{"id":1254,"date":"2009-08-20T22:15:17","date_gmt":"2009-08-21T03:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/?p=1254"},"modified":"2009-08-20T22:30:22","modified_gmt":"2009-08-21T03:30:22","slug":"alice-tully-hall-sounds-great","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nicomuhly.com\/news\/2009\/alice-tully-hall-sounds-great\/","title":{"rendered":"Alice Tully Hall Sounds Great"},"content":{"rendered":"
So, the new Alice Tully Hall sounds fantastic. My friend Elena and I sat in literally the last row all the way to the left for the John Adams chamber music concert featuring the ICE ensemble<\/a>. The sound doesn’t have to be great in the last seat in the house (I saw the Kronos Hvartet from the last seat at BAM’s Harvey Theater and I couldn’t hear squat) but the sound was excellent. In this post I want to touch on three issues. Number one: The fucking caf\u00e9 in the new Alice Tully Hall, which continues to be terrible. Number two: John Adams and Synthesizers. Number three: new music leather and hair.<\/p>\n Number One<\/strong>: The fucking caf\u00e9 in the New Alice Tully Hall, which continues to be terrible. I want to love this place. I want this place to be everything I need out of life: a place to relax and kill time in between various things to do at Lincoln Center. During Lincoln Center festival, in particular, stuff is happening all the time; it’s very smart to have a central place where you can get a sammich and cappuccino. I have blogged about my experience there before<\/a>, and was glad to see upon arrival that the Officious Homosexual was nowhere to be seen. Excellent. So, I sat down with my laptop, and started looking for an outlet. Okay, not so many outlets. I worked off of battery power for a while until I saw some of the ICE kids (one of whom was the unbelievably fabulously named David Byrd-Marrow, an effortlessly well-intoned horn player) and then I got shy and nervous and started hunting aggressively for a place to recharge. Now. There is an outlet “\u201d a pair of outlets in the corner of the caf\u00e9. I go over there, plug in. I’m there for an hour, I have my meeting, I order multiple cappuccinos, I order food. As I turned my attention to something online (which now works there, wirelessly and without great effort), a small woman came over to me and said that I was not allowed to plug in my laptop. Excuse me? It sucks for me and it sucks for her: we are both victims. Clearly, she doesn’t personally<\/em> care if I plug in my laptop. But somewhere, in some office somewhere in Lincoln Center, there is somebody who has decided, presumably with a grimly autoformatted document generated on Microsoft Word on their PC, that it is Not Allowed<\/strong> to have a Laptop (or “any other device”) plugged in in the single pair of outlets in the corner of at65, the caf\u00e9 in Alice Tully Hall. I wasn’t about to confront this poor woman, because I know how that conversation goes (“it’s not my rules”) . Short of the “take me to your leader” conversation, I decided to put a pin in it and take it 2 tha web. If any reader in this space can explain this rule to me, holla in the comments. Also forward to me all relevant .docz.<\/p>\n Number Two<\/strong>: John Adams and Synthesizers. Adams has used synthesizers in, like, most of his mature works. They creep in even in early works like Harmonium<\/em> (1980); they comprise the body of his Hoodoo Zephyr<\/em> (1993), and they appear as more naturalized orchestral citizens in Nixon in China<\/em>, Slominsky’s Earbox<\/em>, The Death of Qlinghoffer<\/em>, etc. <\/p>\n [audio:TouristSong.mp3] See, so, it’s like, you know, a piece for synthesizer. I like Adams’s shamelessness about putting MIDI on his website, including even the dreaded MIDI saxophone<\/a>. And the dreaded MIDI hi-hat. And I like how it’s integral to his compositional process and how that trickles down into MIDI keyboards turning up in the ensemble. My big question was: how is this stuff going to age? Check out this second movement from Gnarl\u00c3\u00bd Buttons<\/em>, one of the pieces from Monday’s programme:<\/p>\n [audio:MadCow.mp3] So, it’s something interesting to think about. It’s from 1996; when you put a clarinet in a piece, you don’t think, how is this going to age (even though the clarinet was the new toy in Mozart’s time), and yet, thinking about synthesizers there is this idea of a time capsule. Check out this aria from Klinghoffer<\/em>:<\/p>\n [audio:ItIsAsIf.mp3] And you think, well, it’s a gorgeous piece of music. It’s got this Alto Rhapsod\u00c3\u00bd<\/em> stylez male chorus in the back, a really unexpected pants role Palestinian terrorist, Alice Goodman’s twisty, imagistic poetry: everything you want from stuff. And yet: synth tom-tom? I think that this opera will be around in 500 years (the last eight minute aria is some of the best Adams music that there is), and I wonder what the music director of, like, the West Baghdad Community Opera in 2449 Anno Domini<\/em> is going to do to rescue those MIDI tom-toms from themselves. Here is that last chorus:<\/p>\n [audio:YouEmbraced.mp3] This is some beautiful vocal writing, some exciting synthesized piano, some great use of 60’s soul backup vocals, and wonderful lyrics from miss thing<\/a>. When she says spinal column? Somebody at Trinity College, Cambridge, needs to send that heifer an extra treacle sponge for that. So good. And when she says, “long-imagined son” at the end (5:45 into the excerpt), I still get a little weepy.<\/p>\n
\nJohn Adams Tourist Song<\/em> from Hoodoo Zephyr<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n
\nJohn Adams 2. Mad Cow<\/em> from Gnarly Buttons<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n
\nJohn Adams It Is As If Our Earthy Life Were Spent Miserably<\/em> from The Death of Klinghoffer<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n
\nJohn Adams You Embraced Them<\/em> from The Death of Klinghoffer<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n