Beethoven Violin Concerto
John Adams Harmonielehre

Yes please! That’s precisely what you do. You take a big ol’ good thing, make Midori play it, then, a big new American thing after the jump. Phew. I will be there, cheering and singing along to the third movement at full volume.

Also, it’s an All-Rouse program in the spring that I’m really excited about. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody actually get paid to play Ku-Ka Ilimoku, even though it’s probably the most performed piece of music since Happy Birthday.

Christopher Rouse Ku-Ka Ilimoku

I steal the thing that happens 2:16 into this about six times a day. Not so much with like, Mr. Miyagi right afterwards but you get the idea.

I’ve gotten really into Loney Dear, particularly some of his mouth-gamey songs. Check this out:

Loney Dear Ignorant Boy, Beautiful Girl

Really satisfying, right? The song emerges from the texture, and the text, when it comes in, is on a drone, and the chords and the ostinato muttering do the heavy lifting.

Okay, some news: I’m putting out two albums on Decca, one of which is in collaboration with Bedroom Community. We are all thrilled about the whole thing; check out the info here. The BedCom co-release is ready for download now, via Bandcamp, and if you click up in there, you get two bonus tracks: A Long Line, and Twitchy Organs, an ambient/drone piece which some of you have been asking for forever! Enjoy! And here’s tha album art:

For those of you in London, we’re going to be performing the score along with the divine Stephen Petronio Dance Company at the Barbican in October, so everybody put on your raincoats and come holla.

As you can see, it’s a series of problems.  The first is, of course, the inevitable awkwardness of being defined by those with whom you have worked, which I understand is useful for “contextualizing” music, but in this particular case, each of us could not sound more different than the people who appear after our names in brackets.  Then, there is the strangeness of the abbreviated names (B. Frost being by far the most strange), and the outrageousness of the spelling of Valgeir’s last name.  I feel bad for him, because his is a doubly-nested set of references inside the mistake: Sigurrós is a standard Icelandic name for girls, and, when rendered Sigur Rós, is the name of a very popular Icelandic band.  The ø instead of the ó is itself a confusion over what exactly ð is (when read on signs, people still ask what’s that o with the weird accent?).  So everybody loses.  Then, also, nobody involved is from Sydney, bold and in white at the top of the page.  Who thought that?  Was it a bad google?  Should somebody on our end have asked to have seen this?  Does it matter?  Does anybody care?  Should we even have seen it?

I’m inclined to think that it doesn’t matter, or that it’s one of those things that you need to make not matter.  What’s important is that the show went incredibly well, and it was packed with a really age-diverse crowd.  My favorite was the sixty-something lady sitting at the foot of the stage freaking out with rapture during Ben’s pieces.  I have learned to temper my onstage banter (I do the lion’s share of it; Sam does some of his intros) to sound marginally less rapid-fire especially in places where movies are dubbed into the language of the country (equals better written comprehension of English but less idiomatic conversational English), and last night was especially funny because I don’t think anybody knew what the fuck I was talking about due to sleep deprivation and rather a surfeit of red wine at the wrong time of day.

We played an outrageously late show at the Haldern Pop festival — 2 AM start time!  We played right after The National, whom I adore and played a song with, which was a fun juxtaposition and required only mild running through a mudpile of ecstatic punters and old pizza crusts.  Our festival set is an hour long, so it’s kind of a best-of, and, despite some electrical malfunctions, was a really, really fun and high energy affair.  Just FYI, it’s a Calabrian pizza dude called Roberto who makes a delicious mushroom pie on the festival grounds.

I was up in Iceland for 10 days before coming to Germany, and I managed to get myself half-sick: a sort of lingering, annoying series of day-long variations on flu themes.  Day one: The Sniffles, Day Two: Back of Throat Thing, Day Three: Runny Nose Thing, etc., as a result, I slept a ton, and had delirious, hysterical dreams about lethargic dinner parties, dreams about headaches, dreams about subtle but itchy rashes.  It was kind of great to be so checked out, but I think I really need to stop watching Intervention before bedtime.

Did everybody read or at least process this silly fight online?  Drew McManus summarizes:

If you aren’t aware of what’s going on here’s the 10 second synopsis: Mac Donald wrote an article titled Classical Music’s New Golden Age (meaning now) but Sandow didn’t like what she had to say so he wrote 5,413 words (most of which were entirely unflattering) over five articles to explain why. Shortly thereafter, Mac Donald fired back with a scathing retort…In most online debates, the respective authors are polite and happy to examine differences in opinion but from Sandow’s initial volley, it was clear that this wasn’t going to be a good-natured “agree to disagree” dispute. On a simplistic level the argument pits the “prophets of doom” (as coined by Sam Bergman) against those with more of a upbeat outlook, with Sandow spearheading the former and Mac Donald characterizing the latter.

Okay cool.  The whole exchange is “worth reading” or something, although it will probably make you insane.  What’s curious about the whole thing to me is what the next step would be if you agree with one of them or the other.  Like, if you agree with Mac Donald and think that we’re in a golden age, what next?  Write Emmanuel Ax a postcard?  Make out with Jordi Savall?  And if you agree with Sandow, I bet you what you’re meant to do is hire his ass to consult for your organization to save it or put it on the arc.  It kind of sounds like a mob operation to me, but what do I know; I’m living in tha golden age!!!  I guess I think it’s obnoxious of anybody to make these generalizations about the direction of the world.  We’re sliding towards gomorrah, we’re striving for Jerusalem, we’re spinning out of control, we’re becoming post-racial…all this stuff is much more interesting if you, let’s say, tweet it in 140 characters, and then spend 5,000 odd words encouraging specific behavior…?  It’s kind of like those Al Gore lightbulbs; I completely bought the 140-character thesis (“the world is in trouble re: global warming”) and am happy to take any specific action necessary to change it, even if it means installing those ugly-ass bulbs in my bathroom.  What’s kind of cute about the Mac Donald / Sandow argument is the way in which the whole thing is kind of like a lot of new music: nobody particularly likes hearing it, but people sure will argue about it for lack of anything better to do!

We had a few hours off in Berlin yesterday and we ran to the Pergamon Museum, which I love; I saw it with my grandparents as a kid and it’s got an entire Greek temple and a ton of Babylonian things and a hallway of stelae, who doesn’t love a hallway of stelae?  There’s a little exhibit about something that I always find very unsettling, which is historically-informed recreations of Greek statues with their original paint scheme.  This, for some reason, freaks me out, and I should imagine a lot of others: one of the things I love so much about antiquity as it is (or has been) presented is the cool austerity of the greys and beiges.  But:

Aaah!  Also:

There something a little Henrik Vibskov about the whole thing:

As a result of my maniacal cleaning, I have uncovered some problems in my iTunes library; namely: sometimes my cover art does not match the song/artist. This is one among many complicated issues…these are some recent things, though, that have come up on my iPhone shuffling through:

Buxtehude:

Múm into dude I don’t know:

A very special padded blazer edition of Piano Phase, by Steve Reich:

And my favorite, because I adore both albums equally:

I love Remy Ma. I also love, more than anything, this video, which I will not embed here, but offer as a link to those interested. I recall, when it came out, my girl Nick doing an unspeakably brilliant IPA of how she pronounces the word “Remy” and “fuck” but I can’t render it here for technological reasons. It’s a girl who claims that she used to “fux” Remy, but you really have to watch it to get the full breadth/depth of the Situation.

