Saturday, September 12, 2009

A George Crumb Celebration

The University of Colorado's Faculty Tuesdays has started up again with the beginning of the fall semester. The first two weeks featured Peter Cooper on oboe, and David Korevaar's Clavier Trio. Both concerts were good starts for the season.

Korevaar chose an interesting transcription of Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht" by Eduard Steuermann. I've always liked this piece but was somewhat taken back by the use of the piano. The violin (Arkady Fomin) and cello (Jesus Castro-Balbi) were too often covered by the piano that it just didn't sit right with me.

And then this week ....... A George Crumb Festival!!

Steve Bruns, Hsing-ay Hsu and Daniel Kellogg, all Colorado faculty members, coordinated four nights of the music of George Crumb to celebrate Crumb's 80Th birthday. Crumb was there each night and was warmly received by the audience, faculty and performers. Some of the scores of some of his music were posted on the walls of a reception room and aren't like anything that I could figure out. Circular staffs, clusters of chords; pointers and arrows; strange inscriptions which must mean something to someone. Typical Crumb, I suppose. At CU there were also afternoon lectures and master classes and recitals that I couldn't make but which, I'm told, were fun.

Crumb began his academic career at Colorado in the early 60s, then taught at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 1999. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1968, among other international prizes. Much of his music is available on 13 CDs from Bridge records.

My first exposure to Crumb was back 8 or 9 years ago when Giora Bernstein conducted a performance of "Ancient Voices of Children" at the Colorado Music Festival. In this work a soprano sings Lorca poems into the sound box of the piano with woodwind and percussion accompaniment I liked it enough to get a CD at the time but over the years when I returned to it the sound wasn't the same. When it's a CD compared to a live performance the CD always pales.

What is Crumb's music like? He's hard to categorize but you can recognize him when you hear him -- I think. I bought several of his CDs and I'm listening to some now. While I can't say I really like it, it is mysterious and interesting.

The first night's concert saw David Korevaar perform Crumb's "Eine Kleine Mitternachtmusik" on a "well tampered-with clavier", ruminations on 'Round Midnight' by Theolonius Monk. During the week the pianists performed on a "well tampered-with clavier", a Baldwin. It was modified with a "Dampfenader" to control the damper and sustain pedals so the pianists could stand up and reach the piano's insides without worrying about the pedals.

Also on the opening Tuesday, 4 percussionists from the Colorado Symphony, Hsing-ay on piano, Patrick Mason, baritone and Julie Simpson, mezzo all coordinated by Allan McMurray did "Voices from A Forgotten World". The program stated there were over 150 percussion instruments on stage and I believe it. The songs included some familiar tunes abstracted in Crumb's way. Strangest to me was "Beautiful Dreamer" with Mason and Simpson whispering words to each other -- very memorable for some reason.

The next three nights were more Crumb -- lots of percussion; instruments played in peculiar but interesting ways; and voices whispered, shouted and often very beautiful (particularly Kristin Gornstein). While listening I sometimes wrote notes to myself of impressions of what I was hearing. Here are some in no particular order: instrumental abuse; shouts-singing-whispers; long "loud" silences; round-robin piano - 12 hands; minimalism without repeats; stand-alone sounds; missing melodies; sly inserts; lost sounds; unknowable wrong notes; piano inside and out - a real percussion instrument; tippy-tap and slam; unappetizing sounds; make believe music; endings of long silence.

Crumb has an affinity for Lorca and offers musical settings of his poetry. I've no command of Spanish, so whatever was sung meant nothing to me. Others commented to me about the same language issue. Why not have the songs in ancient Phoenician or Esperanto or some lost language from the Amazon? The communication would be the same.

I tried seeing what the Internet music streaming service Pandora "computed" for a George Crumb "station". After seeding Pandora with just George Crumb's name, it broadcast one of Crumb's "Makrokosmos" piano pieces. Pandora proceeded to then play tracks from works by Stockhausen, Bartok, Varese, Shostakovitch, Morton Feldman and Berio. I tuned it on the next night and got similar results. Crumb's music genome clearly computes to the 20Th century, but he has a distinctly voice.

