I love the ritual of arriving in Iceland. For some confusing reasons, you have to go through security again upon landing; this slows down the whole process and, weirdly, relaxes some of the typical anxiety about rushing off the plane and through the duty free. I have the habit of walking just past the arrivals hall, into the transfers area, to buy an orange juice to make sure my Icelandic card still works (this time, no: my old bank, Kaupþing, has turned into something called Arion with a distressingly Navajo logo; apparently, I have to go “in” and speak with my service lady). While one awaits one’s bags, the halogen glow of the duty free beckons; also one’s cellphone starts buzzing with requests for Red Lucky Strikes and Whiskey. All of this achieved, hop into the car, turn left then right then left then right then around the corner into the dark, slow, anglerfish-observed curve of the road into Reykjavík. I’m in bed now, preparing for a nap, with the windows open, the fan on, and the promise of a long day.
I hope everybody bought Daníel’s album and Valgeir’s album! Daníel is playing a show with Sam Amidon on the 3rd of March at LPR in New York; I’m totally gutted that I can’t be there, but everybody should go, and clap riotously. One thing that drives me batshit crazy is how Icelandic names are encoded on iTunes; sometimes they will render Valgeir’s name Sigurdsson, which is an alright substitute for what it really is, which is Sigurðsson, which is to say, the Son of Sigurður, which is his dad’s name. Poor Valgeir is occasionally written up as Sigurrósson, which is an abomination, because Sigur Rós is (a) a girl’s name and (b) the name of an Icelandic band, and it doesn’t even make any sense b/c it would have to be Rósarson, and so the whole thing makes less sense than “Jumbo Shrimp.”
Classical Music encoding on iTunes is such a riot, too. Have any of y’all ever bought an opera off of iTunes? If you sort your library by album, you end up with one artist called “Anna Gonda, Brigitte Poschner, Czeslawa Sania, Eva Randová, Hans…” and it’s like…oh! Right. It’s the old Solti Lohengrin recording. Hip-hop is even worse: “Busta Rhymes, Mary iGrec Blige, Missy Elliott & Rah Digga.” Isn’t that just the Touch It Remix? Can’t somebody get on team common sense up in iTunes? I know about four people who would be great at this; Apple, call me.
You should call my friend Matthew to separate out the two; it’ll take him approximately two days to go through the entire catalogue and discern who’s talking about what (that is, until my opera comes out at which point it’s anybody’s game.) (j/k!)
And also: you need to distinguish between cum as it is used in Latin (it means with) and cum as in skeet as in nut. I can’t deal with looking through these expurgated versions of psalms titled C*m Dederit or Peccavimus c*m patribus nostris. It’s silly, and it’s just going to make people think about skeet when they should be thinking about Christ.
Speaking of skeet & Christ, last month, I read, with great relish, Gayle Haggard’s memoir, Why I Stayed. The basic thrust of the narrative is that her husband, Ted Haggard, who was the pastor of an megachurch in Colorado, was involved in a gay sex scandal, where it was alleged that he either did or did not have a three-year relationship with Mike Jones, an escort in Denver, who either did or did not buy crystal meth for Haggard, and either did or did not give him Erotic Rubs-Down with or without Happys Ending. Now. Gayle Haggard’s book essentially narrates her thought process during the first 72 hours after her husband told her that “some of the accusations were true” through the deliciously bureaucratic process of the church’s overseeing body basically banishing this family from the fellowship of the church. Haggard portrays herself — as she, to a certain extent is — as a victim of not only her husband’s infidelities but also of the corporate and very un-Christian process by which she and her husband were removed from the embrace of the church. (Keep in mind that these huge churches are the new 16th century Catholics: we are talking very complicated political overseeing bodies, lawyers, presidents, Ralph Reed de’ Medici etc.) This is something I found genuinely touching, as I found the same thing in The Eyes of Tammy Faye; in the eyes of sexual misconduct, the warm embrace of the church really does vanish into a series of writs, subpoenas, formal documents, obliquely legal agreements. This stuff is awful and fascinating and, for women of faith, it always does seem to come as a surprise that church highers-upp will reach for the litigious mode a lot quicker than they will hug you and talk about Grace. Gayle Haggard’s book — from start to finish — is genuinely touching as she navigates her relationship to her personal faith and to the faith-structures she herself helped organize.
In my slightly buttoned-up understanding, to be shunned from a parish is a very extreme form of punishment. The particular brand of charismatic Christianity that the Haggard family belongs to prides itself on being inclusive, and Gayle Haggard takes great pains to both address and avoid the inclusiveness of her church. They welcome everybody into the church — the young, the old, the straight, the narrow, the gay, the intersex. This is, in my experience, true; I spent a few weeks in Colorado and I went to a bunch of megachurches and was literally welcomed with open arms. These people are not messing around in the context of worship. What she never says, despite her frequent dippings into scripture, is that crazy right-wing Christians will banish the fuck out of you if there is any implication that your husband was some kind of Gay. See, these people Я Stupid, like, in a Ruminant sort of way, but they are also savagely defensive of what they view to be the sanctity of their community and family (vis gay marriage, etc). So when you, Gayle Haggard, stand by your man, who may or may not have gotten his salad tossed on the regs by a hustler, you are not allowed to be surprised by people shunning you. What your ass needs to do is reach back all the way to college, all the way back to your childhood, and think about every nasty, un-Christlike thing anybody near you said about a gay person, and think about all those moments you did not correct them. You need to think about how you told your kids about homosexuals and homosexual behavior. You need to put down that New Revised Standard Edition and do a real reckoning from A to Þ, and realize that you, your man, and the community of which you were once pillars, are freaked-out bigots, and they can smell the pong of lube and ‘tina on your coochie that was there transferred by your man. It’s on you, Miss Þing. Tammy Faye got fucked over big time, but remember that it was her ass hugging AIDS victims on national TV while you were still having your Ken & Barbie courtship with your gayfaced babydaddy.
Gayle writes,
Before Ted revealed his deepest problems to me, I wouldn’t have wanted to touch the topic of homosexuality in any forum. I didn’t want to even think about it. If someone had told me that her child or husband struggled with same-sex attraction, I would feel compassion, and I’d promise to pray for her. I wouldn’t reject her son, daughter, or husband, but I wouldn’t have wanted to invest myself in understanding the person’s battle. I could give sympathy, but empathy? I didn’t want to think about it that much.
This is good. This is a good step, and I like how she distinguishes between sympathy and empathy even though it’s stupid because you shouldn’t need to feel empathetic for people with lesbian daughters. Notice, though, how she avoids the idea that she would have to deal with the homosexuality of a peer, right? It’s always the husband or son, and then she slightly expands it to include Mary Cheney. But then she goes into this whole exegesis about desire and sin and all this folded-up connection between homosexuality and ingrained behavior and all this pseudo-science that completely ignores that probably 10 out of every 100 women she knows has gotten it ate by another woman. She links homosexual desires to OCD and bipolar disorder — holla! I have a trifecta! — and then quotes James, talmbout:
Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away. These desires give birth to sinful actions. And when sin is allowed to grow, it gives birth to death.
Translated:
But every man is tempted, when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed. Then when lust hath conceived, it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished, bringeth forth death.
K fine. She concludes, “That’s why, as strange as it might sound, we can rejoice when our sin is exposed.”
So like…tell your man to get off of twitter talking about lie detectors and tell him to tweet about his sin! I want to know what it is so that I can meeklie processe ytt.
