Now Music in New Albion: Playlist

Preface

"What John Cage is about is not Zen; it is experimental existentialism. It profoundly uses onsite trashing conventional ritual occasions and forms and systems through which social substance is infrastructurally bolstered to force pitiless confrontation with out-there voidness. Listeners composers performers undergoing extreme exertion or even more extreme nonexertion under the unyielding imperative of strenuous rigors meticulously detailed, stringently demanding, random-processually generated, globally undecipherable. Anticulture not alternative culture. Sound you have to hear, that you can't exactly hear; sound that you strain to grasp and that leaves you coming up poignantly empty. Once you know the reality of silence, content is up to you. Existence is not a career opportunity. If you escape from that, what is it, precisely, you are escaping? Nice is not what John Cage is about; what John Cage is about is more like the real-life sense of what you might mean by Serious. Probably John Cage would not have said any of these things, so maybe they're completely wrong."

- Benjamin Boretz "An Epigraph for John Cage" from "Being About Music Textworks 1960-2003 J. K. Randall Benjamin Boretz Volume 2: 1978-2003"

Texts

Streamed

Wayward in Limbo

With the Chapel closed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Wayward Music Series now moves from the concert hall to the living room. In place of our usual ten monthly concerts, Nonsequitur is curating and commissioning ten Seattle artists each month to create a series of streaming audio sessions of exclusive material. Many of these will be essentially “live” performances recorded at home for this occasion. Others may create a mix of pre-recorded material that has not been previously released elsewhere.

- from the Wayward Music Series website at https://www.waywardmusic.org/.

September 26, 2020

Jenny Ziefel

In Memoriam (for Bill Smith and Ruth Bader Ginsberg)
Uncertainty and New Realities
Clarion Call
Prayer and Hope for the Future

strategy:
start at bottom
- open and explore spaces above it
- keep the pitch work lively
- modules of durations and internal tempi/rhythm
- touch base stretch to the side
- open all the little drawers
- touch the buttons
- density variable

the mechanism is loopish
diaphragm
center of body
breathes out
through trachea and mouth cavern
resisted and controlled in shape
by throat tongue
embouchure activating reed vibrations
on pipe length
by finger wiggling
down by the diaphragm
released into the acoustic and atmosphere of outside
body making color
body
shape of body
at the center of the space filling it
standing on it
all to ask

how does the shape of the body communicate through the reed into the shape of the sound in one room?

September 27, 2020

Ted Poor and Cuong Vu

what cycles measure to measure measures a reference span with internal spans its harmonic content and sequence link spans to melody like rocks in a stream bed any of which can be taken apart shifted along without compromising its essential immobility steady purpose each finding a way to play duets within their respective parts.

Recorded

September 26, 2020

Symphony in A minor, op. 56 (#3) "Scottish" - Felix Mendelssohn - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

wisps lost in dark forests follow traces that might become
but hope not
a regular symphonic first movement
there's the cadence . . . yep there it is

proto Dvorak
Scottish like an opera
set in Scotland
an exotic locale
pre-nationalist

Ben sometimes opined about one thing or another (not this) that it was at its best when it wasn't trying to be a Symphony, in this case when it isn't trying to be Haydn.

here's the scene set in the quaint village
the costumes are great
doings in a castle
uh oh
stern majesty
proud dark deeds

spirits are afoot
best to keep them occupied with counterpoint exercises
repeat
how old fashioned
rondo-id
rather nice when it gets going
definitely rondo-id

hymn time!

Soirees de Vienne - Valse Caprice #6 - Franz Liszt - Vladimir Horowitz [from Horowitz in Moscow]

the floor's going to shake if everybody dances like that
and delicate inner parts
magic visions

like an homage to Schumann with a bit of Liberace twinkle

September 27, 2020

Beatrice et Benedict - Hector Berlioz - Orchestre de Paris, Daniel Barenboim, Yvonne Minton, Placido Domingo, Ileana Cotrubas, Nadine Denize, Roger Soyer, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, John Macurdy, Genevieve Page, Choeur de l'Orchestre de Paris, Arthur Oldham

melody emerges from character and creates it
or might be something that's running around in the streets

orchestra tracks and amplifies and mirrors the emotional structural rhetoric of the dialogue of the words within the tune

a narrator in this recording tells us
in meticulous French
the story between the musical numbers

redolent of Lelio or Manfred down to the elaborate choral numbers
duet soprano & alto to die for
complete with internal orchestrated recitative
a mark that allows modulational freedom

how might the diegetic non-diegetic concept play out within an opera?
more layers to work with actually

sometimes the orchestration talks back
it is us
it abandons us
for the chorus
join the chorus
we are the chorus

Prelude to Die Meistersinger - Richard Wagner - Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy

The Glorious Soviet of Singers of Nürnberg

September 28, 2020

Boris Godunov (1872 version), Prologue - Modeste Mussorgsky -Polish Radio National Symphony Orchestra, Jerzy Semkow, Martti Talvela, Leonard Mroz, Nicolai Gedda, Bozena Kinasz, Andrzej Hiolski, Aage Haugland, Halina Lukomska, Polish Radio Chorus of Krakow, Boys Chorus from the Krakow Philharmonic Chorus

a political instability presented without explanation
presented:
the antagonist and the antagonized
focused power
sullen resentment
no characters
just the masses
and power

bitter piety

Slava!

not triumphal

September 29, 2020

Fünf Gesänge, op. 72 - Johannes Brahms - Thomas Quasthoff, Justus Zeyen

ultra concentrated contrapuntal convolutions
nothing escapes

Trio in A minor, op. 50 - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Eastman Trio

each step is prepared and made
then unmade step by step
all roads lead to stormy exclamation of passion let loose
or dark despair

how much is this intended for the enjoyment of the players
and how much for a distanced audience

at a distance and in a crowd a listener might have a more difficult time finding their way inside the part work as it coalesces in a large space

at that time symphonic was the norm of expression
big big big
at such a state all the time and for what

back where we started but louder

Italian Serenade - Hugo Wolf - Berliner Philharmoniker, Semyon Bychkov

at play with how it puts itself together to be itself

tipsy tippy toe
no histrionics
for Hugo

Sonata in F minor, op. 13 (#1) - Alexander Scriabin - Michael Ponti

September 30, 2020

sliding from grasp

Symphony in D minor, op.13 (#1) - Sergei Rachmaninoff - Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin

adventure! danger!
full of compositional detail,
skillfully arranged

but doesn't stay with any topic long
the order of 20 second groups doesn't seem to have any particular reason behind it, tonally or narratively
- so what then

full of ideas about what could go in a symphony
a parade without reason

October 1, 2020

Pelleas et Melisande, Act I - Claude Debussy - Orchestre symphonique de Montreal, Charles Dutoit, Collette Alliot-Lugaz, Didier Henry, Gilles Cachemaille, Pierre Thau, Claudine Carlson, Francoise Golfier, Phillip Ens, Choeurs de l'OSM, Iwan Edward, Denise Masse

where is this music
in relation to the story
to the stage
to the voices
to us

a constant mute chorus
it can observe paint react
but is invisible to the characters
it is an invisible mirror surrounding them
inhabiting the stage with them
our stand ins
up close

In Session at the Tintinabulary