Photography by Tom Hayes

The blog responses to Justin Davidson’s provocative piece, “The New New York School” from March 20, 2011 in New York Magazine—an appraisal of the music of several young New York composers—are so far coming down almost unanimously against Davidson’s thesis that our contemporary inclusiveness gives young composers nothing to rebel against, leaving their energies scattered and ultimately diluted, no matter how much energy the pieces exude on their surfaces. He is called out as being an old school modernist, entrenched in a decrepit idea—that making something new requires rejecting the formerly new.

More mixed is the response to the assertion that much of the music from the New York composers in their thirties, which he dubs the “New New York School”, ultimately sounds the same. Depite challenges to Davidson’s ability to evaluate this sameness, I think it can be said that determining a salience of similarity is more of a statement of personal perspective than literal fact. All composers and pieces are obviously literally different, but generally they can also (eventually, at some reductive level) be seen as similar too. In Davidson’s case he’s interested in the similarities of the music of this particular scene. And one similarity he hears is a neither-here-nor-there absence of motivational direction. He says, “[the] composers seem muffled, bereft of zeal.”

He then connects this personal reaction to a conundrum in our current lives: we have access to and openness towards everything, which is sometimes like having everything but sometimes like having nothing. He says this group of composers “seems disoriented by its own open-mindedness“ and that the results of their “nonsectarianism” are “shockingly tame.”

Critics are supposed to connect dots to a bigger story and if Davidson feels that something is missing in the musical zeitgeist of this time he is supposed to point it out. Of course the composers are supposed to refute and ultimately ignore this. But the critic’s assessment is not based upon the composers’ opinions, or even their intentions, but rather his or her experience. In his follow up comments, Davidson admits he was expecting to write a ringing endorsement but he actually, as a listener, found the music somewhat lacking. It may not be your feeling, but it was/is his.

The one line that probably sparked the biggest reaction was the last: “What they badly need is a machine to rage against and a set of bracing creative constraints.” And the blogosphere heaves an eye-rolled sigh, exclaiming rhetorically, “Aren’t we past this kind of thinking?”

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The blowback from this, I think, interestingly highlights a significant cultural paradigm shift. The thirty-somethings of today (of which I am one) are the second generation of the everything’s-okay, no-style-can-hold-us ethos. For us this thinking is more normal than revolutionary, though we don’t take it for granted—I think we still own our omnivorous tastes with (probably unnecessary) pride and even a sort of left-over fervor that our parents’ generation has relaxed on. If the next generation ends up taking it for granted, it will be because the core ideal of nonsectarianism has almost complete ascendency now, even in the stodgy, unfashionable halls of academe.

My undergraduate composition teacher, David Vayo, told us that when he was in school the composition students would get together and do their own thing away from the presumably close-minded gazes of their teachers. I think he was disappointed when he found out we weren’t secretly meeting in such cabals, developing our own rebellious faction. But how could we? He was leading us in improvisational games where people crawled around on the floor and blustered lip-raspberries into the wrong end of a euphonium. There was nothing off the table left to be secret about.

His mild disappointment in our lack of conspiritoriality somehow lines up with Davidson’s thesis in my mind. I’m sure that David’s experience of the bond between young composers having to strongly and vividly assert their view point was a powerful experience. Whatever conflicts (real or imagined) existed to them must have helped sharpen their focus and redouble their conviction. Ironically the power of their vision led to the open-minded future they wanted and subsequently (unintentionally) denied their students the opportunity to similarly respond.

There is something different about this world where everything goes. We, the thirty-somethings, seem to largely be ardent believers of the new order and we readily shoot down dissent, but, as with anything relatively new, there are aspects and consequences of the changes in culture that we can’t yet fully anticipate or understand.

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In his follow up comments, Davidson says that today is, “one of those scary and exciting transitional periods when conventions have fallen away and are difficult to replace.” In other words, the last ardent rigor (which one was that now?) has dissolved into transition. And Judd Greenstein, one of the composers under discussion, couldn’t be happier to agree in his response. He sees no problem in this dissolution and in fact welcomes the end of this historical narrative which perhaps never really existed in the first place. Greenstein’s blog and others as well form a kind of chorus of agreement: “We don’t need to invoke a separate Other in order to define ourselves.”

