Course Blog: "Through the Looking Glass" - Ayman Bin Kamruddin on Music, Science, and Interrelation
(Photo: Einstein playing the violin in the music room of the S.S. Belgenland. Credit: Keystone/Getty Images, borrowed from an NPR article on Einstein's brain, linked via photo.)
I come from the background of a person completely immersed in an ocean of scientific knowledge, from a very young age. Growing up, I had an encyclopedia set dedicated to “The World of Science” and can say that I’ve always viewed the world through a scientific lens, believing only in physical absolutes and the cause and effect logic underlying much of science. My upbringing (in a small unheard-of town in the Middle East) was mostly devoid of Musical and Artistic Culture, and I’m still rather confused about it all, although my recent experiences have begun to teach me how to appreciate these worlds. For instance, three years ago, I thought that art was little more than a waste of space. Until recently, I’d been very concerned with what art and music were about. Even today, I can’t really grasp what art is. (It’s true that these philosophical anxieties have prompted some very difficult questions about why science exists and what it is, but you might have to hunt me down in the flesh if you want to hear about those.) Having said all of this, maybe you can now understand better why a group of people spending any more than a couple of minutes talking about music would have sounded a bit like the monkey zoo to me (albeit one with great respect for taking turns to speak).
I’d been in the habit of signing up for humanities courses for the easier, binary, pass-fail option, exerting as little effort as possible to scrape a passing grade. Well, this was until I serendipitously came across a course which spoke of the influences the world of Literature had on the world of Music. What???! How could this be? I’d always imagined the world of Literature to be exclusively independent of the world of Art to be exclusively independent of the world of Music to be exclusively independent of the world of Science. Imagine the absurd shock I had when I read of claims of the evolution of the artistic world entwined with the evolution of my purely absolutely true scientific world! It’s really funny. Right now, I’m investigating what seems, to me, to be a really mysterious parallel between classical and modernist literature and music, and, lo and behold, classical and modern (or, quantum) physics. Both divides happened to coincide with the World Wars, but I digress.
And so, to summarize, this is how I used to perceive music before this course wrung my brain inside out: a sonic performance that existed in its own bubble. Ah, how naive.
What do I think about music now, after a thousand dollars’ worth of concerts and endless hours discussing music inside and outside class? Well, it’s just like any other subject, isn’t it? There are terms that have sprung up and survived, like those of pitch, tone, harmony. There are concepts of what fits into a standard trope, and what does not. There are depths to how musical instruments work with each other, and the ways in which they don’t (these are concepts I’ve heard about from trusted musical friends, but don’t understand fully for myself). There are philosophies of what music is, what it should strive towards, what it could be, how it could evolve—I myself find the ideas of Italian Futurists very appealing. Hell, there’s even a mathematics to music, as expounded by certain poets and musicians. So, what do students of music talk and think about? Just about everything under the sun, it turns out.
Course Blog: "At a Jazz Show" - Marko Gluhaich on Movement, Bebop, and the Marcus Shelby Orchestra
(Photo: Faye Carol with Marcus Shelby. Credit: Press photo for the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, Marcus Shelby and the Freedom Jazz Choir performance upcoming on June 5, 2014, original page linked via photo.)
Now mind you, up until then all of the songs had been a bit slow, the more traditional big band tunes typical of early Duke; however, in a sudden change in mood, trombonist Dr. Mitch Butler ripped into a solo that immediately brought soul into the music the band was playing on stage. It was at that moment I realized that we were watching a show. The difference between a show and a performance is not based on the attitude of the audience members, but rather on the passion with which the musicians play their instruments, and on the individuality and character they bring to their playing.
The Marcus Shelby Jazz Orchestra performed a dedication to “The Legacy of Duke Ellington: 50 Years of Swing!” I have attended a number of jazz shows in the past, but none have been in such a large venue. One of my favorite aspects about jazz shows is the intimacy the audience can have with the performers and the spiritual experience that results from that intimacy, so the idea of watching a jazz show at Zellerbach was not an optimal one. I was worried that the reactions would be different, that the audience could not be as engaged, that the beauty and soul of the jazz music would dissipate as it travelled through rows and rows of audience members. I was worried that the musicians would play too stiffly, that they would not present themselves through their music, but rather just play the pieces the way they were written. The first song came on and I began to tap my foot, but became self-conscious as I looked around and noticed that I was the only person in my row making any bit of movement. I thought that my shaking leg would shake the row and cause these stoic concertgoers discomfort and break them from the trance state they had entered into. It continued this way for the first song, and as the stoicism continued for the second song, I began to be disappointed—were the concertgoers not going to absorb the music? Were they not going to connect with the band members? Was this too big of a concert hall for the audience to be engaged? But by the third song, “Creole Love Call,” heads were nodding. The tune is a slower jam, but began to stray from the more traditional early big band work with which they opened. And by the fourth or fifth song, I was no longer hesitant to absorb the music fully.
The two halves were markedly different—the incredible talents of guest performers (Faye Carol, Matthew Szemela, Jules Broussard, and Joel Behrman) drove the first half. I was particularly impressed by Jules Broussard, as was most of the audience. A virtuosic and celebrated saxophone player, he had no problem letting the audience know that they were watching a performer who had shared the stage with the likes of Ray Charles. His capped off his powerful work in some of the later tunes of the set with a demonstration of his raw talent wherein he played his two saxophones simultaneously. Faye Carol was another highlight. I spoke to another concertgoer who expressed to me her disappointment with Carol’s singing; however, I could not have been more satisfied. She is a true jazz singer. Defying the ideal of the popstar trained voice, Carol feels the songs—and you can feel the songs with her simply through her demanding stage presence. After shedding her high heels upon entering the stage, she strutted around the band members with the carefreeness that makes jazz music jazz. Her witty banter between songs and her usage of conventionally ugly vocal sounds combined to create a model jazz singing performance.
While the first half was driven by these guest performers, the second half was driven by the uninhibited nature of the Duke’s later compositions. I personally enjoyed the second half much more than the first. The Shakespearean interludes were horrific, despite Shelby’s intentions to portray the Duke’s interest in the Bard. They deterred from the ambience and added pretentiousness to the concert that would have ruined the second half for me if it wasn’t for the beauty of the compositions that followed the speeches.
The music of the second half was closer to my personal tastes in jazz music. The first jazz I was ever introduced to, about 8 years ago, was bebop—one of jazz’s heavier forms. This for a very long time was all I knew of jazz. My attraction to the loud horn solos and the incredible speed with which the players played has persisted over the years as my listening palate has grown. I was drawn to these players that could completely absorb the music they were playing, and as a result, I could completely absorb the music and feel it with the intensity with which it was played. I received that same feelings I get when listening to bebop during the Marcus Shelby Orchestra’s second set, and I think the audience felt similarly. There was more vibrancy in the attitudes of the audience members, more shouts and shakes. The vibe was disrupted occasionally by the Shakespearean monologues, but the players helped the audience enter back into the same trance from which they came.
The enthusiasm of the audience as we all exited Zellerbach aptly reflected the performers on stage. Despite watching these performers in such a large venue, it was a jazz show, not a jazz performance. It was just as good as if we had watched them perform in a small club. Their stage presence was that big. I have not stopped listening to the Duke since.
Course Blog: "To Bebop or Not to Bebop (There's No Question)" - Jaren Feeley on the Marcus Shelby Orchestra
(Photo: Marcus Shelby and the Marcus Shelby Orchestra. Credit: Ulla Havenga for Z Space, original page linked via photo.)
Friday, May 2, Zellerbach Hall, 8 pm. The Marcus Shelby Orchestra walk right on stage, the band members pick up their instruments, and we’re off. The sound of early—unadulterated—big band jazz fills Zellerbach Hall.
