A good news - bad news kind of thing

The Detroit Symphony is scheudled to perfrom the four symphonies of Charles Ives at Carnegie Hall in May 2013.

I find myself on the horns of a dilemma. To go or not? On the one hand, this is an opportunity to hear some of my favorite music all in one sitting at what is, acoustically, my favorite concert hall. On the other hand, the conductor will be Leonnard Slatkin.

Ewwwww.

And I see this blog now has six followers. How did that happen?

Whoa-oh-oh-oh on the radio

Thanks to WPRB Princeton for broadcasting Nielsen's great Clarinet Concerto this morning. The beautiful, round-toned reading by the soloist, Hakan Rosengren (with Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra) brightened up my commute and put me in a wonderful mood that lasted until the moment I walked into the office.

Once I sat down, nothing could save me.

The Nielsen was so good it almost made me forgive the station for the godawful prep school recording of HMS Pinafore that Teri Noel Towe subjected the region to last Friday, complete with updates on where all his fellow preppie cast members are now. (News flash, TNT: Nobody cares.) He made me want to shoot myself, or him. I can usually put up with the pedantry and the shameless namedropping because he does play some extraordinary historic recordings, but if the music sucks, too, controlling one's temper is a wasted effort.

Kinagree Smith at Flying Fish at Roller's

The folk trio with two names — Kinagree Smith — played two sets last night at Flying Fish in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia. The venue is the second floor of Roller’s restaurant on Germantown Avenue. (The official name is Flying Fish at Roller’s, which can make for some awkward prose. The link to my preview article is at left.) Personnel were Jack Kinagree and Lexi Smith on guitar and vocals, and my old friend Ira Segall, whom I’ve known since I delivered the Philadelphia Bulletin to his parents’ home, on Third World finger percussion.

Ira’s a latecomer to the band, and, as Jack explains in the article, the reason the name hasn’t been expanded to Kinagree Smith and Segall is that it sounds too much like a law firm.

I don’t follow the world-folk scene, but a band this good could convince me to start. The love lyrics could be banal — of the you-complete-my-soul-and-your-kisses-give-me-life variety — but the two, four-song “suites” from the band’s forthcoming CD were genuinely touching. And boy, can Jack and Lexi sing.

My favorite number, as I think everybody knows at this point, was Jack’s “My Folk Music (Wants to Kick Your Ass),” Jack’s anti-ode to the clichéd notion that folk music is warm, fuzzy, politically committed, environmentally aware, spiritually comforting, and so … Joni. He turned it into a sing-along, which was perhaps unfortunate, because I didn’t know the lyrics well enough to join in, and the song works well enough on its own. But that’s a niggling complaint. It’s a great song.

Ira was the Harpo of the group: he didn’t join in the vocals (a good thing too, buddy), and he seemed rather aloof, sitting off to the side and keeping his body still, moving nothing but his fingers as he played. The exotic instruments — mostly chimes, Arab and Nigerian drums, Tibetan singing bowls, and those little Indian cymbals — provided an unobtrusive underpinning of thumps, clicks and pings. In the small space, they didn’t overwhelm the guitars or the vocalists, as a standard set of jazz drums would have. Lexi referred to the effect as “texturing.”

At the start of the second set, Ira also performed a short percussion solo, expanding his arsenal to include gongs, drums and a Pakistani frame drum known as the tar, which resembles an embroidery loop 30 inches in diameter. For a little while, I was back in my comfort zone — the familiar sound world of Crumb and Cage — which suited me just fine.

Attendance was small, unfortunately. Lexi says live turnout is always a problem when your fans have come to know you primarily through the Internet and they’re scattered all over the world. Then again, the little dining room wouldn’t have held too many more people.

Colleen Roult Barron

Friday, December 30, was my daughter's 25th birthday.

Got $123.14?

This just in from the Charles Ives Society Newsletter:

The Ives Society Critical Edition of Ives｡ｯs Symphony No. 4 was published today by Associated Music Publishers (subsidiary of G. Schirmer). This is a landmark publication, among the most important accomplishments of the Ives Society, and made possible by the support of the Maxwell Foundation.

Mvts. 1&2 were premiered in 1927, mvt. 3 in 1933. The whole work was heard for the first time in April 1965. Since then the symphony has been performed hundreds of times, and recorded by at least nine conductors (Stokowski, Farberman, Serebrier, Ozawa, Dohnanyi, Thomas, Karabtchevsky, Adams, Litton, all using problematic performance materials. Under the guidance of Ives Society executive editor James Sinclair, four editors contributed to the new edition. A new performing edition, based on the Critical Edition, is now available for performances. This monumental work will now seem rather easier to rehearse!