Gayle writes, eloquently,
The Bible addresses how to confront a believer who’s sinning and how to apply discipline if that person won’t repent. But that wasn’t the case with Ted. It wasn’t just that he had broken down in tears before me, his staff, and the overseers, confessed his sin, and asked for help. He had also chosen to cooperate fully with the overseers, even though we didn’t agree with the way they were handling the situation. And he didn’t resist the idea of going to Phœnix for counseling. It seemed clear to me that Ted had repented.
To support this, she quotes Galatians 6:1-2:
If another believer is overcome by some sin, who who are godly should gently and humbly help that person back onto the right path. And be careful not to fall into the same temptation yourself. Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ.”
Now let’s check out the KJV, because I don’t even understand what Bible she’s on about:
Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted. Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.
Oh, honey. The spirit of meekness. Why didn’t you call out the fact that the spirit of meekness is not found in the fact that you observed that “the atmosphere at New Life had changed from one of life and freedom to one of suspicion, fear, and control”? Why did you allow yourself to be subjected to such Roman laws? Was it because you were ashamed? Both of y’all immediately obfuscated what sin we were even talking about, by throwing up these smoke screens of the generic words “Sin” (which, let’s not forget, is translated in the KJV as “fault” in this instance, which is a little different) and also of these lie detectors? She says that she knew that their instructions were going against the bible; why not speak out then?
The reason I bring this up today is because Ted Haggard (@tedhaggard7, on twitter) has been bringing up the fact that he passed four lie detector tests about “what went on” and that Mike Jones, the escort, “failed one.” Now. If you’re as obsessed with this as I am, you can read Jones’s own account of this test, which is a slightly over-dramatized tale of sleep deprivation, depression, and stress. But what @tedhaggard7 will never do — can never do — is tweet, in 140 characters, What He Paid To Have Happen To His Body. But that’s what we need to hear! If he’s gonna publicly be on there talking about lie detector tests, I want to hear his version about what exactly happened. I want him and Jones in a room, together, arguing about what went down. Gayle has made this into public property, and I’m sick of this pussyfooting around the issue. All this talk about lie detectors, as we all know from watching as much SVU as there are days in the year, is aside the point. Ted Haggard is somebody who made it his business to hide a part of his life deeply; surely he can keep it together enough to pass a lie detector!? You so know President Clinton could pass a lie detector test about anything. A lie detector test — and all the noise around the results — is just as litigiously informed as all the contracts that banished the Haggards from their parish, community, and friends. Ted & Gaÿle Haggard know as well as anybody that after the last trump, they are going to be held to account for all the people they helped through hard times, for all the stuff they taught their kids about forgiveness and about damning, and for all all the words both printed and tweeted that are true, or false, or misleading.
I‘ma end this on a positive note. A boy from my high-school whom I always found to be, like, one DB too passively Christian has involved himself in what seems like the exact right thing, which is a farm in San Francisco that’s supported, loosely, by the Anglican Diocese. I love projects like these, because I think the Anglican church has exactly the right attitude about community gardening (at least in this instance) which is free from a lot of the meshugena veganism and backwards ideas about community (that always, always, play out on message boards or in passive aggressive notes about somebody’s dry lemon bars and somebody else’s undercooked lentils) that normally plague such a community garden. I am going to donate to their truck fund and urge everybody to do the same. This is the one weird place where I kind of support faith-based charities — except those ones that h8 abortion — because I think that’s one thing the church can be really wonderful at. Don’t h8, donate to Haiti. Etc. Dot com. Bar and Grill.
Guess what! While everybody was sleeping, Bedroom Community has put out two super-exciting new releases.
First, Valgeir wrote the soundtrack to the film Draumalandið, which itself is an adaptation of a wonderful book. Check out the book/film website here. The soundtrack is a crazy amalgam of electronic sounds, acoustic sounds, long melodies, and short repetitive patterns. I play a lot on it, conducted it, and co-wrote one of the trax. Nadia played on it too; we threw her on a plane to Iceland for three days to lay down what turned out to be some iconic viola solos. Get into it here.
Then, a new addition to the Bedroom Community Roster: Daníel Bjarnason and his first album Processions. It is a series of works in assorted sizes, from the intimate to a giant piano concerto. I adore Sæunn Þorsteinsdóttir, the cellist, who is all over this album. This album is exciting for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it has chamber and orchestral music under the same roof. This doesn’t always happen. Also, electronic content is elegantly folded into the texture of the music just as, say, an oboe would be; it’s not electro-acoustic music, it’s just music.
I went last night to the Philadelphia premiere of Tan Dun’s opera Tea: A Mirror of Soul. As with the best pieces, its triumphs and problems are encapsulated by the title. What I believe he means is Tea: A Mirror of the Soul, right? The libretto, which the composer co-wrote, is in a very stylized version of English. What you end up with is lines like “though bowl is empty, scent glows… though shadow is gone, dream grows.”
I am going to be really honest here and just say that I don’t really know where to file this re: like, Race & Language. This shit was written IN ENGLISH; the music is gorgeous, poetic, and fluid; surely this Mr. Miyagi-ass grammar is a hindrance to the flow? Or should I say: Pidgin: A Hindrance to Flow? The “bowl is empty” line occurs six or seven times over the course of the opera; each time, the vocal line would actually be helped by adding “the” to it. I will confess here to Not Getting It. All of this reaches a particularly distressing point with the climactic sex scene:
Okay. I think I just have to leave that alone. The commas, the dragon…I think it is speaking from a Place to which I Have No Access. Does anybody else know what a dragon well is? Because I didn’t. Apparently it’s Longjing tea? So then that line should read as, “pressing the Longjing tea, Longjing tea overflows?” If that’s what it means, what does that mean? The lines are translated inside themselves? Do I need to file this under “is you is or is you ain’t my lotus blossom?” I will leave you with my overall impression which is that the music is beyond gorgeous, an overflowing stew of textures, lines, and geologically percussive textures, all in the service of a libretto that literally sounds like a series of fortune cookies strung together in order to teach us the age-old lesson that Str8 Men Will Kill Each Other 4 Pussy.
(I will add here that it was fabulous to see that the three onstage percussionists were Haruka, Chihiro, and Yuri, all three my gurlz from Juilliard, whom Tan Dun employed with a series of Dada-esque tasks: ripping paper, spanking water, molesting giant scrolls).
What I am interested in, here, though, is the idea that maybe I’m crazy and maybe what occurred, vis-à-vis That Libretto, is totally great and fine and I’m just having a strange reaction. But the other thing is this: thousands of people have seen this opera, in a variety of stages. Did anybody every perhaps lightly interrogate the libretto? This is an issue particularly close to my heart at this time; my opera which is happening at the ENO in two years and at the Met in four had a workshop in October. We (that being me, the Met, the ENO, the director, the librettist) invited a small group of friends and trusted advisers to come and hear it, and before we started, I told everybody that one of the conditions of their presence was that they be completely frank about anything that struck them as weird: length of sequences, specific words, vocal quirks, plot issues, believability — literally all of the possible things. At the end of it, I got a series of emails from said friends & advisers which addressed a lot of those little details, and then some bigger things: “That whole section is way too long.” “That lady’s character is under-developed.” This is good to hear! I need to hear this stuff! And anybody, anywhere, who is ever invited to a piece of work in a developmental stage, is under a Literal Moral Obligation to make her comments known. That’s the whole point of the Process, of Life, of Making Art in the first place. Interrogate your friends and they will do the same for you; it’s about a project of complete honesty and gut reactions; between friends, wound heals quickly; with audience, much stifled laughter.
