Category: music

Creating something every day for 365 days: the music

Lichtenbergians

Posted on by Dale

This past Saturday was the Annual Meeting of the Lichtenbergian Society, a top-secret organization for creative procrastinators. That is, creative men who procrastinate, not men who procrastinate creatively. We celebrate the virtues of procrastination. We are a veritable support group for procrastination. With drinking.

This Annual Meeting is one of the most important evenings of the year for me. Even though we gather often during the year and are companionable and argumentative, even though we have a website through which we communicate our ideas and passions, still this particular meeting stands out, because it’s the only meeting in which we have a ritualized ceremony.

We toast our genius Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, German physicist, aphorist, and satirist, and inveterate procrastinator. We submit Corroborative Evidence of our Claims, i.e., creative works the creators of which would have been well-advised to have procrastinated over a good deal longer. Then we Consign said Corroborative Evidence to the Flames.

Next comes the part that means the most to me. We have a journal in which the recording secretary has recorded each member’s Proposed Efforts the preceding year. The secretary reads out the list of what we thought we might accomplish this year, and to each we have to respond: “Accomplished” or “Cras melior est” (our motto, which means “Tomorrow is better”). After everyone has confessed responded to the secretary, and there’s a lot of discussion and commentary, we stand and have a silent meditation on the Year’s Efforts, followed by a silent toast.

This year, I am ashamed to say, I accomplished all four of my goals. Last year I was zero for seven, which is also pretty bad, but at least had the virtue of making me an exemplary Lichtenbergian. This year I felt cheesy, as if I had cheated somehow by choosing easy-to-conquer goals, and as if I had not set goals extravagant enough to be worth attempting. Success did not make me feel as if I had accomplished anything.

So in the next part of our ceremony, I was determined to challenge myself more. This is the Engrossment of the Proposed Efforts: each Lichtenbergian states for the record what he hopes to accomplish creatively this year. This is an awe-inspiring exercise, because you know that at the next winter solstice, you’re going to be confronted with your claims and have to acknowledge your success or failure.

After everyone is done, we have another toast, to the Proposed Efforts, followed by the agenda. This year’s topic was “compulsion and void,” revolving around the polar ideas that a) we are compelled by our nature to create, and b) we are confronted by the void which renders our creations pointless. How do we deal with these ideas as artists? And it may be that more toasts are made as the evening progresses. You get the idea.

What were my Proposed Efforts?

  • continue my painting, both the abstract Field series and my studies for the Epic Lichtenbergian Portrait
  • restart the 24-Hour Challenge, which to my surprise I had proposed last year to do only for six months, which is just about what I managed
  • compose one complete work, any description
  • write one good short story
  • begin work on A Perfect Life, my proposed description of what it’s like to live a life like mine
  • and in conjunction with all of the above, produce a lot of crap, i.e., produce boatloads of work

I think what I’ll do is blog about this for a couple of days. I need to write more anyway, and I need to set forth some ideas about this whole process and each of the particulars.

Art

Posted on by Dale

I had an interesting experience last night, in which I encountered a work of art that affected me viscerally, aesthetically, and intellectually. It was especially powerful because I had not gone in expecting to be so affected.

The opera Orfeo ed Euridice by Gluck is one of those that everyone talks about being so wonderful, but I had never seen nor heard it. I made a feeble attempt yesterday at becoming familiar with it, but downloading it and giving it quick listen on the way up to the Cobb Energy Center (Atlanta Opera’s current home) wasn’t enough.

If anything, that prepared me to be disappointed. I found the piece to be ponderous, just so much early classical dithering. “Pretty.” I knew that these early works (like the works of Handel, Haydn, and Monteverdi) have found favor in the past forty years, but I also knew that it takes a pretty slick director to make them work, usually by layering “meaning” on top of the music. I was sanguine about my prospects for the evening. In fact, I stopped and bought a mini-Moleskine to slip into my jacket so that I could write down my ideas during intermission(s).

The notebook remains unsullied. I was captivated from beginning to end.