A jazz big band requires concerted coordination among the members—the vast majority of parts are written out and inflexible, making the ensemble more akin to a symphony than a bunch of cigarette smoking beatniks. But to make a big band performance excellent, the golden thread of individual glory must tie it all together. When, come the head of the tune, the man with the shiny trombone stands up, it is the audience watching and listening with new sharpness as he takes one last inhalation of air. Then the solo begins, and the state of jazz is attained. Risk, creativity, that perfect high note that the audience loves to have; and then—if all goes well—there is a wave of applause and another instrumentalist is twitching up onto his feet, and taking a deep breath…
So it goes, with Marcus Shelby plucking away methodically at that bass, back to the audience, never once taking a solo. The man already has his logo-name printed all over the bandstand. It also gives a musician (or any human being) mystique to occupy a position of authority without ever making it clear why he or she should (or shouldn’t) wield such prestige. In these cases, the audience usually imagines hidden virtues and talents.
An excellent violinist, a very special guest, is introduced onto the stage, where he commences to blow the audience away with musicality and virtuosic technique. Next, the “queen bee” is introduced to the stage, Faye Carol, a veteran singer who walks onto the stage in heels and then promptly removes them to go barefoot. It is a symbolic gesture that seems to assure the audience that no superficiality or false pretenses will be had.
Faye’s voice does not have the silky smooth texture of a younger chanteuse, but moves rather like a venerable kung-fu master in a duel: there is a general economy of movement, but suddenly there will be a quick glide up to an unexpected note, or an funky wide vibrato between two notes that keeps going unstoppably while the band’s chords shift under her. She seems to know exactly what she is capable of, and she carries herself with supreme confidence as she hits all the right notes. Sometimes it really seems as if she is off key, and I lean in a bit in my seat—and ah yes she is then certainly in key, now strutting away and laughing nonchalantly over her shoulder.
After Faye’s songs end, one older white man sitting a few rows in front of me, wearing conservative jeans and a tucked in dress shirt, always stands up and gives her his one-man standing O.
The second half of the performance is marked by something very uncommon to jazz concerts: the spontaneous appearance of solo actors, reciting monologues from Shakespeare! First one walks down the center isle, later there is one above us in the balcony, reciting the most famous speeches of the most famous plays: Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and so forth.
It is customary at performances in concert hall venues like Zellerbach to witness a group of artists perform at a high level within a domain, such as a dance troupe, or a piano-singer combo, or a symphony. And yet, when one goes out to a fancy dinner, it is expected that there will be an appetizer of one type of food, then a change of pace for the entrée, and finally a new thing altogether for the dessert. Excuse my bold analogy, but there is something really cognitively rewarding about feeding the senses strikingly different things in one sitting. I love jazz concerts, but when I get to start sinking my teeth into the Shakespearian dialogues, I find that a part of my brain is getting out of my mental seat and touching the ol’ synaptic toes. Surely it takes a larger group of performers to create high quality performances in different artistic domains, but imagine if a symphony were to cut out a couple violins and a flute from the next performance of Mahler’s 2nd, and instead hire a good slam poet to lay down some rhymes in-between movements? How much more satisfying would that be?
You, dear reader, do not need to agree with me about the statements above. It is a roundabout way of me conveying my appreciation for the Marcus Shelby Orchestra, who performed to a packed house on May 2nd, introducing trumpet players, and violinists, and singers, and thespians to the audience like chef-servers of a restaurant specializing in the cuisine of the Duke.
Course Blog: "Western Classical Hip Hop and the Future of Rap Fusion" - Jaren Feeley on Ensemble Mik Nawooj
(Photo: JooWan Kim and Ensemble Mik Nawooj MCs. Credit: Raoul Ollman and Ken Lew, used for a March 22, 2012 article in the Daily Cal, linked via photo.)
Thursday, April 17, Yoshi's Oakland, 10 pm. “A ONE and-a TWO and-a THREE and-a FOUR and-a!”
With these rhythmically precise utterances, pianist-composer JooWan Kim counts in the music of flute, clarinet, cello, violin, drums, upright bass, lyric soprano, and two rappers—Ensemble Mik Nawooj is in effect.
I am no hip-hop aficionado, but I did live out my public school years in the first decade of the 2000’s, when the most common music rattling the truck of teenager’s cars was hip-hop. I didn’t reject it, though I preferred to listen to Miles Davis and Erik Satie on my own time. But when I was hanging out with other people my age, someone would inevitably put on some old-school hip-hop (think A Tribe Called Quest, Mos Def, or Nas) and we would all know the lyrics. Freestyle rap battles ensued among the boys in the parking lot.
I’d imagine that I have a somewhat similar outsider-appreciation of rap as does JooWan Kim, who halfway through the night’s performance confessed to having a preference for west coast gansta rap (I am positive I saw the two rappers onstage share an incredibly brief look of mirth). Those familiar with the genre would probably not be surprised by JooWan’s use of violins or piano on a hip-hop track. Rappers have been spitting lines over classical motifs throughout the history of the genre. But for the purposes of hip hop there is generally a relatively simple and catchy melodic groove that is not too busy, which functions as a predictable frame of reference that gives form to the rhythmic movements of a rapper and puts focus on the storytelling aspect of the song. Simply put, the hip hop song will appropriate just a simple part of a classical piece for the sake of the art of the rapper, at the expense of the sophistication that makes classical music so deeply compelling.
What makes Ensemble Mik Nawooj so interesting, is that it seems to do the opposite: the music of Mik Nawooj appropriates a simple part of hip hop—the rapper—and adds it to the beautiful sounds of a live chamber ensemble, and the sensibilities of western classical music. In theory this sounds like a reasonable idea, but it neglects the fact that hip hop is more than music, it is truly an attitude and a style, and the rapper is not an instrument, but an MC.
This understanding, which sinks in over many years of exposure to hip-hop, seemed to be lacking from Ensemble Mik Nawooj. The rapper is the interface between the rhythmic world of drums and bass and the everyday world of words, and thus stands in-between the audience and the DJ, tying it all together. In a live show the rapper does not rap, he or she guides the experience. If the rapper is telling a bonafide story, he/she must command the audience’s attention throughout the plotline, and where there is music, a great rapper can get the audience to move (the old “put your muthaf*cking arms in the air” is a classic example that was briefly tried out by one of the rappers of Mik Nawooj). The rapper is truly an MC, and must possess a degree of authority onstage—but in classical music, the composer is the conduit for the music and the authority onstage, and this was the case with JooWan Kim. Any doubt as to who was in this role was dispelled at the end of every song, when JooWan Kim dramatically extended his hands into the air in front of him and conducted his ensemble, always begging more! more my woodwinds! In all my life, I have never seen one musician leave his or her instrument and actively direct with loud arm gestures the musical playing of other musicians onstage, and for such a small group, I felt it bordered on the distasteful.
And so we had two disempowered rappers onstage, whose lyrics were often indecipherable over the music of the chamber ensemble. It often felt unfair to the rappers, just as if (on the flipside) a full orchestra was called in to perform at a live performance of a rap group that just wanted to sample a few repeating 8 bar phrases. This is why it was one of the highlights of the performance for me when one of the rappers (trying to read lyrics off of his iPhone, but getting lost) went freestyle, and immediately began talking about the circumstances of his life and region, bringing up the youth of San Francisco and the way they are living out their lives. It felt like truly bonafide hip hop, because it was—and at moments like these, the elegant backing arrangements added to the musicality, rather than monopolizing it.
JooWan Kim puts forth that “the goal of Ensemble Mik Nawooj is to cultivate and elevate pop music and pop culture, and in doing so we will create music for the future generation that is both accessible and sophisticated. It is my belief that this is the next step of evolution in music.” I suggest that much rap music already is both accessible and sophisticated, with the accessibility being in the melodic and harmonic simplicity, the sophistication being the highly nuanced rhythmic presentation of the lyrics, and for live performances, being a true masterof ceremonies. It is an interesting and noble endeavor to elevate the music of hip hop to a more harmonically sophisticated level, and I commend JooWan Kim for taking the first steps. But the art of rapping will need to develop sophistication in a new direction to accommodate the added complexity of rapping in a meaningful way over changing harmonic structures, and in the live performance (where the classical instrumentation really shines) the cultural tension between composer/conductor and MC will need to be fruitfully resolved. Even with this, it will be interesting to see if hip hop music will accommodate the dilution of inner-city style by the self-conscious sophistication of classical music.
