The Winter that Refuses to Die

March Fourth and still a good foot of snow covers our back yard! Its a hard, crusty, icy mantle. We've had snow cover steady since Christmas. January was the big snow fall month and February was just plain cold so nothing melted much. Our roof sprang a few leaks, and our heating bill went through the same roof. Huge mountains of plowed snow decorate our streets, but these ungainly sculptures, now soot black, do little to elevate our spirits or arouse our aesthetic libido.
I've had my x-c skis in the back of the car but haven't used them in over a month as this hard old stuff doesn not invite trespass by foot or ski. Frustrating to say the least because it LOOKS so inviting from a distance.

In my class at Yale, ("Minimalism: Before, During and After") we have just listened to John Adams Harmonium. I am amazed at how powerful and full of expressive grace it is after all these thirty some years. Sure, it has an abundance of exurberance--maybe a bit too much--but it really holds up. Those cowbells at the end of the second movement haunt and remind me of a September night in the Sierran cabin when we were awakened by faint clangings, distant harbingers of summer's end (the bovine migration from the high country).h

News, news news!!
But the big Adamsian event was, of course, the Met's production of Nixon In China.We were fortunate to be able to attend the dress rehearsal and had great seats just six rows back from the pit. I am not an opera fan and I doubt that many contemporary operas will still be around in the next fifty years or so, but I have a feeling that Nixon will, if only because there's so much damned good music in it! A week after seeing the performance live, I was able to see it again in so called HD transmission in Yale's Sprague Hall. This was overwhelming and brought you into the opera more than the live performance. It was thoroughly captivating. Jame Madalena does a remarkable job with Nixon's character and has been doing so all over the world in the last 25 years. His voice seems a bit strained now, and he on occasion misses a high note or two, but his dramatic power is flawless; he really owns that character.
Dramatically I've always found the enigmatic last act weak, but it doesn't pull down the rest of the work; it is what it is and as such is unique and probably will be around for a long time.

A lonely ski trail

Where, one wonders, does it go?
More snow this week and as it mounts into great piles it remains serene and quietly seductive on fields and meadows and in woods. I was thinking yesterday as I was pushing along on my old skis--gliding actually,the snow being fresh and dry--about an obscure piece by Sibelius, A Lonely Ski Trail (En ensam skidspor) written in his "late" period. Based on a poem by Bertil Grippenberg, it's a charming little "melodrama" with the poem being recited. Charming isn't quite right as it's full of that Nordic tristese and resignation tinged with a kind of loveliness. It's rather dark actually.
But I wondered, as I glided through this crystalline, wintry landscape, did Sibelius go out on skis? I suppose he must have, it being comme il faut in rural Finland. But I bet he dressed to the nines--coat and tie and knickers.

Correction: Not so bleak afterall

This is one of those magical snowfalls that you remember in your dreams

Out on skis this morning along Mill Creek (Eli Whitney's old stomping grounds). About a foot of pristine snow, easy to glide along in.
The prediction of bleakness for today was ill-advised.
Maybe it's me, feeling kind of bleak myself lately. I've been grappling with the last psalm of my Psalmbook, and it keeps turning into a doxology (it is, in fact "Old Hundred"); now its becoming a Halleluia of sorts. The whole idea of the Psalmbook came from Arvo Paert's "Missa Brevis" wherein the vocal ensemble and string quartet are truly minimal and perfectly so--talk about economy of means! But it's turned into something more akin to Steve Reich's "Tehillim".
The anxiety of Influence! That's the trouble. Well, I have often preached that composition is only the art of discovery. Originality is a construction, a "trope." (Thats a foggy notion!)
I've been thinking about Tucson, remembering the pristine natural beauty of the mountains and desert and the souless suburban sprawl that offsets it; why do these violent acts always seem to happen in places where the weather is good?

