The San Francisco Symphony returns to New York.
by Paul J. Pelkonen
Michael Tilson Thomas at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony. Photo courtesy Carnegie Hall.
The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas is in his third decade at the helm of the San Francisco Symphony, one of the longest and most consistent runs of a music director in a music business where maestros change podiums like NFL quarterbacks switching teams in free agency.
Within the constraints of his position as Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera, conductor James Levine can pretty much do as he pleases. On Sunday afternoon, he led the MET Chamber Ensemble and a group of young singers in a diverse program at Zankel Hall. Its focus: the development of modern music in the 20th and 21st century, from the early experiments of Charles Ives to the neoclassicism of Stravinsky, all the way up to modern experiments by John Cage, Elliot Carter and Charles Wuorinen.
In New York City, the year 2012 will be remembered for natural disasters, pseudo-Mayan hysteria and the cheerful mayhem caused in the city's concert and recital halls by due to the observance of the 100th birthday of John Cage.
On Friday night, Leon Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra acknowledged the centennial of that iconoclastic American composer with The Cage Concert at Carnegie Hall. The performance, which is (as far as we know) the last major concert of the year to feature Cage's music, included the New York premieres of two late works.
Unlike some concerts which rely on this composer's vast output to stand by itself, Dr. Botstein chose to place John Cage in a context of important musical directions of the 20th century. In encyclopedic fashion, the set list covered minimalism, indeterminacy, 12-tone serial organization and a healthy sense of the absurd, before culminating in the performance of three Cage compositions.
The performance opened with the most conventional music of the night: Anton Webern's Symphony. An example of Webern's intricate 12-tone style, this two-movement ten-minute work creates spidery, delicate textures, a brush of bassoon, a short series of notes on the strings, and (most importantly) a breath of empty space between the notes, the rests themselves forming part of the work's integral fabric.
Too often, the life of a classical music critic involves the same procedure over and over. We sit in preselected seats, usually in the same section of an opera house or concert hall. The musician(s) are onstage directing sound toward us. And we don't get up except for a quick break for intermission, a gulp of coffee, a friendly chat with a colleague, or a trip to the loo.
The Tuesday night premiere of Kevin James' 100 Waltzes for John Cage broke all of those rules. The 75-minute piece for nine players (Mr. James' group, the [kāj] ensemble) and pre-recorded sounds (played through quadraphonic speakers) proved an active listening experience. Audience members and press alike were invited to walk through and around the performance, experiencing the landscapes of sound from multiple angles.
Mr. James drew inspiration for 100 Waltzes on Cage's own 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs, a legendary 1977 work that used a map of New York and calculations from the I Ching to provide players with 147 addresses at which to play, but no indication what they were to do once they got to the randomly chosen location. This new work used random number generation (his assistant was introduced as his "tosser of coins") to pick locations at which to "mine" sounds and preserve them.
On Wednesday night at Bargemusic, the Flux Quartet continued their celebration of the tricksome legacy of John Cage, composer, iconoclast and maverick of modernity whose works continue to baffle listeners (and sometimes, players) today.) The first part of the program held an early, familiar work. The second and third explored difficult, gnarled sounds: what the casual listener thinks of when they hear the name "John Cage."
And sometimes they run away.
The String Quartet in Four Parts is a refreshing surprise to anyone expecting nothing but noise terror from this particular composer. Here, the writing is more conventional, almost dreamy. Its sounds are stretched, pulled apart and then knotted back together as the composer strove toward a new way of making music.
The Flux players created a performance of grace and great beauty here, paying fitting tribute to the composer's early period.
The Flux Quartet fétes John Cage at Bargemusic.
by Paul Pelkonen
Three faces of John Cage.
It was a hot summer night on the Brooklyn waterfront.The swelter and scent of the East River served as backdrop for a Bargemusic appearance by the Flux Quartet, the New York-based nw music ensemble who specialize in bold explorations of the last century's avant-garde.
This concert was the first part of the FLUX's three-concert series celebrating the 100th birthday of composer, chef and iconoclast John Cage. The program paired Cage's music with adventurous explorations by three of Cage's contemporaries: Earle Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff.
The program opened with a few introductory words from FLUX violinist Tom Chiu before opening with Morton Feldman's 1956 composition Three Pieces for String Quartet. This was dreamy, atmospheric music that seemed to hang shimmering in the heated air. Each piece sounded as if they could have been the soundtrack for the barge itself, echoing the creaks and wails of a vessel at rest in harbor.
Hollywood action star Nicolas Cage (real name Nicolas Coppola) explores the experimental music of John Cage (real name John Cage) in this YouTube video. I didn't create it. I wish I had. The video was originally posted by user aslucas07. (Thanks!)
American Mavericks comes to Carnegie Hall.
by Paul Pelkonen
A key component of John Cage's Song Books, and a valuable source of potassium. (Andy Warhol was an "American maverick too!)
The stage of Carnegie Hall on Tuesday night had a poker table on it. Some microphones, two pianos, and a counter with a typewriter at one end, some fruits and vegetables, and a blender.
John Cage. Charles Ives. John Adams. Steve Reich. Meredith Monk.
These are just a few of the composers featured at American Mavericks, next week's week-long festival at Carnegie Hall celebrating the bold music of American composers who continue to push the envelope in the 20th century and beyond. The program seeks to challenge the traditional conservatism of Carnegie audiences by presenting these modern composers next to each other instead of trying to contrast them with better known music by Brahms or Tchaikovsky.