So, this morning, I packed up my apartment in London and am headed back to New York — here is a list of the detritus accumulated during the month’s stay: 1 map of London, affix’t to the wall with blu-tak, 15 wine corks fallen behind the computer, £16 in loose change, 1 bottle of ginger wine (unopened), 1 bottle of Dubonnet (one last sip left, but at 9 in the morning I wasn’t about to fuck with it), a USB cable with the word “TONY?” scrawled on it, a promotional pamphlet for the Diva Cup, a tube of somebody’s tinted lip chap, an envelope that used to contain a phone number on it until Jónsi wrote all over it in marker, a toenail clipping (!), a note I wrote to myself on a picture of the Queen that says, “Warshing Upp Liquid,” and a piece of manuscript paper with four notes written on it (G, C, B and E, descending from the top of the staff to the bottom line.)
I am proud of this.
I am also proud that my opera is finally announced and organized; you can read about it in plain-speak here and in slightly plainer speak here. I got a slew of really nice emails and notes from people — thank you! I also made the mistake of reading some really horrible comments about “me,” which I stopped reading about six in, but which Danny addressed here. I’m excited about new opera, anybody’s new opera! And so should we all be. Putting on an opera is an Herculean Feat and I stand in awe of any composer who has forded that particular river, from Corigliano to Floyd to Adams to Glass to Adamo to Monica to Erica to Rita to Tina.
Has everybody been reading John Adams’s blog? There’s something very wonderful about the design of it, I think, even though it reminds me a lot of Candyman?
And we’ve all been dealing with how the Philadelphia Orchestra, bless their hearts, launched this weird campaign online, called Unexpect Yourself? Read Amanda Ameer about it here. The whole thing breaks my heart, not just because it’s appalling to look at, but also because it just pongs so acutely of corporate groupthink. I much prefer a doomed campaign to have at least a human touch, rather than this, which is just so awful. I’m going to Philadelphia in a few days to see Tan Dun’s opera Tea, and I will investigate the physical reality of this campaign. The thing is this, and this relates to my opera haters, too. We’re all in this together. We all want the world to be a beautiful place, where music radiates out and touches the ears of the rich, the poor, the monarch and the slave, right? So when we criticize each other, let it be in the interests of this project, rather than just to spit bile. If I say something nasty about an arts organization, I’m not trying to booty shake on its grave. I’m also trying to do it publicly, and with my name on it, so that there is some kind of personal responsibility, which is precisely what the Philadelphia campaign lacks.
There is probably room here for a brief aside about the (necessary) corporate structures that support arts organizations versus the public faces of them; I think that in general, organizations that have somebody from the management with a name, publicly visible, are very smart, because you can feel a Curatorial Hand guiding you through your season there. The Wigmore Hall is like that; John Gilhooly sort of escorts one through the concerts. This applies to other brands, too; I think that Virgin are wise to have Richard Branson be so public — this way, criticism can be directional. Instead of spending all that money on stock photos of white people, surely what Philly needs is any human being who can go to the world and be an advocate for what’s going on there. Perhaps that’s Allison Vulgamore? Questions, questions. I guess what I’m loosely getting at here is that I want everybody — artists, people who hate their art, presenters, producers — to be good advocates, griots, and ambassadors for their work & ideas.
I know it’s really considered rude to bite the hand that feeds, but a good example of a doomed campaign that at least has a human touch is the New York Philharmonic’s new logo, right? It’s shocking, and the thing is we all know it. Urrybody. It’s nobody who thinks this thing is alright. I showed it to my web designer and he looked like somebody hat opened the Arc of the Covenant. I mean, look at the M! Look at the W! This is really some entry-level Adobe™ Illustrator put-text-on-a-line shit right there. But what I like about it is that you can tell that somebody hunched over a desk really loving on that W. Somebody really cared for that H, and its busted twin. Somebody manipulated that raggedy-ass K by hand and somebody else walked by the desk and said, “good work, team!” It’s touching, in its way. But I would actually like to ask if there exists a sentient being somewhere who thinks that logo is even remotely okay, and if so, please announce yourself (by Name) to the concierge’s desk and tell me WHY. It’s by the same lady who did the Met’s logo, which is gorgeous! So it could be one of those things like how every composer has one fucked up piece that nobody likes, or that just takes a little more time to get used to. I would take a bullet for Steve Reich but for years I couldn’t bear to listen to that Anatevka-tastic slow movement of “You Are.” And eventually I came ’round when a singer told me, at (drunken) length, how much she loved it. I was convinced! Maybe I can be convinced of this logo! It just is gonna take a face, a smile, and a good argument.
What is actually amazing is the New York Phil’s iTunes season pass. Everybody should get this. It auto-downloads randomly, so it’ll be like four in the morning and all of a sudden, it’s the Sinfonia Concertante, with Dohnányi, and Cynthia Phelpz sounding hot hot hot! I don’t know if it’s the same team that did the logo as does the accompanying PDF booklet, but the booklet is very well-designed, informative, and reads well as a PDF (as in, it’s designed well for the screen and you don’t have to esquint or reduce/enlarge, even on a laptop).
To summarize: Arts organizations, stop the corporate groupthink. We’re on2 u. Everybody buy the Philharmonic’s Seezin Pass. Invest in Blu-Tak; it truly is a versatile adhesive. Be an advocate for your ideas, even if they are criticisms.
I’m going to add this here at the bottom; it’s a comment from my very sage boyfriend, Ben, who writes:
I said this on Amanda’s blog and I’ll say it here, because people from arts organizations may read this and they should know, tactically, what is wrong with the Philadelphia Orchestra’s campaign.
The organization, and their firm, opted for a gimmick but clearly did not consider their audience. I lived in Philadelphia for (5) years, god help me, and the project reeks of something that is not audience appropriate.
They had a not-as-doomed-idea: People try all kinds of shit, so they should try the orchestra. So why not find some actual, living-breathing people who attended the orchestra and tell their story, instead of using weird stock photos of people who don’t look like anyone in their target audience? I’m sure there is someone who … say … went to see Mahler instead of an Eagles game on a whim (maybe it was a gift?) and is glad they did. Why not feature them?
The lesson here is simple: If you are an arts organization, and you hire a marketing firm, and they don’t ask you – directly – in the first 30 minutes who your audience is, what that audience wants and why would someone want to see your shit, don’t hire them.
The sub-lesson here is simple as well: Don’t use stock photos! Hire someone.
