Nico
Muhly,

So, I write this, as I tend to write these posts nowadays, from the departures lounge at JFK; I have been delayed now five days from the start of the Whale-Watching tour; we have been forced to cancel shows in Germany, the UK, Belgium, and Ireland “” it’s a giant mess. The whole thing, however, has been sort of romantic: I spent twenty minutes on the phone with a woman from the Cunard lines and entertained a fantasy of sailing across the Atlantic with a countertenor friend “” surely they would grant us free passage in exchange for our nightly duets: him singing “Fairest Isle, Öll Isles Excelling” and me accompanying him with the harpsichord patch on the slightly sea-sticky synthesizer with a clattery (but ultimately useless) high F. Surely we would be upgraded to the room with the spiral staircase and a languid Moroccan attendant (all of which are pictured on their dotcom)! Surely we would gorge ourselves on beef Wellington!

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 Stravinsky Octet has put me very much in the mood to blog again. I haven’t done it in a while, because I’ve been in four thousand different places, and made the stupid mistake of starting a blog post on a plane, and then sort of forgot where I filed it, and lost it, and found it, and got very confused, and now I am finally, after a rather trying week in New York, in London, in a hotel run by (and seemingly for) Spanish people, attempting to organize my little black notebook of thoughts.

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.

because this week, my garden is working overtime! Some things I’ve been working on for years are finally coming out, and some things I’ve been working on for less time are slowly pushing their tendrils out of the ground.

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:

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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:

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Boy Lilikoi MIDI parts all as piano (excerpt)

Compare that to the real shit:

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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.

I know, I know, I know, I shouldn’t always do this every time somebody writes something about my friends, but here is a funny and – mostly great article – from the In. D. Pendent about Jónsi’s upcoming album, which begins:

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.

Last night, I went to the Icelandic Music awards, which is just about the funniest thing you can possibly go to as a foreigner. It’s essentially a scaled-down Grammeez, but with way more inside jokes and way more awkward award speeches. What’s also amazing about these awards is the way that everybody, of course, not just knows everybody but also worked on everybody’s project. Like, half of the nominees had made their projects at Greenhouse studios; another slightly different half were artists I’ve recorded with numerous times “” there were almost no strangers to me. All the interstitial banter was carried out by Sigtryggur Baldursson and a woman whose name I forgot but who was easily eight months pregnant. The two of them were in a perpetual state of rushing from the stage to the balcony of the opera house, and breathlessly reading from the teleprompter, and rushing back down. Divine. I would say that I understood about 82% of what was happening, which, all things considered, is not bad for a foreigner.

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:

IMG_0082

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).

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 PhÅ“nix 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:

rubbing the…
oolong, dark dragon, rises.
squeezing the…
moli, jasmine flower, opens.
pressing the…
loonching, dragon well, overflows.

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 Adobeâ„¢ 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:

http://www.jjtiziou.net/jj/

Audience>Message>Strategy>Tactics y’all.

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!

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(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).