Nico
Muhly,

I love the feeling in New York of these last two weeks in August. I think for a lot of people (especially people in Publishing?) it’s mind-numbingly boring, but there’s something very exciting about watching the men working in the elementary school across the street from our apartment dusting off the desks, wheeling in a new water cooler, de-gooing the windows to make room for new paper cutouts.

Last year at this time I was listening incessantly to this one song by The Robot Ate Me. Now, this is a project by a boy called Ryland; I don’t fully understand the title of his project but I’m not sure you’re meant to.

[audio:2-01 On Vacation.mp3]
The Robot Ate Me On Vacation

Listen to how awesome the clarinet is during the chorus of this song, just gently shading the vocal line with a little halo. It reminds me of a child drawing an angel’s halo, where the idea that it vanishes when it’s behind the head doesn’t really enter into it. I would say that everybody should buy this particular album, entitled On Vacation, but that you should not by any means buy the album entitled Good World, which is an Offense against God & Man Also.

Sometimes I wonder with Indie Music if a lot of it isn’t about working the Uglies out of the system; there seems to be this Shadow Notion that if you have a song that is an Offense against God & Man Also that people will be forced to “deal with it.” I think in the classical world, a lot of those issues got worked out between the 30’s and the 70’s: as in, sifting out the kind of thing that’s Difficultly Beautiful (Britten?), Beautifully Difficult (Boulez), Just Ugly (Stockhausen ““ I know, I know, whatever, I have never liked it), Ugly but Conceptually Beautiful (Sessions), Conceptually Ugly but Beautiful, and so on and so forth, as well as the people who have the patience for each. Obviously, it comes down to a matter of taste but I think in the universe of classical music, we have developed a set of skills to distinguish between Craft (at a fundamental level, beyond the level of personal taste) and Just Screwing Around. Check this out:

[audio:01 Djien.mp3]
The Robot Ate Me Dijen

Like, you know? The squeak in the clarinet at the end, is that on purpose? Does it matter? By what criteria can we measure the recording, the performance…once the rules are, “it’s lo-fi, it doesn’t matter how busted it is,” I feel like all bets are off. And, obviously, I love to be challenged when I listen, and I am the happiest to listen to anything that I feel like has been made in a spirit of generosity. But when I suspect that the motives are Elsewhere, it’s harder for me to hop eagerly on board.

A brief caveat about my including Britten in that list above. He is one of my all-time favorite composers because sometimes his music is so naturally appealing to me that I feel completely at one with it. Then, other times, I feel like he is telling travel stories, cooking food he learned how to make other times; usually this is more difficult to immediately engage with, and sticks in the back of your mouth for a few days like a random caraway seed before you realize how much you loved it in the first place.

I am about to celebrate what is known as my Golden Birthday. People have been going on about this for a little bit, talking about, “oh, it’s so fun! it’s the best year EVER,” so, I merrily Wikipedia’d It and discovered nothing useful in particular, except for some weird other birthday customs (as well as some randomly inconsistent and uncorrected WikiKapitalization and Punktuation):

If the knife touches the bottom or when withdrawn from the cake comes out dirty the Birthday boy or girl may have to kiss either the nearest boy or girl (Opposite sex).

Birthday cakes have been a tradition dating back as far as the Middle Ages when the English would conceal symbolic items such as gold coins, rings and thimbles inside their cakes. Each item was associated with a prediction. For example, a person finding a gold coin in a birthday cake would supposedly become wealthy where a person discovering a thimble would never marry.

Hmm, Dire Portents indeed! I don’t recall if any Mystic Tailsmans appeared inside my 25th birthday cake, but 25 was certainly a very exciting and bizarre year. I do remember us all discovering a board game in the thrift store in South Róyalton, VT, which involved one person putting on a bib and another person putting on a wick-on-a-chestplate and then the two people engage in some kind of weird frottage. I want to end on a slightly more severe note with a bit of W^ill’m Byrd:

[audio:03 Miserere mei.mp3]
Byrd Miserere mei, Deus
John Rutter / The Cambridge Singers

Text
from Psalm 51

Miserere mei, Deus: secundum magnam misericordiam tuam.
Et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum: dele iniquitatem meam.

Have mercy upon me, O God, after thy great goodness : according to the multitude of thy mercies do away mine offences. Wash me throughly from my wickedness : and cleanse me from my sin.

Indeed! The thing that makes this particular motet so delicious is the moment at “Et secundum multitudinem” (roughly 1:30 in). Until that point, the harmonies had been dipping around darker valleys, occasionally peeking above the tenors and basses writhing up and down scales. At that moment, we leave the mountains and hop directly into the clouds for a second ““ the upper voices join hands for this little phrase. It’s very, very satisfying. The motet then continues to tighten itself back up into steely supplications, but for me, the brief oasis of that phrase makes the piece work.