Live
October 31, 2015
The Pearl Fishers - Bizet
Seattle Opera
McCaw Hall, Seattle
Leaving aside the deeply uncomfortable in-your-face mid-19th Century European attitudes about the 'exotic', there were plenty of things to enjoy - intricate vocal lines, lots of choral singing, and a good mix of solos and ensembles. It is very easy on the ears. The effusive emotional palette was nearly drowned out by the sets, whose colors and patterns seemed intent on out-shouting the music.
November 3, 2015
Cristina Valdés
Meany Hall, Seattle
Cristina, as always, played with clarity and thoughtfulness, doing her utmost not to get in the way of what she's playing. Truly a breath of fresh air.
Cantéyodjayâ - Messiaen
 |
| Messiaen |
A group of astounding textural/rhythmic episodes marred by a refrain that sounds thrown away. In the notes M writes that it "gives unity to the work". I couldn't think of why such fabulous material would need unity, exactly.
Tres Piezas para piano - Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann
An organism, spacious, chantlike, emerges from its own roots. Completely believable.
fardanceCLOSE - Chaya Czernowin
Contrasts of size, of registers, of clottedness and transparency. I could have listened to this longer - or again for that matter.
Among Red Mountains- John Luther Adams
Full of big bold changes that make little difference.
 |
| Grossmann |
Variations for Piano, op. 27 - Webern
Folded shapes, contraptual, un-nesting themselves in new ways each time we pick one up.
Piano Counterpoint - Reich
Tuning dials turned here and there to pick out different parts of the spectrum.
November 6, 2015
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle
Nadya Kadrevis
I was taken by the peculiar narrative person of this music. My first thought was that it is like a film score, providing a sonic point of view of a visual sequence, but a visual sequence that is very nearly, but not quite, in the first-person singular - the so-close-as-to-be-nearly-first-person second person, the music in the position of a close observer of a close observer.
Clement Reid
I had forgotten, or didn't know, that Clement plays not just piano but guitar too - a trick I have never been able to manage. I liked his notion of "clumps of ideas".
Neal Kosály-Meyer
This silence is your own.
Nicole Truesdell
Violin and piano each finish the sentences of the other, person and place spilling into the same cup.
Beth Fleenor
Beth brings more ideas to the table in 10 minutes than there are crickets in Tennessee. Pretty much leaves me, gape-jawed, astonished, eating dust. Love it.
Recorded
November 1, 2015
Trio in C minor op. 101 - Brahms - Istomin-Stern-Rose Trio
Development is explored as a deep unraveling, the music coming apart, forced asunder by its own flexing.
Peacherine Rag - Joplin - William Albright
Syncopation as a flavor of rubato.
Passacaille - Satie - Frank Glazer
Unravels more quickly than Brahms, but much more comfortable with it.
Symphony in F-sharp minor, No. 10 - Mahler (Cooke) - Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle
A first person account of the experience of dying.
First Movement: It begins by levitating, never sinking to the utmost bottom. The phrases inflate and blossom, impossibly large, in long ocean swells of rhythmic time. Comforted again and again. The intensity of the expression is the disease that consumes, lurks.
Second Movement: About the business of finishing up, assembling scenes, back stage.
Third Movement: Quick alternations of state, nagging thoughts intercut with other distractions.
Fourth Movement: Crisis, clinging to the happy place, adrift on the dire abyss, invisible. The motor slows to a stop, fading past nothingness.
Fifth Movement: The passage beyond, confused, as if hearing the undersides of the most recent fading past nothingness. Infinitely slow easing back into bliss, long melodies leap through realms of realms. Breaking through. Plunging in one dimension, suspended in another, the moment when the bass drum does
not come in is the moment we realize it was not a barrier keeping us from life, forcing us into death, rather it was what kept us back, the last tether. Now we can go on.
In Session at the Tintinabulary
November 1, 2015
Tambourine Quartet - Keith Eisenbrey
Karen and I were riffing about a scene in the novel she's writing when out popped the idea of a tambourine quartet. Once an idea like that is in the air the only option is to act. We had to buy a fourth tambourine to fill the quota. Darn!
November 2, 2015
Gradus 278 151102 - Neal Kosály-Meyer
Atmosphere in the sense of a 3-D, or Music-D, map - parameters of sound indexing parameters of temperature, pressure, humidity, the shapes of clouds in sound.
Exchange (continued) - see part one here.
(Keith) Riffing in contrapunctilio obligato:
Neal Kosály-Meyer:
Except that it seems that you DO have a notion that has a quite particular
meaning: that of being amputated or
severed from that which you don't wish it to be amputated or severed from, or
of being the instrument or victim of murder.
Keith Eisenbrey:
I don't have a way of understanding it that I like, that I would
want to believe Cage meant. I don't want to believe Cage is a
monster (or more precisely, that this is a monstrous statement), but I haven't
been offered an alternative.