This is, as I was saying, the essential reasoning of our generation and I, for one, can’t fault it. But I can also appreciate that resistance and conflict can be a powerful crucible not only in helping one define oneself, but also in inspiring urgency in that self-discovery. I think becoming the best composer you can be is, to some degree, a process of uncovering yourself and maybe it’s true,to an extent, that it’s hard to get as deep inside yourself as you want to go without some external pressures to reckon with.

But, just to take one example, in today’s composition teaching, everyone that I know teaches toward the student’s core individual aesthetic and not towards a single, universal aesthetic. As a teacher, the goals of [1] challenging students to grow while simultaneously [2] being receptive to whatever it is they are trying to do (whether you like it or not) aren’t contradictory, but sometimes there is some tricky balancing. The point is that teachers today work hard to reach around significant aesthetic differences with their students rather than lean into them.

That’s not going to change soon and I personally wouldn’t want it to. And I don’t think Davidson is advocating that either, but his central point—that composers of my generation haven’t met with substantial resistance in terms of defining their voice—still has a ring of truth to me.

I think the push-back assumes that Davidson is advocating some kind of reactionary return to days when teachers forced students to write a certain way and powers-that-be shut out promising young artists. But I don’t read his article that way. I see him starting from his experience in recent concerts and extrapolating to a larger question about how we arrive a vital sense of who we are such that we can powerfully express that sense of self in today’s new cultural environment. Granted this could have been done more circumspectly, but he wasn’t writing a book: he was wrapping up a 1000 word column filled mostly with review-type specifics. And beyond being a passive Chamber of Commerce-like spokesperson or assuming a sort of patronizing role as interpreter between a supposedly inarticulate artist and a supposedly unimaginative public, what is the critic to do other than speculate broadly about things that point to larger cultural issues?

I could be wrong, but I prefer to assert my own version of reality and read his text in a way that makes sense with my world vision. Let’s chalk it up to my generation’s mandate to be both self-absorbed and radically inclusive.

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In adding my voice to the online response to Justin Davidson’s, “The New New York School” I considered his suggestion that composers face new challenges in the recently evolved paradigm that he calls nonsectarianism—the oppression of too much freedom. My initial (conditioned?) response of disagreement was in-step with other writers, but further reflection led me to feel that the issue isn’t entirely obvious and there was at least sufficient reason to pose the question. After all, as I asserted in closing, posing challenging, provocative broad cultural questions would seem to be a critic’s most important job.

But I think critics get into trouble when they move from assessing into advising, and Davidson’s closing line about artists needing a machine to rage against reads to a composer like unwanted advice, whether or not it was intended that way. At the Musik der Jahrhunderte festival in 2009 in a public panel, my wife, composer Karola Obermueller, got into it with a critic regarding collaboration in contemporary opera. The critic had constructed a narrative that said that “real” collaborative opera would look radically different from what we see today and that no one was actually doing what he thought should be done (which he then tried to specify). But I would assert that laying out blueprints for the future is the wrong approach for a critic. He envisions some kind of magical “newness” and wants to be the forward-thinking guy who predicted it would happen before it did, leading the artists by the hand to the pot at the end of the rainbow.

But if anything that’s antagonistic to the creative process. Creators have to stumble onto things on their own. Otherwise they can’t totally own it. So we can critically access all we want, but if there is a problem in the musical culture it’s up to the musicians to fix it, to find a way through. They’re the ones who have to imagine, write and perform us into the future. And they’ll have to do it on their own time as it comes.

