An Appraisal
A Musical Pioneer Who Never Stopped Searching By BEN RATLIFF
It happens all the time. Friends hear jazz that veers toward the traditional, or toward the refinement of a basic form, and they say something like this: "It's good, but isn't jazz supposed to be looking for something new?"
Whether they know it or not, they're thinking within a system of expectation that Max Roach helped create. Mr. Roach, who died yesterday at 83, was in on the ground floor of aesthetic change for much of his working life. He just kept on being involved in whatever mattered most, zeroing in on particular regions of his drum kit and reshuffling rhythms, inventing percussive patterns that helped move jazz away from typical swing.
Some of these were tiny details of accent or phrasing that enjoined choruses or displaced a rhythm, and they worked like secret coding for the hungry musicians of the time. (The great drummer Roy Haynes, who is slightly younger than his friend Mr. Roach, said that when he heard him playing on Coleman Hawkins's 1944 recording "Woody'n You," it was like someone talking to him.) But some of the gestures were much bigger. Eventually Mr. Roach started a label, Debut, with Charles Mingus. He connected jazz to American social concerns, he set the standards for solo and duo improvisations, and he accomplished much else.
Again, some of these things might now seem like what jazz musicians do, often with some grant money and a clearly articulated press release. But Max Roach got there had already made it seem natural. He was in Hawkins's band at the age of 20 in 1944, recording proto-bebop. He was part of Charlie Parker's quintet from 1947 to 1949, a band that changed jazz through its recordings on Savoy and its performances at the Three Deuces and the Onyx Club in New York. He was probably the greatest percussive foil for Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins. (That alone ...) He played on Miles Davis's "Birth of the Cool" sessions in 1949 and 1950, the manifestolike recordings of a new, chastened, chamberlike jazz. The group he led with the trumpeter Clifford Brown — which for a time included Mr. Rollins — was one of the greatest things about jazz in the 1950s, making beautifully constructed studio records and fascinatingly intense, though still little-heard, live recordings.
He played compositionally, complementing the work of jazz improvisers who also were master writers; this made his work with Booker Little, Herbie Nichols and Hasaan Ibn Ali special. (It's also why, when he played an aggressive Cuban rhythm with Powell in "Un Poco Loco," or in 4/4 against the waltz time of "Carolina Moon" with Monk, or in 5/4 on "As Long As You're Living" with his own group Max Roach Plus Four, he made it work within the piece, made it all sound natural.)
In his collaborations with Abbey Lincoln, Mr. Roach made civil rights issues ringingly explicit. He worked with percussion ensembles and strings and gospel choirs, always as original aesthetic choices rather than following the dimensions of established formats. With the pianist Cecil Taylor, among others, he played some highly rhythmic duo concerts — the last in 2000, at Columbia University — that were among the most memorable performances I have ever seen and heard. He had no second thoughts about working with the putative jazz avant-garde, or with hip-hop; he dived right in. And finally that may be his legacy to jazz: He seemed to have no fear.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/music/17roac.html?sq=&st=nyt%22musical%20Pioneer=%22=&scp=1&pagewanted=print
Hits From a Drummer Who Reveled in Change
By BEN RATLIFF
A selected discography of recordings featuring Max Roach, in chronological order:
'THE COMPLETE SAVOY AND DIAL MASTER TAKES' Charlie Parker (Savoy Jazz, three discs). Bebop from the 1940s and early '50s, landing like an asteroid on the jazz scene. Tracks with Mr. Roach include "Now's the Time," "Koko" and others.
'THE AMAZING BUD POWELL, VOL. 1' (Blue Note/EMI, 1951). An album split between a 1949 quintet including Sonny Rollins and Fats Navarro, and a 1951 trio session with Powell, Mr. Roach and the bassist Curly Russell; it includes "Wail," "Dance of the Infidels" and "Un Poco Loco."
'CLIFFORD BROWN AND MAX ROACH' Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (Emarcy/Universal, 1954). Mr. Roach's great working band of the 1950s; basic parts of the jazz repertory, like Brown's "Daahoud" and "Joy Spring" come from this recording.
'FREEDOM SUITE' Sonny Rollins (Riverside/Concord, 1958). A beautifully conceived album from Mr. Rollins's short, exciting trio period.
'BRILLIANT CORNERS' Thelonious Monk (Riverside/Concord, 1956). Monk fully rising to his heights as a composer, with Mr. Roach articulating the rhythmic details.
