Here’s something by RwO–Leads by Kathleen Bader:

That was performed by Robert Maril, baritone and cello; Elisabeth Halliday, soprano; Bonnie Lander, soprano and violin; Ruby Fulton, viola; George Lam, violin.

Last week RwO finished a tour in Boston a short bike ride from my house. (I would have gone even if it was a really really long bike ride. I would even have driven, and I hate driving.) They performed with the West End String Quartet, a terrific young ensemble. (Or maybe I should say a young terrific ensemble, since their youth was beside the point in their performance. They’re good.)

After my cousin’s stellar performance, the high point for me was a piece by one of RwO’s own composers, Ruby Fulton, being for the breakdown, played by the quartet. Here are two pieces by Ruby, THE END and The Walls are Taken Away, live at An Die Musik in Baltimore:

The performers here were Bonnie Lander, soprano; David Smooke, toy piano; Courtney Orlando, violin; Michael Shank, guitar; Rob Parrish, drums.

The toy pianist (not actually a TOY pianist–you know what I mean), David Smooke, is a professor at the Peabody Conservatory where many of these musicians studied. RwO performed his mini opera, Criminal Element, written in a language of his own devising, which I thought was terrific. The idea seemed to me a bit, well, ungrounded. But it worked. Here’s a piece  for piano, 10 hands by David Smooke:

That was h.àt. (homage à dr. teriwilliker), inspired by the evil deeds of Dr. Teriwilliker from “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.” Performed at Mercyhurst College by (in order): Rachel Reszler, Mitchell Alpaugh, Shana Plunkett, Kelton Macke, Shirley Yoo. Under the direction of Shirley Yoo and the composer at Mercyhurst College.

RwO also sang a mini opera by their other composer, George Lam, called Someone Anyone, a ten minute suspense novel for two. Different and exciting.

Here’s an excerpt from Lam’s one-act opera The Persistence of Smoke.

The opera features mezzo-soprano Sandra Cotton and baritones Scott MacLeod and David Weigel. The libretto is by John Justice.

If you get a chance to see Rhymes with Opera or The West End String quartet grab it. But, in general, grab any opportunity to hear young musicians play new music. It’s always exciting and interesting and often beautiful and satisfying.

I’m experiencing a summer full of new music, so I’ll be blogging more frequently to share stuff I’m discovering and enjoying. Coming soon: Simon Cummings and Mamoru Fujieda.

Then I stopped by one of my favorite blogs–Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s The Rambler (linked in my blog list to the right, but until now, with a bad URL – sorry). There I read, “It really feels like we’re coming to the end, Aldo Clementi, the last of that extraordinary generation of post-war Italian composers . . . has died at the age of 86.” I’m embarrassed to say, I’d never heard of him.

On the other hand, an embedded YouTube video on that page introduced me to Clementi’s music, and showed me my first step away from Feldman (whom I’ll never stop worshiping.) I’m sorry Clementi had to die for me to hear about him. I hate ironies like that. But that won’t stop me from celebrating my introduction to his wonderful music.

Here’s the embedded video that grabbed my attention:

And here’s a piece that reminds me a bit of Morton Feldman:

There’s a lot more of his stuff available on You Tube. And there are some great CDs.

Hope you enjoy him as much as I do.

The following interchange took place over the breakfast table between me and my housemate Nate -

me: I feel a sense of relief when I run into the word “epicenter” in a story about an earthquake. It’s so often misused to mean something like the real real center. But in fact it means the place on the surface nearest the actual center (which is not the actual center).

Nate: So the center of culture is actually five miles beneath New York City!

me: Good one, Nate!

—————————–

“Epi” means “upon” not “really really.” (Although I have to admit that my dictionary surrendered and has “center” as the second meaning. Sigh.)

We must do something about laxity and slipshod standards and . . . and . . . and usage of which I disapprove!