Media organization is really intense though. If you listen to a lot of classical music, you know what I’m talking about: whole CD’s, with each track assigned to a different artist. It’s like, Lorraine Hunt with the orchestra of the age of whatever. Lorraine Hunt + Random Tenor + That orchestra + That Lutenist whose name I forgot. Lorraine Hunt + That Lutenist + That Oboe d’Amore-ist whose name I forgot. And you have to go through it the entire way and make exxxtra sure that everything is organized as you, your own self, would search for it, which is to say, That Beautiful Lorraine Hunt album. Or whatever it is that you would say to your friends is what you need to be able to type into the search field.

Does anybody else suffer/celebrate (from) this problem, with the wrong cover art? Ur girl has refresht, rebuilt, reorganized and still the Books come up as Ngwemy.

The other amazing thing about doing a deep media organization is that you come across totally random things you never knew you had. I found an album by a Finnish singer-songwriter I didn’t even know:

Sami Kukka, Sisältäni varjon löysin
If the audio doesn’t turn up for you, check out this YouTube.

And it’s like, where has this gorgeous thing been all my life? I didn’t buy it from iTunes. A search in my email reveals no mention of this name, “Sami Kukka“. The iTunes store has it, but not enough people have rated it to display an average, and, mine are untagged mp3′s. So where did it come from? I emailed all my Finns and nobody is taking responsibility. It’s totally weird and delightful. I’m happy to have found it, and have listened to it all day.

In other news, some of my upcoming projects have been announced. I’m very excited about everything, but in the short term, I’m particularly excited about the Los Angeles Master Chorale releasing a disc of my choral music on Decca. Choral music has been a focal point of my emotional landscape for years and years, and it’s great to see it collected all in one place. The disc sounds amazing, and it’s the first commercially available disc of works that I haven’t written for the studio, and I’m thrilled about the whole situation.

I am doing a few shows in Europe in August, with Bedroom Community, and we are all super psyched, so check the sidebar on this site for more information and tickets and all that.

PS Many of you have kindly written to me about my website possibly being hacked by some kind of Erectile Dysfunction Drug. This is something like True; my lovely webmistress and I are working on fixing this, but for now, be nice; your girl has been very busy as has her webmistress, and now it seems as if the audio is not working, but everybody is going to get through this, and remember that the web is a Process. You should see the batshit spam comments I get on this site:

I mean, really, what did I do 2 deserve this!?

Alice Goodman, who wrote the text for of [sic] Nixon in China, is now an ordained minister of the Church of England, dispensing piety to her flock in the shires; holy orders did not restrain her from denouncing Adams as a “dickhead” when their opera was performed in Brussels.

It’s a cute two sentences, right? Descriptive, and sassy, and shit? Except that it’s totally not based in reality; AG wasn’t ordained at that time and was, as Danny points out, still a Jewish Librettist Lady. And also, the opera in question was not Nixon, but rather Klinghoffer, so the springloaded sentence which would have been so delicious is just…bitchy? Anyway, that’s fine, everybody’s gonna go see this thing anyway and they can judge for themselves. I hope the formula is that “word dickhead in preview article = butts in seats” and that’s what the writer was aiming for.

I mean, surely, it’s the hope of music reviewers that they’re reviewing to a full house, right? If you review a restaurant, you want to review it at its top form, with the kitchen at full capacity, and the waiters in that ecstatic, sweaty bliss of business. In that spirit, I read with a certain degree of joy and a certain degree of anxiety Anne Midgett’s article about Moby-Dick + its relationship to other new opera, including my own, in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Short story: Jake Heggie, a composer, wrote an opera version of Moby-Dick. Everybody was eskeptical. A zillion people went, four opera companies are doing productions, it was a big success. Cool. She goes on to describe other new productions around the country: Seattle, Santa Fe, Fort Worth. And then she asks the question: How many people are really listening? That’s a good question! But then she puts my name in her mouth, and solicits an anonymous quote thus:

(“I can’t fundraise for underage sex,” one opera director said about Nico Muhly’s forthcoming Met opus.)

Oh hell no. First of all, miss thing, you have to call me before you solicit an anonymous quote from “an opera director,” I mean please, what is this, Opera Deep Throat? But that’s fine, whatever, my topic is risqué, if you weren’t a sexual creature until your twenties, like all the heroines and heroes of Britten, Mozart, Wagner…oh, wait. Well, I mean…can you fundraise for Incest? Rape? Is there another codeword you meant to say?

She quotes David Gockley, who has commissioned more new opera than anybody ever in the history of ever:

“You don’t have enough real opportunity to edit,” says David Gockley, the general director of the San Francisco Opera, who both there and in Houston has been responsible for the creation of more new American opera than most of his colleagues combined. “There are no such things as previews and out-of-town tryouts.” For a long time, therefore, commissioning an opera meant giving a large amount of money to a composer, waiting a few years, getting a score back from the composer and putting it on as written. This resulted in more than a few turkeys – not least because few composers are trained during their studies in how to write opera.

This is totally true. Even though I studied a million operas in school, and I studied with John Corigliano, who wrote one of the great American operas (“The Ghosts of Versailles“), it’s a totally new medium for me, and studying it and doing it are totally different, just as reading cookbooks and cooking are two different things. The solution, of course, is to workshop: you perform the piece with a piano and some voices in front of people who know better than I do, and you ask their opinion, and take it or don’t, but at least you’ve begged for their honest criticism. Composers, it should be said, do not always know best, especially in the very important matters of pacing, length, and dramatic timing. For this, I can approximate, but I rely on Craig Lucas, the librettist, and Bart Sher, the director, and basically anybody else who works in the opera world, to tell me what they think can be improved and what isn’t working. But then, back to the article:

All this collaboration tends to yield the operatic equivalent of Hollywood studio films: big, slick, audience-friendly fare aiming for blockbuster status, rather than indie-style creativity.

You just don’t get to have it both ways. You can’t set up this dichotomy between “Indie-style creativity” (what does that even mean?) and “Hollywood.” This is a really old-fashioned, terrible binary to harp on, and it just perpetuates idiocy. It shines a really ugly light on what is (or can be), in reality, a wonderfully collaborative process. If the other option is me getting a commission, having an idea, and sitting in a cave and writing an “opus” about it without anybody helping me edit, nobody would be happy except my own ass, clapping my hands together like Flipper at the ninety minutes of continuous celeste, organ, countertenor and trombone music I would inevitably produce, on the subject of that one time Bach walked to hear Buxtehude improvise.