Course Blog: "Three Perspectives on Modern Dance and the Evolution of an Art Form" - Tori Sweeney on Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, and Yuri Possokhov
(Photo: SF Ballet dancers perform in Yuri Possokhov's new choreography of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Credit: Erik Tomasson via the SF Ballet's program page, linked.)
As a dancer myself, I have had much experience learning various dance styles, including: tap, jazz, ballet, hip-hop, contemporary, and modern. With all my training, I have marveled at the fact that even when taught by various teachers, each dance style will always revert back to a basic technique, an unchanging technique. A ballerina in the 1950s was practicing the same barre and center floor exercises as I do today. This semester, I had the opportunity to see multiple renowned dance companies: the Martha Graham Dance Company, the San Francisco Ballet, and the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. All three of these companies approach dance with visibly different styles, yet ballet is at the center of them all. That said, I do believe traditional dance forms can still contribute to the sense of a new experience for an audience. After watching these dance companies, I was both in awe of, and shocked by, the rigidity of the individual genres as well as by the impact of choreographies using combined forms. I also wanted to take this opportunity to describe some of the variety I’ve seen.
In each program I attended, there was one performance piece that stood out to me, and each of the pieces was originally premiered in the early to mid-1900s. The Martha Graham Dance Company performed Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Originally premiered on October 30, 1944, it tells the story (as specified in the Cal Performances program notes) of a man and a woman “building a house with joy and love and prayer,” a “revivalist and his followers” with their “shouts of exaltation,” and a “pioneering woman with her dreams of the Promised Land.” The piece includes intricate movements, simple walking and running patterns, body music, harshness, cupped hands, rotation and contortion of the upper body, and contrast between use of kinetic tendencies and stillness. When looking to title or classify this work of art, many would refer to it as a ballet. But does it really follow the strict technique of ballet? The answer is no, and that is what makes this piece of choreography so unique and timeless. Martha Graham was the pioneer of the modern dance movement. She took the ballet form and created a whole new dance technique. She removed the rigid upper body, the light hands, and the fluidity and elitism of ballet. As a result, she created works that featured pedestrian movements, a sort of colloquialness, while still valuing sharpness, precision, and beauty.
Martha Graham was following other innovators of the Modernist period. In American music, George Gershwin was finding a music of the people, bridging the gap, by bringing everyday jazz music into a classical concert setting. In Western Europe, Stravinsky, Bartok, and many other composers were fascinated with folk music, nationalism, and bringing cultural history to their people. Meanwhile, following Graham’s rise to fame, Alvin Ailey founded the Alvin Ailey Dance Company upon the idea of discovering and revolutionizing a dance through which African Americans could perform and celebrate their culture. Alvin Ailey, a student of Martha Graham, popularized and participated in the development of modern dance that both embraced pure modern dance and blended modern dance with African influences.
On April 2, 2014, I had the pleasure of seeing one of the Alvin Ailey Dance Company’s most popular repertory pieces, Revelations, which originally premiered in January 31, 1960. This work is structured around spirituals, religious songs developed around slave culture that express secular salvation. There is a direct expression of longing for freedom, yearning to be unchained and free from slavery, between the lyrics of the song and the choreography of the movement. (See this clip—“I’ve Been Buked”—for a glimpse of the music and dance in action.) The dance style includes contractions, hip swings, African folkloric movements, acrobatics, pedestrian movements (i.e. walking, running, skipping), while still featuring moments of ballet. When Revelations first premiered, there was a controversy over labeling it ethnic because the movements were derived from traditional African dancing. At a time when ballet was considered the purest form of American dance, Alvin Ailey fused this traditional form with modern and Afro-Carribean dance. Ballet came to be associated with racial terms, which was a shock for many. At the same time, it paved a path toward acceptance for African Americans in the dance community. Ailey eventually created a dance form that was palatable for audiences across the world. And with pieces like Revelations, he demonstrates such genius.
Finally, I had the opportunity to see the San Francisco Ballet’s new rendition of The Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky and choreographed by Yuri Possokhov. Originally choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, and infamously premiered on May 29, 1913, it brought about riots and uprising with its jarring music and choreography. Possokhov’s rendition may not have caused upheaval among contemporary audiences, but it did bring turmoil to my mind. The whole piece felt like one giant oxymoron. It constantly shifted between elegance and contortion, chaos and unison, traditional ballet movement and movement reminiscent of the original choreography, such as jerking stamps, violent jumps, and choreographic floundering. To my eye, there did not seem to be a solidified intention behind the choreography. It was as though Possokhov had taken elements of traditional ballet—beautiful arms, pointed feet, rigid torso, and graceful partner lifts—and replaced them with their complete opposites. Yet, there were still many moments when traditional balletic form would return unpredictably. This made it very difficult for me to grasp what was unfolding on the stage. With my expectation that certain moves will be used consistently throughout a work to express narrative and character personality, one difficulty that I had with Rite of Spring was that the choreography used these different styles to portray the same emotions, thus making it very difficult to understand character portrayal.
As beautiful and interesting as the piece was, I was lost in the instability between dance forms. For example, Possokhov introduced into the piece a traditional couple in love, the “pas de deux” of the ballet, which ultimately seemed to distract from the original purpose of the work. The innocent girl playing the Chosen One, someone with whom the audience was to sympathize because she must be sacrificed to the gods, was now battling her struggles with a lover. Furthermore, the traditional “pas de deux” led to a decidedly less traditional major emphasis on sex. Such dramatic contrast of innocent love and mature sexual relation furthered the chaos and confusion in my understanding of the narrative. Possokhov’s attempt to blend dance forms essentially became a battle of superiority between dance forms.
To briefly conclude—although the three performances I saw this semester all grew out of the same basic technique of modern ballet concert dance, they each felt distinct and gripped my attention for different reasons. It is wonderful to realize how an art so unchanging in its base elements can become so unpredictable!
Course Blog: "The Third Dimension in Stravinsky's 'Rite of Spring'" - Nate Blackmon on the San Francisco Ballet
(Photo: Benjamin Stewart and James Sofranko of the San Francisco Ballet dance in Yuri Possokhov's reworking of Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring. Credit: Erik Tomasson for the San Francisco Examiner, original article linked via photo.)
Saturday, April 12, War Memorial Opera House, 8 pm. I am totally unqualified to talk about dance performances. At least, I thought I was until I saw the San Francisco Ballet perform Yuri Possokhov’s new (as of 2013) choreography for Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
This was my first ballet, and the hype surrounding Rite of Spring was lost on me—I knew little about the music or the original dance, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky and premiered a century ago in April, 1913. At the suggestion of my class, I refrained from learning anything about the performance beforehand—I was to be a fresh set of eyes seeing this groundbreaking work of Modernism for the first time. The first two pieces on the evening’s program (Rite of Spring was listed third) seemed to fit right into my uninformed conceptions of what ballet is—people twirling around on their toes to classical music. Caprice, choreographed by Helgi Tomasson to a combination of Camille Saint-Saëns symphonies (Symphony No. 2 in A minor, Opus 55, and Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Opus 78), and Maelstrom, choreographed by Mark Morris to Beethoven’s Piano Trio Opus 70, No. 1 (the “Ghost”),had lots of twirling, lots of prancing, and lots of elegant homogenous dancers who clearly showed an incredible amount of skill and athleticism. The audience would clap their approval after a particularly pleasing performance by a ballerina or whatever a male ballet dancer is called. These little applauses estranged me even more from the performance. Everyone else was clearly finding enjoyable distinctions in what I saw to be plié after pirouette after prance, after conglomeration of ballet clichés. It was hard to stay awake.
To say that Rite of Spring kept me awake is a massive understatement. The other two dances had stayed within a comfortable assumption of two-dimensionality, favoring side to side movement that, from our relatively distant seats, seemed to exist on a 2-D plane. Yet the curtain rose for Rite of Spring and a slanted stage rolled half-naked dancers to the floor like primordial slime. This stage rose in the back to exaggerate the invocation of depth, oozing dancers down the structure, from back to front. The scene was immediately striking, and otherworldly. And then they started to dance.