An Apology
BTW, this odd little post has had more hits than anything on the site of late. I can’t imagine why. (Unless it’s Nate’s friends and family.) I didn’t tag it or write it with SEO in mind. In fact, I’m embarrassed that I’m attracting page views that may not be deserved.

If somebody who ends up here by mistake would leave a comment explaining what sent them here, I’ll be happy to change tags or something to try to keep that from happening.

The composer is Morton Feldman. I don’t know if anyone else agrees with me about his status in the pantheon, but I’m certain of it. I promise to explain that when I do post the article. For now here are some samples and a link to an article.

This first selection is just over a minute and a half of Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet played by Kronos Quartet. I encourage you to listen attentively to the entire selection:

That’s typical of the pared down nature of Feldman’s work. But he does take other approaches to his explorations. Here are a few of my favorite Feldman pieces from YouTube. The first is part one of Rothko Chapel. If you like it, you can find the other parts on YouTube as well.

Next is a piece for full orchestra called Coptic Light.

If you enjoy those, try other Feldman pieces on YouTube.

The New Yorker magazine recently published a wonderful article about Feldman written by my favorite music writer, Alex Ross. I recommend it highly. It will be better than anything I can tell you here. But I hope you’ll come back when I’ve worked out the things I want to say and have posted them here.

Here’s a taste:

(That was the opening of Notalghia, performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra directed by Hiroyuki Iwaki, Michael Dauth solo violin)

Over the years, I’ve worked to appreciate some difficult music, particularly academic atonal stuff (some of which is very much worth the time it takes to enjoy). On the other hand, I find Takemitsu’s music — as strange as it sounded at first — easy to love. As different as it is from what I’m used to, I feel like it invites me into a sound world that I don’t need preparation to enter. All I need to do is be open to it.

I hope it works for you in a similar way. (I’d love it if you let me know either by leaving a comment or emailing me at charles@cthiesen.net.)

Now let me give you a story about the composer. (I do believe life is as important as art. Or nearly so.)

In 1958 Takemitsu was an unknown member of the young Japanese avant garde when Igor Stravinsky visited Japan and asked  Japanese Public Broadcasting if he could hear some of the latest Japanese music. According to Wikipedia, they put on Takemitsu’s Requiem for String Orchestra by mistake and Stravinsky made them leave it on so he could hear the whole thing. This led to Takemitsu’s recognition by Western musicians and subsequent success.

It’s a great story. And it’s on Wikipedia so it must be true. (Actually, that Wikipedia article is very rich in technical stuff about Takemitsu’s musical methods and influences — stuff I’m definitely not going to go into here, so I recommend that you read it on Wikipedia if it interests you.)

Here’s a lush solo piano piece, For Away (1973) played by Peter Serkin:

If you think that listening to more may bring you to a place where you begin to like it, explore YouTube for other Takemitsu pieces. If you already like it, buy a CD, or some MP3s. Takemitsu was prolific. There’s a large and rich sound world out there waiting for you.

Right now I have the Goldberg Variations on in the background. I feel a little guilty using such great music as the accompaniment to my life, but I often pause and notice particular phrases, stop for a minute and listen to a passage.

Nonetheless, I wish I spent more time actually listening. I regularly resolve to do that (and then forget). But this post gives me an excuse to pay attention right now. And you can do it with me.

Here’s a brief excerpt from Bach’s Goldberg Variations — it’s from the first statement of the theme that all the variations are based on — performed on piano by, respectively, Andras Schiff in 1983, Angela Hewitt in 1999, and Glenn Gould in 1981. Notice how different they are.

The most obvious difference is in tempi (pretentious Latin plural of tempo — speed). Hewitt’s version is a little slower than Schiff’s. Gould’s is like molasses compared to the other two. But there are many other differences.

Here’s an interesting way to compare the versions bit by bit. Start the Schiff version. Listen to just one phrase, one bit of music long enough to be distinctive, short enough to remember. Like this — the first phrase from the Schiff version:

Hit the pause bar at the end of the phrase, then start the Hewitt version. At the end of the phrase in the Hewitt version pause it and start the Gould version. It’s much easier to hear the individual differences that way.