Want more direct advice. Here’s a great firm (that I used to work for, okay) that does all the marketing for the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, 1812 Productions and others:
http://www.dfsi.org
Also, any designer worth their salt in Philly knows that JJ Tizou is like, the best arts photographer in the area and would have taken something compelling, not some couple in a convertible:
A few days ago, I posted about how difficult it was for me to get a phone up and running in England. I got some sympathetic comments and then one sort of mean thing about being middle-class. That sort of angered me, because I realized: what do you do if you’re a non-English-speaking, non-Middle Class immigrant to London? If I can’t, with my fancy Ivy League education (and whatever Juilliard is — Shochu League?) get a pay-as-u-go phone working, what is it like if you’re Chinese? The end result of the phone saga is pretty great, though. The basic outline is this: I bought, legitimately and from the Apple Store Online, an iPhone linked to an Orange Pay-As-You-Go SIM. It worked. I gave everybody the number. And then suddenly, it no longer worked. There was no message or warning; it simply ceased working. I called them from my American phone. I argued with them. I faxed them my financial details. The Fraud Team had taken over my case. The Fraud Team is not “Customer-Facing.” The Fraud Team leaves work at 4:30 and doesn’t work weekends. I spent a weekend — and $425.44, I later found out — using my American phone to conduct my affairs. I went into an Orange Store. They were embarrassed and horrified and polite and apologetic and all, themselves, immigrants who had gone through similar hoops upon arrival from Pakistan and Bulgaria. An hour later, they made contact with the Fraud Team. The Fraud Team was not helpful; the Fraud Team communicates with the store employees using a little text-only computer terminal very similar to a Minitel. The Fraud Team took off at 4:30, presumably to light kittens aflame or worship Baphomet. The next day I went to another Orange store, and an Australian man told me: your best bet is either to only top up using cash or to have an English person pay for your phone bills; that way the credit card is linked to a UK address. You know how he knew this? Because that’s how he pays his own bill. Motherfuckers. The only way to make my legitimate phone work is to commit fraud? So now I have exactly the worst, most bizarre and illegal kind of phone, whose bill is paid by my friend J—. Doesn’t that sound like some Al-Qaeda pre-paid terror organization shit to you? I’m trying to figure out a way to make Orange, be they Customer-Facing or Not, to realize the error of their ways. If you make the bureaucratic process so opaque that Middle-Class people can’t even navigate it, chances are, your system is certainly not going to work for, let’s say, a Nigerian student who turns up and has his phone cut off and has no recourse to his other phone to call your customer servants.
All of this is not to say that I’m having a bad time! On my walk back from the first of two Orange Stores, I had to pass through the small network of streets in the City, near where the Fire of London started. This area is amazing because every streetcorner offers a quick glimpse of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which looks like a giant meringue on a plinth. When the light hits just right, which, in winter is several crepuscular hours, a walk through that area is unrelentingly beautiful. With a cup of coffee & with the promise of dinner with friends, I felt like the luckiest man alive. Every time I eat at St John — a pie with Alex, an ox tongue with Sigga Sunna, a snail with Jamie — I am filled with an overpowering life-umami.
The new piece I wrote for Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto and the Britten Sinfonia has been happening on tour; I went to two of the first leg of performances (in Eindhoven and Amsterdam) and am heading to Cambridge tonight to hear another. It’s a complete decadence to hear a work so many times in one’s life, to say nothing of in a single month. I’m also excited because the performance in Amsterdam contained one of the most professional trainwrecks I’ve ever witnessed. Something happened — somebody came in early, somebody mis-cued, somebody wasn’t paying attention in the back — and it came dangerously close to falling apart. I like it though: the adrenaline focuses everything that happens immediately afterwards and you end up with a shimmering, taut remainder of the piece. The same thing happened when I went to see Signal play Steve Reich’s Double Seggistett at LPR a few months ago: for one split second — maybe half a bar? — there was a brief clenching of the ostinato, and the whole thing almost broke. Brad Lubman pinched something and relaxed something else, and then everybody was right there for the rest of the piece.
I’m interested in that tautness. In chamber music, you get this almost all the time. Watch a string quartet and you see every player constantly focused, negotiating, bartering, manic. In larger ensembles, this is not always the case. In the better ones, though, you start to see it creeping in on stage: I saw James Levine conduct the BSO in a Midsummer Overture at a tempo of quarter note equals, like, seventeen thousand, and there was a lot of focus on that stage. Last night, I went to see the New York Philharmonic on their tour in London, and their first encore, Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, was like that: completely focused from the first stands of the violins to the back of the horns.
Sadly, I cannot say the same for some of the other pieces and players. That’s always what I do when I see big orchestras: I look at the back of the second violins, at the back of the violas, to see how engaged people are. It’s fascinating. Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra is a giant cauldron of textures, a sort of Szechuan hot-pot affair with little bits of things bubbling to the top covered in other things slicked with a third thing. The performance was great — don’t get me wrong — but Kind and Venerable Sir in the back of the violas: I’m watching u. And y’all phoned it in. That tremolo may not be the most important thing in the texture at that time, but you have to play it like it is — otherwise, what are we all doing with our lives?
All that said, it was great to see the Philharmonic outside of Fisher Hall, where I never go. The playing was great. The programming for the tour was, let’s say, a solid B. First night: That new Lindberg thing, followed by Prokofiev 2nd Piano Concerto which was fucking awesome. Bronfman ate that thing for dinner. Then Sibelius 2, which is always a plecz. Second night: A Haydn Symphony (bad idea), Adams’s The Wound-Dresser (more on this in a sec), Schubert Unfinished (fabulous) and Berg Three Pieces (fabulous). Then Egmont as an encore, then a Bernstein nibblet with the funniest English horn queef I have ever heard in my life. Now you look at these two days of tour programming and you think: okay, fine. It’s all fine. But in the back of my head something is screaming: more new music, more American music, more music by New Yorkers. Get that Haydn off of the stage and do a new American piece for chamber orchestra (Note: nothing’s wrong with Haydn. It’s just dopey to play on a tour and, like, yes, the trio from the minuet is hot shit and shows off the horns’ high notes, but it’s still just dopey). Do the Reich Duet for Two Violins! Commission something! Don’t do Egmont; do Short Ride in a Fast Machine. You already have one of the synthesizers for the Wound-Dresser! And all the percussion from the Berg! I know that I’m always going to back-seat program for the Phil, but I’ve said it before and I will continue saying it until I die: I want my hometown orchestra to be my home team. I want to see the season and scream, “I love my life and I love living in New York.” I don’t want to open up the LA season brochure and start looking into rental properties in Rancho Cucamonga just so I can hear Tehillim.
Anyway, whatever. They sounded great. I’m just saying. And they’re doing something of mine in a few months (for chamber-orchestra, off-venue, watch this space for more information) and I thought Alan Gilbert did a gorgeous job. There was one sort of sad moment in the Adams where Thomas Hampson (who sort of looks like Mitt Romný, has anybody else noticed this?) sings: “Poor boy, I never knew u, yet I þink I could not refuse this moment to d-i-i-ie 4 u” at which point the strings do this unspeakably gorgeous long, descending, Elgar melody, which burrows into the ground into the horns, and then gets picked up by a trumpet solo, Glory-style. It’s a beautiful, heart-breaking moment and Gilbert was doing full 360° DaWinci arcs with his arms and the violins were playing it sort of like, Mezzo-Forte Poco Espressivo Ma Non Troppo. Of course I was looking at the back of the firsts and screaming with my eyes: bitches! It’s about War! It’s about the SIDA! it’s pertinent, it’s gorgeous, it’s a huge American melody. Make me some fucking gravy out of this line, like how you’re gonna out of the Schubert in twenty minutes’ time!
(As I write this, I am now on my way back from Cambridge, on a train that smells like tuna in the worst possible way).
This last week has gone by incredibly quickly; I’m not entirely sure how I lost track of so many days. Last Saturday, so exactly a week ago, I conducted a workshop for composers at Cambridge. This was, without a doubt, one of the most interesting experiences in my life. But I’ll start from the very beginning: rail replacement service caused me to be One and One Half Hours Late! I was so mortified. There is nothing worse, for me, than being late, and this was the worst kind: stuck on a train. Everybody involved seemed quite forgiving, though, so when I turned up 90 minutes after the start time, we got to work quickly. The format was familiar: an ensemble of student and professional players was assembled in a slightly overlit room, and six student composers had written pieces for the ensemble. It was, if I remember correctly, wind quintet, string quartet and piano, with a restriction on how many winds you could use. So you ended up with six pieces for the dreaded Mixed Ensemble.