The women weaved in and out of the men, writhed with them on the floor, suggestively suggested pagan sexual practices that left little to the imagination. They crouched on hind legs and lurched around the stage in ape-like ancestral tribute. Everything was rhythmic. Gone was the melodic symphony worn threadbare by all my previous conceptions of ballet; the music was bizarre and repetitive and pulsed with rhythm. It was strange, foreboding, distant. In a wish to represent pagan rituals of sex and sacrifice, the dancing was feral, more like baboons lumbering around than the pretty pirouettes of the earlier pieces.
Out came a spear-wielding pelvis, two men freed from traditional ballet gender roles wrapped in a stretchy costume of pelvic anatomy. It ranks amongst the strangest things I’ve ever seen, and I loved it. They slingshotted around the stage, lifted each other, danced in ways together that would surely make some non-San Franciscan audiences uncomfortable. They chose the girl fit for sacrifice, and the people tore off her clothes in affirmation. She danced and fornicated her way to the slanted stage, was dramatically tied limb by limb to a cluster of trees bent to hold her, and torn limb from limb when they were released. And that was it. The dance wished to invoke pagan sexual and sacrificial rituals, and it did just that. Its lack of deeper commentary or meaning—at least, this is how it seemed to me—gave it a simplicity and focus that I really enjoyed.
I was hesitant to talk about my opinion of the performance since I felt so out of place and estranged by the first two pieces. The audience seemed in on something that my untrained eyes couldn’t appreciate. The other two pieces were totally uninteresting to one unacquainted with ballet performances, but Rite of Spring was the opposite. To one ignorant of ballet performances, it was fresh and engaging, hugely in part because it shattered my conceptions of ballet that had been corroborated all the way until the curtain drew back and the stage powerfully took control of all three dimensions. Then I felt qualified to write about ballet, excited even, to share my discovery. Sometimes an untrained eye can offer a notable perspective on a form of art entrenched in misconceptions for centuries. And now I know that those misconceptions are, in fact, misconceptions—ballet isn’t just pretty people pirouetting, it can take control of an entirely different range of emotions, sounds, and visuals. It can have an entirely different dimension.
Course Blog: "Decalibrating Sensation in Art After War" - Nate Blackmon on the Kronos Quartet
(Photo: The Kronos Quartet performing Aleksandra Vrebalov's Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 to the backdrop of footage from World War I, edited by Bill Morrison. Credit: Lenny Gonzalez for The Wall Street Journal, original article linked via photo.)
Sunday, April 6, Hertz Hall, 7 pm. “The monumental blunder began in Sarajevo, when one man shot another.”
The Quartet appears on stage without an entrance.
Shadowy lighting.
Magnified shadows of the quartet playing on either wall of the stage.
Somber soldiers marching and playing trombones.
A massive war effort, cities of citizens waving to the camera with optimism on their faces. The hopefulness balanced by slow, Eastern-sounding music fitting for a man stumbling in the desert.
Men dig trenches, the music rises while the holes grow. Rousing apreggi offset weary looks on their faces, dirt flinging back behind themselves. Each man is indistinguishable from the other.
Dreary, 1-2-3-4 time.
Order dissimilates. The first violin strains to be heard over the noise of the quartet, it fights oppressive dissonance with melody. Discernable at first, it loses power, is overpowered, gives in to the moving droning discord of the other three.
A dog barking at a dead body.
Black smoke. The nitrate film is over a hundred years old and decays into bizarre colors and distortions. The edges of the screen disintegrate into magenta bubbles, but the black smoke is untouched—a thick, powerful plume coming off the roof of a barn.
Each member of the quartet overpowers the other in an aimless sound of discord and bottomless melodies.
A loose string on the viola. It dances around Hank Dutt’s head, a cursive movement at odds with the discordant performance around it.
A blimp.
Two men sawing a log.
It was here that I became aware of the central paradox of the show. The images were specific, and the music disordered. Without the context of being in a theatre, sitting in a seat with a ticket stub in my pocket for the world premiere of a piece about World War I, every image was almost meaningless and every note incomprehensible. The piece was trying to depict the aimless purpose of the men in the war—that they were aimless, that they had no purpose. Yet the act of depicting their purposelessness in a sold-out multimedia presentation filled the most menial images with value. Two men sawing a log, nitrate film decomposing in dim light, foreboding music in the foreground, expectant forward-facing faces, most over the age of fifty: all these elements gave meaning to the meaningless. I began to ask myself, Can a piece of art attempting to represent senselessness really do this, considering the engagement of sight, sound and space? My senses were fully engaged in a show that wished to dissociate them.
Toward the end, the music and the visuals become chaotic. Crashing planes, psychedelic fire. The film decays into abstract images and barely discernible patterns usurp the music. Everything gets louder—the colors, the sounds, the intensity of the images changing at a rapid pace. And at some point during these crescendos, the two violinists of Kronos leave their instruments for two artillery shells hanging on the stage. They are gongs. Former instruments of death turned into instruments of music. Each sings a soft pang, one louder than the other, played to no (to me) discernible rhythm, barely heard over the chaos coming from upturned viola and cello. Then silence, and a blank screen, and a vacuum of sound and sight as stimulating as the audiovisual saturation that preceded it. Applause refills the empty theatre.
As I rode my bike home after the concert ended, I was thinking again of that paradox. How does a piece of art attempting to render the meaninglessness of World War I do this, when put on a stage and showed to paying people in seats who will seek the meaning in the thing placed in front of them? I had enjoyed the show, if enjoyment is tied only to engaged senses. The visuals and music and lighting and Kronos and Aleksandra Vrebalov and everyone else involved made a show that engrossed me entirely from beginning to end. I had been nervous, elated, afraid, and dazzled when it was running, and I was sad when it was over. As soon as I realized this, I saw that the performance totally worked. It desired and created a dissociation of the senses—sight and sound and sense of space were used together, apart, against each other. Their relation to each other and often to themselves were broken from conventional methods of understanding, a purposeful and premeditated dissociation to reflect the meaninglessness of World War I. But that’s not to say senses weren’t there, or in the War itself. Men were afraid, brave, tired, hungry, full; they saw pretty things and unspeakable things. Emotions were everywhere, but went nowhere in the devastating lack of a greater meaning. And Beyond Zero did just that.
Course Blog: "Expectation and Experience (Reflections on a Thursday Evening)" - Aliya Manguramas on Ensemble Mik Nawooj
(Photo: The floor and stage at Yoshi's Oakland before a show. Credit: Darryl Walker, original website linked via photo.)
Thursday, April 17, Yoshi's Oakland, 10 pm. On this Thursday night, Yoshi’s was full of people spilling out onto the sidewalk. After all, it was early spring, and if you squinted hard enough the weekend looked like it might have already started, so we squinted and in the growing darkness we were at Yoshi’s halfway between 9 and 10 pm.
Inside, the venue was a semi-circular room full of small tables and chairs facing a stage lit by a reddish glow. Though vacant, it was full of stuff: a piano, a drum set, a bass lying on its side, microphones and wires, music stands. I just had time to take it all in before the lights dimmed slightly in anticipation of the night’s performance.
Maybe I was preoccupied, excited, tired after a long day, but I do not remember what I was expecting the Ensemble Mik Nawooj to sound like. I do remember being surprised to hear the first music of the night drift from the piano keys with an ethereal, dreamlike quality.
This turned out to be a recurring motif of almost every piece we heard that night− intricate instrumental introductions and long, drawn-out codas steam-powered by a flowing piano line. I got used to seeing the vocalists standing at the front of the stage with hands clasped and heads bowed, counting the beats until their next entrance cue.
And when that beat dropped, I could not help thinking that this was music I had been waiting to hear my entire life. But we’ll come back to that.
It is important first and foremost to consider what an ensemble is before launching into a discussion of Ensemble Mik Nawooj—the word is, after all, in their name. A common and straightforward definition is “a group of musicians, actors, or dancers who perform together.”
This group of musicians is conducted by founder, composer, and pianist JooWan Kim, a figure in flowing white trousers who commanded the room from the baby grand, pushing keys with ease and a forced nonchalance− a classically trained musician, one might surmise, who was trying to be more laidback. In addition, the ensemble consisted of two “emcees” (main vocalists who might also be called “rappers”), a soprano (who seemed to be there largely for the purposes of creating wordless sound), a drummer, an upright bass, a cello, a violin, a clarinet, and a flute.