The music was beautiful. What was muddy and ponderous in the recording I downloaded was clear and limpid in performance. Part of that is the difference between live and recorded, part was the interpretation. While it rarely moved me or thrilled me the way that Boheme or Elisir d’Amore or Figaro do, it was simple and gorgeous.

(I’ll say right now that Gluck’s much-vaunted “reform” of opera is not just hype. Rather than a succession of florid vocal showpieces, the show was taut and moved right along, clocking in at 85 minutes without intermission.)

The production was designed by John Conklin, originally for the Glimmerglass Opera Festival. You can see photos here (pdf, but worth it). That was the first pleasant surprise: a hyper-competent intelligence guiding the look and feel of the thing. It didn’t overreach into vague postmodern metaphor, it simply provided a good-looking and coherent mise en scène for the action of the opera.

The performers were topnotch. Countertenor David Daniels knocked Orfeo out of the park. Yes, it took a little while to get used to an alto voice coming out of the throat of a man, but it didn’t take long. Katherine Whyte was a beautiful Euridice, and both she and Deanne Meek as Amore were very effective actors. (You may remember my complaint about the soprano in Elisir last time.)

But it was the direction of the piece that bowled me over. Lillian Groag did a phenomenal job of structuring stage pictures to fill the music. The overture was a harvest festival, with all the usual peasant business, ending with a joyous round dance that ended abruptly as the dancers realized with a shock that Euridice had fallen in their midst. That set up the opening number, which is a chorus of mourning. Orfeo’s punctuating cries of “Euridice!” began offstage, a nice touch: rather than a repetitive “woe is me” effect (as the original score suggests), we were led into action as he learns of her death and then comes onstage to confront it.

It was the ending, though, that sent me soaring out into the evening. This version of the story has a happy ending. Yes, I know. After Orfeo cannot resist Euridice’s pitiful pleadings, he turns and embraces her, and she dies a second time. It was actually quite affecting. So he lies down to die himself, but Amore shows up and rewards his corragio by bringing Euridice back to life again.

Happy ending, triumph of love, etc., etc. The chorus streams onto the stage to celebrate. The happy couple are seated, and before them two dancers, dressed in gleaming robes of white and gold, re-enact their story to the final chorus: they’re in love, she dies, he journeys, she awakens, they journey, he turns, she dies again.

And then…

The dancer Euridice does not arise again. The dancer Orfeo turns in puzzlement to Amore, but she has turned and is walking upstage. She’s leaving. The real Orfeo leaps to his feet, distressed. The chorus reaches out in dismay to Amore, and on the last note of the opera, she turns to look over her shoulder, her face an enigma. Blackout.

Whoa.

I barely had time to see it coming. What had been a lovely rendering of an 18th-century classic was suddenly wrenched into the 21st century. The original myth, with its themes of love and loss, was suddenly, awfully, terribly restored to its rightful focus, subverting the artificial happy ending of Gluck’s audiences and throwing our humanity into the bright light of mortality. Absolutely wonderful.

New music, 10/28/09

Posted on by Dale

I actually sat down and wrote a new piece of music last night. It’s a surprise for someone who would never read this blog, and its performance is far from assured, so I’m not going to post the actual score here.

I will link to the mp3, however.

It’s not done. I am going in tonight and kicking the last verse up half a step, that kind of hokeyness is part of what the piece is about, and then adding a semi-elaborate coda.

If it is scheduled for performance, I’ll let you know.

UPDATE, 9:09 PM: The mp3 is now the finished, cleaned-up version.

Portrait, 9/21/09

Posted on by Dale

From the same photo as the last one, but partial, and enlarged. I’m still not bold enough to start “coloring” in the entire surface.

In other news, I opened an “abortive” second movement to the string/bassoon piece and was revulsed by what I heard. I cannot seem to get my brain to turn the music back on.

