, so I'm going to take this post to justify what iI've done with the Sarabande.

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Music Monday: Tabakova: Modetudes

This week, we pivot from the saturated world of the orchestra to the leaner, more tightly focused world of the solo piano. Dobrinka Tabakova was born in Plodiv, Bulgaria in 1980, but she moved to London in 1991 and has lived there ever since. Altho her family is full of doctors and scientists, they were also avid music-lovers, and it didn't take long for Tabakova to start gaining recognition — she won her first prize (the Jean-Frédéric Perrenoud prize) at the age of 14, and has racked up numerous accolades since, including the honor of writing an anthem for Queen Elizabeth II's Golden Jubilee. All of the performances currently listed on her website are in Europe, but with her prodigious talent, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before we start hearing her works played on this side of the pond as well.

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There's Nothing Noble . . .

A few episodes into the third episode of Queer as Folk, hotshot violin prodigy Ethan Gold is approached by an agent who offers him everything he's ever wanted: Solo concerts, regional and national tours, even a record deal with a major label. There's just one catch: Ethan can't openly acknowledge his boyfriend for fear of alienating (homophobic) audience members. At first, he refuses to consider it, but then Brian Kinney finds him playing on a street corner and tries to talk him into signing. As he walks away, he tells the violinist "You know, there's nothing noble about being poor.".

You can tell from his smug smile that he thinks it's a terribly clever line, and, infuriatingly, no one offers much by way of a counterargument over the rest of the episode. Not wanting to pass up his life-long dream, and seeing the logic in Brian's position, Ethan signs the contract.

Now, he's a free agent (insofar as we're pretending he's a real person and not a fictional character . . . ) and can do as he likes, but still. "There's nothing noble about being poor." Well no, there isn't. But there isn't anything noble about being rich, either.

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Music Monday: Ranjbaran: The Blood of Seyavash

Right now I'm working on a short film score for the Marvin Hamlisch Film Scoring Contest, so my listening has tended to the dramatic and sweeping. (It also means I've started focusing on the soundtracks to movies I'm watching even more than usual, sometimes to the point of missing lines of dialogue . . . ) And while there's certainly a lot of highly dramatic repertoire written for the concert hall, much of the best of it comes from the stage. So today we feature one such work, a ballet by Persian composer Bezhad Ranjbaran.

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Taking IN the Trash

There's a scene in the movie Big Eyes where someone is nearly stabbed with a salad fork. It's a striking — even shocking — scene, and not the least because the surroundings are so very un-stabby. Elegant socialites in bejeweled cocktail dresses are standing around chattering in small groups. Fussy hors d'oeuvres sit on delicate china, waiting to be consumed. Antonio Vivaldi's "Spring" is playing in the background.

This scene reminded me of another scene in another movie, specifically the German art gallery scene from The Avengers. The tone is somewhat different — and the stakes somewhat higher — but once again a gathering of swanky people in fancy clothes turns abruptly into a scene of violence. This time, the accompaniment is a string quartet.

I can think of any number of scenes like this. Not scenes where upper-crust socializing is interrupted by unexpected violence, but scenes where classical music is used to imply classiness and sophistication. Put on a little Mozart, and we're swept away into a world of refinement, elegance, and charm. To be sure, it's overwhelmingly a world of surfaces — we're in the land of tittering laughter at an art gala, not raw confessions wrenched out in a private room — but there can be no doubt that it's a classy affair. (I'm primarily talking about diegetic uses here — times when the music is actually happening in the world of the story, instead of extra-diegetic uses where it's just happening in the soundtrack. Most movie scores would arguably fall under the classical umbrella, but you're usually not supposed to notice them consciously; here I'm dealing with moments where you're supposed to consciously notice the classical music as such.)

The flip side is that this is a very small emotional box to live in. It's polite laughter, not a bellowing guffaw. You might be melancholy, but there isn't enough room to be devastated. The most confrontational you can get is saying something arch. This is music you appreciate, not music you enjoy.

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Contamination

"Lo, body and soul" — "Beat! beat! drums!" — "Bearing the bandages, water and sponge"

Junior year, thru a convoluted chain of circumstances, I found myself in possession of an omnibus edition of Walt Whitman's poetry. Now that I actually have time to read for pleasure, I've been making my way thru the leaves, taking the opportunity to connect with a part of my cultural heritage.

Many of the poems, of course, are famous in their own right — this is far from my first exposure to "O Captain! My Captain" or the rambling "Song of Myself". Many of the others, unsurprisingly, are totally new to me, obscure outpourings from the nineteenth century. Some of them are striking, others forgettable, but they're all new to me. But then there are the ones I know thru a sideways route, the ones that composers have set — in whole or in part — to music that I know well.

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Music Monday: Hindemith: Tuttifäntchen Suite

Here in Los Angeles, it's usually necessary to put on socks to be comfortable outside, which means that various Winter Solstice holidays are just around the corner. I'm going to be taking the next few weeks off blogging — this Friday's post will be the last one until 2015 — so this seems an appropriate moment to get into the holiday spirit. Often, when tasked with presenting seasonal music, I go for the deliberately out of place, pointing to things like Krzysztof Penderecki's languid, brooding (but "Silent Night"-quoting!) second symphony, but today I'm going to do something of the reverse: Present a cheerful, exuberantly naïve work from a composer who is rarely either of those things.