'WE INSIST!: MAX ROACH'S FREEDOM NOW SUITE' (Candid, 1960). Highly political and aesthetically bold, with a group including the singer Abbey Lincoln, the trumpeter Booker Little and Coleman Hawkins.
'MONEY JUNGLE' Duke Ellington (Blue Note/EMI, 1962). With Charles Mingus on bass and Mr. Roach on drums, Ellington made an odd record of aggression and calm.
'PARIS 1989' Max Roach and Dizzy Gillespie (A&M, 1989). Mr. Roach had played aggressive duo improvisations with Cecil Taylor, Archie Shepp and others; here he does it with a colleague from the '40s, and makes all phases of modernity in jazz sound relative. BEN RATLIFF
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/17/arts/17broac.html?ref=music&pagewanted=print
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Friday, August 17, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
August 16, 2007
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.
Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog's immunization records.
"This is not going to happen again," Ms. Duncan said. "The next time, I'm carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures."
Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.
There are many reasons to digitize one's precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.
Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, "preserves history and lets people tell their stories," said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.
"People want to use their content with today's tools, like iPhoto and YouTube," to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.
Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.
DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.
Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.
Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.
Hewlett-Packard's all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.
Epson's Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.
H.P.'s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.
A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.
HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.
This is one case where you won't get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.
Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple's iMovie ($79, part of iLife '08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).
VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer's ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.
If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.
Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.
VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer's hard drive by plugging the VCR's output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a "pass through" mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC's hard drive.
Sony's $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.
If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.
LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.
Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable's amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.
While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.
For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.
If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/technology/circuits/16basics.html?pagewanted=print
null
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/technology/16Basics_AudioLink.mp3
Basics
The Record of Your Life as a Digital Archive By ERIC A. TAUB
WHEN Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, Karen Duncan was ordered to leave her uptown neighborhood.
Among the possessions that Ms. Duncan, a lawyer, and her family took on their evacuation to Mississippi and later to Baton Rouge were two large trunks, filled not with clothes, but with the stacks of paper that recorded their life: photographs, birth certificates and their dog's immunization records.
"This is not going to happen again," Ms. Duncan said. "The next time, I'm carrying a digital flash drive — not trunks — loaded with my pictures."
Ms. Duncan, like millions of other Americans, has her feet firmly straddled across two technologies: embracing the new digital era but still hanging on to the paper records of the fast-disappearing analog age.
There are many reasons to digitize one's precious records and store them on a PC: to preserve them from aging, to make multiple copies that can be kept in separate places, and to create multimedia slide shows, perhaps to show future generations.
Digitizing records, whether documents, old photographs, or favorite LPs, "preserves history and lets people tell their stories," said Mark Cook, marketing director for Kodak Gallery, a Web site that stores consumer photographs.
"People want to use their content with today's tools, like iPhoto and YouTube," to create new forms of entertainment, Mr. Cook said.
Today, virtually any traditional document, movie or musical recording can be inexpensively and rapidly digitized and stored on a hard drive. And for those who do not want to spend the time, low-cost commercial services will do the job for you.
DOCUMENTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS So-called all-in-one printers have become the norm, with machines that print, scan and handle faxes available for under $100.
Optical character recognition software, included with such devices, will recognize printed text and convert it into a form that can be edited by a word processing program.
Photographs can be scanned and saved in the JPEG format at resolutions of at least 1,200 dots per inch. Once in a PC, software like Adobe Photoshop Elements ($80 for the Mac version; $100 for the PC version) can enhance faded colors, remove scratches and crop the image, just as with pictures shot with a digital camera.
Hewlett-Packard's all-in-one printers can scan in one pass as many photographs as will fit on the scanning tray, then save them as separate images.
Epson's Perfection 4490 ($350) includes a 30-page document feeder and scans up to three black-and-white pages a minute; it also scans 35 millimeter slides, negatives and photographs.
H.P.'s Scanjet G4050 ($200) scans up to 16 slides or 30 negatives simultaneously, and saves them as separate files. It does not, however, include an automatic sheet feeder for documents.
A number of services will do the conversions for you, either at storefronts or by mail, like Scanmyphotos.com. For those who are concerned about letting their precious memories out of sight, Kodak offers batch digitizing of photographs and other documents through its ScanVan, a vehicle that is currently on tour in the Eastern United States.
HOME MOVIES The simplest way to digitize those shoeboxes full of Super 8 movies is to use the technique perfected by movie pirates: project the image on a white wall, set up a digital camcorder on a tripod, and then shoot the film.