It may seem an inconsequential detail, but I think it is important to note how differently each person in the ensemble was dressed− what each of them considered to be “performance” attire. The dissimilarities spoke volumes about their varied backgrounds, and highlighted the fact that they were not peers. The two emcees wore hats, one a jazzy fedora, the other a casual baseball cap paired with ripped jeans. The soprano wore a black cocktail dress, while the cellist had on jeans and a t-shirt. None of them adhered to any kind of uniform, and their styles ranged from street casual to formal.
It was, after all, the point of the whole endeavor. Self-defined as a “hip hop orchestra,” their music is tagged under both #hiphop and #classical. They brought together things that seemed like they could not− should not− mix, things from different places and times and genres. Though it may have at times been refreshing, this apparent lack of coherence within the group was also limiting. Each person played the part written for them, in some cases literally, and nothing more. Each instrument (and here we have to consider even the vocalists as instruments) had a certain role, a role that was almost stereotypically defined and expected of them, which limited either the musician’s or the instrument’s musical potential. Disparately, each musical line could not speak by itself, and could only contribute to the whole.
So we come to a second, perhaps more philosophical definition of the word ensemble: “a group of items viewed as a whole rather than individually.”
With this in mind, we must discuss the Ensemble Mik Nawooj not according to its distinct parts, but rather as a whole entity, because there is no distinct part that could, by itself, represent or refer to their music. Which brings us back to that beat drop.
I leaned back in my chair and prepared to let the music wash over me, though with every cymbal crash and string sforzando, every shouted lyric and piano crescendo, I inched closer and closer to the sound of something indescribably fulfilling that was hidden somewhere in that music. After sitting (occasionally fidgeting) through a semester of beautifully outdated classics, I was ready to get up and dance. I laughed every time the cellist smiled at some private joke in his sheet music, I waved my hands when prompted, and nodded along without prompting.
Maybe it is because I am a musician that I constantly seek instrumental music with a more contemporary sound (and the flip side of that, contemporary music with more instrumental virtuosity). It is not rare, but neither is it common, to find an orchestra or ensemble that plays new music that is also what we might consider popular music. So much of what we have come to expect as new and avant-garde has to do with obliterating our expectations of what an instrument is, what sound is, what music is—and that is not what Mik Nawooj is about.
I am reluctant to say their music is easily digestible, but their music is easily digestible. They appeal to the ear—there are no drawn-out dissonances, no testing out of instruments in ways that have not been tried before, no creation of sounds we had never thought to make. All their songs are easily defined as songs.
The way Ensemble Mik Nawooj pushes the envelope is by taking these sounds that we already recognize and decoupage-ing them into something unexpected. A single song might include incredible freestyle rapping and soaring soprano lines. It might reference sativa dreams set to the trilling of a flute, a violin doing Vivaldi-esque string crossings while drums thump out a steady groove. Theirs was a concert that nodded to Wu-Tang and updated Brahms for its own purposes, took these things and cut them up and turned them into something else, something that yearns to be viewed as a new, whole music.
I am not qualified to definitively state whether the Ensemble Mik Nawooj succeeded. I would like to say that I was moved by their performance, that I would much rather listen to their songs than any Top 40 pop standard, and think that the question of their success is as simple as that. Yet there are so many other things to take into consideration, so many expectations of what new music should be doing, so much in the history of music that has raised the bar unrealistically high. Still, I am inclined to believe that even when you take all of these distinct filters for how we perceive music, sometimes it can just mean that we went to a jazz club on a Thursday night and saw a train run through the middle of the street, that we sat at small round tables and watched a bunch of people, whoever they were and wherever they came from, stand on a stage and make music that made me nod and clap and smile, and that is the whole thing.
(Photo: Ensemble Mik Nawooj in performance. Credit: Sterling Munksgard Photography.)
One passage in particular that I like to come back to for inspiration comes from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:
No relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence—that which makes its truth, its meaning—its subtle and penetrating essence... We live, as we dream—alone.
For me, this passage isn’t just words, it isn’t just prose; it has to it a universal music, a “penetrating essence.” This passage is what made me want to write poetry when I was sixteen, because it points out how impossible it is to fully communicate to others your own experience of life, and yet there is a poetry to it that seems to perfectly convey the impossibility, and so makes it possible to communicate. Poetry to me is so much more than words—poetry lives and breathes and transmits emotion not only in its words, but in the moments of silence, in the breaks between the lines, in the pauses.
The biggest reason why I don't trust other people to read my poetry is that I feel they won't get what I'm trying to convey if they don't read it with the exact cadence, rhythm, or flow that I imagine it to have. Without the right emphasis on certain syllables, without the right pauses, without the right slowing down and then speeding up, some of the meaning is lost for me—much of the meaning is lost actually. The unique musicality of the poetry is lost. This is also one of the reasons why I think writing or speaking about music and sound is so difficult—for those of us who feel music expresses what we can't express in words, to attempt to use words to talk about music can be a daunting endeavor. For me, music fills in the blanks where words fall short. I have no formal education or training in music, and therefore no vocabulary to describe what happens formally in music pieces, making my experience of music purely sensational, not intellectual. I think this is also why I love Romantic era poetry—you can feel it and it transports you to another place and time as opposed to most of the Modernist poetry that must be explained to be understood.
Because my experience of music is sensational, music either moves me or it doesn’t, which brings me finally to my reflection on seeing Ensemble Mik Nawooj perform on April 18 at Yoshi’s in Oakland. As someone who grew up around the Bay Area, hip-hop has been an integral part of my life since I was in junior high school. I’m not talking pop-culture hip-hop; Im talking gritty, real, I-have-something-to-say-that-needs-to-be-heard, underground-that-needs-to-be-above-ground hip-hop. Genuine hip-hop, in my opinion, is spoken word poetry put to music, and Mik Nawooj slammed! Each individual musician, singer, and MC brought a unique essence to the collaboration, not just because every individual (ten in total!) was doing something different on stage, but because they each had a unique style and presence. This individuality was so refreshing to experience, especially in comparison to performances like the Vienna Philharmonic, where there are basically fifty caucasian men in butler-like tuxedos playing Viennese music that has been played for hundreds of years without alteration. Being so close to stage allowed for me to really see the musicians’ and vocalists’ expressions as they performed, both as they were individually demonstrating their talents and in their moments of silence, making the show incredibly moving to me, in both a visual and auditory way.
As I was saying previously, for me there is not just meaning in moments of audible or verbal expression, but also in the pauses and moments of silence. These performers were living poetry to me, from their postures, to the emotions shown on their faces, to their ways of keeping time or measuring beats. The conductor and pianist JooWan Kim was especially wonderful to watch keeping time. Beyond any other conductor we’ve seen, he appeared to be painting on air, infusing the negative space with his own aural vision and passing it on to the musicians who then passed it on to the audience.
Another wonder to watch and hear was soprano Lauren Woody. Often, singers and instrumentalists can seem to me like two different categories of musicians, but Lauren used her voice as an instrument, producing sounds that weren’t tied to words. It was so incredible to hear her matching notes with both the flautist, Dr. Carmen Lemoine, and the violinist, Michele Walther. I was able to notice how Lauren used her entire body to sing—I could see her changing her body shape to manipulate the air pressure coming out of her lungs, and I could see her changing the shape of her mouth to transform the acoustics of the notes produced by her vocal chords. It occurred to me that this must be why she can match both a wind and string instrument—her vocal cords are like a string instrument using vibrations to produce sound, and the other factors mentioned are similar to the way a wind instrument works using air pressure. Perhaps it was the close proximity to the stage that allowed for me to notice these movements, but more than that I believe Lauren channels the energy of her own life into the music she produces, similar to the way JooWan Kim channels his energy and vision while conducting.