What became immediately apparent to me is that these six composers were incredibly skilled, technically. Every gesture was really intelligently handled — quick atonal lines that whipped around corners like fancy waterslides (as opposed to not-fancy waterslides; those of you who have been on them, or have heard lesser works of Poulenc will know what I mean when I say that the corners do not Handle Well). They were especially good at the “single-note” orchestration trick where you have, say, an F, and the piano plays it loud, and a clarinet is playing it really really soft, and then a muted horn sneaks in, and then a cello plays the same note, but as a harmonic, a little bit later. It’s a good trick and these kids were ON it.
What also became clear to me, based on the reactions from my comments, was that these kids had never been explicitly praised or criticized before. It seems as if the only thing that they were comfortable hearing was a sort of middle-of-the-road platitude. The thing with music is that, yes, it’s unteachable. But there are some things that are Just Great about certain pieces, and other things that are Just Mistakes. The composer’s word, I think, is quite fallible — and I speak from experience. Oftentimes, I wish I had somebody who would just rush into my studio and say, here’s the deal with this piece: this part is awesome, and these two bars have to go. Or “those two bars are irrelevant.” I’ve written at length about this problem before; in the other Arts, both applied and otherwise, there are outside forces to temper the artist. Visual artists are restricted by the size of their canvas or the space their art will inhabit. Writers have editors! Can you imagine, composers, if you had an editor? Somebody you love & hate & trust & mistrust who has access to your music at any juncture? If you look at any novel, you see, in some back annex, the writer lavishing praise on their editors. It’s people who are Paid to Know Better than the Composer.
Anyway, we don’t have those. We have our friends, we have the musicians who play our music, and we have each other. And, of course, we have audiences, but you don’t want to be in the editing phase when you’re presenting a work to the public. So I’ve started being quite blunt with others and with myself especially about things that are working and things that are not working. And I do fantasize about what would happen if composers had editors. I know that in retrospect, somebody would have told me that a bunch of the shit I wrote between 2004-2006 was way too long. But just to be momentarily alternative-universe, do you think somebody would have told John Adams that the third act of Nixon was too long (it isn’t – it’s a dreamy reverie that is a welcome and rapturous thing) or that the end of act I of Klinghoffer is too long (it is, sort of – it’s kind of seventeen minutes of slightly similarly harmonically constructed material with obbligato solo instruments before we get the chugga-chugga-chugga Night Chorus)?
But this opens up the biggest question is: how can a composer learn to defend her work? If my editor told me, “Hey Nico, you’ve gotta cut six minutes from this piece,” and I disagreed, I’d have to access a very interesting linguistic register. It’s this thing of talking about your own art as an object distinct from your own body &/or mind. This is the thing I was trying to get the Cambridge kids to dip into: dear boy, with the beautiful atonal horn line: you’re good at that. You’re not good at pacing. Let’s work on it! Let’s talk about what you want to achieve, emotionally and intellectually, with all this beautiful counterpoint. If you have a clear agenda, it’s going to solve all your problems. Dear madam, with the gestural content to rival Boulez: let’s clean up your notation so we can talk about why you have titled your piece with Scripture. Does the scripture trickle down into the work, or does it frame the work? Why are these seven minutes of music preferable to, for instance, seven minutes of silent meditation on the same scripture?
In that spirit, we had our first rehearsal for my new piece Impossible Things — a double concerto for violinist Pekka Kuusisto and tenor Mark Padmore. Within six seconds of starting work, Mark, Pekka, and I, along with Miss Jacqueline, all agreed to change basically all of the tempo indications. I cut two bars. I confessed stupidity about a double-stop in the cellos. We rehearsed the ending, which is kind of fast. It sounded great. We took it on the road to Holland. At the pre-concert awkward pacing-around moment one of the violist confessed that one bar in the ending was “a little bit tricky.” He showed it to me: it was a fucking mess! A completely unidiomatic disaster of string crossings. What had happened is that it had been originally a violin line in a different key and when I moved things around, I forgot to check to see if the string crossings worked, which is normally a process of calling Nadia in the middle of the night while she’s at the kluh and being like, “hey, okay, so get into second position, and…” I thanked him, but then I realized, honey, tell a bitch during rehearsal! I would have fixed it right then and there!
Anyway, all of that is a very long way of saying, it’s a really good skill to have — almost as important as being able to excite a single pitch through orchestration — to be able to defend your work verbally, as well as being able to accept criticism on the teleological level, as in: why should this music exist as opposed to the same amount of silent reflection on the same themes?
From tha Þkrappbook:
an email from me to Pekka Kuusisto:
I have a few ideas about the piece — I figured out two possible cuts that I think will help with pacing. I’m wondering if you think you’ll have time to incorporate them maybe tomorrow in Tilburg?
I want to cut bars 151, 152, and 153.
I want to turn bar 331 into a 3/4 bar. So everybody just does whatever they’re doing for 3 beats and lose the last two “quavers” and crash right into 332. I think this is going to help enormously with this awkward transition.
Finally, I want to cut 517, 518, and 519, so basically, that bar at 516 happens and diminuendos right into the downbeat of 520 and your lyrical sóló
and I wrote you all these new double stops in the fast movement
Grow some balls, you sound like a child. If the guy at orange wasn’t Bengali would it still be 9 out of 10 on the fraud scale? You sound pathetic. A call to arms for Londoners? From you? Yeah, the revolution starts here and boy is it middle-class. If Londoners were like you the city would be dead in ten years.
[Nico responds: Well, I think the nature of this revolution would be specifically designed for people like me and our petty, bourgeois concerns like phones and getting coffee & sandwiches quickly. I can't pretend to speak for the Subaltern in London, or anywhere for that matter — being born middle-class is so eternal, isn't it — but it sounds like you 'n' Gayatri are ready to really roll up the sleeves and get to work with the capital-R Rev! Onwards! I'll be on the sidelines with artisanal sandwiches for when you get tired. ]
an amazing Wideo of Gayatri Spivak talking about…essentially, herself, but, you know, in trajectory:
“This particular robbing of agency, as it were, had unleashed a much greater charge, and generally in the name of gender, gender as alibi….there is not enough time, we’ll try to make an end soon – in this context, I will argue……” — she is so great — she drops these little farts and then rushes away from them, never to return! I love this woman.
I have had a very frustrating pageant of inefficiency in London today. I got an English mobile number last night — which, in itself, was a very complicated ordeal despite the fact that I only wanted a Pay-As-Þú-Go phone. (the complexity is beyond description; let me just say that it was only pharmaceuticals that kept me from eating a man’s liver on Oxford St) It worked, and I set up a whole series of interviews and social appointments on it. And then, I woke up this morning to a doomed “no service” message. Restarts, network resets, etc. I eventually called my Cervix Provider, Orange, to discover (after 30 minutes on hold, with actually kind of satisfying hold music), that my account had been suspended for Fraud. The only way, darling Yogesh from Tech Support informed me, to reättain service was to fax (?) my most recent credit card statement (?) to a certain number. Now. Let’s think about Things that Seeme Fraudulent. As far as I’m concerned, faxing my bank statement to some Bengali dude is like, Fraud level 9 out of a possible 10. Me trying to move to London and behave like a normal human being is like, 2 out of a possible 10. Anyway, I endured the Faxing Process (which, let it be said is not easy; it involved PDF’s from Citibank, reformatting from 8.5×11 to A4 sized paper, and an amazing scene of four generous women from the Roundhouse huddled around their fax machine trying to get it to work.) They had no way of confirming that it worked. I don’t know if it worked. My phone still isn’t working.