When you’re done with the first phrase you can go back to the Schiff version and hit start, and it will pick up just where you left off. That way you can compare the three versions phrase-by-phrase.

If you want to go back to the beginning at any point, either drag the grey bar back, or reload the page. And if you only want to do a phrase or two now, this page should be here for you to come back to whenever you’re in the mood.

Please do me a favor if you don’t mind. If you enjoy doing this, let me know either by comment (link below) or email charles@cthiesen.net. I’ll be more likely to do something similar with other music if I get a positive response to this.

Here’s a reward for sticking with me so far — the entire Aria (that we’ve heard part of), performed by Daniel Barenboim this time, on  YouTube. (It can’t be embedded, so follow the link.) If you’re interested, you can find all of the variations on YouTube by a variety of artists. And when you find one you like best, why not buy the CD or download MP3s.

This is another of those things that I feel compelled to write just because I have a blog. It has nothing to do with music. You should probably ignore it.

As I crossed our main drag at dusk today, I stopped on the white line to let a muddy yellow and white city bus groan by. Beside the door on the other side, I knew, the capacity was recorded —  Seats 39.

Four people sat scattered about inside.

What rolled over me (in place of the next car in the  lane I was crossing) was a chest-filling sense of unlikeliness. How have our lives evolved so that we use an eleven ton box on wheels to carry four people?

A Martian stopping by for a visit might wonder, are these the elite? Do the empty seats symbolize privilege? What in the name of Valentine Michael Smith* is going on here.

I know the answers of course, and I lay them out here to impress (maybe my second grade teacher. I don’t expect them to impress you):

1. The buses carry many more people over the course of the day.
2. These people are decidedly NOT the elite.
3. The buses have to carry the few at times to make the service work so that they are there to carry the many (and the many are there to be carried).
4. This is worth doing because even though these huge machines use  deranged amounts of energy, and their carbon paw prints are the size of mastodons’ . . .
5. . . . they use less energy and pollute less per person than automobiles do.

But this just moves the question along. My Martian guest would then be inspired to ask about the unlikeliness of automobiles. There, before and behind and beside the bus are smaller boxes, each using about two tons of steel, each gulping gas, moving one person someplace.

Wait! No! There’s one with two people.

* A super-nerdy reference to Robert A. Heinlein’s novel Stranger in a Strange Land, about Martians among other things.

Rich, complex, and beautiful — could describe someone to fall in love with. But I’m talking about an Arabic song, sometimes rendered in English as Lamma Bada Yatathanna, an ancient muwashshah, a genre of secular music from Al Andalus, Moorish Spain, which means it’s from some time before 1492 – that’s half a millennium ago!

Have a taste before I say more about Lamma Bada:

That was by Radio Tarifa from their album Rumba Argelina.

Here’s a bit of a very different version. (There are hundreds of versions. This song is very popular.)

That was by the terrific Nubian Oud Player Hamza el Din from his album Eclipse.

Here’s one translation of the words:

When the gossamer nymph appears,
My beloved’s beauty drives me to distraction;
Surrender
Surrender
When I am enraptured by a glimpse,
My beloved’s beauty is a tender branch caught by the breeze;
Surrender
Surrender
Oh my destiny, my perplexity,
No one can comfort me in my misery,
In my lamenting and suffering for love,
But for the one in the beautiful mirage;
My beloved’s beauty drives me to distraction,
Surrender
Surrender

Source: Hamza EL Din’s album Eclipse.

This song caught my attention, not because of the exotic melody, not because of the lyrics (which I didn’t understand), but because of an extra beat.

In modern notation, Lamma Bada is rendered in 10/8 time. That is, there are ten beats to the bar. Listen to this slowed down version (I hope Radio Tarifa doesn’t mind) and see if you can count those beats. (It starts on 10 — the upbeat — and ends on 9.)

When I heard it for the first time, I wanted to cut it up finer and I counted, 1-2-3, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3. (If you’re interested, you might try again counting like that.)

