Songs and Sommeliery

If you ever have me over for dinner, don't break out the fancy wine.

I won't be offended by it — I don't have some strange and idiosyncratic vendetta against expensive libations — I just won't appreciate it.

I have four basic categories when it comes to appreciating wine: Undrinkable, Not My Favorite, Decent, and Wow This Is Good. Beyond the most rudimentary language of dry vs sweet, I have almost no way of describing what I like; my palette is unrefined and promiscuous, perfectly happy to lap up the cheapest grocery store offering or the fanciest private reserve — and completely incapable of telling the difference between them. The complex, florid descriptions on the backs of bottles, the earnest, enthusiastic recommendations in wine stores? Completely meaningless to me. I can smile and nod as the words go by, but ultimately I'd get about the same amount of comprehension from a lecture in advanced quantum mechanics.

This isn't the fault of some defect on my tongue. I have no doubt that, given time and training and bountiful samples to sip from, I could develop my ability to dissect all the nuanced flavors that expert sommeliers pick out. I might not be able to become the very best wine taster in the world, but I'm sure I could become decent enough to have strong opinions on what I should pair with my next meal. I could totally do that.

I just don't want to.

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Music Monday: Archer: Piano Concerto

As Kimberly Archer (b 1973) notes in her program note for today's piece, composing a piano concerto is “one of those nearly obligatory ‘composer benchmarks’” that almost all of us wind up tackling at some point or other in our careers. To be sure, there are times where this kind of expectation can feel stifling — most of us want to be individuals, not cookie-cutouts — but by the same token, seeing how a new person works in a familiar genre can be a quick and powerful way to get a handle on what they're about. The sheer number of pre-existing piano concerti gives a rich field for comparison without having to dive into the treacherous waters of comparing radically different kinds of works. Here's a form with a long and storied tradition; let's see what you make from it!

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So You Want to Do Otello

The new Met Opera brochure for the 2015–16 season is here! It came on Tuesday, and even tho I don't live in NYC right now, I was still excited about it, because a) simulcasts are a thing and b) the Met is an institution of national significance in the music world I move in, and I like feeling hip to what's going on. Usually I have some gripes with their repertoire selection (predictably, all the operas they're doing were written by men, and the most recent is Alban Berg's Lulu from 1935), and while I have many thoughts about those things, there is a more pressing issue that needs to be addressed:

They're doing Otello in blackface. Again.

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Music Monday: Makris: Variations and Song

Andreas Makris was born 7 March, 1930 in Salonika, Greece, and spent the early years of his life there. His early piano studies were cut short by the outbreak of World War Two, but then his father traded salt and olive oil to a starving man in exchange for a violin, and Makris began teaching himself that instrument. After graduating from the national conservatory in Greece, he emigrated to the United States in 1950, and ultimately graduated from the Mannes School of Music in 1956, before going on to continue studying at the Aspen Music Festival and, subsequently, traveling to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. Instead of staying in France or returning to Greece as might be expected, he settled back in the United States, quickly taking a position in the violin section of the National Symphony Orchestra, where he played for 28 years.

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Music Monday: Lash: Moth Sketches

Hardly any information about Moth Sketches (2013) is floating around on the internet — even the listing on her publisher's site is a bare-bones rundown of instrumentation and duration — but according to an archived copy of the program from the première performance, the work started out as a score for a short animated film about a moth. Eventually, the music parted ways from the movie and became a stand-alone work, but the origins left their imprint, and she found herself thinking of different materials as quasi-dramatic characters. The form is still abstract, however; she describes it as being like a braided rope, "involving many strands of differing colors" such that the surface is constantly changing as the piece unfolds.

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Why I Listen to Music I Don't Like

This past week was the Next on Grand festival down at Disney Hall, a series of concerts celebrating contemporary American composers. I couldn't attend every single one, but I caught the bulk of them, my bus pass getting a strenuous workout in the process. Seeing this behavior, you might well think that I was rather besotted with the repertoire, in love with the pieces on the program.

By and large, I wasn't.

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Music Monday: Dillon: The Infinite Sphere

Despite the historical prominence of the genre, I don't really listen to a lot of string quartets. It's not hard to find reasons why: I'm a wind player, so I can't exactly perform in one (nor can the people I know from sitting next to in most ensembles . . . ), most of my exploratory listening is in times and repertoires rather more recent than the core of the quartet repertoire, and the music theory courses I took tended to be centered more around art songs and piano sonatas. It will come as no surprise, then, that the ones I do know tend to be rather off the beaten path. 

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Blame Your Tools

My low register was sharp.

This, in and of itself, was not terribly surprising. The bassoon is full of awkward acoustic compromises, and the low register on my instrument had never been particularly in tune, even under ideal conditions. I'd made some changes to my setup (including swapping out part of the instrument) senior year of college that had helped considerably, but still, it was hardly surprising that the first time I pulled out a tuner in LA, low B-flat was aspiring ever upwards.

So I did what I've been trained to do. I set about drilling myself with intonation exercises, training myself not only to be able to hear when notes are or aren't in their proper place, but also to be able to get them there from the moment they start to sound. For those of you unused to the joys of woodwind playing, this involves a lot of fiddly manipulations of parts of your body you don't normally think about: How high up in my throat is my larynx right now? Can I get it lower? What's the shape of the back of my tongue? Is there equal pressure coming from every direction around my mouth? All this while watching the needle on the pitch indicator stubbornly refusing to budge.