I am now convinced that England is essentially an enormous logistical game, like that thing where you tilt a surface to get a marble to fall into a specific hole. At a certain point today, after 45 minutes with Yogesh and fielding all the insane emails attendant to my failure to “answer” my “phone,” I seriously entertained the idea of just Going Home, where the streets are paved with pork belly and I can make my phone go. Tickets were investigated; fraudulent medical excuses were fabricated.
After a few hours of really horrifying logistical +44 hours, I decided to just abandon hope of leaving and repair immediately to St John, where I et: Snail, Sausage & Chickpea, and some Parsnipp Soup, with a glass of white wine. All of this set me straight: London is a place obsessed and consumed by inconvenience, with a few fortresses of awesomeness, St John being one of them. The physical space is heaven, the food is heaven, the staff is heaven, the font is heaven, the glasses are heaven.
Later that day, I went to the Roundhouse to rehearse. I adore the Roundhouse. It is one of the most beautiful spaces in the world. The bar? Was great. I sat there for an hour, from 3-4, answered emails, made some arrangements for friends, and then was informed that the bar was closing for “a changeover.” A changeover to what, I axt. “Dinner service,” was the answer. “So, can I sit here while you change over?” “No.” Now we come to a crossroads. Do I get hood with these people? Or do I just leave like how they are very politely asking? I left because I had to make a phone call, but this woman’s attitude stuck in my craw. What am I meant to say to her ass, “I’m playing here Sunday; can you please just let me keep this wee table in the corner during your changeover? can I stand up for 5 minutes while you reärrange the candles and naps-kijn?” Instead I just sort of collected my things and left.
BUT THEN. Leitur. At 6 PM, I wanted to go to the bar, with an administratrix from the orchestra, to get a glass of wine. The barmaid on duty (I reïterate: barmaid on duty) informed us that we could not achieve wine. Why? Because. The fact that there were three half-full bottles of red wine literally within my arm’s reach was immaterial 2 her. I followed the lead of my administratrix hostess and we left. But then fifteen minutes later I said to myself, you know what? Fuck these people. So I marched back up and said, what amount of money can change your mind? The barmaid was horrified. I said, what can I say or do to achieve a glass of the red wine that is half open, slowly fermenting in front of my wery eyes. She said, “oh, well, you can have a plastic glass of it without any problem. It’s just a glass that we can’t do.”
Hello. What are we dealing with here? Was she saving face? Should she have said this bit about the plastic glass 30 minutes before? Am I a crazy New Yorker? Am I petulant? Is she crazy?
I want to use this space as an urge to Londoners to Stop the Madness. Question all the times that people tell you that you cannot do a thing that you clearly should be able to do. It’s wine behind the bar; it’s £4.30 in your pocket; surely we can make something happen. It’s foreign students and workers in your city: give a bitch a cellphone without struggle. It’s people who want to express their dollars in pounds: give a bitch a bank account without all this rigmarole. I’m really over the Eichmannesque behavior of everybody up in here. It’s 10 PM, I’ve been working all day, you have to let me eat! I would love (sort of) for there to be a place besides St John that is an Acceptable Atmosphere in which to exist.
One thing I have to say, though, amidst all of this, is that the Roundhouse is an amazing, amazing place. I did an interview for their in-house radio station and on my slightly curvèd walk to the studio, I walked past what seemed like almost infinite mini-studios with Macs with Logic and ProTools rigs. All these rooms were filled with fresh-faced 21-year old musicians who in some way establish tenure in this fabulous space. What this place amounts to, in New Yorker terms, is the thing that all of us have been dreaming of for years. It’s like Zankel Hall meets Terminal 5 meets a studio meets the American Music Center. I was beyond impressed with it; I was sort of moved by my brief walk past young people using the computer and very moved by one group of two of them: a gay boy and a (?) girl, riveted by the flashings of Logic on the screen of their iMac. I want the iTunes download of whatever it is that they made that day.
Pre-concert talks are always really funny to me. I always fear them slightly but know that it’s really important to do because concertgoers tend to really like them. I never go to them, so I have no idea what you’re meant to do to make a successful one. I got sort of blind-sided today by a series of unfortunate events (1. coffee machine malfunction at home, 2. totally weird subway situation, 3. an unexpected walk outside in the very very cold with no coat to a Methodist church filled with home-schooled children who had written a wonderful spatial set of variations on Copland’s Sextet) and ended up at a pre-concert talk at the Wigmore hall where I was disastrously hungry and over-caffeinated and was too OCD to use the toilet and was wearing one layer 2 few. So! I ended up sounding slightly manic and in my frenzy fucked up my Queens (I lumped Purcell in with Elizabeth rather than Mary) and then got totally insane when this random guy asked me My Least Favorite Question in the World.
My Least Favorite Question in the World is a question that only the English ever ask. It is a question that is not in fact a question but is just a mean comment, disguised in an observation. It goes something like this: “Isn’t it the case that in the new music scene in New York, a lot of music is being written ___*insert generality here*___”. If the generality is that the pieces are short rather than long, this is code for “Americans are superficial.” If the generality is that pieces are more for orchestra and less for small ensemble it is a coded comment about Americans being opportunistic. Today’s variation was that music in “the” “new” “york” “scene” is composed, for the most part, of music for voices and percussion ensemble. And I just thought to myself, what on earth is the question here? And instead of answering politely, I kind of lost my cool and just accused this poor dude of coded language and was very unrelenting. I was basically like, “I’m sorry that all the fun festivals at the Barbican are Reich and Adams but, like, Tehillim is a beautiful piece of music and let’s not generalize about scenes” and then I added something about the Kwakiutl and something else about Lesbians just to confound anybody who was trying to follow me logically. After the talk, I tried to find him to apologize and sort of make peace but he had vanished and I had to Majorly Correct my caffeine/sweat/hot/cold/toilet qi.
Anyway, the short version of this story is: sorry, dude! You came to my pre-concert talk and I am super appreciative and you asked what I think was an innocent question and I unloaded a huge pile of sass on you for no reason.
But then, I sort of got to thinking (cue Carrie Bradshaw cut-away here) that questions about “scenes” in other places are always, in a sense, coded. I have written about my sense of, and my relationship to, “the” “new” “york” “scene” in this space before; I’m not even going to link to it because I was very cruel to a few people and hurt a bunch of feelings. If you want to find it, just search in the search box. But the point is, I am so committed to actively resisting these notions of scenes — I just bristle anytime anybody uses the word. But probing a little deeper into my weird hang-up about this, I realize that my music is slowly unraveling itself from being written in New York. Impossible Things, the piece that Mark Padmore and Pekka Kuusisto will premiere with the Britten SInfonia next week — not a note of it was written in America. Motion, which we’ve been touring for the last few days, was written almost entirely in Singapore and Cambodia. This giant opera I’ve been slaving over was written almost entirely in Iceland and the Faeroe Islands, with only the merest dynamics and articulations added in the 212. This big piano piece I’m writing now is going to have been entirely written in this ridiculously expensive, vaguely Saudi-banker efficiency in London. What right do I have to speak about what’s going on in New York? An English friend is instant messaging me right now saying that he’s about to see all my musician friends at a gay bar in New York — I am in my pajamas realizing figured bass and the church bells in Smithfield have just struck 3 AM; I am completely Remov’d from the Scene, pieces for voice and percussion notwithstanding. Who has a right to articulate what’s going on in a place?