Since I started off this post talking about the significance of poetry in my own life, I will end by speaking about the MCs, Do D.A.T. and Sandman, who not only joined Lauren in contributing literal voices to the music, but brought the rest of the ensemble into the hip-hop heavy sound through their lyrics, their poetry. Do D.A.T. in particular, who had more of a street-style, was fascinating to watch and hear after he admitted that he was not completely sure of his lines for one song and was going to read some of them off his phone. He soon couldn’t keep up the beat with this method, though, and began to freestyle, but I never would have known had he not told us of his switch to improvised lines. Sandman, clad in a more formal blazer and fedora, like Lauren, seemed to use his voice more like an instrument; rather than operatic singing, however, his talent was in incredibly fast verbal articulation. Even though I couldn’t catch every word he was spitting out, I could tell that he was articulating every word in the lyrics, just at astounding speeds. Although it may seem contradictory to say that I appreciated the poetry of the music and then comment that I couldn’t make out all the words because of the speed at which they were recited, it is not contradictory for my own experience of the music. Like I mentioned, poetry to me is not just about the words, its also about the pauses, the breaks, the varying speeds and tones and inflections, and the MCs moved me with these aspects of their poetry.
In closing, Ensemble Mik Nawooj was one of the best musical performances I have ever seen—pure art in every sense. Even without JooWan Kim explaining the ideas and inspirations behind each song, I feel I would have known the emotions being conveyed—for example, the tragic yet not completely lost feeling in the song “Without Goodbyes.” Between the visual, aural, and emotional experience of seeing these ten individuals on stage, it seemed to me that their words and sounds were not short of pure communication in any way, and it is experiences like this that take away frustration and restore fascination in me when I must think about concepts that can seem so abstract.
Course Blog: "Poignant Premieres, Callous Critiques (Reenvisioning the Contemporary Music Review)" - Brenna Wylder on Aleksandra Vrebalov and the Kronos Quartet
(Photo: Dissolving footage of a World War I dogfight from Bill Morrison's film accompaniment to Aleksandra Vrebalov's recently premiered composition for string quartet, Beyond Zero: 1914-1918. Credit: Borrowed from the Edinburgh International Festival website, linked via photo.)
Sunday, April 6, Hertz Hall, 7 pm. “[This] 40-minute multimedia spectacle by composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and filmmaker Bill Morrison is blunt, repetitive, aggressive, dull and ultimately rather pointless,” reads one of the opening lines of Joshua Kosman’s scathing review of Beyond Zero: 1914-1918, which premiered at Hertz Hall early last month. The review goes on to accuse the piece of “[playing] like a History Channel homily,” due to what he believes is an overly dramatic and “desperate attempt to lend weight to an overly familiar lesson.”
When I was little, I used to wonder what would happen when the songs ran out, when literally every note combination had been exhausted. I’ve since accepted that even if such a day were to come sometime soon, no one would really care—pop songs, with their same general note sequences and rhythms, are proof of this. But Kosman, in his review of Beyond Zero, seems much like my childhood self, focusing on newness as the foremost standard for creativity. Dislike of a new work on its own terms is one thing, but why does it matter so much if a similar piece already exists?
A confession: I’m biased regarding Beyond Zero. On the Thursday before I sat myself down in Hertz Hall to see the premiere, Ms. Vrebalov herself came to our classroom and spoke to us. Beyond simply telling us what her thought process was like when writing her new work, she actually engaged in our discussion of one of my favorite poems, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. She said something that has since stuck with me as remarkably prescient and introspective: that the poem is the dregs of culture washing over the void that was left by the destructive force of war. This interpretation is something that I have always felt, but had never been able to articulate—and it was of Ms. Vrebalov’s words that I was thinking when the lights dimmed and the music began on the night of April 6.
For truly, just as the poem has moments of beauty, so did Beyond Zero have measures and snippets of exquisiteness, measures where the Kronos Quartet sounded almost like a typical classical ensemble. “In this decayed hole among the mountains / In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing / Over the tumbled graves”—I thought of these lines when the music swelled in what might have once been a melody. “I will show you fear in a handful of dust”—as remnants of voices drifted out from indiscernible sources, I thought of Eliot’s shadows and red rock and dust. “Shantih shantih shantih”—after the Byzantine chant toward the end of Vrebalov’s piece, the echo of a gong faded and on the screen, a parachute drifted slowly from a burning plane. Eliot’s use of the Upanishad had never seemed more appropriate.
It was also the case that, for every moment of beauty, there were moments of deep discomfort, where the music became stark or cacophonous. The string quartet, capable of such tight and beautiful harmonies, produced notes that twisted and braided around each other in a dissonant coil of sound. Often it didn’t sound like music at all—and yet, accompanied by the recovered footage of World War I edited and arranged by Bill Morrison, everything came together. The graininess of the video blurred in and out of focus, its nitrate decay cast bubbles and swirls across the screen, the music flailed along, and all in all it felt very much like The Waste Land’s void.
For the first, and probably the last, time in my life, I felt I knew for a fact what the composer’s vision was for the piece—not only that, but I felt completely on her wavelength. Clearly I have a bias when it comes to my own enjoyment and appreciation.
So to say that Kosman’s review was a bit of a shock is an understatement. For a music critic with a public voice to write from an angle of smug authority is, I feel, incredibly off-putting and ultimately unhelpful to readers. It means very little to me to be told that Beyond Zero is inferior to Black Angels because I had no knowledge of Black Angels before reading Kosman’s review and was not even alive to participate in the moment of its premiere. I am also, consequently, not in a position to fully understand the impact it had on the listeners of its time. When Kosman says something like, “Where have we heard this before?,” I feel he is only furthering the general public’s distaste for more contemporary, limited-access art pieces because he excludes listeners like me from the “we” he uses.
I don’t believe a person can have a productive conversation about a contemporary piece by making comparative references to other fringe pieces that a potential audience (or readership) might not have training in, or knowledge of. While it might be nice to make recommendations for further listening, simply implying that such listening has already been done by all readers just discourages people who haven’t heard of George Crumb, for instance, from ever going out of their comfort zones. Even snobby college students with a vested interest in appearing “intellectual” (like me) can’t be guaranteed to have the knowledge Kosman seems to assume we must have. It's true that if we don’t have bestowed or trained interests of our own, we might pretend to like the ballet to seem cultured, or an underground band to seem different, but an art piece from the ‘70s? What are the chances?
Meanwhile: the premiere of a new piece commissioned to commemorate the centennial of World War I, performed by a string quartet known for pushing the envelope, featuring real footage from the war? Tell me more about that! Even if you didn’t like it, Mr. Kosman, tell me why, on its own merit—or, if you’re going to compare it to something else, make the comparison to something a wider population can understand. And if you absolutely must bring up a piece your readers might not know, at least acknowledge how specific your point of view is, and tell me a bit about why it matters that you don’t think this new piece was as good. Make me care.
In order to further understand Kosman’s review, I took it upon myself to listen to Black Angels. I found a live video recording of it on YouTube (performed in 2012 by the Filharmonica Quartet) and settled down to see what all the fuss was about. At the opening, the musicians sat in a circle of light. And then they began, and I immediately noticed the differences: Black Angels is much more percussive, with the first violinist and the cellist holding egg shakers, occasionally tapping their instruments; they sit with glasses of water near them, perhaps in order to produce ambient sounds not picked up on the recording; and sometimes they just—stop. There is complete silence for seconds at a time. The first violinist makes weird vocal grunts and sighs even while sawing away. And then there’s a section that sounds like an audible dog whistle—it was just in the range to put me on edge, and it was so piercing I had to skip forward. The piece ends on a whimper as the musicians put down their instruments and tap on the water-filled glasses. The circle of light dims and the musicians are swallowed into the darkness surrounding them.
My verdict: I found Black Angels incredibly weird, particularly because it did not have a visual element (like Bill Morrison’s haunting film), and so I had no way of contextualizing the sounds I was hearing. It’s true that both performances included music that sometimes made me uncomfortable and on edge—but without the visual context of Morrison’s work, I was simply left with the uncomfortable feeling. It just built up inside me, to the point where I felt I had no choice but to skip several minutes of the piece. With Beyond Zero, I was able to work through those uncomfortable moments because I understood why they existed, and they felt appropriately sobering in conjunction with the distressing film clips. Perhaps in part because Crumb’s piece was produced at a time when everyone was profoundly aware of the ongoing war in Vietnam, there was no need for direct visuals or other concrete symbolism. However, the Vietnam War is just as mysterious to me as World War I, so I felt completely lost and frustrated while listening to Black Angels.