The offense I’m taking here has more to do with the idea that asking for editing help is a kind of Rom-Com Formulaic Groupthink. I’ve always advocated for editors in classical music; I’ve blogged about this a million times before and I wish I had somebody to whom I could send my music before it gets performed who would look it over and say, you know what, this is brilliant, but you need to cut, like, forty-five seconds here, and this entire middle section here. I’m getting better at doing this myself, because in concert music no such person exists, but in opera, we are very lucky because there are people whom you can ask if something is too long, too short, too racist, too sexy, not sexy enough, too much crotale, not enough crotale. It’s just the composer’s responsibility “” not chore or forced groupthink agenda “” to ask. I trust the genre to provide me with the people to help me participate in the wonderful history of opera, and, with any luck, to innovate cleverly, venerate respectfully, and make something that everybody will enjoy.

I should add here that since she wrote it, I had a very polite email exchange with this journalist, and she posted a very good Q + A with Peter Gelb here, and the whole thing feels slightly calmer. I guess all those liberal arts just get my knickers in a twist when I read about binaries in the way people think about Art. Gelb says it best:

At the end of the day it doesn’t mean it’s going to be more successful than something else. But we’re trying to provide the support system to help pieces have the potential of being more successful.

Precisely so. And the truth of the matter is that wouldn’t it be worse to put something terrible on stage than to be politely told that what you’ve written isn’t working? I’ve never had any problem at all with throwing music out or back-tracking; there is space in my life “” in most composers’ lives, I would hope “” for experimental, composer-driven projects: spun-sugar, fragile, collaborations, half-improvised Finnish folk music jam-sessions, allegorical evenings with sculpture and hair everywhere where 100 people come, 97 enjoy it, and that’s a beautiful thing. I know that I am incredibly lucky to be working with people who want to put a good opera on stage; having scored something like a Hollywood movie recently and having done all that other crazystuff recently I can tell you that this process is very much outside of that binary A.M. outlines above.

I got tweeted at by somebody who asked the other day, “Is opera a better vehicle for your work than, say, a musical?” It’s a funny question, the idea of a the work needing a vehicle. I’ve never thought of my Work as this beast that needs to be transported around town, with one’s entire life being spent in pursuit of the ultimate vehicle? Like, an Eddie Bauer-branded Ford Explorer or something? I always thought of work as being a continuous reaction, a process, a set of techniques, rather than something so Giant that it requires a continuous Expression.

I am spending the 4th of July in Vermont for the first time in a few years; my town has this fabulous fireworks display on the 3rd, and then a completely traditional and wonderful parade on the morning of the 4th.

The workshops were great, and, as always, a chance to meet young singers, which is always a welcome bonus of these things. These young singers had an especial anxiety about getting the notes and rhythms right, which is one of these interesting things. Some notes and rhythms I really really care about, but I’m most interested in what happens when they relax into them and make them their own. Almost universally, if you tell a singer, just don’t sing the rhythms, sing whatever you want, they end up doing a perfect, relaxed, precise, Ninja-like interpretation of what the score says. Go know. With singers I feel like you need to be some combination of the Dog Whisperer and Mary Poppins to get the desired result (which, as with all things, is a Relaxed and Elegant Precision).

Some thoughts:

St. Paul’s Cathedral is Elegantly Precise.

This pudding (from St John Bread + Wijn) is Precisely Elegant.

Butter chicken is Iconic.

Are these mixed messages? Are we being elegantly precise here? Why don’t I own an automatic label machine again?

I’m super excited because Decca are releasing a recording by the Los Angeles Master Chorale of a big pile of my choral music! It’s very exciting for me because this material has had a very strange life and it’s great to see it all collected together. I like thinking on the guardian angels of the music, too: two pieces written for George Steel, one when I was like, 19, and another last year, and two written for Judith Clurman in various guises, one from about six years ago and another from four years ago. Tim Brown, John Scott, my old choirmaster Mark Johnson are also peeking down from the gallery.

I am here in Salisbury for a friend’s straight wedding; I’m hoping it’s really fun.

I’ve had a very productive two weeks in Iceland: I worked with Valgeir making an album for our friend Terry, whose stage name is Puzzle Muteson (I don’t know what it means either). I discovered Puzzle’s music on MySpace by accident “” I was in a rented apartment in Paris with glacially slow internet, and had been chatting with my friend Caroline online, who said that she wanted to get a basset hound and name him Puzzle, and somehow, some frantic mid-afternoon googling led me to Puzzle’s MySpace and a song of his called Tightrope Dance, which I immediately fell in love with. Fast forward three years and he is, after a variety of complicated maneuvers (he’s from the Isle of Wight), in Reykjavík, recording with Valgeir! As an added bonus, Dan Bora, who has worked with me for about seven years, is onboard as Valgeir’s engineer for the summer; there is no greater pleasure than when friends work together. Puzzle’s record will be, with any luck, the tenth release on Bedroom Community, the label whose first release was my own Speaks Volumes in 2007.

Bedroom Community presented a show in Iceland at the National Theater as part of Listahátið Reykjavíkur (Reykjavík Arts Festival), and we managed to include all four artists on the label on the shô. Daníel Bjarnason presented three pieces for mixed ensemble, and then Sam, Ben, Valgeir and I performed an expanded version of the show we’ve been doing on the road for the past month. It was great to play for what felt like a hometown crowd “” when you play in a venue and hear a recognizable laugh (what’s up, Ingveldur!?) and a distinctive cackle (what it do, Hrafnhildur!?), it’s an especial joy. This is one thing I love about playing in non-classical situations: you can directly interact with the audience. Sam did a flawless Only Tune, Una completely owned Honest Music, Helgi was a superstar, Nadia played one of the best Keeps in Touch I’ve heard her do; I played a brand-new piano piece, Valgeir was in octopus-like control of his electronics, and Ben made the bones of the house shudder with his ever-satisfying low d.

Daníel is, first of all, so impossibly handsome, it drives me crazy; have you seen this man? But the other thing that I love about playing with him and working with him is that he is slowly figuring out the complicated but ultimately satisfying process of turning what starts as concert music into music that works in more flexible, informal settings. He wrote a piano concerto whose third movement, Red-Handed, is, in its original setting, a complete triumph of orchestration for large ensemble: it’s scored for maybe seventy players, with a lot of ingenious doublings and fabulous harmonics and col legno and alternate fingerings and so on; Daníel has been working on ways to make it happen for eight players, and you know what? It totally works. We played it as the first piece in the show with: violin, viola, contrabass, two percussionists, me hitting a rasp against a piece of wood, Daníel playing Rhodes, and Víkingur Ólafsson playing the solo piano part written for him. This reductive process is one that I’ve been struggling with: if you write a piece that makes sense in Carnegie Hall, how do you make sure that it works if you find yourself playing a show in a smoke-filled boîte in Switzerland? The answer, as it turns out, is to take very little, but very controlled, action. If the notes and rhythms are poppin’, and your sense of orchestration is flexible, you can easily swap out the clever gongs with a prepared piano, the complicated string divisi with some judiciously placed double-stops. It’s like cooking; the other day, in Reykjavík, I craved so desperately a carbonara. It wasn’t as much about having some kind of authentic Roman experience, but more about the idea of the egg with the bacon and the cracked pepper and the cheese. In Iceland, you can’t really get guanciale or any other cured pig product besides just “beicon“, (they have yet to receive the hipster charcuterie DIY revolution) and lord knows it’s no peccorino (although Dan Bora brought some excellent Parmesan). But it’s about taking the knowledge of the quote-unquote original, and shamelessly applying it to the situation at hand: a suburban fridge in Breiðholt and thirty minutes’ time. The result, barring a slight mishap with the cooking liquid, was exactly what I craved: that sense of egg yolk sticking to esophagus, the umami of the parmesan, the outrageous salt content and stupid amount of pepper, the smoky Icelandic bacon. In any event, I have great respect for Daníel’s ability to MacGyver his giant concerto into something easily rendered by an octet.