So now I’ve come back around, and I feel like I was right to bristle at the question. The implication in asking about what’s going on somewhere else is, in some way, a dig. Isn’t all art in Russia this sort of ironic Stalinist self-referential portraiture? Isn’t all music in Bamako just folk music with an electric bass? Isn’t music in Paris just IRCAM algebraic jibjab? It becomes a question about your relationship with your own city: what is being made in London that’s beautiful? Who is making music that moves you, Question Dude? Is it Patrick Wolf (whose slow descent into more & more baritone pleaseth)? Is it Simon Simon Bainbridge? Is it Michael Nyman? Where Judith Weir at? What did you people do with Steve Martland, anyway?
I love London and would love to get a handle on what music is being made here that is touching people. As a foreigner, being fêted with these numerous and wonderful performances, it’s hard to get a handle on. I’m doing a workshop for young composers in Cambridge on Saturday, which I hope will give me some sense of, you know, who these people are and where they are deriving their pitch material from. But I’m not entirely sure that seven hours in Cambridge is going to necessarily give me the synecdochal overview that would be the analogue to whatever it was that Dude.co.uk was talking about with the voices and percussion thing. Did he mean the Little Match Girl Passion? Was it a dig on the Little Match Girl Passion?Tehillim? Four Proverbz? That batshit George Crumb thing that’s the most beautiful thing in the world, Unto the Hills?
I write this from London; I have finally finished one of my favorite tasks, which is Provisioning — buying those weird necessities that you never think about: band-aids, tea, shampoo, blu-tak, the proper house lotion, the proper loofah for the shower, the right kind of garbage bag. My girl Jamie came over not twelve seconds after I arrived bearing a bottle of Dubonnet and another bottle of Gin, so now I can make the drink of which the Queen Mum & the Queen herself were/are most fond. (I also got into a whole “gin and dubonnet internet wormhole featuring articles and pictures and all sorts of shit). Provisioning in London is not the easiest thing in the world because their drugstores or supermarkets don’t tend to have that genius “sundries” aisle like up in the Duane Reade. So, for instance, I just spent the better part of an hour trying to find anywhere within walking distance of my apartment that would sell me any kind of adhesive; near the end of the hour I grew so desperate I almost got all Margaret Cho’s mom and just bought some cooked rice and made a little sticky ball.
I am in London this month in residence with the Britten Sinfonia; the residence is multi-faceted and multi-media. There are three main elements to it, though. I programmed for them a lunchtime concert lasting precisely one hour, which consists of three Orlando Gibbons motets arranged by me for clarinet, piano & strang quartet. Then, they perform the Howells Rhapsodic Quintet, a new work by me (Motion) based on a Gibbons motet, and then the Copland Sextet for dessert. It’s a perfect little hour; I love that Howells so much because it is so awkward — he is a melodist, and the melodies are delicious, and he also tries to write little clarinet licks that are not so successful but there is something very beautiful about it. And the Copland is a classic! So that’s Part the First of my Residency. This lunchtime experience is happening all over the UK (and it happened in Krakow yesterday) and everybody should come because what better way to spend a lunchtime hour?
The second part is a big show — but a one-off — at the Roundhouse in London this coming Sunday. The Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Nick Collon, are doing two older works of mine (By All Means & Step Team), I am gonna play Philip Glass Mad Rush on the Pianoforte, I’ma conduct Steve Reich City Life, and Sam Amidon’s going to come and sing three songs, including a newly exploded and orchestrated version of The Only Tune. So that’s part two of the thing.
Part Three, and sort of the most involved part, is a big concert with a string orchestra, tenor Mark Padmore and violinist Pekka Kuusisto. I wrote Pekka a violin concerto and Mark a song cycle that happen to be the same piece of music, so it’s kind of a double-concerto but not really. With it, we’ve programmed Adams Shaker Loops, my favorite, Britten Les Illuminations, my favorite, and Reich Duet for Two Violins & Strangz, also my favorite. What more could you ask for? All of this kicks off in Eindhoven, NL, later this month and then arrives in the UK in the beginning of February.
One of the frustrations of my life is dealing with institutional PR imbalances. A good example is this gig at the Roundhouse. It is, by far, the most “high-profile” of all of the three shows — people are tweeting and blogging about it, half of my inbox is Roundhouse-logistics. But in terms of the actual work for me involved, it’s pretty minimal. It’s older works; I have to re-learn Mad Rush which is hard, I have to conduct City Life which is hard, during which you sort of have to think about 9/11 never 4get but! Compare that, which is a fun, fabulous, glamorous one-off, to the work of writing a thirty minute new work for violin and tenor! There are so many chores involved in doing that — you have to choose the text, in this case, newly translated Cavafy Poems. You email back and forth with the translator, you make crazy sketches, you write down the words ‘Alexandria’ and ‘Homosexual’ in nine different colors. You skype Finland. You buy every single recording Mark Padmore has ever made. You ask everybody in Christendom & the Caliphate what they think about Mark Padmore’s Voice. You sort through those emails. You buy Ian Bostridge’s thesis for six hundred dollars, high on ambien. You cut a poem. You add another. You make diagrams of the structure. You figure out that Mark Padmore has a very handsome e-flat. You fall down an internet wormhole about e-flat. You figure out that Pekka Kuusisto plays Sibelius better than anybody and avoid calling him asking him to play “that note from the second movement of the Sibelius concerto” over the phone and then doing the same to Hilary Hahn. You call the translator in Germany and ask if he means savoir or pouvoir. You fend off an email asking for programme notes before you’ve finished the third movement, a nice passacaglia. You argue with your copyists about syllables. Snippy words are exchanged. You go to Cambodia, you volunteer at the circus school, and somehow, your phone has reception and it’s people asking for more programme notes! It’s an enormous amount of work, a new piece, and there is something very relaxing about presenting a concert of older works. I’m not complaining; this is a good problem to have. But it’s complicated.
A big problem with my life was that my e-mail filter was marking as spam all emails from two very important English women who are sort of going to be coördinating my life for the next bit — Pippa Ricketts and Camilla Stagg. I lost almost a week of emails from both of them before I realized what had happened.
The big moral of the story is that I encourage all fine Englishpeople to come to all three events, as it will give you a pretty comprehensive portrait of my goings-on for the last six months. One is a lunchtime snack, another is a one-off extravaganza, and the third is a beautifully curated and, I hope, well-wrought evening of song and strings.
I am, like many people, totally addicted to Anthony Bourdain’s show No Reservations. When I was 18, my friend Liz and I went together to Bangkok kind of on a whim, and we totally were relatively chilled out about eating food off the street. No Reservations has made mainstream the idea that it’s OK to eat street food wherever. I stand by this; I ate some wild things off the street in the last two weeks in Cambodia (including a really ill-advised sun-dried clam covered in chili sauce and salt…), and the only time I got tummy trouble was off a plate of bruschetta (which, it must be said, floored me: I had to cancel two appointments which is very unlike me, but really, y’all, I was beyond Immodium). But: I want to know who’s writing the music for this show. Everytime Bourdain waxes poetic, it gets very, very, Philip Glassy, to such an extent where one wonders if an intellectual property lawyer should get involved. I know it’s hard for TV and film composers: you get footage, and usually it’s been temped with one of three things: Thomas Newman, Philip Glass, or Massage Parlor Ethnic Putumayo Potpourri, and then your job as the composer is to imitate that to the best of your ability, with two weeks to do it and a bunch of angry people screaming at you talmbout is it done yet.
Dear Editors of Film. Please stop temping films with the same shit. Call me. I will send you other things. The soundtrack to Glory was great in 1988 or whenever that was but you have to quit it now. Let’s innovate, let’s branch out.
But for reals, #thatsillegal to oscillate with minor 3rds, and flesh it out with i and VI back and forth.