In the bleak mid Winter

After the Boxing Day Blizzard two weeks ago, we still have large patches of snow and ice here and there; it's also rather cold. Bleak is a good word for this season.
I love that Christmas carol, written by Gustav Holst, and I love even more the other setting by Harold Darke--it seems., well, bleaker, but also redolent of hope which, I think, is the sub-text of Christmas, isn't it?
Just occurred to me that this is the last day of the Nativity the so called Three Kings Day, so I can report on our Christmas Eve dinner, a beautiful side of Norwegian salmon, garnished-- no, covered-- in chanterelles. Yes, that's right, I broke down and bought them t the local Whole Foods. To my amazement, they were reasonable in price ($15 lb) and in decent condition ( chants are hardy and can maintain their integrity when others mushrooms have rotted away.). I believe their provenance was Oregon. With all the winter rain the PNW has been getting this year there seems to be a bumper crop. We enjoyed more on New Years Eve,when they underscored with their earthy, chewy succulence some gamey lamb shanks..
I suppose it was the utter lack of chanterelle fruitings last summer that gave me"permission" to buy them.
A recent post on my friend JA's blog ("Hellmouth") talks about "Stravinsky's Arm Farts." www.earbox.com/posts This is worth checking out. It tuns out, according to John (backed up I imagine, by his old nemesis, R Taruskin) that as a young boy Igor was quite adept at this method of body percussion --he learned it from a local serf on he family estate in the Ukraine--and that it may have been the source of his punchy, off kilter rhythmic machinations heard in Le Sacre etc. Musicologists, take note!
A new snow storm has moved in. It's quite lovely outside now; tomorrow it will be bleak.

Gloucester Cathedral-Holst

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRobryliBLQ

Kings College Camb.-Darke

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNdqF9XfMD0&feature=related

Cage the Harmonist

One of the most telling anecdotes John Cage relates is the story of how Schoenberg warned him that if his ear for Harmony didn't improve he'd spend the rest of his life banging his head on an impenetrable wall, andCage's acceptance of that reality.His feeling for Harmony simply did not exist or if it did, had no role in his composing.

I think that on a higher plane, however, Cage was indeed a harmonist

A new biography has recently appeared (Kenneth Silverman Begin Again ) and has been widely reviewed, most notably by John Adams in the NY Times and Alex Ross in a lengthy piece in the New Yorker. According to Adams, a veritable "Cage Industry " has arisen in academia. I'm not sure I see evidence of that but the Cageian mystique certainly lives on, some 18 years after his death. There are already several good books on Cage (Kyle Gann's short but incisive one on 4'33" is my favorite) but the new one is more comprehensive; it clocks in at well over 400 pages. And there are still areas of his life and music not examined that thoroughly.

The main thing that I got from the book was the unrelenting dedication Cage had to his creative process; he was, in a word, hyper-industrious. The act of "composing" for him was his life and despite the fact hat he traveled widely and was always showing up at this festival or that, he was only truly content when at home working. This applies to all periods of his life. He just wrote and wrote, and always followed some scheme, pattern or process..

The other thing that Silverman brings out is Cage's assiduous attention to details and correctness in the interpretation of his music. It is often thought that his cavalier attitude to the traditional building blocks of music, leaving such details to chance-generated processes, would allow free-wheeling improvisation in performance. Once he had arrived AT CERTAIN PROCEDURES, HE DEEMED IT PARAMOUNT TO ADHERE TO THEM--NO MONKEYING AROUND as the NY Phil players did for their infamous "performance" of Atlas Eclipticalis in 1968.
Oddly, I think, he was both a free wheeling spirit, allowing any and all sounds or events into his musical world, and a stickler to detail and the rules. A paradox? Perhaps.
One of the more amusing and astonishing adventures in Cage's life occurred in 1959 while he was living briefly in Italy. He became a contestant on a popular TV quiz show called "Lascia o Raddoppio (Leave or Double). The idea was that a person's expert knowledge of a single subject would be subject to more and more difficult questions as the prize money doubled; missing a question would result in falling back to nothing. This was similar to the American quiz show, The 64 Thousand Dollar Question.
Th show was extremely popular and Cage became a celebrity in Italy over night. The final question, which won him five million Lire, asked him to identity all the white spored mushrooms in an authoritative book called Studies in American Fungi by George Atkinson. He not only knew the answers but rattled them out in alphabetical order! Clearly he had done his homework, and I suspect, he had something of a photographic memory.
The penultimate question asked him to identify a picture of one species and elaborate on various aspects--spore color, size of spore in microns etc..Silverman erroneously identifies the mushroom as "Bacillus tomentosis which, upon investigation, turns out to be a mishearing of Suillus tomentosis! (see picture above) Alright, Silverman is neither a musicologist nor a mycologist! But what happened to fact checking?
John Cage died in 1992 at the age of 79. I remember quite vividly what I did that day. I was in Maine with family on vacation and heard the news on the local classical music station. I was shocked because John Cage was not the sort of person you expected to die, so I went out by myself on my bike looking for mushrooms--it seemed the proper thing to do. I found a beautiful cache of Dentinum repandum. When I returned from my foray I sat down and wrote a spontaneous improvisatory "remembrance" of Cage. It was printed in the Fall issue of the ISAM Newsletter.
The great divide in Cage's music has always been a point of contention and controversy. There are many who admire the early percussion works and prepared piano studies but eschew completely the body of work based on indeterminacy, and I suppose there are some whose taste and admiration go in the opposite direction..
I see his life as one of great harmony Here is what I wrote at the end of the essay:

"Cage's contribution to new music before his leap into indeterminacy around 1950 was enough to gain him a place in the Pantheon. The percussion music, prepared piano and works such as the string quartet and the Seasons comprise a very original and impressive collection. Even though he turned his back on that way of composing, the works still exist and he did not disown them.
Perhaps this music represents a forcing or pushing principal, the Yang part of his life, whereas the later work is a more yielding acceptance of the way things are--the Yin side. So there would seem to be a great harmony in his life, even if our ears don't always hear it.