Was the Crumb Festival successful? Most certainly! Concerts were all well attended, performances garnered standing ovations and everyone seemed to be smiling when they left. I'm glad I went and congratulate the school of music at CU for tackling an ambitious project like this.

Tuesday, September 08, 2009

Right angled tracks

I was listening to Pandora last night, using it's Quick Mix amalgamation of my play list selections. The apparent legal requirement to play only tracks of unrelated music can lead to horrible results. Pandora selected an orchestral piece by Elliot Carter, an atonal disjointed murky piece of music. Then, without a second's break, an equally dissonant contemporary piece by Gregory Kurtag was next. The mathematical similarity between the two pieces, based on some distance function calculation of music content, was obvious. But the musical clash to the ear was jolting -- I really, really objected to the immediate right angled turn. I wasn't really aware it was Carter and Kurtag, but the abrupt clash forced me to figure it out and to think about it. Yuch! I turned off Pandora.

I switched my "chumby" to listening to WQXR in New York. When I lived in Connecticut it was my favorite station, the "voice of the new york times". listened nightly to good music, played in its entirety with entertaining announcers commenting appropriately. It was a first class operation.

When I first connected to WQXR, Haydn's "Farewell" symphony was about finished. The announcer made a few cute remarks about it and then signed off. And then it was just music -- unannounced music -- complete music -- but unknown music. I guessed (correctly as it turned out) that it was guitar concerto by Rodrigo, but why was nobody saying anything? After about 25 minutes it ended with someone saying "check out our online play list to identify the piece you've just heard". Wonderful. Big media's economic problems manifest themselves on WQXR by eliminating the personal touch. Now, at the stroke of midnight the station seems to go on autopilot, playing music from a play list with occasional recorded fragments telling the listener to go to a web site to check out the play list and figure out what was being played. If that isn't a crock! The city that never sleeps now is entertained by an automaton. So much for the state of classical music on the radio and the Internet.

Wednesday, September 02, 2009

An observation on Internet streaming music

With the rise of Internet music, in many ways replacing terrestrial FM radio, I've noticed something that's missing from the experience -- the announcer.

Since the Internet means computers and a user's computer has a keyboard and screen, the Internet music providers assume the listener is in front of a screen and attentive. Not so!

I generally listen to Pandora, Last.FM, Live365 (Contemporary-classical.com) or my own music from my MP3 library. At night I use my "Chumby", an interactive media player which is wirelessly connected to my internal network and thus to the Internet. It's actually a small linux-based touchscreen computer with some neat features. Normally I listen to Pandora while reading then set Chumby's timer to turn off as I go to sleep. I still listen to the music after the lights are turned off. But what I'm hearing is often a puzzle -- I know the piece but can't place the name or I don't think I've ever heard it before and really like it. But what is it? Classical music on FM had an announcer saying something like "Now, Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" and then the announcer would say it again after the piece was broadcast. Stations would also publish their prior day's play lists, so that if I missed the announcer's comments I could go to the web page and figure it out. This doesn't seem possible with Internet classical music streaming today.

When you think about it, the insertion of phrases like "Now Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" and "That was Bela Bartok's String Quartet No 3 with the Takács Quartet" is essentially the same as the insertion of an advertisement inserted on web pages by Google's AdSense -- aural additions versus visual ones. It's actually the insertion of two adjacent phrases "That was" PriorPiece followed by "Now" NextPiece. I've suggested to one of the Internet stations that they provide these announcer tips. It could be optional and possibly an additional revenue stream. Make sense to me. While I'm only interested in classical music from these music streaming services, my son agrees that it would be useful for his music(?) too. I guess no surprise there.

Since the recording industry despises their customer base and forces music streamers to live within the tyranny of tracks the inserted phrases would thus have to something longer like "Sibelius symphony number 6 in D minor, Opus 104, second movement, allegro moderato with the Vienna Philharmonic lead by Lorin Maazel". A bit of a mouthful but better than silence and ignorance.