The other thing I managed to do in Iceland was to finish a large batch of revisions on my opera, Two Boys, which is opening in just over a year at the English National Opera. I’m so excited about it that I’ve assumed a certain catatonia about the whole affair; there is so much to do, and so little time, and so many ð-factors, and so much culling, discarding, revising, adding. It’s funny how there are some issues that are so tiny (“does the word how sit better in this range or this range,” or “exactly how many syllables are in the word extraordinary“) and others are so large (“does the beginning work at all as theater? is the plot clear at the end? is the tessitura completely wrong for the random surgeon we introduce at the beginning? would a surgeon even be a baritone, or what?”). I also have a vaguely crippling fear that the piano reduction that I’m workshopping (I hate that verb, I know, I hate it, shh) with is going to be so stupid compared to the orchestration that everybody is going to think I’m stupid and the project is stupid; I have this urge to write little notes all over the piano part saying things like, “this will eventually be really cool strings doing this plainchant thing, sul tasto, and one solo viola doing this trilling thing but in the back of the section, see, so it’ll be there but not there, and then the oboe will be a halo behind ur voice, right, so it’s really not just like this dumb f-natural sitting there” but I’m resisting the urge.

In between now and when the workshops for the opera start, I have two other matters to attend to: a concert in Washington, D.C., and a new piece for Signal ensemble: a Stabat Mater re-transliterated from the Latin by Craig Lucas, who, by no coincidence, is also the librettist for Two Boys. This is being performed alongside a US premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s; I love his music so much; I turned pages for a Juilliard pianist who was playing Harrison’s Clocks and was entranced from that moment on. I went to see his opera Minotaur and am so delighted to share a program with him. I also have no greater pleasure in life than writing liturgical music. I have always dreamed of being able to focus maybe half the year on writing sacred music, but specifically sacred music for use in sacred contexts. My sense of what a composer should be is rather more like a fonctionnaire than an artist; almost all of my favorite music was written by church composers or state employees. My happiest moment as a composer, literally, was when I walked into St. Paul’s Cathedral in London to have some ashes imposed, only to hear my music being played as an Ash Wednesday prelude. I had no idea it was going to be happening, nobody knew I was there, the organist played it as if I were dead, which is exactly as it should be. It’s no rating, it’s no over-exposure, it’s no comment thread. It’s the smell of candles, a handful of reverent Japanese tourists, a curate quickly walking through a metal gate. In any event, it’s all very exciting and I’m looking forward to the summer in a major way; I’ve moved house in New York, and the new space has in-wall air conditioning!

As always, my ability to speak Icelandic peaked the day before I left; there must be a name for this syndrome. Just this morning, I woke up, and finally managed to figure out what’s up with the declensions for numbers one, two, three & four, which has been a seriously emotionally crippling hang-up for years; I’m perpetually rolling into the club either solo or five deep, to avoid having to decline the number of people in my party. It’s one of those vibes where you have to get involved with the neutral if there’s so much as one girl anywhere in sight, or babies, or who even knows what, and it’s much easier to just travel with the undeclinables.

One totally weird thing about touring “” and working in the studio, to a lesser extent “” is the Mount Fujiesque access to news. I’m so used to my normal routine of waking up, making coffee, clicking three tabs on my computer, and having about forty news websites pop up, which I can slowly read while refilling the mug. On tour, you wake up in…Winterthur? Leipzig? and groggily wander out of the bus to find the nearest place to brush the teeth. On the way, a glimpse of a German headline: North Korea sunk a South Korean submarine? Bristol Palin has a…outspeaking…engagement…oh! a public speaking deal…okay, something about an Austrian political scandal, okay, something here about shanty towns in Australia? And then by the time you get to the internet, the connection is so slow and sound check is in ten minutes and really a shower and shave is more pertinent, so you just read some completely random article in the New York Times about fructose and learn nothing about the Koreas, the Palins, and Antipodean housing crises.

Maybe I’ve just been gone for too long, but I think that the New York Times has some of the best writing these days. I’m thinking in particular of the new restaurant critic, Sam Sifton, and Cintra Wilson, who has been writing Critical Shopper articles for a few years. In particular, though, she wrote an article last week whose last two paragraphs I found to be heart-meltingly beautifully written, as well as containing a fabulous meditation on the point of fashion and style. She’s approaching a sort of cargo panted Diana Vreeland level of maxims and bons mots; look at this conclusion:

But even in a potentially meaningless universe where civilizations crumble, institutions collapse and creatures fade into extinction, there are still a few mathematical certainties: things of genuine quality tend to eternally recur, especially if they’re made of heavy cotton duck or decent leather. Nobody ever looks like an idiot in a good peacoat, and (a trick I learned from movie wardrobe girls) people tend to notice how comfortably you rock your silhouette far more than they notice the safety pin holding your hem together or the fact that your buttons don’t quite match. (In fact, these charming delicacies of distress are mimicked by top designers, to create the illusion of character and provenance.)

“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” said William Blake. On Church Street I stood underneath a tree that was having a riotous outburst of pink flowers, and I may be far from wise, but eventually I noticed that no matter how much money I threw at it, it didn’t get any prettier. It wouldn’t have been prettier if I had replanted it on 86th and Madison, either. The point is to recognize a meritocracy in things of value, regardless of their low points of origin, current trendiness or future invisibility. Quality is quality, period. All else is corporate fear, hype, vanity and vexation of the spirit. Foolish is as foolish does.

Also, Sam Sifton is one of these writers where I wonder if anybody is actually editing his column. Look at this paragraph:

An immodest little pizza of black truffles and fontina is an elegant and delicious take on the sort of puff-crusted pies Mathieu Palombino makes at Motorino, and worth a run through the excellent and deep wine list to find a pinot noir from Au Bon Climat to drink with it. Pizza at a Vongerichten restaurant? This one is exactly the sort to thrill a couple who hasn’t had a pizza since that time they needed to get takeout because there was a wreck on the Saw Mill up near where Hawthorne Circle used to be, and they didn’t get home from Tanglewood until nearly 9.

It’s amazing, right? It’s such a specific reference, and his subject position is so deliciously compromised by the mockery of it, because of course, he has to have been in that situation his own self in order to understand what it’s like! It’s great to have one’s hometown paper be an awesome paper. “¨

Bach Vergnugte Ruh! Beliebte Seelenlust
Masaaki Suzuki, conductor
Bach Collegium Japan

Right? So good. What I would really love, though, is for somebody knowledgeable about Bach to take me through a year or two with the cantatas, presenting them in liturgically appropriate order, etc., and digging out the best recordings. My natural instinct is to hoard recordings but I’m scared that something like this aria would fall through the cracks. Any recommendations for a book?

