Reverb untamed

Reverb has allays been my friend, both the natural and electronic kinds. While the "soup" simile may not be very attractive, it's better than the dry toast effect you get in some dead concert halls. Sibelius remarked somewhere that the orchestra needs a "pedal" and his orchestration often demonstrates that built in kind of resounding acoustic.
The other night I went to a concert of the Dessoff Choirs "Bach Refracted" st the cavernous Church of St Paul the Apostle near Columbus Circle. Two of my pieces, September Canons and Holy Ghosts, were played by two excellent musicians, Todd Reynolds and Libby van Cleve, and in both cases we had to tone down the reverb as the space itself was delivering plenty--too much in fact. This was especially apparent in the choral music--the strange effect was that the initial attack was at a lower level than the echo, and there was plenty of that.The idea that a space might not only reverberate sound but actually amplify it as well is kind of unusual.
Last night I happened to be watching the wonderful film Passage to India. There is a marvelous scene at the spooky Malabar Caves where the echos produced disappear momentarily and then come back louder.I'm not sure if this is possible acoustically, but it made for a awesome moment in the film.The strange echo in St Pauls seemed to me to mimic that. I wonder if Paul of Tarsus ever got to India? He certainly traveled a lot.

Lugubrious

Sometimes, everything seems strangely connected
In my last post I spoke of the Swede Tomas Transtromer and his love of Schubert and his poetic idea that somewhere in the multitudes of New York on a given night, someone must be playing Schubert, and to that person everything else is insignificant.
Yesterday I was perusing a slim volume of his more recent poems, one of which--indeed the title poem--is entitled "The Sorrow Gondola"(Sorgengondolen).It's actual a poem about a piece of music,Franz Liszt's "La Lugubre Gondola II". This very bizarre piano piece uses angular melodies and weird harmonies to create a world of mystery and sorrow--its one of Liszt's very late pieces, composed in Venice (where else!). His friend (and son-in-law!) Wagner died shortly afterwards.also in Venice. I was playing the piece at the piano trying to fathom Liszt's odd chord changes, when I remembered that amongst the vast corpus of the music of John Adams, there is a transcription he made for orchestra of this music; I found the CD and listened. It made so mach more sense in the orchestration than as a piano piece, and this thrilled me to rediscover this strange Adamsian opus.
Now I am going to re read the poem as a musical entity, as if it were to travel in time, as if it was a kind of music.
And then I thought--what would Franz Schubert have thought about it as a lieder text?

Tomas Transtromer

Pictures above:
TT being serenaded at his Nobel lecture; at the piano with one good hand.


Tomas Transtromer has always been my favorite Swedish poet, well maybe neck and neck wih Ekelov, so I was elated to hear he had won the Nobel prize this year. Some naysayers complained that the Swedish Academy, which chooses the Nobel winners, shouldn't have named one of their own country men. But Tomas Transtromer is a universal poet, and his works have been translated widely, into as many as 60 languages.
Music, and its inner meaning for him, is a theme that permeates his poetic output, and he is especially close to Schubert. Sadly, he suffered a stroke several years ago and lost the use of his right arm.He's been a good pianist and now is learning left handed repertory, and it was rumored that for his Nobel lecture he would simply play something of Schubert (a transcription I suppose), but as it turned out various poets read his poetry to him and did so in several languages.
But the moment that I won't forget (I watched this on the Nobel Prize web site) was of a string quintet playing the Schubert C major Quintet right in front of him, only a few feet away. If you know his poem "Schubertiana" you would know what this meant to him.

Here's the first stanza of his poem:

“Schubertiana”
by Tomas Transtr¨omer. (Trans. Kalle R¨ais¨anen)
I.
In the evening-dark of a place outside New York, a look-out point
where one glance can encompass eight million people’s homes.
The giant city over there is a long, flickering snow-drift, a spiral
galaxy on its side.
Inside the galaxy, coffee cups are slid over the counter, store-fronts
beg with passers-by, a crowd of shoes that leave no traces.
The climbing fire-escapes, the elevator doors gliding shut, behind
locked doors a constant swell of voices.
Sunken bodies half-sleep in the subway cars, the rushing catacombs.
I know, also — statistics aside — that right now Schubert is
being played in some room over there and that to someone
those sounds are more important than all those other things.

Almglocken

Rambling along on the "canterelle trail" in Sleepy Giant Park the other Day, I found myself besieged by a group of Mahleresque tunes which had invaded my head. I wondered why this would be. Maybe its the sylvan setting? The pastorale? The futility of looking for chanterelles so late in the season (or the irony, which could accord with the Mahler ditties.)

Actually my son had reawakened my affinity with old Gus, as the other day we were driving and he insisted on playing the Symphony No 1, in the car, and l when we got back to the house he put on a record (yes, an LP) of the Sixth, which I must confess is one of my favorites--the slow movement being desert island material. I used to think the Third's slow movement without parallel, but lately I've thought it a bit too indulgent, somewhat over the top in reiterating those achingly longing long lines of desire. (A colleague of mine after a performance of the Third at Woolsey Hall in NH was heard to complain loudly in the lobby about this music's treacly sentimentality--"it's like a bunch of drunks at a high school reunion singing the alma mater over and over again).
Among other things, what kills me in the Sixth is the use of the almglocken (see picture above)
They appear very subtly (in most recordings) and are quite random in rhythm and pitch--Mahler wanted this "aleatoric" texture to conjure up an alpine pastoral setting. (although truth to be told, had a bunch of cows with their clanking bells wandered into the vicinity of one of his alpine composing huts, he'd have had a fit--he demanded silence from Nature when working.)
Another composer who has used cow bells to great affect is John Adams--in his"Naive and Sentimental Music" among others. And having brought Adams and Mahler together here, I ought to mention the book review in last Sunday's NY Times wherein a new biography of Mahler gives John the excuse to write a short essay on his take on the greatest symphonist since Bruckner.