Finally, regardless of Black Angels and the feelings I had towards it, I am now even more certain that Beyond Zero is capable of standing alone. If “newness” really is the measure of value, Beyond Zero clearly had elements that were not included in Black Angels. But more importantly, a work’s originality should not, in my opinion, be the basis for judgment. Was the piece capable of reaching its audience and bringing about new understanding? Throughout Beyond Zero, as the fragments of civilization washed over me, I felt deeply connected with the loss and devastation of something that had before always seemed abstract and unapproachable. I am still feeling the remnants of this awe, all these weeks later, and I will carry it with me beyond the doors of Hertz Hall, even beyond this class. That, to me, means everything.
Course Blog: "From Schoenberg to Schubert (Making Room for Complexity)" - Emma Rosenbaum on the Calder Quartet
(Photo: The Calder Quartet plays at the Kaplan Penthouse on Saturday, August 3, 2013. Credit: Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times, original article linked via photo.)
Luckily for the Calder Quartet, I must have unconsciously over-anticipated just how brutal sitting through an entire chunk of Schoenberg’s atonal compositions would be, because once I was in Hertz Hall, listening to Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 2 (which opened the program), I surprised myself with a deep breath. It simply wasn’t as discordant and difficult as I had prepared myself to endure. I have had a limited introduction to Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique and it wasn’t exactly the most enjoyable experience. This piece, however—despite marking the beginning of Schoenberg’s plunge into atonality—had clear themes, and the jerking of bows across instruments felt more artistically placed than discordant. The melody could have been purely screeching (judging from some of the reactions my family members have had to Schoenberg’s later works), but it wasn’t. My unexpectedly relaxed state allowed for certain details to sit more nicely in my mind and enhance the music overall. For one thing, instead of focusing on the discordance (unless it was overpowering), I could focus on Schoenberg’s instrumentation, scoring, and stylistic choices.
Something that I really attached to was how complicated the combination of melodies became. Schoenberg had every instrument doing its own thing at several times in the piece, and yet they all fit with each other. Simply put, I think that’s really brilliant. Schoenberg had to have kept so many elements in his head, and the performers had to follow strange timing and still not be distracted by the actions of every other player. The collective brainwork that went into this performance was something I was better able to enjoy rather than pick apart.
Another really interesting aspect of Schoenberg’s quartet was the addition of the soprano part (sung in this case by Yulia Van Doren). This was not something I had prepared myself for, but I actually found that the Emanuel Ax and Anne Sofie von Otter recital—our first concert of the semester—had already laid some groundwork. I felt that the singing movements of the string quartet were really reminiscent of the Otter and Ax rendition of “So Many Things” by Nico Muhly. Both had this strange and eerie melody being led through the instrumental parts by a powerful female voice (Otter’s mezzo soprano, Van Doren’s soprano). But I think, of the two singers, Van Doren was so much more impressive. She had emotion and a strength of voice that I appreciated immensely. Otter’s performance felt theatrical while Van Doren’s felt sincere. We watched Otter from the back of Zellerbach’s vast main floor, while we watched Doren from the middle of Hertz Hall, a mere thirty feet away.
A lot of factors worked together to make Van Doren feel more effective to me—her extreme talent being one of them. She brought out a really great paradox of the piece in that her lyrics contradicted her melody in a lot of ways. The lyrics, taken from poems by Stefan George, express feelings of foreignness and then acceptance. They are strangely archaic compared to the realism of the time but this does not make them any less poignant. The music felt pensive and then violent, with long flowing tunes turning to discordant chaos. Van Doren embraced the contradictions within her performance and so resolved them as parts of a complicated whole, which is what I think Schoenberg was aiming for. I see Schoenberg’s work as a celebration of complexity, and this performance embraced that concept for me.
The second piece of the program, meanwhile—Jörg Widmann’s String Quartet No. 3, “Jagdquartett”—revived me in the best of ways. It started simply, but became the most fun of all of the pieces of the afternoon. It had amazing intricacies and alternations between folky tonal music and discordant, more modern, themes. The alternations gave an air of spontaneity, which was enhanced by the fast pace of the piece. Spontaneity became a theme of the piece with seemingly random shouts and unconventional instrumentation. Violins were played like cellos. The cello was attacked by elaborate tricks and exhausting competition. Masculine shouts were first scattered about and then violently repeated. Overall, I thought the performance of this piece was fabulous. It was so witty and fun and engaging. This piece is what made me want to write my blog post about the Calder Quartet. They executed exactly the kind of fun I was looking for, especially after the release I was feeling throughout the Schoenberg.
Finally, Schubert’s String Quartet No. 14, “Death and the Maiden,” which ended the program, was pleasant, but I felt that it aligned itself with the classically structured and formal aspects of many of the prior performances we had seen. The excitement that I usually seek with music felt held back by the Romantic structure of the piece. There was significantly less of the incredible counterpoint and concentration I had witnessed earlier, as in the Schoenberg; instruments rarely distinguished themselves at a comparable height of complexity. That said, it was still beautiful. While I had to resort to the listening skills I’ve been refining at some of our previous concerts, making note of patterns and of themes changing keys, the second movement reached a higher level for me. I think that it was so much more impressive to me because of how it strove toward the colorization of the Schoenberg and Widmann pieces. The sound was richer, and the reason this stood out to me is because, after the first two quartets, I really noticed all of the empty spaces in Schubert’s composition that could have been an opportunity for complex enrichment. While the other two composers fleshed out their sounds with embellishments and new harmonies, Schubert offered something sparse in comparison—a skeleton of a quartet, or so it seemed to me. The second movement not only seemed to fill out more of the mind space available to process sound, varying each instrument’s role, but it also had this elegant melody that, in my opinion, drooled emotion, making up for those moments where it lacked a fuller, or more elaborate texture.
To conclude—I think that, while the afternoon's program was fun and smart, I would have ordered the pieces differently. I would have wanted to move from Schubert to Schoenberg to Widmann, and to experience the musical progress as progress. My experience was altered significantly by the order—I might have enjoyed the Schubert much more if I hadn’t listened to it in the context of the other two works. Still, the celebration of complexity that I witnessed in the first two pieces, and the pure Romantic elegance of the third, were enough to boost my appreciation for string quartets (which had been pretty high to start with)!
Course Blog: "Sonic Surprises, Differential Descriptions" - Ayman Bin Kamruddin on the Calder Quartet
(Photo: The Calder Quartet—from left, Ben Jacobson, Andrew Bulbrook, Jonathan Moerschel and Eric Byers—plays at Zankel Hall on April 15, 2011. Credit: Matthew Dine for the New York Times, original article linked via photo.)
When I reminisce on the classical concerts I’ve attended, I remember them as all sounding approximately the same. I can notice the differences between composer A and composer B, but those differences seem at times minute, and at times beyond my grasp. What was it about composition X that shook me in a way that composition Y did not? How did a particular segment of a performance evoke a particular feeling in a particular person of a particular background? How do different musical instruments play together to create a particular effect? These are some of the questions that have been born out of my discussions with my class, except the answers still elude me. And I think my lack of vocabulary makes it hard for me to remember all but the vaguest instances and segments; even if I did remember them, I would recall them to you by way of whistling or humming. When it comes to understanding the style of a composition or the evolution of style within a single piece, or ascribing any relevance to an element within some scheme, I find myself lost. And so, between composition A and composition B, all I can definitively say is that they are different, and no more.
All of this shockingly changed when I heard the Calder Quartet’s performance of Jörg Widmann’s String Quartet No. 3, "Jagdquartett" (2003). I found this piece to completely overturn my perception of classical music as, at the very least, structured, organized, highly coherent, mostly consistent, and continuous. One observation I’d made before attending this concert, and that I felt no one could deny (especially after viewing the Vienna Philharmonic): classical musicians are often essentially motionless, save for their arms and neck. But the Calder Quartet playing Widmann! There was motion, a lot of it. Wild, crazy motion. By the end of their performance, the musicians had hairs flying off their bows, and I had even been afraid their bows would break at various points, what with all the swinging and whipping. As for the music itself? I found it to be the most interesting out of all the Schoenberg, Schubert, Brahms, and Haydn we’d heard. Jagged and erratic are terms that first come to mind, and also highly unpredictable. I would also say that the piece ascribes very loosely to classical structure. I did not expect all of that screeching and wailing, nor did I expect it to be as fragmented as it was. I was rather caught back by what I found to be very innovative usage of the instruments themselves. Not only were the musicians dragging their bows along the strings in a way I hadn’t observed before, they managed to fit in sounds that I would ordinarily find absolutely wretched.To be precise, I had never seen or heard the sound of bows moving across the bridge of a string instrument instead of across the strings—it’s a horrible sound, but within the context of Widmann’s piece, they managed to use it well!