The week-long concert series is curated by Michael Tilson Thomas, music director of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. "M.T.T.", (as he is known) has assembled an exciting series that should make the staid plaster arches of the Stern Auditorium echo with exciting new sounds.
The sound moves upstairs on Tuesday, with the first of two concerts by the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. Jessye Norman joins the orchestra to sing works from the Cage Song Books. But the real plum here is the New York premiere of John Adams' Absolute Jest, a kind of concerto for string quartet and orchestra.
Wednesday night features special guest Emanuel Ax, playing Morton Feldman's Piano and Orchestra. Also featured: Sun-Treader by the underrated composer Carl Ruggles, and A Concord Symphony by American pioneer Charles Ives.
The festival ends with two concerts at Zankel Hall, featuring members of the SFSO. Thursday night features the fantastical music of Harry Partch, whose kit-bashing approach to composition resulted in the creation of some truly unique instruments. The concert also features music by David Del Tredici, the New York premier of Mason Bates' Mass Transmission, and the Concerto for Organ with Percssion Orchestra by Lou Harrison.
Friday night features Music for Pieces of Wood by Steve Reich and the New York premiere of Ms. Monk's Realm Variations. The concert (and the festival) ends with Echoi by Lukas Foss and Jacob's Room a monodrama by Morton Subotnick.
The Juilliard Percussion Ensemble pays homage to John Cage.
Fingers on the hammers: John Cage prepares a piano.
Monday night at Juillard's Sharp Theater was the second concert in this year's FOCUS! Festival. This year, the festival celebrates the coming centennial of John Cage, the always quotable, often imitated father of the avant-garde movement in American concert music. When needed, New York Philharmonic percussionist Daniel Druckman conducted.
For the uninitiated, Cage's music grew out of the experimentation of composer Henry Cowell, who was a pioneer in writing "tone clusters" (mashing down multiple keys of a piano at once) and to "prepare" a piano (holding down the strings with we objects.) Cowell's Ostinato Pianissimo led off the program, a shimmering, airy web of sound that seemed to emerge, unfold in the air, and dissolve.
It was followed by Three2, a late Cage composition for three players. The percussionists stood at distance from the stage, making soft noises on a snare drum, eerie wailings on a lumber saw and gentle tones on tuned gongs. The music was wispy, almost insubstantial. Then it was gone.
The Third Construction is an earlier Cage work, with four percussionists playing in sync like a particularly noisy gamelan. Noisy, because the instruments include large coffee cans, bamboo cricket callers and a "lion's roar" (performed with a bass drum and a rope.) But despite the clatter, the music never sounded cacaphonous.
The second half of the concert opened with Mr. Cage himself. His disembodied voice, lecturing on the concept of "Nothing", filled the air of the Sharp Theater, sounding uncannily like the HAL-9000 computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Eerie, fascinating and a performance in itself.
The silence was soon ended, by Cage's Credo In Us, which pitted a prepared piano and percussion instruments against a recording of the Largo from Antonín Dvořák's New World Symphony. The older piece was turned on and off seemingly at random, creating chopped phrases of English horn, 'cellos and brass that jabbed their way into the textures created by the percussion players. When the electronic orchestra was cut off mid-phrase, the piece was over.
The concert ended with the Concerto for Organ with Percussion Orcestra by Lou Harrison, a longtime associate of John Cage. The Harrison Concerto featured the organist playing his instrument with fingers and wooden blocks on the keys, creating liud tonal clusters for the percussion to clatter and bash against. The second movement was quieter, and more atmospheric. The third returned to the high-volume non-chords and discordant percussion, creating brusque blocks of sound for the audience to contemplate.
There's been a lot of stuff on this blog recently about 4'33", the iconic piece of anti-music by composer John Cage. Over in the UK, there was even an effort to get the piece played as the BBC's Holiday Single, à la the film Love Actually.
Anyway, here's a recent performance from Dutch television featuring composer, conductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw offering his interpretation of the piece in front of a television audience. I am sure that you will find it interesting...listening.
If that's not enough about 4'33" then check out my recent 'review' of a studio MP3 recording of the work, currently available on Amazon.com.
An old college buddy of mine just sent me an MP3 being sold currently on Amazon. So I thought I'd oblige him with a review.
John Cage's groundbreaking piano piece 4'33"
uses clever harmonic development to make a profound statement of great musical depth. Celestial harmonies resonate throughout the piece as the lush orchestration (written to be played by a single performer) develops with fluid textures and rock-solid rhythms that echo the very bones of the Earth.
The opening theme of Tacit 1 is a profound one, echoing back to the pauses that feature in Anton Bruckner's mighty Second Symphony. In Tacit 2, Cage's use of rests, played in a complicated fugue has been known to move audience members, and yes, critics, to tears.
The final section, Tacit 3 builds to a powerful climax, with silent thunder resonating back and forth as the composition ticks down into its final minute. The theme returns again, making a profound, shattering statement as the pianist shifts on the bench in order to reach the middle C on the keyboard. But the C is never heard, replaced by strange microtones that are inaudible to all but the most cultured music lover.
And for only a buck, you can now own this fine studio MP3 recording of Mr. Cage's audacious work as performed and released by The Sound Corporation. All you have to do is click the link in this article and buy it. Send it to your friends. Send it to your enemies. It's the perfect IPod stuffer.
John Cage was one of the most revolutionary, groundbreaking composers of the 20th century. And by all accounts (and a photograph published by British symphonic commentator Norman Lebrecht) he could make a mean pasta sauce.
P.S.: This article was written in 4 minutes, 33 seconds. I think Mr. Cage would have liked it.