Dobranoc, Henryk

A beautiful Indian Summer afternoon. As I walked down the path from top of Whitney Peak-- carefully, as the fallen leaves have now accumulated, hiding rocks and roots which cold send one sprawling-- I wasn't even looking for mushrooms. Despite the warm weather and recent rain, I knew the season for mushroom foraging was over.
A few days ago we heard that Henryk Gorecki, the great Polish composer, had died at the ge of 76 in his native city, Katowice. I wondered as I walked if Gorecki had been a mushroom hunter. I knew that he lived part of the time in a chalet in the Tatras mountains, not far from his childhood home (Supposedly paid for with the royalties he received from his big "hit," the Third Symphony --over a million copies sold!), and it seemed to me he would have been the type. In Poland, apparently, everyone hunts mushrooms, especially in the mountains. Why would he be any different?
So I thought about Gorecki and his music on my walk, but I didn't listen to his music on my iPod. Instead I listened in my memory-- especially the amazing, inexorable eight part canon in the Third Symphony. When I got home I put on the recording of "Good Night" one of his more austere pieces,and one that could truly be called "minimal". Dawn Upshaw's shrill (in the good sense ) declaiming of the famous lines from Hamlet sent a chill up my spine.

Good Night, Henryk, flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Both Gorecki and Arvo Paert composed music in the late seventies that spurred the so called "Holy Minimalist" school. This could be a misnomer but they did start something. A considerable group of Eastern European composers writing in a new, simpler, deeply spiritual manner grew up in their wake. Tormis, Kancheli, Silvestrov, Martynov, Sumera, etc to name a few at random.
One composer from Slovakia that I have recently discovered is Vladimir Godar. A CD of his music has come out on ECM (where else?). Even though his music might occasionally remind you of Paert or Gorecki it has a distinctive sound and his voice is unique. Especially noteworthy is his Slovakian Stabat Mater --Stala Matka --which is built around the astonishing, brooding alto voice of Iva Bittova

MINIMAL !

One week ago I was in Scotland for a three day festival-- mostly in Glasgow, but also a day in lovely Edinburgh. As you can see from the photo of the festival poster, I was last but not least. They put on three pieces--Fog Tropes, Alcatraz and Orphic Memories; the last played by the stellar Scottish Chamber Orchestra --it was a really good performance under the guiding hands (he doesnt use a stick!) of Baldur Bronnimann

The festival was simply called "MINIMAL," and featured music by most of the usual suspects.
I used to be adverse to the all too facile use of this sobriquet--the "M" word--and would rail against its indiscriminate use in musical taxonomy. But now I don't care anymore; it is what it is, and once these labels catch on, people get use to them and that's that.
I could argue that early Steve Reich (Violin Phase for example) is actually Minimalism as an "aesthetic," but early Adams (Shaker Loops for example) is actually Minimalism as a "style."
But I won't, because the time has come to leave these distinctions to the nit picker musicologists who will need fodder for their mills
But in one area there an undisputed legitimate use of the word Minimal--the mushroom scene.
There has been nothing, not even a minimal flowering of fungi to speak of. When I returned fom my Scottish trip I scoured the woods of East Rock park and found nothing but a bunch of old King Stropharias, not worth bothering with.
This year there are no Honey mushrooms, no Bi color boletes, no black trumpets.--none of the usual Fall species one would expect to find. Not even agaricus campestris on lawns.

The only mushrooms I have found recently has been a cluster of "honeys" (armilleriella melea) growing at the base of an oak tree in Glasgow's Kelvingrove Park. It was a healthy looking cluster but I didn't harvest them, for where was I going to cook them up? in my hotel room?
Also, "honeys" can be surpsingly bitter or acrid in some areas (something to do with the tree they are growing on--they are lignacious), so why take a chance? I remember that in San Francisco honeys growing in eucalyptus groves always had an off, camphor like taste.I ate them anyway--stupidly.
So, this has been a truly Minimal season for mushrooms. I am almost tempted to rename my blog "The Minimalist Mycophage"