Listening

Posted on by Dale

I’ve set the Havergal Brian aside for the moment, he’s just not doing it for me, and pulled out another CD from my shopping bag in the van. This one is Lamentate by Arvo Pärt. It is for piano and small orchestra, not exactly a concerto, but a suite of pieces that feature the piano as the “one” with which we identify.

I like it a lot, so went to load it into iTunes, then found out I already had. Clearly I have never paid attention to it.

It was written in response to Anish Kapoor’s gigantic sculpture Marsyas and in fact had its premiere there in the Tate Gallery’s Turbine Hall. I returned to that fact after listening to the piece twice and it makes an interesting difference in hearing it.

The music is very beautiful: stark, powerful, tender, and very sad. Pärt says that, inspired by the staggering vastness of the Kapoor piece, it is a lament for the living, who have to deal with the issues of death and suffering, who have to struggle with the pain and hopelessness of this world.

The large movements, like the first two, marked Minacciando and Spietato (“threatening” and “pitiless”) are awesome, but it is the slow movements that tear at your heart. The fourth, Pregando (“praying”), is a lovely meditation, while the ninth, Lamentabile, is Pärt at his breath-holding best. Using a modal scale, the piano and oboe trade a plaintive lament against a steady ppp ostinato. The upper keys of the piano give out frightened little bird cries while the lower strings sigh and dissolve, all in the enormous echoing cavern of the exhibit hall. I can only imagine what it would be like to sit beneath that gargantuan sculpture and hear this music.

This is music I want to write.

Random listening

Posted on by Dale

One of the benefits of tripling my hard drive space is that I can now add more of my CD collection to my iTunes. The fact that I long ago exceeded my old iPod’s actual capacity frees me up to add whatever I like, and now I have room to do so.

So until I can get over to the dark and cluttered corner that is my old CD collection and go through to see what I’ve been missing, Handel’s Water Music springs to mind, I simply snatched up a stack of CDs from the floor and transferred them to my van. I figure I need to at least listen to them again before deciding I need them on tap.

I seem to have purchased a great deal of Havergal Brian. I know I got his huge “Gothic” Symphony back in the day, and it begins well. And I think I had a few of his smaller symphonies on LP even, from the estimable Music Heritage Society.

Who is he? He has his own website and his own Wikipedia page: a composer more respected than loved (although his Society seems fairly idolatrous), and whose music tends to exasperate more than clarify.

Anyway, this particular CD is of the “Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme” and the Symphonies No. 20 and 25. Performance is by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, conducted by Andrew Penny. So there.

His music is challenging to say the least. It’s nominally tonal, but without a diatonic center. Themes tend to be dark and noodling, and there is nothing like development, just constant exploration, never looking back. Mood swings are precipitous and neverending. Suddenly, we’ll swing round a corner and hit a major chord, and then just dissolve away into the next vista. Movements don’t end, they just stop.

This might be fascinating, but it’s not, at least not so far.

I do have to say that the “Fantastical Variations” is a lot of fun, but it’s easier to hear because it is weaving incredible elaborations on a very familiar tune. (I won’t say what. Ask me to play it for you next time you’re around the fire.) The man had a gift of invention and of orchestration, to be sure.

And one has to admire his doggedness. Almost none of his music was performed, and none of it very often. He lived to be 96, and eight of his 32 symphonies were written after he was 90. None of his symphonies were recorded until he was 95. It is history such as this that makes me wonder whether I should hang it up, like Charles Ives, or keep going, as poor Havergal Brian did.

Goals

Posted on by Dale

Here we are, end of GHP and vacation, the beginning of the school year, one of those cusps that seem to demand that I set some goals, to figure out what I want to do next. I don’t know why, especially since these are no-brainers. It’s not as if I’m going to not do these things if I don’t write them down, but writing them seems to give them some legitimacy.