N:
It feels more direct to me to think of the sound AS nature, or as just
being itself, rather than being an emanation, messenger or intermediary. As when Beckett said that Finnegans Wake is
not about a thing, it is the thing.
K:
For me this ignores that sound only exists for us through mediation. Direct
perception isn't an option (at least for me), outside of divine intervention
(which I don't rule out).
N:
Using the trappings of concert music certainly thickens the plot,
especially back in the day when musicians and conductors would ignorantly or
intentionally sabotage pieces like Atlas.
Nowadays recordings like this one or the SEM Ensemble's seem to me to
offer a different and refreshing thing that a set-in-its-ways beast like a
symphony orchestra can do. Hearing
orchestras do repertoire like this well actually gives me hope for music and I
guess for humanity.
K:
Played well or ill isn't the problem. Either way it has been sucked into
the prestige factory, stamped with a brand name.
N:
Hearing Cage played well always feels me to me intensely
human and intensely uttersome, generally requiring significant engagement,
attention to fine detail, a respect for the composer and what he has made. I guess I find it more exciting when what is
being uttered is a sound formed and contemplated in as much detailed glory and
mystery as is possible to form and contemplate, and often mysterious as
utterance, just as often serendipitously connecting to the rest of the piece in
a theatre or a phrase or an arc that can be as extraordinarily compelling as if
it had been the result [of] an intended design, and often the more enjoyable
because I know there was no such intention.
K:
I have never been convinced that there was no such
intention, and yet I often enjoy performances of Cage's music.
N:
As indicated, I don't think sounds cannot utter if we're actually
listening to them. There is perhaps an implicit metaphysic in Cage
that utterance, consciousness, feeling, thought are not exclusively human
qualities or attributes, but are generally present in all things.
At least that's the way I like to imagine the universe, not privileging thought
feeling and design as being things that only humans do, but as being inherent
properties of all manifestations of matter and energy. Can't be
proved or demonstrated one way or the other, obviously. Imagining
it that way, for me, makes the universe more fun, friendly and less lonely, I
guess. Cage's music played well usually makes it feel more likely
to me that this is in fact the way things are.
K:
So
thought-privileged sounds, as sounds themselves, are utterances of themselves,
utterances of their own thinking, and therefore have everything present in them
that would be present in them even if you didn’t think of them as being only
themselves. As a way of understanding what Cage meant it seems to me like a
fancy way to have your cake and eat it too.
N:
I would argue that privileging thought, feeling, design etc as
exclusively human, and narrowly defining "utterance" to conform with
that is the more amputating and murderous act, and the sort of thing that
defines what Freud called the General Neurosis, that which makes us, as
Nietzsche would have it, the "Sick Animal." I don't
need all music to be like Cage's, but I definitely need Cage's music among
those I hear and contemplate--for me it opens kinds of doors and windows OUT of
the sickness that hardly anybody else's does.
K:
How did Freud get in here? Anyway, I don’t believe I privilege TFDe as
exclusively human, but rather that human TFDe are a privilege of being human. The TFDe of other’s are
distinctly other, fabulously alien.
Corrolarily, my own personal TFDe are exclusively, ineluctably, mine, they are
not those of others. When I hear the music as an other’s utterance it is
precisely the otherness of that utterance that I value.
N:
I'd add that all of
this very much validates and confirms the work I've taken on with Gradus. Among lots
of things, that project is very much about taking that Cagean sound-in-itself
notion and carrying it into a way of playing which is not dependent on the
strictly composed ways that JC employed. Your continued
enthusiasm for Gradus means
even more to me given the frustrations you still have with Cage, since
it feels like I'm managing to transmit what's most important to me about
him in a way that you can receive without as much ambivalence as you experience
with Cage's own compositions. Must be doin my job.
K:
Please see my
copious, frequent, and often enthusiastic, comments on Gradus through the
decades. Apropos of this discussion, the greater part of my frustration with
Cage is in understanding what he was talking or writing about. The music I have
heard is (apropos of this discussion) problematic in the sense that I have
trouble lining it up with (some of) the talk about it.
N:
P.S. Felt I needed to add that my
final response (to your bit beginning "If emptying the sound of its
utterance-hood . . .") was not meant to be as harsh or contrarian as
it may read. That came out because it hit me that the imagery of
amputation and murder were reminding me of something on point, which was Norman
Brown's close reading of Freud, Life Against Death, especially the
sections in which he traces the early developmental crises and their
culmination in the Oedipal phase. Brown emphasizes that these are not
simply "normal" developmental phases however universal, but
tragic and traumatic experiences that each of us has gone through, and that the
final result, the mature human ego, is in fact something which is profoundly amputated
or castrated from that which it would be better not to have been amputated or
castrated from. Freud's heartbreaking insight is that we are
as a species burdened with an awful and constitutional illness out of which it
is difficult to see the way out. Brown sees more hope than Freud,
partly through a re-thinking of psychoanalysis at a social level rather than
just individual, but also in ways that artists might envision different,
healthier ways of being human.