NO POWER!!

BOLETES

NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN SEVERAL WEEKS AGO. THE HURRICANE SEEMS A DISTANT MEMORY NOW (WE'RE GEARING UP FOR WINTER-- YESTERDAY I BOUGHT A ROOF SNOW RAKE!)


Many have said "you guys were lucky, your power was only off for a few days" Considering that some folks here in CT still don't have it back (five days running) we do indeed feel "lucky."
Sitting in the dark with some candles and a flashlight or two, I thought "this should be a positive experience, like you are at your cabin in the Sierras and have the kerosene lamps going and the wood stove fired up; but no, its not like that at all. There's no romance. You really want "normalcy" to return. I tried reading for a while but couldn't concentrate so I stuck my iPod buds in the ears and ran the composer gamut, coming to a sudden halt at Sibelius, Symphony No. 4.
"Perfect" I thought--so dark and cold. I thought it might be interesting to follow the score, which I had handy, even though the low light made it hard to read; but the basic outlines of the notes was enough--it's long familiar music to me, but I hadn't listened to it in a while.
Back in Sibelius day--the 4th symphony dates from 1910 or so--electricity was not a given, especially in rural areas. Sibelius liked to compose at night (often with the cognac bottle handy) and I've often wondered if his output increased after electricity came to Ainola, when he could have better lighting for his nocturnal labor. But the Fourth is dark music and seems to paint a bleak but subtle music. It is bare bones stuff, shorn of ornament, frill and decoration. Its nick name was the barkbrod" symphony, which refereed to the Scandinavian tradition of mixing ground up birch bark with flour during times of hardship and famine.
The hurricane left a tremendous amount of moisture from the heavy rains and the woods and fields around here have been bursting with fungi.. I found a tremendous "Hen of the Woods" on my neighbor's lawn (tasty but needs long stewing) and a bunch of boletes, porcini like (not really edulis but close).
Identifying Boletus species can be challenging some times. But eating one you are not sure of is not as risky as you might think. There are no "deadly" toxins in the Boletus family, although there are a few that can give you a nasty gastrointestinal experience. If there are red pores (under the cap) and it stains blue wen cut, you are skating on thin ice.The "bad" ones taste bitter and the edible ones taste good, although many are mediocre.
So the rule is, about Boletes, if it tastes good, eat it! The same cannot be said for other mushrooms, especially the deadly Amanitas which, apparently taste pretty good

Bruckner on the Beach

After my ramble a few weeks ago over Bruckner as a montane composer I thought it might be interesting to size him up as an oceanic composer, especially as we went to Cape Cod last week and spent a good deal of time contemplating the mighty surf of the Wellfleet beaches. One day the sea wsa very rough and the waves were gigantic--no one , not even the most intrepid surfers, ventured into the water. Walking along the shore I found the scherzi of some of the symphonies quite well matched, but it was on another day, when the rolling breakers had more regular and rhythmic movement, that I found the Adagio of the 7th Symphony most compelling.

I wondered how old Anton would have liked walking along at the waters edge, barefoot, hearing his mighty creation in his ear buds--wait, that wouldn't have happened! Among his many eccentricities was an obsession with counting and apparently, given a beach, he was fond of counting grains of sand. I suppose it was sort of a meditation. I don't think he'd have made much progress.

The Brucknerian gradual build-up of minor climaxes that finally accumulate in something big and smashing, is certainly analogous to the way waves come in to shore. But in essence, I think Bruckner is more at home in the mountains than in the maritime environment.

Of course the ocean has its own sounds and doesn't need any sound track added to it, yet...there's a great temptation. I think the Brucknerian ocean analogue has to do with the peaks and valleys of the waves, those crests and troughs which are reflected in Bruckner's wonderful analogues of light and dark, loud (really loud!) and soft. His climaxes do so often work up to a glorious "breaking" just like a wave's behaviour.
Today, walking in the East Rock woods, there were so many boletes about that I made little progress, stopping so often to check then out and admire them (the red and yellow "Boletus bi-color" was particularly vivid and tasty too)---like Bruckner counting his grains of sand.

Brucknerian mountains

Sunday afternoon, a hot sweltering day in the City, I sat in the vast expanses of Lincoln Center's Fisher Hall, and I couldn't imagine being in a place more different from where I had been the week before-on the shore of an alpine lake at the base of the Sierra Buttes in the Sierra Nevada
Yet the glacial ebbs and flows, the undulating valleys and peaks of Bruckner's 9th Symphony transformed the hall (in my mind anyhow) into a very montane environment.
Literalists, or objectivists, would downplay the affective power of a Bruckner symphony, pointing out, in contrast, its purely"musical" (ie, "formal") attributes. Maybe it was because I had so recently been in such an environment that my sensors picked up the connection between musical structure, meaning, memory and mountains.
Yes, there are Brucknerian mountains, and they are not all in Austria
And indeed there are Mahlerian mountains, and even Beethovenian mountains (pace LB whose famous essay "Bullsession in the Rockies" from the late fifties warned us from such "meaningful" allusions - and no, there are no "Buxtehudian "mountains.}
Although I don't think Bruckner was much of an "Alpinist"--ie, a mountain climber/hiker--his music has its wildly contrasting peaks and troughs; in fact whole series of climaxes of varying intensities is a perfect way of "reading" a mountain range or massif such as the Buttes.
This begs the question: can we "read" Nature as we do Art? Or do we need to?