One thing about touring that always happens is that we all get obsessed with a song and are perpetually running around singing it. Unfortunately, this trip this was the winner:

…which as far as I can tell is the infamous “Smell Yo Dick” song but subjected to the Junior Boys treatment; the whole thing is so good, and I had forgotten how beautiful the vocal inflection is “” landing on an appoggiatura is a time-tested trick for plaintive content; what works even better here is that it leans into a suspended note, sort of, so the whole thing becomes quite melancholic.

The phrase iterations:

It reminds me, weirdly, of one of my favorite phrases in opera, which is Adams’s setting of “Sea-Level” about a minute into this aria from The Death of Klinghoffer.

John Adams
Aria of the Falling Body (Gymnopédie) from The Death of Klinghoffer
Kent Nagano / Lyon

Deelish, right? Dropping a ninth, too, is a really awesome thing and it sits really well in this voice.

I am happily stuck in Iceland. I had to cancel a show in Valencia, which was hideously agonizing “” the airports were intermittently shutting down in Iceland, and I was scared that if I left, I would never get back! There is a certain glamor to having one’s motions restricted by something as unpredictable as a Volcano; the charts and graphs of the predicted plume are deliciously old-fashioned and can be found here. I’ve been hitting refresh constantly.

Latvia! I had never been there. My first piano teacher was Latvian, and I never really got a sense of what her life had been like before she came to America. What little I knew was her shouting down the hall to her husband or talking on the phone to her son or organizing piles of paper in a funny language as I arrived. In any event, this place was fabulous. We were playing in Ventspils, a Hanseatic-league town about two hours from RÄ«ga. Everybody was so-o-o-o-o nice and fiendishly well-read and curious and friendly and everything you want people to be like (occasionally, you turn up in a town and the people involved in putting on the show are wary, suspicious, unimpressed & opaque). We had a point-person with the very Dick Traceyesque name of Micks Magone (wasn’t that actually the name of Madonna’s character from that movie?). The added bonus was that this completely out of control great performance-art-cum-electro-pop band called Instrumenti played a short set before us:

What’s better than that!?

I’m now installed in Iceland. I have another round of workshops for Two Boys in three weeks, so I have a bunch of that to finish, and then a series of smaller pieces, and then, and then, and then! So, a good long desk is in order, with some coffee, some trips to the pool, some exercise (finally) and some time away from the internet. People ask me if I have a ritual when I compose, and I’m always struck by a little pang of sadness when I have to truthfully answer that I travel too much to have a proper one. I’m trying to see if I can stay in one place for longer stretches this next concert season, so that I can have if not one ritual, a series of continuities to try to impose some order on this mess.

I will conclude this with a recipe:

One thing I have observed about traveling in a group is the importance of not eating as a group. I think people’s weirdnesses “” mine especially “” come out in the context of a meal. I’m firmly of the philosophy that there is a natural way that a restaurant wants things to work “” a qi, a sort of natural waterway that governs the appropriate things to order, the way to order them, the procession of dishes. Large groups need to really get on that boat, or it turns into a big nightmare shipwreck of people ordering god knows what kind of substitutions and random banana splits in the south of France. I had a friend at Juilliard who, whenever we all went out as a department for Chinese, which was basically once a week, would inevitably ask for this mysterious concept of “a dollar extra shrimp” on/in whatever it was that she had ordered. This was one form of her insanity; the other would be to turn dish (a) into dish (b) through a series of substitutions: a fried noodle with beef and chicken would turn into a Singapore mai fun by adding curry powder, ham, subtracting the beef, and a dollar extra shrimp. No matter what happened, the end result was that everybody else’s dishes ended up completely dada: shrimp in a noodle bird’s nest format, gai lan with shrimp all over them, a coca-cola with shrimp shells scattered around them like ancestral offerings. The moral of the story is that when you’re eating with a group, find that flow, and ride it all the way to shore.

We had a day off in Paris, and I saw such wonderful things that made me so happy.

Paris is so about this woman, in the supermarket, paying in pennies:

It’s about this poodle, tied to this pole:

It’s about precisely these oysters and a glass of white wine:

We also played such a great show in Paris, and I had the surreal experience of my piece with Benjamin Millepied, Triade, happening at exactly the same moment at the Opéra de Paris. I like this idea, that one trombonist can be playing the auxiliary vocal parts for The Only Tune in the 11th while two trombonists and a pianist bang out the vanilla gamelans for Triade up in the 9th. There’s a video here. I also find that simultaneity very relaxing in the context of all this yammering about style & genre on the internet of late. Dennis DeSantis wrote a nice retort and dismissal of all of it, which I would like to quote: “Figure out what you like to hear. Then go listen to it and make more,” he writes. Quite so. It’s been my experience that people who want to talk about style and genre are taking advantage of the noise of that conversation to avoid the actual task of writing or making music. Get back to work and get off the internet! Am gonna follow my own advice and edit these clarinet slurs right now, and figure out this harp pedaling.

It’s a shame to have missed the shows in Berlin, Ghent, London & Dublin, but I think that they are being rescheduled. For some reason re-scheduling something seems much easier than actually scheduling them, but as I’m not doing any of that, I shouldn’t speak out of turn.

One thing I’ve noticed about smaller towns in England built around Cathedrals is that you can sort of know your way around without really knowing your way around. The surprise is always The Lesbian Bar, or the strange out-of-place bistro in “The Old Biscuit Factory” or whatever. It reminds me of towns in Vermont where if you can find the Grange Hall, you can find the crazy mini-mart with the Ben & Jerry’s factory seconds.

Anyway, the moral of the story is that with any luck, I will soon be hurtling on my merry way to Dublin with Sam Amidon, and we will start the tour officially tomorrow in Gateshead. All of this is contingent on, you know, Acts of God, Act of Gods, and all other permutations thereof. Is everybody following @eyjafjalla on Twitter yet? Is she following you? And, as of right now, I am already three days into the tour, so, all went according to plan. I kept all the bit about the countertenor and the cruise ship because with any luck it’ll still happen.

Last week, I posted about something that was very interesting to me, which was a young composer from my high-school writing to me about advice on his choral music; this correspondence was handled over Facebook, and I was rather struck by the right-wingèdness of his profile; I wrote back to him politely and in great detail, and then as an appendix just pointed out that I was a little uncumpf with all the pictures of him with, like, Sean Hannity and Dinesh D’Souza all over the place, including, it must be added, as the primary avatar, as in, the thing that pops up when he writes to you. I then blogged about it in a sort of confessional style; the point was not that I had shut down some kid, nor was it any self-congratulatory story about how I had, like, stood up to oppression, but I received a somewhat alarming number of comments all of which you can read if you scroll back, or, if you’re reading this in some RSS way, in the fashion to which you are accustomed. The comments were surprising especially given the fact that nobody actually had access to any leg of the dialogue, which was, in fact, quite civil and not in the least bit confrontational; I will add here that it has continued and has moved on from politics to something much more interesting, namely, Stravinsky’s religious music. The point of posting about it in the first place was that I was piqued by the exchange; I wasn’t sure how I was meant to behave. Should I not have said something? My father pointed out that it would be the same thing if somebody wrote to him asking for advice about something, and he looked in the background and found sort of loosely skinheady things; should he, as the husband of a Jewess, raise an objection?