I found myself leaving the Calder Quartet performance in an ecstatic mood, enlivened by the unexpected surprises Widmann offered. In the language of analogies (my other recourse for describing the differences I perceived): if Brahms were to be a long, unbroken train ride into the country, Widmann would be a journey involving rickshaws, jet planes and a lot of frantic running to catch the next bus. If Schubert were to sound like a waterfall in a hidden forest, Widmann would be glass tinkling and breaking all around you while you still discern the sound of some waterfall, which might not actually be a waterfall but a looming thunderstorm. If Schumann were to be the color red, Widmann would be the color tetris. I may not know a lot about classical music, but I’m very impressed with the way this composer breaks so far out of tradition without resorting to gunpowder, jet propellers and electric arcs.
Here are some live excerpts from The Bad Plus's jazz rendition of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, performed in 2012 as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series.
And here is a link to the world premiere of the full piece, as broadcast on WGBO's "The Checkout" on March 26, 2011.
Click on the above image to read The Rumpus's fantastic 2009 interview with David Harrington, iconic violinist and founding member of the Kronos Quartet! We saw Kronos premiere Aleksandra Vrebalov’s Beyond Zero: 1914-1918 on Sunday, and are honored to welcome David to our classroom today.
Course Blog: "The Bold and the (Bores of Being) Beautiful" - Brenna Wylder on Jonathan Biss
(Photo: Jonathan Biss performing from his Schumann recital series at Zankel Hall in March, 2013. Credit: Marcus Yam for the New York Times, original article linked via the photo.)
Sure, Romantic era piano music tends to be the most inoffensive and universally liked genre ever (at least in the Western classical tradition), but I really can’t give it my full attention for more than three minutes. Two-hour concerts are mind-numbing: no matter how much a pianist sways back and forth, pores over the keys, and delicately pounds and presses, there is simply not enough going on to keep me entertained. This lack of interest is not only due to the lack of visuals: the audio itself is completely tiresome. Therefore, while Jonathan Biss’s masterful performance was less dull than most due to some variety in composers, I still found myself incredibly uninterested throughout most of the program.
Let me explain. Brahms’s intermezzos have an unparalleled musicality to them that make them deeply emotive, in that each system, measure, note sounds absolutely beautiful and pleasing to the senses. Biss played with passion and incredible skill, certainly expressing that emotion to a T. Brahms is unmistakably beautiful—unfortunately, the pieces are so wonderful and pleasant to the ears that, for me at least, I completely tune them out. Emotional, sure; beautiful, absolutely; but fun? Exciting? Captivating? No, not even close. These traits are not mutually exclusive after all—a landscape painting of a sailboat can be picture-perfect and gorgeously depictive, but few would say it put them on the edge of their seat. And try looking at a landscape painting for two hours; tell me how fun that is! Brahms’s pieces, which feature long sequences of minor nuances, is, to me, similarly unchanging, if predictably pleasant. And ultimately boring.
So, so boring.
In fact, when preparing to write this I went back and looked at the notes I’d taken during the program. For Brahms, the word “lullaby” came up for every single piece—accompanied by words like “pretty,” “melodic,” and “proper.” It seems that even when I forced myself to pay attention, the most descriptive words I could muster might also be found in a report by a third grader who had just discovered adjectives. While this might simply be a testament to my own limited vocabulary for music, there is nevertheless a pattern here that does not occur in my notes on other concerts.
This was especially noticeable when, from Brahms’s frilly Rhapsody in E-flat minor, the program shifted to György Kurtág, a contemporary composer who proclaims that the “maximum expression and content should be formulated with the fewest notes.” It’s no surprise that Kurtág, who’s still alive today, has this wildly different approach. While Brahms might be studying a landscape painting for hours on end, Kurtág is that part of the program where you look up from your reverie and realize you’re actually suspended off the face of a mountain 500 feet up. It might be beautiful, sure, but you’re deeply uncomfortable and suddenly aware of every minute movement. And your head hurts a little bit.
Kurtág’s Játékok (1979, 1997) compositions are, I feel, aptly described by the program notes as “musical aphorisms.” These pieces are only sporadically melodic and always unexpected. While there might be predictable note sequences in Brahms or Beethoven, you never know where Kurtág might go next. A particular favorite of mine, “Like the Flowers of the Field, Vol. 5, No. 20,” was peppered with weird and simple melodies that came in and out of the piece, alternating with scales. Another favorite was “(…and round and round it goes), Vol. III, No.19.” The program described it as “[seeming] to be the merest fragment from some unwritten hyperactive piece.” It is this “hyperactivity” that, for me, makes these pieces interesting and entertaining—they cover a wider range of notes in a shorter amount of time, which makes it more enthralling to listen to as expectations are constantly thwarted.
If you’ll forgive me another analogy, I think Romantic era classical music is like a sitcom. There might be some variety between the episodes, but the audience watches knowing that all the sets, characters, and plots are only so varied. There is a clear beginning, conflict, and resolution within the twenty or so minutes of airtime. Sitcoms are also very accessible, because not much changes from episode to episode, and even then, the characters are not extremely complex. Romantic era classical music is likewise predictable and accessible across time and space, which, much like sitcoms, are not necessarily bad traits. When the dialogue is snappy and the characters are dynamic, romantic era classical music can achieve a lot, even push at the boundaries of the genre. This might be Chopin, also included in the program, which did bring some tension with some unexpectedly trembling, varied, and slurred notes. But sometimes it isn’t well done—the storylines become stale, the characters annoying caricatures, and the seasons drag on for way too long. This version of the sitcom is not completely without value and merit, but it’s really only tolerable as background noise—that’s Brahms to me.
That’s also everything that Kurtág is not. Like The Walking Dead or American Horror Story, Kurtág is something uncomfortable and downright horrifying to witness, but entertaining and exciting nonetheless because you never know just which character is going to die horribly next, just as you never know which note is going to follow the other in Kurtág. Sure, Kurtág does not have such widespread appeal (they don’t play reruns on TBS), but his work can hold attention as long as it occasionally returns to its core melodic values, which Kurtág does by sprinkling beautiful note sequences amidst the idiosyncrasies.
In conclusion, my point is not to argue that Brahms’s masterful compositions have no place in the world. It is just that I don’t have much interest in being around to witness them. I’d hate to say that the relevance of classical music is diminishing, replaced by risk-taking contemporary music, but there certainly is a need for more intriguing performances. It has become a lot to ask contemporary laymen, who are accustomed to constant stimulation, to sit through a two hour performance of pieces which are these days associated with sleeping and studying. While pleasant and unassuming to the ears, they are so within a limited range of expectations. For me, they might as well be The Big Bang Theory. And I’d rather watch Game of Thrones any day.
Here is a complete recording of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Opus 132, as performed by the Borodin Quartet. And here are a few other recordings available via YouTube you might compare:
Quartetto Italiano
Barylli Quartet
(Off of YouTube, the Juilliard Quartet's complete Beethoven cycle is a must-listen!)
This is the Beethoven quartet most referred to by scholars considering the musical influences at work in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. While attempts to map the quartet (or any of Beethoven's late quartets, for that matter) directly onto Eliot's poem are dubious at best, Eliot did write the following of Beethoven in a letter (dated March 28, 1931) to his friend Stephen Spender:
I have the A minor Quartet on the gramophone, and I find it quite inexhaustible to study. There is a sort of heavenly, or at least more than human gaiety, about some of his later things which one imagines might come to oneself as the fruit of reconciliation and relief after immense suffering; I should like to get something of that into verse before I die.
