[joshuaclausen]

Modernist music is cool.

This post is: 1) part concert review of Ensemble Dal Niente's presentation as a part of the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's Liquid Music concert series. 2) Part reflection on the marketing and reception of the Liquid Music series. 3) Part straight-up statement of personal values.  I'd say that's a good and appropriate way to start a TUMBLR. Let's start off with some of the the spicy stuff: Some will see SPCO's Liquid Music series as cynical, on par with playing orchestral Metallica arrangements. 'A misguided sacrifice of standards made to keep concert music alive,' etc. We've heard this kind of thing before. Just want to make it clear from the top that this is not where I'm coming from.  Yes, for a Classical-market campaign, Liquid Music looks pretty commercial. It uses good, fresh design. The Current and the Walker have been involved. This will make some uncomfortable but I appreciate these things. As a composer and supporter of new music I'm very heartened by such a large-scale sophisticated effort to, you know, reach people.  I'm proud to be a part of a community that can sustain this. Beyond the marketing, I see what Liquid Music has been doing as not only ok and not-cynical but maybe even brave, at least when it comes to the contrast we are presented with in the last two concerts: Jherek Bischoff and Ensemble dal Niente. These are very different evenings of music in many ways, which I'm going to talk about a little bit more below, but one thing they share is they're not popular music. By this I'm referring to market position/status, not style. Both groups are non-mainstream with respect to what's happening in most of their relative markets. In this context I'd call a Classical-market concert that featured another performance of Beethoven's 5th symphony or Mussorgsky on Halloween a concert of popular music as much as the concerts on Miley Cyrus's world tour. Another e.g.: although Björk's music is statistically more popular than that of almost all musicians that self-ID primarily as a 'composer,' in this context I say she is not pop because she is more likely to be recording the symbolic silence of an ancient yak fossil than trying to compress a 808 kick drum until it bangs just right. Similarly, both Bischoff and Niente are fringe riders and they are there because the work they do is not in the center of their market's tastes. Another way they are similar is they have both been selected by this series and put back to back. We are being asked to consider these two as meritorious and worthy of our attention with the same ears. The kinds of sounds happening in these two events are wildly, wildly different. If either a primarily new-classical fan or a primarily edgy-pop fan went to both of these concerts, how would they react to the concert they were less familiar with? This series is asking us to consider that. In my experience this kind of thing isn't easy to do. It can turn people from potential markets off. It can ruffle cultural feathers. This is why Liquid Music might be considered brave, or at least remarkable. Even though Bischoff and Niente are both fringe-riders they're still situated in different markets, both of which carry a lot of associative baggage in the minds of potential customers. With this in mind, I'd like to address these great fightin' words from a conversation between MPR's Steve Seel & the Walker's Phillip Bither on 89.3 The Current:

"SS: So, the first thing that's exciting to me about this show [the Bischoff show], and pretty much every show that's been part of the Liquid Music Series and the kind of stuff that you guys do at the Walker as well, is how it's one more glorious nail in the coffin in the era of horrible, difficult, academic modern music. I mean it's music that's still extensively serious, but beyond that, it's pretty much where the comparisons end to the world of "modern classical music" that drove too many people away in the 20th century. I mean this is just as much indie-rock as it is classical music. PB: Absolutely. In many ways you could tie it closer to Pet Sounds or something, not necessarily the 20th century classical music tradition." I get where Seel is coming from here and why Bither agrees.  The above interview was mostly centered on the Bischoff concert and what it represents and that's how the Walker is connected to the series (they sponsored the Bischoff show).  But Seel did address the Liquid Music series as a whole, and especially now that the Dal Neinte performance has happened I think it would be illuminating to re-evaluate these comments. While Jherek Bischoff's music could be interpreted as opting out of 'difficult' influences from the 20th century (although you'd probably have to keep Minimalism in there which in its day could be quite stringent in its own ways), it's impossible to interpret the dal Niente performance in the same way. That performance was chock full of gnarly, awesome ass-kicking modernist-tradition-influenced music.  There were practically no melody & accompaniment textures. There were no guest artists from the rock scene. There were no emotional diatonic melodies over sustained subdominant triads. I feel a need to urgently insert that I like these kinds of things, I don't disdain them. I'm just pointing out that they didn't happen in that concert. There was a lot of complex counterpoint and dense polyrhythm. Two of the pieces were concerned primarily with space and timbre, and hardly at all with melody or rhythm. Every work sought harmonic strategies outside the triad-based tonal language that is used for almost all popular-market and pre-20th century Western music. What I see in Liquid Music's incorporation of the dal Niente performance in the series is much more continuity between, or at least the coexistence of, edgy-popular-music-type currents and the creative legacy of all that 'difficult academic music.'  At least that's what I hope to see. I'm now going to go into a little more detailed 'concert review' mode, while also continuing with this aesthetic reflection kind of thing. This isn't to say that there weren't also other influences at work in the dal Niente program. Stefan Prins's Piano Hero clearly nods at pop culture with its title, albeit in kind of cheeky way.  During the piece Winston Choi at MIDI keyboard plays back tiny shards of prerecorded audio/video content. The content features two arms playing the inside of a piano with hammers, sticks, brushes and fists in a raw and aggressive style. This jagged, glitchy "scratched DVD" effect is redolent of certain currents of experimental electronic pop from the late 90's and early 2000s - Oval's collages of CD-skip blips and the sounds and images of Aphex Twin's piano experimentalism on Drukqs come to mind. There's also an extended period in which the piano controller doesn't cue any sound or video, even as Choi bangs on the keys. It would be very easy for an audience member to assume in this moment that something has gone wrong with the playback, and the player is marshaling on, going through the motions of the piece until it starts working again. I know I would have thought this if I hadn't seen this piece before and read about other performances of it. The actual purpose of this section is to make an extra-musical point of some kind about performance and technology, I think. I can't say I really get it. However the fact that it's intentional seems kind of punk or dada to me - 'I dare you to misinterpret my piece.' Noah Keesecker's The universe is made of stories, not of atoms also seems to participate in this aesthetic polyworld. It includes fast, click-like electronic sounds and powerful bass frequencies. The rhythms of these sounds are more complex than EDM's usual straight-duple-rhythms-at-various-subdivisions, and they punctuate the texture in a structural way. This could suggest the edgy side of electronic pop or the decidedly 'academic' electroacoustic style. The acoustic textures of the work are also quite varied and evocative.  In my favorite passage Ligeti-esque ensemble polyrhythms gradually transformed into a dense counterpoint of syncopated,  angular melodic lines reminiscent of avant-garde jazz. I think it's at least plausible that both of the above works intend the kind of brave multi-referential risks that it looks to me like Liquid Music is taking in its curation of the entire series. While these two works were at least partially concerned with the expressive legacy of 20th-century modernism the remaining works were entirely concerned with it.  If you asked these composers (excluding Cage of course) about their influences you'd hear a lot more about folks like Elliot Carter and Morton Feldman than anyone in indie rock or edgy pop. Both the concert and the series are better for it. The next set of works (two by Rebecca Saunders and one by John Cage) were performed without interruption. This set formed a mesmerizing demonstration of the purely sensual power of this kind of music. I particularly enjoyed the sensitive, etched Stirrings Still by Saunders. It's a gentle and mercurial piece built from a complex interplay of focused, detailed gestures in each part. It continually shifts in texture but unlike some new works with this proclivity for through-composed local complexity it doesn't feel opaque or impenetrable. It's also quite disjunct for the most part, each instrumental part very individualized and free, yet the feeling of line and phrase within the group is always palpable and expressive. The final work, Enno Poppe's Salz was probably the hardest sell on the program for audience members that aren't already on the 20th-century avant-garde train. I'll admit, it took me until the wild-but-restrained flute/drum set duet about 9 minutes in before I was a real fan, but as it evolved I found it more and more compelling. By the end of the work the texture alternates bright, intense microtonal cluster chords with a carefully orchestrated ensemble tantrum. This was all held together with excellent, passionate conducting by Michael Lewanski. To an uninitiated listener, my guess is the piece will come off as intense and eccentric, like a crazy neighbor who's building a spaceship out of bike parts in his backyard. But certainly not just an intellectual exercise. Certainly not  just 'academic.' This is part of what I don't get about people that say they don't like Modernist music: I don't understand how a person could come away cold and dismissive from a performance like that, which is so intense and so clearly 100% pro, happening right in front of them. Works like Poppe's are unbelievably rich and visceral sound worlds which take an amazing amount of interpretive vision and incredible, dazzling performance skills. I suspect that many folks with ground axes for Modernism have had bad first impressions, either from recordings (it's a lot easier to dismiss this kind of music if you can't see it) or substandard performances, and from there they get used to thinking that it all just sucks. I would like it if something was done about this. Now it's time to segue into the straight-up statement of personal values. Why am I bothering to write this? I care what people like Steve Seel think. It makes me sad when incredible expanses of past and future musics get dismissed out of hand - when noted cultural figures relate the impression to their audiences that 'you shouldn't bother with this kind of thing because it isn't for you.' Some proponents of modernist music have no problem with the term 'elitist' and even self-apply the term. I don't want to see myself this way. I think modernist music is cool, and I want other people to think so too. Also experimental music, and electroacoustic music - the legacy of all that midcentury 'difficult' stuff. It should be cool to be interested in Carter, Stockhausen, Cage,  etc. and the people who follow in their footsteps. Not elitist, not nerdy, cool.   By 'cool,' I mean the enjoyment and appreciation of this music should be looked upon with favor, and there should be an openness and encouragement toward non-specialists to engage with it at whatever level they want, and maybe even try to learn more about it. There are other genres that my be considered somewhat inaccessible by the general public for some reason or another, but still get this benefit. Hardcore punk or post-bop jazz may not be everyone's thing, but the people who are big fans of it and know a lot about it are pretty cool, right? Modernist music is just as intense, interesting and cool. It just has a PR problem. I like to see myself as involved in several musical scenes. I tend to especially like the musicians that challenge some of the assumptions of their scene. This is kind of like having a lot of weird friends.  In my experience the more edgy or fringe-ish an artist or even a style is compared to its genre's mainstream the more open it is/they are to different kinds of musical valuations, influences, etc. Those folks tend to be curious and experimental - inquisitive about new systems and open to their influence, rather than just insisting upon one system and its ideology. This series has that kind of spirit. It's getting different folks together.  It always feels nice when all of your friends from different corners of your life come to the same party, get along and have nice conversations with each other. Liquid Music is throwing that party. You should go to it.