  • get back into the 24 hour project work. I have #12, #13, and #14 still to set, and they’re all three doozies. I really ought to try to come up with two more movements to go with the string quartet/bassoon piece.
  • get serious about my “Field” series of paintings, especially Seth’s commission
  • schedule Tai Chi time, and stick to the schedule. Grayson gave me a beginner CD for my birthday, and I’ve only looked at the first section once. The problem is finding time and space. But I must.
  • get serious about my ELP sketching, especially faces. Soon it’s going to be time to start sketching in paint as well. It has occurred to me that proficiency in graphite does not automatically transfer to gouache.
  • do some writing in the Neo-Futurist vein for Lacuna. The GHP theatre kids used the Neo-Futurist mold for their work this summer and it was a fascinating way to do theatre.
  • and of course the labyrinth needs attention: mowing, reseeding, repair, installation of the omphalos

That’s not too much to think about, is it? It does not include routine stuff, like cleaning my study or doing the final reports on GHP, or updating the WordPress software everywhere, or starting back up with Masterworks Chorale and Lacuna Group.

Various updates

Posted on by Dale

I brought the bowl back to the dorm this morning. It’s awfully heavy. I continually fear I will drop it.

The cracks are now a feature, not a bug. When I think back on the puzzle of what to do with the interior, I am reminded of the line from Casablanca: “It seems that destiny has taken a hand.”

I spent an hour with a string quintet this morning reading through and working on Waltz for string quartet & bassoon. A cello subbed for the bassoon. It was great fun, and I was able to help them hear what I heard and to play it. I think that with actual rehearsal it would be a very presentable piece indeed. My friend and colleague Stephen Czarkowski plans to program it this fall, so maybe we’ll get a YouTube video performance of that.

There were three places that I wasn’t sure were effective, and I found that I was right about those as being weak. I was able to fix one of them on the spot, and the other two are simple doubling issues, i.e., I need more oomph at two spots that sounded bare, so all I have to do is copy and paste some notes. Done, for a ducat!

I haven’t blogged about this because it’s been touchy, but for the past week here at the Land of Pan-Dimensional Mice we’ve been under “social distancing protocol” restrictions due to the flu. No one could sit directly next to each other, everyone was issued hand sanitizer, etc., etc. (There is no hand sanitizer in the city. Tomorrow there will be no Sharpie markers.)

The “no touching” thing had some interesting repercussions. We canceled Field Day and the Saturday night dance. (Everyone dressed up in their 80s finery anyway.) I canceled my Grand Ball. We had to cut seating at peformances in half, which meant we had to double the number of performances, which meant increased monitoring duties for me, which meant less time to get the program ready to close out. It was very stressful.

The worst was facing the fact that we were going to have do the final Prism Concert twice, cancel the Friday night Graffiti Dance (the kids sign each others’ t-shirts in a last paroxysm of bonding), and somehow split up Saturday morning’s Convocation. What kind of good-bye is it when half the people you love are not there? And the idea that we were going to keep these kids from hugging each other was ludicrous. The increasing anxiety about this very real downer was getting to everyone.

Last night, however, the word finally came that since we had not had anyone register any symptoms since our only case ten days ago, we were free of restrictions. We could end our summer as we should. And there was much rejoicing.

All in all, we were magnificent. We responded quickly and appropriately, and the kids were fantastic in their good-spirited compliance with the protocols. They were actually grateful that they were still at GHP, and many said so. All the final events were kept on the schedule, and as far as I know no one was turned away from something they wanted to see. We deserve much praise.

Two days, one hour, two minutes until GHP is over.

Waltz, 7/14/09

Posted on by Dale

This morning I had the pleasure of hearing the Waltz for String Quartet & Bassoon read through by the strings majors here at GHP, under the direction of the inestimable Michael Giel.

They read it as a whole group, so it had a bigger sound, which was not at all bad. Also, since the woodwinds were hard at work on their concert for tonight, the bassoon part was taken by a solo cello, which was also fine.

What can I say? It worked, and it worked admirably. I’m pleased. Thank you, Michael and strings!

In other news, Stephen Czarkowski has ordered parts in order to perform it this fall. Who knows, I may actually write two more movements to go with it.

Omphalos update: The bowl is in the kiln.