The major thrust of why I commented on it at all was that right-wingers like Hannity think that gay people are second-class citizens. We’re not allowed to fight in the army; if you can’t die for your country by your own choice, are you really a citizen of that place? Right-wingers think gay people have a radical agenda and are taking over the country by conwerting children to alternative lifestyles et cetera. So I think it’s quite fair to question somebody whose FB profile features his arm around Sean Hannity at something called a “Freedom Concert” and a Reagan quote talmbout “I believe the best social program is a JOB” writing to a gay person asking for advice on how to write choral music. I have always been obsessively & sometimes maniacally trying to be at the barest minimum, competent at everything. Excellence at everything is, of course, the goal. I realized, through high school and slightly less in college, but even still, that this philosophy is pretty explicitly an oppositional strategy to the lazy entitlement of straight mediocrity. I’m not a gay supremacist; I’m just saying that there is an extra fire burning behind many (not all) of us, an extra master’s whip, an extra carrot at the end of the stick, that sometimes isn’t present in our straight colleagues. And of course this isn’t a universal situation; I’m only speaking from my own experience; I get asked a lot what my sort of desert island books and music would be; it’s mainly str8 people up on there. This is of course a very dangerous path to even write about, and the printed word tends to prefer a generalization (see the comment thread under this exchange). I add this as a caveat that really doesn’t need to be articulated, but inevitably there are comments, so I may as well: this is a very middle-class white problem to have, but I’m pretty chill with having a middle-class white problem because I happen to be middle-class and white.

Anyway, all of this is made deliciously manifest in this insane video of this man William Gheen talking about Senator Lindsey Graham’s closeted homosexuality as a reason why he might be selling out his country. Now. America is an interesting place because we do actually prefer our homosexuals to be out & proud, or at least, have it be an open secret. Surely Lindsey Graham is more hurt by his closeted-ness than, say, Barney Frank, who is occasionally called a faggot on the steps of the palace “” but who among us hasn’t been? Bobby Trendy probably faces a lot less homophobia than Lindsey Graham. After a while you stop noticing. In England, on the other hand, the closet is a very useful tool; you can burn that shit like peat for fuel. The closet there has a sort of built in discursive motor that propels; here, it is already clogged with ash. But the connection between Graham’s insinuated treason and the gayness is wonderfully delicious, and only serves to reinforce my point: fuck these people and everybody they know. I’ve sort of come around to thinking that if you don’t think gay people should be in the army or get married or that we’re trying to take over the schools with a radical agenda, then you really shouldn’t ask them for any help with anything. I’m over it, in 2010, to not be able to call this shit out. And if you think that’s mean-spirited, you should have seen draft one.

I‘m just done with these two concerts with the New York Philharmonic; I wrote them a new piece called Detailed Instructions, which is a chamber symphony of sorts, and it was presented along with two other new works by Sean Shepherd and Matthias Pinscher. All of this was done under the auspices of the Philharmonic’s new CONTACT! program; which I believe I have rendered correctly with the capitals and the exclamation. I look forward to their Latin Outreach ¡CONTACT! concert next season. One thing struck me as particularly odd about this; I’m not even sure what the word is, but for some reason, Maestro Gilbert and the Concertmistress decided to always do an Entrée Classique, as in, the pieces would be introduced, there would be several moments of silence, then the concertmistress would come out, tune, then the conductor, bowing, then piece. Hmm. I’m not sure that all of that is necessary in what should be such an informal event; after the show, the official photographer wanted to have a picture of me with a beer, which company had apparently sponsored the series, as opposed than the glass of generic antipodean Shiraz I was rather enjoying at the time. “I’ll do it if you’ll go get me one,” I offered, not wanting to leave the conversation with my friends. She was not amused.

The first thing I want to talk about is Illness in Classical Music. People need to calm the fuck down about James Levine. You can’t open the paper without people freaking out about his health. Oh, his booty itch. His back broken. This dude in Boston is practically sending the hearse over the house right now. What’s confusing to me is why audiences would be upset by this. Let me explain: classical performance is built on the backs of sick singers, conductors, violinists. Probably half of the people we know know and adore at the podium or on the stage were, like, twenty years ago, called in super last minute to fill in for an ailing star. Audiences who are complaining about Jimmy’s coccyx need to realize that they have a unique opportunity to see a young star fill in! There is nothing with more cachet in classical music than “having been there” “” there are countless examples; there’s that time so-and-so got on the Concorde to fill in for whoever else, there’s that time the hitherto unknown Somebody-Pekka Somebodysdóttir jumped to the podium to replace Somebody Else “” to all of you Bostonites freaking out about Jimmy, send his ass a card, and then go to Symphony Hall with nothing but the highest expectations.

I had a wild experience last week; a boy from my high-school wrote to me on Facebook and said, quite politely, dear Nico, we met when you came to speak a few years ago, would you mind terribly looking at this choral music I’ve written, etc.; and of course I agreed, and had him PDF over a few scores. After I hit “send” on the response, I clicked through to his Facebook profile, and discovered that he is a rabid right-winger: pictures of him with his arm around Sean Hannity, quotes by Scalia and like, Dinesh D’Souza and shit and pictures of Reagan EVERYWHERE. Homegirl is probably not yet 17. I sort of didn’t know what to do. I tried, with the help of my man, to dig up as much sort of “evidence” of these Neo-Conservatives being horrible about gay people and the arts or whatever, and came up short. I think all the really violent culture war stuff (when it actually had to do with culture, rather than what it might be about now, which, I’m pretty sure, has more to do with geographically-based abstractions) was from my childhood, rather than this boy’s: mine was the 80′s of Piss Christ, and the 90′s of Giuliani v. the Virgin Mary covered in Elephant Dung. All that stuff has gone rather underground now; you can find plenty of coded discourse by Hannity about, you know, Radical Homosexuals in Th’Obama Administration, whoever they might be (call me!), but really nothing about the NEA or funding for the arts or whatever. I ended up writing this boy some 1,200 words about how good his choral music was (it was very good, although his Latin was rather problematic, and, as befits rabid right-wingers, it was done all in Finale, which is sort of the Christian Coalition of notation software: unbearable, mysteriously popular, most likely designed on a PC) and then another 200 words about my Deepe Offense at his profile, citing my own obvious homosexuality as a sort of reason why he might find somebody whom his idols would deem worthy enough to die for his country or to get married; surely, I argued, there were plenty of straight people who graduated from my high school who were equipped to analyze his harmonies, show him how slurs work, and correct his declensions who could then go on to kill people from a helicopter without the risk of being kicked out for Cocksucking “” it was a very awkward argument to make, and I wasn’t really sure how to approach it, or perhaps I should have left it alone? In any event, it was a fascinating moment.