Another thing I love about No Reservations is that it captures, with film, some of the insane stuff that happens when you travel alone but don’t have time to photograph. A baby monkey came into my hotel room and stole a jackfruit, no picture. A huge monkey shat on a woman on Street 240 in Phnom Penh and she grabbed a piece of tissue out of her back pocket and wiped it off and continued on her way. No picture. A man in drag screamed at me from the entryway of a bar, “Durian have Pie! Durian have Pie!” presumably meaning that drinks were half-price? No photo, or video.
As I write this, I am on the last day of a five-day cruise from New Orleans to Cozumel & Progreso and back again; inasmuch as I travel so much, I’ve never really hung out with my boyfriend’s family, so this is a sort of trial-by-fire where I willingly go aboard a boat with them for the better part of a week. Has anybody ever been on a cruise before? I had not. I had heard tell throughout childhood, and certainly everybody I mentioned it to made a very specific (and sort of French?) sudden intake of air. I read that David Foster Wallace essay which is fantastic. I took a video of a thing that happened at a port of call:
Assorted business. Somebody commented on my post a few weeks ago about tipping, claiming he was a waiter I mentioned, and said I was bad at it! Oh my god oh no; that is literally my worst nightmare. Maybe it’s not true. Maybe it’s just somebody fucking with me. Oh, the stomach is in knots. I will be better in the fjútur. That literally is like, the worst thing that’s happened to me ever, if that’s true.
However, one of the most exciting things is to review fun stuff that’s happened in 2009!
Jónsi Boy Lilikoi from Go
I’m so, so excited about this project. My girl Jónsi made an album and I arranged, played, twitched & spake in tongues all over it. I basically had qart blanche to do whatever, within the confines of the generally ecstatic nature of the music, as you can hear from the piccolo writing, above. It was also fun to work on an Icelandic project with my New York homegirls. Nadia, Alex, Pluckbró, etc. — everybody’s got their moment in the sun on this disc. Plus, I played celeste like, speed-guitar style on one of the tracks.
Some highlights of 2009 for me were working on Thomas/Doveman’s new album, The Conformist. Thomas, like Jónsi, gave me a sort of free rein, although for one song he asked me to write a classic string arrangement, like a perfectly crafted cocktail:
Doveman Angel’s Share from The Conformist
I think it worked out pretty well. My only regret is that Matt Berninger’s vocal was added after I did the arrangement, so I could have left him a little bit more room for that handsome baritone. I made a very…descanty flute and violin line about 3 minutes in; this is the reason why nobody should invite me to a mix of a song for which I’ve done arrangements because all I’d want to hear is that A-flat. Also, I am proud of the final cadence, which melts into place like nacho cheese.
Another fun project from this last year was with Sam Amidon, whose next album, I See the Sign, is coming out in March. He’s pre-released a snippet of it at Bandcamp; check it out! I wonder when indie people are going to get over “lowercase personal pronoun.” Maybe that can be a collective resolution for 2k10?
I wish I could post more audio of the project I did with Teitur, but the recording isn’t done yet, so, that’s going to have to wait. And I did a lot of work on Antony’s album, The Crying Light, which was hugely thrilling, and it seems like so long ago! 2k9 was endless!
I can’t get enough of Christmas music after Christmas starts, by the way. We have twelve days to enjoy it! One of my favorite genres/throughlines of Christmas music is the bitter return flight of Easter.
The Infant King arr. Willcocks (?)
King’s College, Cambridge
Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now reclining,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Angels are watching, stars are shining
Over the place where he is lying:
Sing lullaby!
Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now asleeping,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Soon will come sorrow with the morning,
Soon will come bitter grief and weeping:
Sing lullaby!
Sing lullaby!
Lullaby baby, now adozing,
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not wake the Infant King.
Soon comes the cross, the nails, the piercing,
Then in the grave at last reposing:
Sing lullaby!
Sing lullaby!
Lullaby is the babe awaking?
Sing lullaby!
Hush, do not stir the Infant King.
Dreaming of Easter, gladsome, morning,
Conquering death, its bondage breaking:
Sing lullaby!
Then, finally, I’m going to re-post another Christmas-With-Easter-Roundtrip carol, and a link to what I wrote about it last year, below reprinted, which I think still holds true.
Happy New Year, Gleðilegt everything, see you on the flippsæd.
This is last year’s Xmas Music Observations: I have been listening obsessively to Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the traditional carol “The Holly and the Ivy”. Now, this is a very well-known tune and there are a bunch of very famous arrangements of it, but for some reason this Britten really hits the spot for me. When you get a really plummy recording from England, too, they really lean in on the last word of the chorus, that being, “choir,” and somehow compress it into a one-syllable loaf. I just adore the pagan universe described in these lyrics:
The holly bears a berry
As red as any blood
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good
O the rising of the sun
And the running of the deer
The playing of the merry organ
Sweet singing of the choir
This particular recording has the MOST PINCHED AND DELIGHTFUL KUMAMOTO OYSTER of a countertenor solo in the third verse, too. Check it out.
The Holly and the Ivy (Traditional, arr. Britten)
King’s College Choir, Cambridge
Curiously, I can’t seem to find a source for Britten’s lyrics. The third verse (the one the kumamoto countertenor sings) seems to go on about Tree and Setting Sinners Free and such. I love these tight little protopagan rhyme schemes! Another good example of that is one of these Rhyming Numerologygasms, called “Joys Seven.”
Joys Seven (arr. Cleobury)
Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College, Cambridge
This arrangement is perfectly English: efficient and sentimental without being too outrageous. There is, however, a completely over-the-top descant at the end that performs a little trick. The organ rises up the scale, and the trebles sing aah aah aah on the top four notes of an Ab-major scale. Then, when they repeat it immediately afterwards, the G is flatted, followed by the F, and then a G-natural: it’s very subtle, but it lines up perfectly with the text below “…to see her own son Jesus Christ to wear the crown…” — what you expect is, of course, the crown of thorns, but the word that you get is “heav’n” (to rhyme with Seven). That little turn in the trebles is precisely the Tart Joy of Christmas: you have to make sure that you advance the clock to Good Friday, looming just a few months later. See:
There are several little galling moments, specifically in the sixth cycle, at the words:
The next good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of six;
To see her own son Jesus Christ
Upon the Crucifix.
Upon the crucifix, good man: And blessed may he be,
Both Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,
To all eternity.
Mmm. This is one of my favorite lyrics EVER, because a little digging reveals some alternate words. Check out the first verse the way it’s sung these days:
The first good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of one:
To see the blessed Jesus Christ
When he was first her son.
When he was first her son, good man…
and now an alternate:
The first good joy our Mary had,
It was the joy of one;
To see her own Son Jesus
To suck at her breast bone;
To suck at her breast bone,
Good man, and blessed may he be…
Ooh, see, isn’t that so much better? Then, dig deeper:
þe forte joye wt out in good fay,
was upon halewÿ þursda,
he stey to hevene in ryche aray,
wt fadr and sone and holy gost.
þe fyfte joye wt outÿ dene,
in hevene he crownyd his modr clene,
þt was wol wil þe eyr a sene,
wt fadr and sone and holy gost.
Now we’re talking! Mm, crownyd his modr clene. I wonder if this is an error (Queene is prolly what is meant, here) or if really we’re talking about “clene” in its Middle English use as a noun, meaning, “(a) Guiltless or excellent person; also, purity; (b) = clene Lenten; (c) clear path,” in which case, she, as a Pure Virgin or whatever, can properly join the “sene,” (here, from the root that brings us Synod – sort of a holy gathering) of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Inneresting.