K:
Freud AND Brown! Yikes! We’re not gonna have
enough pie! I was the one who chose the murder metaphor, perhaps I can clarify
with less dire imagery:
Scene One: I hear the sound of a violin. Is
that sound the utterance of the violin or of the violinist? Which would I
rather do without? Cage’s “the sound as itself” suggests to me he would rather
have the utterance of the violin and do without the violinist. I come down on
t’other side.
Scene Two: I hear the sound of thunder. Is that
sound an utterance? If not, it an accident of the sudden expansion of an air mass,
or whatever other materialist explanation you prefer. If so, of what (or of
whom) is it an utterance? If it is an utterance then it is the utterance of
something or of somewhom, of nature (as placeholder for any number of concepts
concerning the greater other out there), of a deity, or of God. If I’m serious
about it’s being an utterance then I must accept the utterer, even if I created
the utterer on the fly from the concept of utterance itself.
Scene Three: A child says “I love you”. Sounds
as themselves or child?
(Neal) Responds to Riffing in contrapunctilio
obligato:
N:
Taking the liberty of removing one stratum (my
previous contributions). Hopefully things will retain
coherence without it.
K:
I don't have a way of understanding it that
I like, that I would want to believe Cage meant. I
don't want to believe Cage is a monster (or more precisely,
that this is a monstrous statement), but I haven't been offered an alternative.
N:
Realized this may be
an important question: Which Cage writings have you
read? If your response is to a quoted “Allow sounds to be
themselves,” rather than to the article or essay in which he said that, the
whole context may help. The pieces in Silence and A
Year From Monday pretty clearly state his take on things, and have
never come across as monstrous, at least to me. If you HAVE read
some of them, and your perplexity remains, here’s what I’ve got for you at the
moment. Cage’s attempt to remove ego from composition
and playing, to let sounds be themselves is part of a
tradition: Buddhist, Taoist, Upanishadist, and in the west
represented by Eckhart and John of the Cross, among
others. The Zen goal to see your original face before you were
born, Eckhart’s “I pray God to rid me of God,” John of the
Cross’s “Nothing nothing nothing and at the mountaintop
nothing.” All the same idea and goal, and the crafters of each
statement knew they were dealing in paradox, in that these are all
extraordinary personalities working with extraordinary and very individual
craft toward the goal of extinguishing ego. And the Zen
Masters, Eckhart, Juan and Cage are definitely smart enough to know what
they’re doing—none of this is naïve self-contradiction. Rather
all share the intuition that this mindset is necessary to get where we want to
go.
K:
For me this ignores that sound only exists for us
through mediation. Direct perception isn't an option (at least for me), outside
of divine intervention (which I don't rule out).
N:
As an artist I always
want to transcend mediation whether or not that is
possible. Direct perception is essential (at least for me),
and I must further hold that divine intervention is a constant, though doubt
and worry about this point never leave us alone.
K:
Played well or ill isn't the problem. Either way
it has been sucked into the prestige factory, stamped with a brand name.
N:
Don’t know that that
prestige factory is any worse than any of the others. We want
connection, revelation, ecstasy, partnership with the divine, yet we must constantly
deal with conformity, stupidity, bullying and branding. To my
mind it makes a difference anytime artists do beautiful things in defiance of
all that. I heard Seattle Symphony do that at least twice last
year playing Messiaen and Ives. That recording of Atlas
likewise breaks through whatever cynicism or hypocrisy may be going on in that
world. As the Irishman entering the bar in the old story said,
“Is this a private fight or can anybody get in?”
K:
I have never been convinced that there was no
such intention, and yet I often enjoy performances of Cage's music.
N:
I’m starting to get
that what you miss in Cage’s talk about what he does is what he’s trying to do,
as opposed to what he’s not trying to do. So here’s my take on
a positive, active intentional version of the passive/negative “let sounds be
themselves.” Cage is always attentive either to defining a
sound precisely in space and time, or else (in the indeterminate works),
providing an example, a direction, and room for a performer to similarly make a
sound in as precise and complete a manner as is possible. The
freedom to the performer is exactly one more dimension of that precision and
completeness. Letting go of intentions (chance procedures et
al) exist precisely to allow possibilities and detail that would not occur to a
composer operating out of taste or habit. Silence and space
receive as much attention as they do in order to frame and give room to these
precision made sounds. Letting sounds be themselves is to allow
them dignity as sentient beings—assuming they are only fit to be medium to
someone’s message to someone else is from a certain point a view an affront to
their dignity and to their souls. They don’t exist to do
something for us or say something between us. Or rather we all exist
simply to delight in and take pleasure in each other, leaving mediation behind
or perhaps shining our mutually radiant othernesses on each other otherness.