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Music Monday: Dring: Trio

"Daaaaaaaaaaa, ba du ba du ba du ba deedle-dee" — It's not often that the first two bars of a piece grip me so suddenly and surely as the opening of Madeleine Dring's trio for flute, oboe, and piano. Yet the very first time I heard them — streaming background music at the office, on a CD I had clicked on for a completely different piece — I dropped what I was doing and frantically tabbed over to Spotify to figure out what I was listening to. It's good to be reminded that even with all the repertoire I already know, there are still delightful surprises out there in the world of this music I love.

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Consider the Audience

This past Tuesday, I had an underwhelming experience with the LA Phil. The concert was an "All-American" chamber show, the first offering in their "Next on Grand" series, a celebration of contemporary American composers. The underwhelmingness wasn't the fault of the music, or not entirely. As with most grab-bag contemporary concerts, I was fonder of some selections than others, despite the consistently high level of performance on display. No, the music alone was fine. What really bothered me were the set changes.

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Music Monday: Schickele: Summer Serenade

Peter Schickele (b 1935) is undoubtedly best known for his work with the music of PDQ Bach, the youngest and oddest of JS Bach's twenty odd children, but he's also a talented composer in his own right. His youthful musical environments were perhaps not the richest — he was the only bassoonist in Fargo, and subsequently the only music major in his class at Swarthmore (1957) — but he wound up studying with many of the giants of mid-century musical education, including Roy Harris, Darius Milhaud, and Vincent Persichetti. When he was only 26, he landed a teaching job at Juilliard, but, even more remarkably, he was able to quit four years later to embark on a career as a freelance composer. He's managed to keep this up right thru to the present — he currently lives with his wife in upstate New York and isn't affiliated with any institution (occasional research work on PDQ Bach at the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople notwithstanding). 

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No More Boring Bios

We need to talk about bios, y'all.

I don't mean book-length, formally published biographies. Those books are a diverse bunch, and the ones I've read haven't been plagued by any repeating issues — whatever failings they have are idiosyncratic and individual, not representative of the genre as a whole. No, I'm talking about the short little bios that get slipped into concert programs, sometimes as part of the notes for a given piece, but more often as standalone entries in the "About Tonight's Artists" section.

On the whole, these bios are terrible.

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Music Monday: Lutyens: Présages

Elisabeth Lutyens became known colloquially as the Horror Queen, and would paint her nails a lurid green to further the association. While it's certainly true that she didn't hold her film scores in the same regard that she did her concert works — she was infamous for asking producers "Do you want it good, or do you want it Wednesday?" — but she was genuinely proud of her ability to score a 50-minute film in as little as five days.

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Indestructible Architecture of Sound

This is Bach. And Bach, more than any other music, . . . is music complete. This doesn't just mean it's beautiful. This means you can play this music all your life, even just this Allemande, and no matter what you do, it will expose you. It will expose everything you are and everything you're not. It will expose everything you can do and everything you can't. It will expose everything you've mastered and everything you're scared of. And I don't just mean about the violin. I mean about everything. It'll show all that today, and it'll show all that when you play it again in 10 years.  And people who know music, who've seen you play it both times, they will see you play it and know who you were and who you've become.

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Music Monday: Williams: The Five Sacred Trees

We've come to that rarest of rare things: A living composer that almost everyone has actually heard of! It's May the Fourth, and to celebrate, today we're featuring a work by John Williams, the man who wrote the music for the Star Wars movies. The most fitting thing, I suppose, would be to feature some selections from those scores, but one of the purposes of these posts is to help get the word out about music that you might not have heard, and honestly Star Wars doesn't need my help to boost its popularity. (If you are one of today's lucky 10,000 and haven't seen Star Wars yet, I highly recommend getting one of your friends to show you Episode IV at least. Even outside of the quality of the film itself, there are so many references to it in popular culture that will suddenly make a lot more sense. It's iconic.)

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Music Monday: Shaw: Partita

So often, in the concert music world, we have a tendency to get caught up in the score. It's not hard to see why: Performances are fleeting and hard to pin down, whereas the printed score is physically there; you can look at it and pick it to pieces and study a given musical moment for hours without having to move on to the next. Still, at the end of the day, scores aren't music. Scores are instructions for making music. For some styles of music, Western notation provides a precise set of instructions indeed, but there are many sounds it's less adept at capturing, and pieces that incorporate them can be a resounding reminder that music lives in sounds heard, not ink printed.

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Rotational Games

So I'm currently in the middle of writing a bassoon sonata. It's the first entirely new concert piece I've written since finishing my musical, the first such piece, in fact, since finishing my clarinet sonata in the fall of 2013. (I've done a couple of concert arrangements of selections from Window for various forces, and while all of them have new material spliced in, those additions are really just connective tissue to make the music work without the words; they lack the depth of compositional intensity that building a new structure from the ground up calls for.) It's going well: I have solid drafts of the first two movements and the third is off to a promising start.

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Music Monday: Schoenberg: Wind Quintet

SERIALISM. The very name has come to stand for a musical bugaboo. Treated interchangeably with "dodecaphony" or the "twelve-tone technique", serialism refers to a style of twentieth-century composition that is notoriously standoffish and difficult to get into. The starting point for the style goes something like this: Tonality — the system of harmonic organization in most Western music from the 1600s on* — by emphasizing one note over and above all of the others. One way to get away from tonality, then, is to prevent any one note from being super emphasized by coming up with a system to make sure that all twelve notes are played roughly the same number of times. The key mechanism to this is the "twelve-tone row", a specific ordering of all twelve pitches in the Western musical system that can be transposed, flipped upside down, and played backwards in any combination. This results in music that lacks a tonal center, music that does not operate along the same tropes of tension and release, expectation and fulfillment as other Western music; it is obeying a different set of rules.

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