As a composer I feel I can’t legislate innovative pieces out of myself any more than I can promise myself I’ll write great masterworks. I have to write the piece in front of me and see what happens. I’m not saying that the composer is without any agency at all, but I do think composers (at an artistic level) are largely powerless to determine the cultural relevance and impact of their work. The one aspect of control I think a composer has is her ambition. But ambition isn’t at all synonymous with progressivism or experimentalism or grandiosity or really much of anything, I guess, other than work ethic, determination and bravery. I think the composer has to write her passion with wild unashamed intensity and let the chips fall where they may.

As an audience member I feel like I don’t ever expect the “next great thing” to happen out of a new piece, but I’m hoping it might happen anyway. I’ll not be surprised when I feel like a piece is only okay, or that it’s like other stuff I’ve heard before. I’ll not be surprised if it’s muffled or lacking zeal. But there is always the opportunity for remarkable things, lovely things, audacious things to burst through, often in fits and starts, sometimes even a whole piece front-to-back. And the possibility for the extraordinary remains tantalizing. I’ll bet Justin Davidson feels the same way.

Photography by Tom Hayes | www.tom-hayes.com

Gabriele Vanoni, why a festival of Italian contemporary music in Boston?

The Italian music scene has a lot to offer: It is situated between the music cultures of France and Germany in many respects, but it has also its own great and rich tradition. It often presents a fresh and unusual point of view on the contemporary music scene. Unfortunately, the support for music in Italy is not as good as in other countries, as the fact that half (if not more) of the Italian composers currently active, live and work mostly abroad. Therefore, festivals like Suggestioni among others are aiming at making this music known a little more. My hope in the long run is to install a continuous collaboration within the Italian scene and the world of American contemporary music, either at US universities (like this year and last year with Harvard and Boston Universities) and/or with American group such as the Talea Ensemble who were our guests last year.

When you compare the Italian and US scenes for contemporary classical music. What are the differences? Are there any communalities?

It is very hard to condense a question like this into a few sentences. What I see is that the Italian scene lives this funny paradox: it is not really big, it has a few world-renowned festivals (Biennale di Venezia, Milano Musica, etc.) and a few more local institutions, but it is pretty much stylistically confined, and it generally has difficulty to grow and survive, due to the lack of funding and support. The General Consulate of Italy in Boston is a happy exception in this respect. On the other hand, I feel in the US there is definitely more space for artistic development. But if we focus on the “content” level, I sometimes think that the price of a (welcomed) broader range of freedom is maybe a little less use of critical sense. Again, this is a broad generalization, and such a topic should be expanded and discussed in greater detail in order not to be misunderstood.

Has your own experience in the US changed the way you go about composing? If so, how?

Indeed so. I think back to my year in Milan Conservatory with great affection and as an intensive learning experience, but it was at Harvard during my studies with Julian Anderson that my compositional voice started to find its own space and contours, and I hope this work continues today. The lack of “stylistical pressure”, in this case, was indeed a piece of luck!

—
Gabriele Vanoni was born in Milan in 1980. After a few experiences as a very young composer at Yamaha schools, he started studying music at the Conservatory of Milan, where he graduated in Piano and Composition.

After his studies in Milan, he continued his education with a PhD in Music Composition at Harvard University, where he’s currently enrolled. This experience allowed him to get to know closely the US music scene, where he met and worked with some of the most interesting composers of today, such as Helmut Lachenmann, Julian Anderson, Brian Ferneyhough, Tristan Murail and Chaya Czernowin, his current teacher.

Thanks to this wide range of experiences and encounters, his music has recently spread internationally and has been now largely performed in Europe (Italy, Norway, UK, Russia) and Americas (United States, Canada, Mexico), in venues such as Carnegie Hall, Biennale di Venezia, Moscow Conservatory, Milan State University, NYU, BIT Teatergarasjen in Bergen and Accademia Chigiana di Siena, among many others. Likewise, various soloists and ensembles have now been involved in performing his music, like the Moscow Studio for New Music Ensemble, Mario Caroli, Gustav Kuhn, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne with Lorraine Vaillancourt, Lost Cloud Quartet, Ensemble Fa and Barrie Webb. His music has also been awarded prizes and mentions in local and international competitions (among others: Concorso del Conservatorio di Milano, 3rd Jurgenson Competition, Concorso Filarmonica, Previsioni Musica 2009, Bohemians Prize, IBLA Grand Prize New York).