K:
So
thought-privileged sounds, as sounds themselves, are utterances of themselves,
utterances of their own thinking, and therefore have everything present in them
that would be present in them even if you didn’t think of them as being only
themselves. As a way of understanding what Cage meant it seems to me like a
fancy way to have your cake and eat it too.
N:
Not sure what you mean by a thought-privileged
sound. I was using privilege in the way that “white privilege”
or “male privilege” is commonly used these days, to critique what I think of as
the privilege of solely human sentience, which I don’t buy, and which I think
impoverishes our experience of the world. Privileging human
consciousness seems to me to only make us unnecessarily isolated and lonely,
and generally and needlessly creates the particularly human malady of
alienation. Zen, Eckhart, the Upanishads, Juan de la Cruz,
John Cage pretty much agree on the way out: Let go of that
privileged sentience and let everything else have it as well, which I’m pretty
sure everything already does.
K:
How
did Freud get in here? Anyway, I don’t believe I privilege TFDe as exclusively
human, but rather that human TFDe are a privilege of
being human. The TFDe of other’s are distinctly other,
fabulously alien. Corrolarily, my own personal TFDe are exclusively,
ineluctably, mine, they are not those of others. When I hear the music as an
other’s utterance it is precisely the otherness of that utterance that I value.
N:
Freud’s here because of his particularly and
empirically founded theory of the General Neurosis, which I understand Cage in
particular as being an artist who profoundly seeks a way out of it, rather than
just accepting it. In order to seek the way out he must
enter that paradoxical realm of intentional use of nonintenion, of having
nothing to say and saying it. In this he did not achieve a
personality-less anonymity, and that was not his
goal. His utterance is there in the tremendous variety
of compositional means he divided to continue working away within this paradox,
never assuming there was some mechanical solution, say simply using the magic
square of Music of Changes for the rest of his life, or for that matter, making
4’33” and saying, “I did it, I’m done.”
K:
Please
see my copious, frequent, and often enthusiastic, comments on Gradus through
the decades. Apropos of this discussion, the greater part of my frustration
with Cage is in understanding what he was talking or writing about. The music I
have heard is (apropos of this discussion) problematic in the sense that I have
trouble lining it up with (some of) the talk about it.
N:
As at the beginning, I think we’d proceed more
constructively if we had a particular piece of writing by Cage to chew
on. If you have a particular piece in mind, maybe we could
talk about that one.
K:
Freud
AND Brown! Yikes! We’re not gonna have enough pie! I was the one who chose the
murder metaphor, perhaps I can clarify with less dire imagery:
Scene
One: I hear the sound of a violin. Is that sound the utterance of the violin or
of the violinist? Which would I rather do without? Cage’s “the sound as itself”
suggests to me he would rather have the utterance of the violin and do without
the violinist. I come down on t’other side.
N:
Cage nearly always wrote for specific performers
and collaborated closely with them. Solo for Piano,
that extraordinary and graphically beautiful compendium of compositional
techniques is essentially a love letter to David Tudor, made with his virtuosity
in mind, his love of puzzles, and the implicit trust in that performer’s
capacity to do wonderful things with an indeterminate
score. “Letting the Sound be Itself” takes a village, so
everybody involved matters, composer, player, bow violin, room, air, tone.
K:
Scene
Two: I hear the sound of thunder. Is that sound an utterance?
N:
If not, it is an
accident of the sudden expansion of an air mass, or whatever other materialist
explanation you prefer. If so, of what (or of whom) is it an utterance? If it
is an utterance then it is the utterance of something or of somewhom, of nature
(as placeholder for any number of concepts concerning the greater other out
there), of a deity, or of God. If I’m serious about it’s being an utterance
then I must accept the utterer, even if I created the utterer on the fly from
the concept of utterance itself.
All sound is utterance when we listen, and
ultimately all sound is the utterance of US, by which I mean, I think, that the
more attentively and deeply we listen the more the barriers and the distances
go away, the more otherness either goes away or else becomes a radiant other
one confronts, or possibly a systole and diastole of oceanic oneness and
confronting radiant otherness and back.
K:
Scene Three: A
child says “I love you”. Sounds as themselves or child?
N:
Both/and, and a gift to me the recipient and obligation on myself as
the caregiving recipient to give back. What if all things are
saying just that, and what if we are actually in a position to speak that back
to all things? That child is very likely seeking to re-charge,
and carries the hope of that oneness which we as parents actually have the
ability to impart if we are attentive to those moments; And then we
have to be ready to let the re-charged child go be OTHER again, and not need to
hold on to the union. It’s a dance and it’s not easy to learn the
steps, but I’m persuaded they can be learned.