For anybody interested in reading it, there is a very extensive interview with me and Jónsi in Reykjavík’s wonderful Grapevine magazine about Jónsi’s album Go, here; the link will give you a full PDF but it’s worth a read if you have a moment. A good excerpt:

J: Starting the album, I wanted to move away from Sigur rós, those floaty, dreamy landscapes. That made it kinda fun to work with you, because you had your midi controller and then you just played and played; “Oh, we have a flute now. What do you think about this? Eeeh, can we have a little bit more this…” [starts singing]. That’s how it worked. Super fast, super or- ganised, no bullshit and he takes it home and works on it. I didn’t think this kind of music could be that spontaneous, that’s one thing I don’t like about classical music and arrangement: it’s too thought about and too worried about.

N: This music wanted to be ecstatic; it wanted to feel like a magic thing erupting from below. So the best way to do all the arrangements was to at first shit them out and vomit them out, make it be all messy and let there be gut reactions. They’re your songs, and I kept telling you “I see brass band, a Mexican funeral,” I basically kept throwing these images out…

J: I think that’s really good, how we would visualize things. For example on Boy Lilikoi, we were talking about Saint Francis of Assisi and how he was preaching to the birds, all these images and layers and colours. I really like that, it’s a good way to describe how music should be.

N: Arranging is really about taking the other person and making them as present- able as you can. It’s as if you’re designing a dress; it’s not about making the dress look good, but the person wearing it. It’s about finding something that is fabulous, that makes you sound fabulous. It shouldn’t call attention to me ““ as an arranger, you have to erase yourself in the process. So spontaneity is the best way to accomplish this, and images are often the best way to accomplish that. Everything has to go to- gether. That was something I really liked about the Sigur rós arrangements, there was a formality to them. They also just serve to make your voice sound so fabulous. What I wanted to do was make it a little bit naked, to claw a little in your range.

First, everybody should go to iTunes, BandCamp, or any other retail option available to them and buy Sam Amidon’s new album I See the Sign. One of the great things about the day when these projects are released is that I can loosen up my superstitious piles of music. I still have, physically in the backpack where I am at all times, hard copies of Jónsi’s charts, just in case something needs to get done. With Sam’s, I keep every single version of the recordings “” loose ones, MIDI ones, rough ones, ones where I replaced the bridge in “You Better Mind” with the themesong from Sex in the City “” check this out here:

You Better Mind Super Rough Demo

The second is, NPR is streaming Jónsi’s album, along with some kind words about me, at this page. I wonder about the new era of digital releases and streaming versus owning and how easy it is to rip streamed data. Then I wonder about arguments like these over @ Danny’s place, and then I want to crawl into a hole and make music on a rock, and record it, and say that it’s not an authentic recording and then crawl back into the hole.
But! This means I can finally throw out the accidental bounce I made of all the woodwind parts for Jónsi’s track “Boy Lilikoi,” but all recorded as pianos:

Boy Lilikoi MIDI parts all as piano (excerpt)

Compare that to the real shit:

Jónsi Boy Lilikoi (excerpt)

Anyway, I am really happy with both those projects and I’m happy that they’re coming out around the same time. I had a wonderful two weeks with Jónsi in Iceland last month helping him put together the live show (about which you can read at jonsi.com), and I’ve been doing a few live shows with Sam Amidon, including at the fabulously curated Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, TN.

I am amazed with Knoxville! They have had urban renewal, but their main center square only has one chain restaurant, and an innocuous Subway at that! I wonder if there had been a decree about the kinds of restaurants that would stay in Market Square “” there were a few decent cafés, a few gestures towards sushi and tapas, and basically anything anybody who wanted a bougie evening could possibly want.

The best meals, tho, I think were at the Barbecue houses towards the old city, but in festivals, you tend to make eating decisions in a more strategic way to how much you might find yourself, in the interests of Abandon or Politeness, drinking later in the evening. In many instances it is Most Wyse to eat an entire swine around 4:30, graze throughout the performance time, and hope for a slice of pizza later.

Glamorous Thomas

Sufjan, not looking worse for wear after he ate his entire barbecue and two of my buffalo chicken tendiz

Miss Annie and Bryce, at the Artist’s Loft

St. Vincent’s drummer, whose name I forgot, but who was great.

I love a Great Drummer. I’ve been very lucky inasmuch as the bands that I’ve worked with have all had Great Drummers. Samuli with Jónsi? Heaven. Bryan with the National? Nothing tighter. Chris Bear with Grizzly Bear? Mesmerizingly great. And Thomas has a stable of solid drummers he works with; some more twitchy than others but always awesome. Joanna Newsom “” and anybody who knows me can attest to this “” is one of my favorite musical minds in the world. But I think she may have taken a wrong step a few months ago?

Her show in Gnoksville was very problematic to me. I love her music, period. I love her singing, period. I love the fact that the lyrics are like that; I like it and I love it and I will always buy her albums the day they come out no matter how spensive they Я. But I think there’s something a little sneaky going on right now that makes me miss the first time I saw her.

I’m going to get this all wrong, but I think we were all in New York in like, 2005. And there was a show at the Bowery that must have been, like, Dewendra, Antony & the Johnsons (with special performance artist guest), CocoRosie, and Joanna Newsom. I don’t know who was in what order this night, but all I know is that I emerged with L”” from the bar, and Joanna Newsom was standing in front of her harp, clapping her hands, talmbout the Panopticon. Is there an easier way to make a nation fall in love with you? Then she played some stuff from the Milk Eyed Mender, and literally that NIGHT I ran home and overnighted her discs to me, and they became staples of our household’s motions in the car as well as a constant soundtrack to all things. This was one of those Epic, Change ur Life shows. Was anybody else there? Does anybody remember when this was? She sang a version of Bridges and Balloons that made us all almost cry.

One of the things that appeals to me about the harp is that it is an inherently non-chromatic instrument. You get these pedals, you put the harp in a key or a mode, and sure, you can change them, but a lot of the more basic choral requirements allow you to focus on moving the fingers. What this means is that some of the Houdini escapes possible in piano music, or string music, simply aren’t possible. J-New seems to have been happy with this for a few years. But now, her live arrangements are very chromatic “” all the notes that aren’t in the harp are being noodled through by strings and winds. It’s sort of like somebody coming and filling in your four-frame windows with a bunch of bird and leaf decals. There’s a somewhat sadistic insistence to those arrangements’ chromae. But that wasn’t really objectionable. What was objectionable was her drummer, who seemed to have been given a vocal mic for to perform with her the Onstage Banter. It wasn’t pretty. It was awkward, and when he was playing, there was a surfeit of gestures designed to place little multiple-note ruffs and fills in places where they oughtn’t be. It was right on the line between ornament and rhythmic footprint, like that girl in high school who touched everybody’s shoulders just a little too lightly. Don’t front like you didn’t have that girl. For those of you who went to Catholic Boyz School, you had your own problems and you are forgiven. A better analogy might be that his participation felt Actively Lazy, inasmuch as he was certainly wriggling around a lot on that stool, but then the thing that he played seemed to be coming from a Stoner Logic space, rather than from a logic that belonged to the songs.