By Zoë Lang

Recently, I have been thinking quite a bit about Gershwin’s 1935 opera Porgy and Bess, mostly due to the fact that we are talking about it in one of my classes. I’ve found this work to be fascinating from several perspectives, particularly in Gershwin’s incredible fluency between different musical styles. His ability to move seamlessly from one idiom to the next is unmatched and makes him stand out from many of his contemporaries who sought to integrate new sounds in their music but were ultimately unsuccessful. Porgy and Bess shifts from what sounds like a Hollywood soundtrack (‘Bess, you is my woman’) to complex ensembles (the funeral scene that opens Act I, scene ii) to standards that continue to be performed even today (one rendition of ‘Summertime’).

Yet despite the many riches that the score has to offer, I found myself strangely frustrated with the ending, specifically the actions of Bess. During the opera, Bess becomes involved with three different men: the dangerous and powerful Crown, who murders a man over a game of craps; the crippled beggar Porgy, who shows his dedication and steadfastness throughout the opera, including his willingness to kill Crown and neutralize the threat he poses on the community of Catfish Row; and Sportin’ Life, a drug-dealing smooth talker who spends most of the opera trying to win Bess over by offering her drugs and the promise of urban life in New York. We see Bess go from a drug-addled woman of loose virtue (when she is with Crown) to a member of the community (when she is with Porgy); in the version that I watched (the Trevor Nunn production) she walks around for much of Acts III and IV with an orphaned baby, physical proof that she is fully integrated and a responsible citizen of Catfish Row. In the end, though, Bess succumbs to her darker nature. With Porgy in jail for a contempt of court violation, Sportin’ Life makes his move by offering her drugs. While she initially tries to resist, we learn upon Porgy’s return that Sportin’ Life and Bess have left for New York (you can hear Sammy Davis Jr. entreating Bess to join him on the boat to New York starting at 5:35. Sammy Davis Jr. played Sportin’ Life in the 1959 film).

I will admit that I was disappointed with Bess: I had hoped that her character had moved beyond her sordid past and become a permanent fixture in the community. However, the more I thought about the fact that I found Bess’s actions to be disappointing, the more I realized that I was accustomed to operatic women seeming to have little to no control over their fates; so many of these stories make these deaths seem inevitable: Carmen, Tosca, Violetta, Gilda, Mimi, Desdemona, and others. Yet this train of thought also opened my eyes to the fact that women with no agency occupy my operatic world. When one of them makes a decision with which I disagree, I am disappointed in her and wish that she had behaved better. Whereas if a soprano is violently assaulted and killed on stage, I view this as completely normal.

Opera relies on an almost super-human suspension of disbelief, drastic temporal shifts, improbable plots, and violent acts. At the same time, there are few genres that have proven as malleable and durable. Perhaps it is in these incongruities that the fascination lies: knowing the end, we can no longer believe in Bess from the beginning, even though her failings make her one of the most human characters to appear on the operatic stage.

Casting a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud from 1956. Photo by m:con Agentur Mannheim

By Paul Michael Coleman

Paul Michael Coleman: I am delighted to have Marios Joannou Elia with me here at the Royal Festival Hall in London. Marios, an internationally acclaimed composer for his pioneering and visionary works, composes not only for concert halls and opera houses, but also for large-scale multimedia events. Marios, I read in the press that your guitar music has been recently performed in two festivals in Poland, in Nysa and Wroclaw, in fully booked concert halls ending with standing ovations. Last Monday you had a piano piece performed by Michael Finnissy during the “New Works Festival” in Southampton. You are now here in London working in the studio for a new composition that is going to be premiered beginning of January. Afterwards, end of January, follows a premiere of your work “Cicadas” in New York City, at the Steinway Hall. And of course, you have being continuously working on the huge spectacle “autosymphonic” for 250 musicians. For this 2-Million-Euro event, you are the general music manager as well. This is just an example of what you are currently doing – how do you manage all this?