My ear, used to our two-, three-, and four-beat bars, heard an extra beat stuck in the middle there — that 4. When I hummed it I’d often mistakenly turn it into a piece with three three-beat bars. I’ve done a little surgery on the Radio Tarifa version (I really, really hope they don’t mind) to show you what I mean. I’ve butchered it pretty badly, but it comes close to the three-beat version I turned it into.

Of course the song doesn’t have an extra beat. That beat is there as part of samai rhythm, a very popular rhythmic structure for muwashshah, one with ten beats to the bar.

There’s more to samai than those ten beats. The rhythm calls for a specific beat pattern in the accompanying percussion. Thanks to Maqam World — a web site dedicated to helping musicians understand the modal system used in classical Arabic music — I can show you how complex those ten beats are. Here’s a graphic:

In case you’re not used to Western notation: the larger note-looking things actually are notes (in this case without pitch) and the smaller flag-like things are rests — they indicate places where music is NOT played. As for the Ds and Ts at the bottom, my friend Catherine, a ney player, explained them: D stands for dum and T for tekk, the sounds that the frame drums (daffs) and goblet drums(doumbeks) make. A dum is the lower sound toward the middle of the drum and the tekk is the higher pitched sound at the rim.

Here’s a great version of Lama Bada with percussion. I found the Dumms and Tekks a little difficult to pick out because the percussionist is embellishing with other hits. But once the oud starts playing it gets easier to hear DUM — –|tek –|DUM DUM|tek — – |

You’ve worked hard to follow my enthusiasm this far. Now your reward: a couple of embedded YouTube videos of Lamma Bad for you to enjoy.

The first is by Lena Chamamyan, a Syrian singer with a gorgeous voice. It starts out very clearly laying out that samai thaqil, then the music becomes lush, almost Western-sounding. Obviously this wonderful song has been interpreted in every way possible. (Compare this version with the Hamza el Din version above).

Here’s an orchestral version, one from Tel Aviv with the Arab Jewish Ensemble Shesh Besh:

I’m sure you can find more, likely as different from these as an oud is from a guitar. I hope you enjoy them.

But even Bach nods. And Alex (you’ll never read this so I’ll presume on our slender web relationship and call you by your given name) you’ve taken a nap on this one.

You published a piece in the British paper, The Guardian, on 29 November called “Why do we hate modern classical music?” In it you ask why works of 20th Century graphic art — painting by such artists as Pablo Picasso and Robert Rauschenberg, for example — have become accepted by the general art viewer, but 20th Century music — work by  composers from Arnold Schoenberg to John Cage — is still considered difficult and is not welcomed even by many sophisticated listeners (including, I can add, some of the musicians who perform it).

This is a question I’ve asked often over the years, but, unlike you, Mr. Ross, I’ve come up with the right answer.

You come close. You cite the “sociological explanation” that concert goers are stuck in front of the performance, unlike viewers of art. But then you argue against this by saying, so are patrons of the dance and modern dance has had no problem being accepted by audiences.

Here’s the thing you miss. We can close our eyes, but not our ears. People can turn away from ballet as easily as they do from Picasso or Warhol, but you can’t really block the sound of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. (And covering your ears during John Cage’s 4’33″ might be seen as collaborating.)

I don’t mean literally that the challenged balletomane will turn away and that will make all the difference. I’m talking about a fundamental difference between art that enters through the eye and art that enters through the ear. When you venture into a museum or gallery and come upon a urinal, a Brillo box, or a block of Robert Rauschenberg red, you might feel challenged, but the sight does not assault the senses the way a hundred or so bars of music without a tonal center can.

It’s the uninterruptible nature of  music, I believe, that accounts for its difficulty and  explains why we “hate modern classical music.” Or, well, why some of us do.

What do you think, Mr. Ross?