You may now pre-order the cloth-bound score (with its attendant CD-ROM) from various locations including Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/Symphony-No-Charles-Critical-Clothbound/dp/1458418480 where the publication shows a list price of $195.00 and a selling price of $123.14 (shipping starting January 8th).

The hell with that holiday contribution to the SPCA. This is much, much more important.

Musicale for Three

I had a nice afternoon, and it had nothing to do with New Year’s Eve. The young pianist William McNally, a student of Jacob Lateiner and Ursula Oppens, is in Philadelphia this week to audition for Astral Artists. He needed a place to practice, and Renee Goldman lent him her living room and her piano. She also invited me over to listen to him, because one of his audition pieces is Elliott Carter’s rapid-fire “Caténaires.” He played it for us from memory, while I leaned against the far end of the piano and followed the score — or, rather, I tried to follow it. Bill faltered a few times and said he was unhappy with the effort, although he was confident he could work the piece back up before the audition. I on the other hand, was quite happy. It’s a rare day you hear a Carter piece up close in a small room, with the notes thrumming through the instrument and into your hands.

I paid for the treat by going to the market with Renee and carrying the groceries in from her car. It was a small price. As we were leaving through the basement, Bill started up the “Caténaires” again, this time with the metronome on. Speed is 96 to the quarter note, and it doesn’t change throughout the piece, which is unusual for Carter.

Best of luck to you, Bill. And thanks again.

More on Carter's 103rd

The pianist Charles Rosen has posted his impressions of Elliott Carter's 103rd birthday concert on the New York Review of Book website. The post includes some nifty audio clips recorded at the concert, so you can hear what all the fuss was about. A clip from another new work, Three Explorations, appears at the bottom. The piece, on poems of T.S. Eliot, were premiered at Alice Tully Hall the week after the concert at the 92nd Street Y.

I was happy to see Mr. Rosen expressed reservations about Retracings III for solo trumpet, much as I did. I'm not a critic or a very well-trained musician, but the convergence of our opinions almost makes me think I heard the music as well as he did.

I must say, however, that I found his opening paragraph puzzling. The principal attraction of Mr. Carter's music, for me, has never really been the time issue, and when Mr. Rosen states that it captures perfectly our experience of time in the modern world, I have no idea what he means.

"We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed," Mr. Rosen says. "In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures."

It does? I honestly cannot remember ever experiencing time in this way. None of my friends has ever mentioned it, either. The theory of relativity does describe time as elastic, depending on speed and mass, but it's unlikely you will ever witness the effects of relativity firsthand unless you have access to a particle accelerator. If, today, our experience of time differs from that of medieval peasants, it's because we are ruled by it more rigorously and more minutely. Our employers break the workday into fifteen-minute intervals, and we are expected to account for every second. It's the pressure and the tedium that get me, not the complexity.

"These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system," Mr. Rosen continues. "We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities."

We might, but I doubt it.

I had a similar problem with the theorizing in James Wierzbicki's little study of Carter, which reminded me that while the composer's music is often extraordinarily exciting, his musings on the nature of time are much, much less so.

And oh — thanks to my good friend (an occasional commenter here on the blog) EH, who sent me the Nonesuch Carter anthology as a Christmas present. He must have found it on my wish list at Amazon. I was holding off on buying it, since I already have most of the music on individual CDs, but now that it's here, I'll give it up when you pry my cold,dead fingers.

Elliott Carter's vocal music

Soprano Tony Arnold has written an informative blog post on the challenges inherent in singing the vocal music of Elliott Carter. Brief as it is, it has implications beyond the ostensible topic and says a lot about Carter's aesthetic in general.

On a side note, I have difficulty reading musicological articles. They can be so technical as to be either confusing or soporific, and frequently they are more about other musicology than about the music itself. Tony's post, written from the standpoint of a teacher and working musician, avoids both pitfalls.

Sleigh Ride watch - IV

This from a friend this morning, via email:

Heard on KYW this morning that the most popular Christmas song this year is "Sleighride," the Leroy Anderson classic. They even credited Anderson by name.

The Kinks' "Father Christmas" wasn't even in the top 5.

Sleigh Ride watch - III

Thanks to John Baron (no relation) for recommending this version:



This doesn't really count, since I didn't come across it accidentally on radio or int the stores.