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Music Monday: Tailleferre: Harp Sonata

Today, we step back from the massive forces and raging sorrow of Corigliano to a work that's considerably more tranquil and serene. Germaine Tailleferre was born in a suburb of Paris in 1892, and originally studied piano with her mother before ultimately winding up in the Conservatoire de Paris. Her father refused to support her musical endeavors, and to spite him, she refused to go by the name she was given at birth. (Tailleferre had to deal with a lot of bullshit in her life as a female composer, living and working in a time when Aaron Copland could confidently proclaim that women had an innate block against composing well. It's hard to escape the feeling that one of the reasons she's so little known is pervasive sexism.)

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The [Homophobic] Author is Dead

So my friends Erin and Noah over at the Limiting Factor podcast were covering the recent renewed attention on the rape accusations against Bill Cosby and got into a discussion about whether you can separate art from the person who makes it. They don't come to a hard and fast conclusion, but they're definitely leaning towards not being able to separate the two, towards the nastiness of an artist tainting the art that they make. They make a lot of good points, but I tend to come down on the other side of this question, and today I'm going to offer some reasons why.

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Music Monday: Corigliano: Symphony No. 1

Come back when your screams aren't so raw around the edges. Edward Rothstein didn't actually write those words in his New York Times review of the New York première of John Corigliano's first symphony (written in 1988 in response to the AIDS crisis), but it's a sentiment that seems to be lurking everywhere beneath the surface. He opines that the piece "is extraordinarily aggressive: to show anger and pain, it shouts and screams and harangues in triple-forte range. These outbursts seem almost tantrums, they are so raw and musically unmotivated.". Later, he calls such gestures "vulgar"; he compares them unfavorably with other "musically sophisticated works" and complains that they "[rely] upon prepackaged emotional baggage" and fail to "enlarge the listener's perceptions". Could you mourn your dead in a way that's a bit more tasteful?

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Music Monday: Agincourt Carol

And now for something completely different. All of the posts to date have featured music from the 20th and 21st Centuries. That's been deliberate: I have an overwhelming fondness for these musics, and I think most of them are neglected and often unfairly maligned as cacophonous and unpleasant to listen to. But they're also not the only good music out there. So today I'm turning to the other side of the Western Art Music common practice, to feature a piece born out of the bitter rivalry between Medieval France and England.

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For a Social Science Fiction

Interstellar has a lot of physics in it.

Like, really, a lot of physics. While some science fiction is quite happy to loiter on the "putty" end of the Mohs Scale of Sci-Fi Hardness [TV Tropes], Interstellar at least aspires to the more unscratchable reaches. The general consensus seems to be that the bulk of it (until the denouement, at least) is at least vaguely plausible; the involvement of Kip Thorne [Wikipedia] certainly doesn't hurt the credibility in that regard. The space tech also feels real: It seems delightfully plausible that our first interstellar voyages would be on clunky, ruggedly built ships with a distinctly 70s vibe — I am 100% willing to accept the Endurance in a way that I simply cannot accept the Enterprise from the shiny Star Trek reboot. If spaceships ever leave the realm of engineering for that of graphic design, it's going to be a long time in the future indeed.

So, naturally, most of the back-and-forth about the film's plausibility has centered on the physics in the second and third halves, from the gravity-induced time dilation to the precise nature and limits of the tesseract. That's all well and good, but there's much more interesting science to be picked apart here.

Specifically, I'm interested in all the social science behind how we get to the world portrayed in the opening act.

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Music Monday: Higdon: Concerto for Orchestra

Despite the seemingly contradiction, there are a lot of pieces under the title "Concerto for Orchestra". (Unlike in a traditional concerto that features one solo instrument, a Concerto for Orchestra treats the entire orchestra as the soloist.) I have fourteen in my iTunes library, and know (or at least know of) several more. It's hard to say much about them as a genre — each one is pretty unique — but they do tend to be virtuosic on every level, displaying compositional dexterity and orchestrational brilliance, and calling for impressive feats from all the players, both individually and as a group. Higdon's fits right into this mold; it's a tour de force from all involved.

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Weak and Idle Themes

Some pieces of music are really good. They reach down inside you and touch you on a fundamental level, they fill your heart with joy or cleanse your mind with cathartic sorrow. Some works, on the other hand, are just bad. They're melodically dull, or harmonically uninspiring, or any of the other myriad things that can go wrong when putting notes on the page. (And I've suffered all these faults and more in my own writing. Music is hard.) But then there are the works that are almost really good. They have a lot going for them, they almost hit it out of the park, but there's just . . . something where they fundamentally miss the mark. 

And works in that last category are often the most excruciating of all.

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The Book of Life

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

— Ursula K Le Guin, "The Ones Who Walk away from Omelas" (1974)

It is easy, almost effortless, to think of artistic masterworks that fit this pattern, exploring miserable lives with elegance and sophistication, marshaling great intellectual and expressive resources to pick apart physical and emotional suffering. It is harder to think of works that revel unabashedly in their celebration of joy, that take happiness and flourishing as their subject and refuse to apologize for doing so.

The Book of Life is one such work, and it is so refreshing for being so.

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