Alex Ross, obviously a prince, was so good as to reply:

I don’t think not being able to close our ears quite explains it, though. As I note, audiences are well accustomed to a high level of dissonance in the movie theater. If the ears were especially vulnerable to non-tonal sounds and liable to be injured by them, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and a thousand other movies would have been colossal failures….

I think the sound is more piercing than the image, and is certainly a factor in the complex situation of modern music….

A gamelan (photo copyright © RichardBlair.com)

A gamelan is an instrument made up of  instruments. It plays the classical music of Bali and Java, Indonesia. But that’s not important. What is important is that a gamelan makes incredible music.

A few gamelan facts:

• Gamelans have been around for over 1200 years.
• A gamelan’s instruments are built and tuned together and are not interchangeable with the instruments of other gamelans.
• Gamelan music influenced Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Benjamin Britten, Steve Reich, Philip Glass.
• But that’s not important. What is important is the terrific music gamelans make.

Here’s a taste. The music of an unusual iron gamelan (most are bronze) from the village of Tenganan in eastern Bali. The cut is just over a minute. I recommend that you listen to the whole thing if you can spare the seconds:

That clip is from a recording given to me by my friends Julian Gerstin and Carlene Raper, who got it from a Tenganan weaver. (It was on her computer. She burned it onto a disk for them.)

(By the way, if you listened to the slower pattern of the lower-pitched metalophone in the foreground, you might have noticed that it continually played beats 4 and 1 of a four-beat bar – or 1 and 2, depending on where you put the downbeat.)

In Bali, the gamelan is a part of life in every village. It lives in a village building and, besides being played by itself, it is played at every special occasion, sacred or secular. It accompanies classical dance, shadow puppet plays, weddings, and funerals. The web site for Gamelan Tunas Mekar (a gamelan from Denver, Colorado, USA) says that gamelan “accompanies temple festivals and traditional life-cycle rites, including tooth filings and cremations, as well as more recreational events.”

I wonder how many tooth filings and cremations Tunas Mekar accompanies in Denver.

Enough talk. Here’s part of a performance by a larger ensemble:

That clip is from a JVC World Sounds CD – Gamelan Semarpegulingan I (VICG 5024-2)]

The incredible speed of the metalaphone players is partly an illusion. Some of the very fast melodies are played by two musicians playing alternate notes. That’s a difficult trick to pull off. It takes endless practice. The YouTube video below is of two musicians practicing this interlocking technique. Note also that beside playing this fast interlocking melody with one hand, they’re dampening the key they just played with the other.

I already said that most gamelans are bronze. Here’s a clip of one of my favorite gamelans. It’s made of  bamboo.

That cut is called “Amuknama (Driving the Water Buffalo)” (I have no idea why). It’s from the CD The Music of Bali (volume one) performed by Swara Cipta Priyanti. (Celestial Harmonies 13136-2). It’s the first of three terrific CDs of Balinese music.

Here are some links to gamelan information I’ve bumped into on the web:

• A page of the region of Indonesia called Joglosemar about  Javanese gamelans
• Some pages from University of Michigan, called Gamelan: Venerable Lake of Honey (I don’t know why) that go into detail about the gamelan tuning systems
• Of course, the Wikipedia page

This post is mainly to introduce gamelan to people who’ve never heard it, and to remind people who have that there may be more to it than they know, gamelan music that they have not heard.

Gamelan is fascinating musically and culturally. Google it with the parameters you’re most interested in – the musical theory, the cultural context, the history, etc.

Here are some longer performances from YouTube.

First is a bamboo gamelan (jegog), Gamelan Sekar Jaya, based in the Bay Area, USA, performing Jaran Dauh:

Next is a more typical bronze gamelan, Gamelan Cudamani from Bali. The video includes the traditional Balinese dance that gamelan often accompanies:

Here’s another bronze gamelan from Bali - Gamelan Gong Kebyar:

If you enjoy those, search for gamelan on YouTube  and you’ll find hundreds more. If you find a performance you think is special please let me know about it. I may link to it here.

The music is also available on CD or as MP3 downloads.