Marios Joannou Elia: It is a matter of self-organization and endless working process. The projects I am especially interested in, like “autosymphonic”, have a high-qualitative musical character that is eminently motivating. Moreover, I am interested in bringing music, in an unconventional and contemporary way, towards a responsive audience. In the case of “autosymphonic”, 16.000 spectators are expected, which is a huge responsibility for my team and myself. This requires an active engagement, both in creating the music but also during its realisation.

Paul Michael Coleman: Your signature is that you use vehicles in your music in a highly extensive manner. Is it difficult to work with such ‘instruments’ and how did all begin?

Marios Joannou Elia: I employ vehicles in a very systematic and musically complex manner. The machinery alone does not provide me with a particularly artistic per-spective. It has to be extensively investigated before being applied in the music. Be-sides, this is how the works are composed – in juxtaposition with, for example, a symphony orchestra and a choir. In 2003 I was working on a composition specifically written for the space of the Volkswagen Transparent Factory in Dresden. I wanted to use the entire main hall of the factory in the music, thus providing a number of practical difficulties, such as the coordination of the musicians that were placed everywhere in the space and in dif-ferent heights. Then, I thought that the VW Phaeton car that is manufactured there was the perfect machine to achieve this. So it was primarily applied as an assisting component for the conductor, but also for a variety of musical applications. Furthermore I make use of bicycles, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, shipping and aviation elements. In 2008, in the opera “The Hunt”, I have employed six cars such as an Aston Martin, a Jaguar and a Ford Mustang as part of the plot as well as part of the musical instrumentarium.

Paul Michael Coleman: Tell us about your music that you are now developing here in London.

Marios Joannou Elia: These days I have been working in the studio with audio pro-ducer Nick Elia creating a trio for cars: a Mercedes-Benz SLS-AMG from 2010, an old-time Aero 6218R from 1934, and for the first car ever built, the patented tricycle by Carl Benz from 1886. This is the most complex musical piece I have to date com-posed, in which the interactivity between the automobiles and their performers is highly coalesced. The three automobiles will be performed by an ensemble of 14 percussionists. The car trio is an integral part of “autosymphonic”. It will be premiered on January 6th 2011, celebrating the New Year in the city of Mannheim in Germany, in Rosengarten Concert Hall.

Paul Michael Coleman: Tell us bit more about “autosymphonic” and the employment of the automobiles…

Marios Joannou Elia: It is a one-hour symphony, consisting of a large orchestra, choir, two vocal ensembles, percussion ensemble and electronics. In addition to this, I am employing a car orchestra of 80 automobiles, including old-timers, super sport cars, limousines, tracks, busses, tractors etc. Since May I began casting numerous types of automobiles all over Germany. To date I have cast circa 120 cars of all types and ages, including Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Maserati and Cadillac. The music will involve a scenery construction of laser, lights, videos, urban screening, LED projections, etc. The symphony is especially commissioned for the 125th anniversary celebration of the car in Mannheim, Germany and is going to be the highlight event of the so-called “Automobile Summer” in Baden-Württemberg.

Paul Michael Coleman: So Marios, when and where will “autosymphonic” be pre-miered?

Marios Joannou Elia: On the 10th of September 2011, in the central square of Mannheim. It will be an open-air production in which the latest technological devel-opments will be applied, but also new ones have to be specifically developed, in order to enable a three-dimensional acoustical irradiation. For example, the 360-degree spatialization system will produce a holographic effect of the music projection. Hence, the square will be transformed in an ‘arena’ of musico-visual events.

Paul Michael Coleman: Is it a central feature in your work to reflect the technological development within music in respect to the evolution of the car as a burgeoning multimedial functional apparatus?