Now. I don’t know whose fault this is. I think about stage presence a lot, because I don’t perform often enough in a year to really be too self-aware of it. I know that I am usually endearing at bantering, so I try to do that, but I also know that in some audiences, an anecdote is not what they paid for and therefore get on with the étude, sonny. I also know that I am a keyboard player, so there’s a limited amount of physical movement I can do to show the audience what a great time I’m having. So I try to have that radiate out in the banter, and in the approach to the piece physically: a little aggression, a little side-show, a little ooh-la-la. Similarly, I like to share the stage with people who have interesting presences “” Sam can command a space, he is a born performer. Thomas tries another method, which is to sort of black hole the space. To listen to his music and watch him has a lot more to do with your own relationship to your emotions than it does to him and his, which is a magic trick quite unsuspected, but almost uniformly successful. In the context of a band bearing somebody’s name, is it not that somebody who needs to direct all the mannerisms on stage, like, Butoh-strict?

Point is: I think her drummer got a lot of people off on the wrong foot with her stage show, which is a shame. She is really one of The Minds around today, I think, and I’m sort of into this misstep. I also was particularly irritated with the drummer (who, by the way, was really handsome and had a nice air about him and I’m sure is a lovely person for whom I will buy many meals and things) because St Vincent, who is a powerful and excellent songstress, has a drummer who is à propos from the book of Diana Vreeland or something; I mean look at him, above! He is just slightly overdressed, which is what you want your drummer to do. He is dressed to deliver. St. Vincent’s show was great, because she relied on each of their instruments to their strengths. The flute, he looped and harmonized; the strings, they filled in chords and the drums were an essay in perfection: the right stroke on the right membrane at the right time. It sounds simplistic, but even when you get into the more experimental realms of things, there still lurk the old ghosts of doing things properly, comme il faut. (To this effect, I ate dinner a few years ago at a very experimental restaurant in Paris; it was quite abstract, but one of the courses arrived and the waiter announced that it was “La poitrine de porc avec sa petite salade de lentilles vertes…” which is, you know, the stomach of the pork WITH HER LITTLE SALAD of green lentils. The idea here is that le porc, no matter the alchemy that had been applied to the artichokes the course before, to say nothing of the freeze-dried operations that would be applied to the foie gras, was going to be served with her traditional salad that appertaineth to her.) The articulations were heaven without your eye being drawn to them; the more complicated the gesture, the less attention he drew to it. It was quite Japanese, in its sense, and so I was impress’t, and took his picture, and forgot his name.

Moral of story: Big Ears was totally great; I Love Joanna Newsom no matter whom she hire; Terry Riley is like adorable grandma, I love everything, I love Knoxville, I am grateful for the kind reception we got both as the 802 tour, as me solo, as Sam solo, as Thomas solo, as Ben Frost solo, as everybody! There was a real we-spirit about this festival, which is exactly as it should be.

I am going to my bed-chamber.

Deep within the basement of an East London working-men’s club, two men who have never been inside such a place before sit beside one another having pink make-up applied to their faces, glitter to their cheekbones, and feather epaulettes to their shoulder pads. Frequently, they catch one another’s eye and giggle in a manner that would doubtless prompt censorious disapproval here on an average night.

Ho! I had literally just been in that same basement with the most outlandish drag queens not a month prior to the publication of that article! One of them had me eat popcorn off her implants! If you’re going to start a paragraph talmbout where I do and do not pass the evenings, at least have the courtesy to ask a bitch!

Second, I’m shocked that nobody’s fixed the toe-curling rendering of the Icelandic title of Sigur Rós’s last album. I’m not asking for Eths and Thorns and Umlauts everywhere, but “Meo suo i eyrum vio spilum endalaust” sounds like a Portuguese streetwalker’s solicitations performed through novocaine. Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaust could just as happily be rendered with the eths (ð) as d’s; the o is just too much. I feel especially badly when Valgeir Sigurðsson gets rendered out as Sigurosson; it’s cruelly lazy! English people! Spell their names right or, at least, close to right or you’ll never get your IceSave Reparationz!

But also: everybody get excited for Jónsi’s album. It’s gonna be so great. I’ll write more about it closer to the time.

The big excitement for the night was that Daníel Bjarnason won Best Composition, which is so cool, for one of the pieces from his album Processions, which was just released on Bedroom Community.

Hjaltalín came and played the two last shows, and one of their two singers, this girl Sigga (who I just found out has the improbably delicious last name “” not a patrynomic “” “Thorlacius”) had also won an award before, so it was a little bit of a lovefest. She is my favorite because she is a big girl who rocks it out; you see her going down the street and it’s nobody better coiffed, nobody better turned out with the garments:

I am so into a diaphanous gown. I’ve been literally counting the seconds until André Leon Talley is on Top Model this season wearing his “13 custom-made Chado Ralph Rucci cloaks.” Also I have a weird fascination with Hjaltalín’s bass player, who is one of those constantly smiling faces on the streets of Reykjavík, and also I think is the only person I know of in the entirety of Ever who can do facial hair properly “” behold:

Squinty, but he could kind of get it, right?

Also amazing was the memorial video in the middle, to commemorate everybody who died in the last year. The PHOTOS of these people, good lord, they were so exquisite! If I can find some online I’ll post them here; these men had such unbelievable hair. And it was great to see how many people on the screen were parents of musicians “” the whole audience was like, who momma that? Who momma that is? And you’d realize it was the mother of the lady from the orchestra who etc. etc. etc. Quite moving. Then, afterparties, afterparties, afterparties, confusing parties, not-confusing parties, boring parties, fun parties, screaming parties, drunk parties, sober parties. At a certain point, Jónsi and I excused ourselves to interview each other for the Grapevine magazine “” sort of like the Reykjavík Village Voice “” and we thought that the best place to do it was the Leather Bar (each town has one), which, because it’s Iceland, is run by the sweetest leather daddy you ever will meet, whose day job is translating cartoons from the English. Apparently he does the Simpsons, and then on weekend nights, runs the fetish club for, like, the two bears in Iceland. It’s fabulous. And I think now my new rule is that all interviews have to be done in fetish clubs.

Then, walking home, the typical weekend in Reykjavík zombie movie of drunk people:

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It’s not much to look at, I know, but this is like, four in the morning, and everybody is on the street, and there are girls screaming and broken glass everywhere. There is something so apocalyptic about that place.

Is there a word for generational anxiety about travel? Sometimes when I see groups of backpackers my age “” be they from America, Germany, or whatever “” I get really really freaked out. Where do they buy those clothes? Why do they have those dippy smiles on their faces? I used to think that my mistrust for them was totally irrational and evil and that I was a wicked creature. But then I learned something last summer! It turns out that backpackers are really bad for small economies because they bring their own food, and don’t spend any money! Now, this was explained to me by, like, a Rather Tipsy Faroese tourism minister, but still. Transporting your own Gorp from Dusseldorf to Reykjavík is Bad for the World. This is my talking point and I’m going to stick to it. (Note: I was going to have a little inset picture of backpackers here, but I realized that I was basically trolling through Swiss Lesbians’s Flickr accounts, and that really isn’t fair usage, is it? I’m sure they are well-meaning. They should just come and spend money in the Kluh and at the health food store HERE so that this country doesn’t completely explode and turn into the Cuba of the North).