Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

CD of the Week: Peter Hill's Bach

2012-02-03T12:26:03-05:00

Fugue in D Major, from the Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II; Peter Hill (Delphian 34101).

Owens spricht

2012-02-03T00:08:40-05:00

In advance of a recital on Feb. 21, the splendid Eric Owens takes questions from fans on Carnegie Hall's YouTube channel. (There are three other videos in the set.) His goal on any given night, he says here, is to "not phone it in." So far, he is most definitely succeeding. My question: will there be a Kurtis Blow encore?

Miscellany: Mostly Carnegie

2012-02-01T19:02:19-05:00

The major musical event of the winter/spring season, by my lights, is the San Francisco Symphony's transcontinental American Mavericks Festival, which begins at home on March 8, stops in Ann Arbor and Chicago, and ends at Carnegie Hall on March 30. In addition to four richly stocked MTT/SFS programs — who could say no to an evening of Ruggles's Sun-Treader, Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, and Henry Brant's metamorphic orchestration of the Concord Sonata? — Carnegie has assembled a neat array of auxiliary events, including a So Percussion Cage tribute, an Alarm Will Sound show, a night with the indie bands WHY? and Danielson, a program of William Basinski and Tristan Perich, a JACK Quartet adventure (the great Ruth Crawford Seeger quartet!), and a recital by Lisa Moore. I covered the original Mavericks festival for the New York Times.... When the Berlin Philharmonic comes to Carnegie later this month, Deutsches Haus at NYU will mount an exhibition of David Friedemann's portraits of Philharmoniker musicians from the nineteen-twenties, with a chamber performance appended.... Seated Ovation smartly critiques Carnegie's 2012-13 season announcement — which, Beethoven excess aside, does have a strong lineup of premieres, not to mention a Joyce DiDonato recital entitled "Drama Queens".... Great Performers 2012-13 will bring, among other things, Paul Lewis playing the Schubert B-flat-major Sonata, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting Wozzeck, Herreweghe conducting the "Christmas" Oratorio, a Timothy Andres recital, and the New York premiere of John Adams's The Gospel According to the Other Mary.... Georg Friedrich Haas's in vain is played by Sound Icon in Boston this Friday.... Beginning on Friday, the Dessoff Choirs mount a festival around Bach's Mass in B Minor, with various contemporary works in the mix, including Ingram Marshall's September Canons and Robin Holloway's Gilded Goldbergs. Dessoff director Chris Shepard blogs about the festival here.... The second edition of the Ecstatic Music Festival opens on Saturday, with works by Jherek Bischoff and company.... The fine young Icelandic cellist Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir gives a free recital tonight at New York's Scandinavia house, celebrating her new recording of the Britten cello suites, on Centaur.

Gayby at SXSW

2012-02-01T16:21:05-05:00

On a personal note, I'm ecstatically happy to say that Gayby, the feature-length directorial debut by my husband, Jonathan Lisecki, has been selected to play at the SXSW Film Festival. I have a tiny cameo in the movie, as does Dan Johnson.

Denk's New Yorker debut

2012-01-31T23:51:49-05:00

When Jeremy Denk began blogging at Think Denk, it quickly became apparent that he is the liveliest writer-pianist since Glenn Gould. In this week's New Yorker, Denk makes his formal debut as an essayist, recounting his experiences with the piano sonatas of Charles Ives. Here is a sample:

My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There's an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I'd been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.

One afternoon, the violinist of the group and I were driving off campus and happened to cross the Connecticut River. Looking out of the window, he said, "You should play it like that." From the bridge the river seemed impossibly wide, and instead of a single current there seemed to be a million intersecting currents — urgent and lazy rivers within the river, magical pockets of no motion at all. The late-afternoon light colored the water pink and orange and gold. It was the most beautiful, patient, meandering multiplicity.

Instantly, I knew how to play the passage. Even better, Ives's music made me see rivers differently; centuries of classical music had prettified them, ignoring their reality in order to turn them into musical objects. Schubert uses tuneful flowing brooks to murmur comfort to suicidal lovers; Wagner has maidens and fateful rings at the bottom of a heroically surging Rhine. Ives is different. He gives you crosscurrents, dirt, haze — the disorder of a zillion particles crawling downstream. His rivers aren't constrained by human desires and stories; they sing the beauty of their own randomness and drift.

Denk says more about Ives in a conversation on the New Yorker podcast. On Feb. 13, he will appear at the Housing Works Bookstore Café, in a new series pairing musicians with writers; the writer in question will be the New Yorker literary critic James Wood, who is himself a brilliant musical commentator, as readers of Best Music Writing 2011 know. I may have to find another line of work.

The new ISSUE

2012-01-31T15:57:35-05:00

A glimpse of the new ISSUE Project Room space at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. Allan Kozinn has a review of the opening-week Gaudemaus festival in the Times; I'll have a brief item in The New Yorker next week.

Glass = 75

2012-01-31T07:39:20-05:00

On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Philip Glass occupies the front page of iTunes: a recording of his Ninth Symphony — which had its world première on New Year's Day, in Linz, and which the American Composers Orchestra will play at Carnegie tonight — is now available. The Carnegie concert looks to be sold out; if you lack a ticket, go instead to the World Financial Center, where Bill Morrison's hugely moving film The Miners' Hymns will be shown, with the Wordless Music Orchestra playing Jóhann Jóhannsson's score live. It's difficult to imagine that achievement without the precedent of Koyaanisqatsi. Today let's recall not only the peaks of Glass's career but also his extraordinary, quiet generosity to hundreds of fellow composers and musicians. Happy birthday!

Mahler at the Neue Pinakothek

2012-01-29T18:17:53-05:00

Alex Ross

Best Music Writing update

2012-01-28T10:53:16-05:00

The fundraising campaign for the new, independently published edition of Best Music Writing is in its final days, and inching closer to its goal. As I wrote last month, it's imperative that the series continue, not least because it allows writers from so many different genres to mingle together, creating a borderless conversation about the present state of music. Daphne Carr, who bravely undertook to carry on Best Music after Da Capo Press dropped the title, has announced the editorial board for the 2012 edition: Adam Curley, Jewly Hight, Miles Marshal Lewis, Bongani Madondo, Michaelangelo Matos, Anupa Mistry, Ann Powers, Mark Richardson, Victoria Segal, and yours truly. We'll assist Daphne in assembling an extended list of nominated pieces; the final selections will be made by next year's guest editor, yet to be chosen. Here is a form for submissions.

George Eliot on new music

2012-01-28T07:28:11-05:00

Those who are familiar with the history of music during the last forty or fifty years, should be aware that the reception of new music by the majority of musical critics, is not at all a criterion of its ultimate success. A man of high standing, both as a composer and executant, told a friend of mine, that when a symphony of Beethoven's was first played at the Philharmonic, there was a general titter among the musicians in the orchestra, of whom he was one, at the idea of sitting seriously to execute such music! And as a proof that professed musicians are sometimes equally unfortunate in their predictions about music which begins by winning the ear of the public, he candidly avowed that when Rossini's music was first fascinating the world of opera-goers, he had joined in pronouncing it a mere passing fashion, that tickled only by its novelty. Not indeed that the contempt of musicians and the lash of critics is a pledge of future triumph: St. Paul five times received forty stripes save one, but so did many a malefactor; and unsuccessful composers before they take consolation from the poohpoohing or 'damnation' of good music, must remember how much bad music has had the same fate, from the time when Jean Jacques' oratorio set the teeth of all hearers on edge.

— "Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar," 1855