Marios Joannou Elia: I do follow the developments of the automobile culture in the conceptual sense, however I reflect it in an idiosyncratic artistic expression. The issue of interaction between humans and machines is of central meaning in my work and it also finds multifarious application in “autosymphonic”. Current and future-oriented technological developments show the high degree of amalgamation between the two elements. On the one hand, the automobile behaves autonomously with human mannerisms. On the other hand, humans adopt machine-like features. In both situations a form of hybridism occurs. In this context, the aspect of hybridism is essential in my music.

Paul Michael Coleman: Thank you very much, Marios, for a highly enlightening dis-cussion.

By Zoë Lang

This post addresses a topic that I’ve hoped to write about for a while: resources for listening to classical music online. I’m planning to stick to resources that are free (no iTunes) and accessible to anyone (no Naxos/Classical Music Library) as well as not potentially infringing on copyright (YouTube). For this post, I will discuss three of my favorites and welcome you to submit others. I’d like to investigate other possibilities for listening online, so please feel free to comment and leave more suggestions.

It is truly humbling to think about the sheer quantity of music that is at our fingertips today. Think about what was available a mere hundred years ago, when one had to rely on either what was playing at their local concert hall (and/or discussed in newspapers), what was in piano arrangements, or what could be studied in scores. Today, we can simply pull up whatever we want from some digital resource and investigate it, making copies onto our hard drives for future hearings. This freedom is unprecedented and astounding.

And yet, how many of us truly take advantage of this potential? It can be equally easy to fall into ruts, simply listening to the same pieces (or composers) as always. Even though I want to expand my knowledge of pieces, it becomes difficult to know where to begin. The same freedom of choice is also constricting in this respect. Attending concerts of an adventuresome orchestra can help redress this problem as well, but many groups are canon perpetuators as well. Also, unless one subscribes to a season, it is easy to fall into the trap of only attending concerts with favorite works, rather than seeking the new.

What I like about the following three resources — apart from the fact that they cost nothing — is the fact that they all encourage the listener to go beyond his/her knowledge of repertoire and explore new works. They do so by making access easy and providing a wide variety of choice. Also, from my experience, all are reliable (they don’t crash often) and have good quality performances. Here are my top three:

1) Klassik auf Klick from SWR 2. I subscribe to this weekly podcast and am alerted to a new recording every Monday from the SWR 2 archives. These recordings are available for free download for that week and can be heard at any time from the SWR 2 website. While these performances can feature canonic composers and works, they also explore lesser known pieces and composers. Either way, it’s a very convenient way of learning new repertoire when it simply appears in my Google Reader once a week. I do my best to keep up with the recordings, even listening to pieces that I (think I) know. For instance, recently Mendelssohn’s Trio in d minor was featured, which has never been one of my favorite works. The first movement is featured in the textbook that I use for teaching my music history survey and it never clicked with me. But the second movement — now that one I liked! Had I not listened to the recording, I wouldn’t have known about it at all, barring accidental attendance at a concert at which it was featured. I will admit that I often find myself loading Beethoven’s Opus 18, no. 5 for the umpteeth time, but I am pleased that this service makes it so easy to also hear works I don’t know.

2) The Schoenberg Center website. Apart from providing digital archives of the Schoenberg Center holdings and creating fun YouTube videos, the Schoenberg Center has also managed to make recordings easily accessible for all of Schoenberg’s works on their website as a ‘Jukebox.’ This is great! I find that it’s one of the easiest ways to get to know new works and explore pieces you might not know otherwise. If you are not familiar with the Schoenberg Center website, and especially the Jukebox, then I highly recommend that you investigate (and if you haven’t already seen that YouTube video, seriously, you really should).

3) Carnegie Hall Commissions. I stumbled upon this website accidentally once when I wanted to learn more about David Lang’s Match Girl Passion. Much to my surprise, not only did I learn more about this piece, but I could also hear the entire work online, for free. The same goes for most of the pieces that have been commissioned for Carnegie Hall since 2006. That is a whole lot of new music by many of the most influential composers working today. For free. There are also biographies of the composers and a wealth of interesting works. I especially liked Evan Ziporyn’s Sulvasutra, but I would encourage you to explore and find your own favorite.