This is one case where you won't get the best results if you make it a do-it-yourself project. The different frame rates of movie film and a camcorder could cause annoying flickering of the final image. Send your movies to a commercial transfer service like Audio Video Memories (audiovideomemories.com), Digital Transfer Systems (digitaltransfersystems.net), and Just8mm.com that uses a telecine machine, a much more sophisticated version of the same home technique.
Movies arrive back on DVDs, ready to be imported into the PC for editing with a program like Apple's iMovie ($79, part of iLife '08) for Macs, or for PCs, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0 ($100).
VHS TAPES To transfer VHS footage, which is analog, into a computer, the PC needs to receive the data digitally. One way to check if your PC is so equipped to do that is to look at the computer's ports. If it has the familiar RCA inputs — the yellow, white, and red connectors — then it most likely is analog ready.
If not, analog images must first be converted to the digital format. To do so, combination VHS/DVD player/recorders are one of the simplest ways to get your home movies off your aging video tapes and onto more permanent DVDs. Available from Panasonic, Sony and others, prices start at under $200.
Alternatively, connect a stand-alone VHS player to a DVD recorder to make a digital copy.
VHS tapes can also be recorded onto a computer's hard drive by plugging the VCR's output cable into a digital camcorder that offers a "pass through" mode (most do). The signal is digitized within the camcorder, and then passed on to the PC's hard drive.
Sony's $229 VRD-MC5 is specifically made to record DVD copies of VHS tapes, or recordings from any camcorder or digital video recorder, without using a PC. VCRs and camcorders are plugged into the device, which resembles a portable DVD deck.
If you do not own a camcorder or DVD recorder, but you have loads of valuable tapes, consider an intermediary conversion product, such as the DAC-200 ($184; synchrotech.com); Dazzle Hollywood DV Bridge ($300; omegamultimedia.com), and VHS to DVD 3.0 ($80; honestech.com). Each product includes hardware and software that converts analog signals to digital,.
LPS, EIGHT-TRACKS, AND CASSETTES Getting your old Country Joe and the Fish albums into your PC is one of the easiest conversions to do, according to Tom Merritt, executive editor of CNetTV.com.
Assuming you still have a phonograph turntable (or eight-track or cassette deck) and it is not the console type from the 1950s or earlier, plug the audio output from the turntable's amplifier/receiver into the minimike port found on virtually all home computers.
While commercial audio editing software is available, Mr. Merritt recommends installing Audacity (audacity.sourceforge.net), a free program available for Macs, PCs and Linux/Unix machines that will manage the files, convert them into a specific format (for example, WAV or MP3), and remove clicks and crackles.
For those who value their time more than the fun of connecting cables and reading manuals, there are plenty of commercial companies happy to do the converting for you. Cassettes2CDs.com will convert audio and video tapes, LPs and 45s to digital format, storing the data on a CD, DVD or MP3 format for iPod use. The company does not handle 78 r.p.m. records, reel-to-reel or eight-track tapes.
If the thought of gathering up boxes full of photographs or phonograph records to digitize is daunting, here is one other compelling thought: your treasured memories will be in a digital format that can still be easily converted to the next video and audio formats that will invariably show up in the coming years.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/16/technology/circuits/16basics.html?pagewanted=print
null
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/audio/technology/16Basics_AudioLink.mp3
Friday, August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate -- and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the ''mystical Minimalism'' of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate — and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the "mystical Minimalism" of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
ANTHONY TOMMASINI
REICH "Different Trains," "Electric Counterpoint." Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79176; CD).
ADAMS Piano works. Ralph van Raat, pianist (Naxos 8.559285; CD).
ADAMS "The Death of Klinghoffer." Vocalists; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79281; two CDs).
RUDERS Violin Concerto No. 1; other works. Rolf Schulte, violinist; Riverside Symphony, conducted by George Rothman (Bridge BCD 9057; CD).
Well before the spring of 1989, when I first heard the Kronos Quartet perform Steve Reich's "Different Trains," Mr. Reich's music had grown far beyond the confines of the stylistic label Minimalism.
The concept for this ingeniously complex 1988 work came from Mr. Reich's memories of childhood travels on transcontinental trains in the late 1930s and early '40s to visit his divorced parents: his mother in Los Angeles, his father in New York. The constant clacking of the train on the tracks imprinted itself on his musical imagination. While contemplating this piece, Mr. Reich realized that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe during his youth he would probably have been traveling on quite different trains.
The piece's repetitive rhythms, cyclic riffs and persistent whistles convey the nervous, hypnotic sounds and feelings of train travel. Weaved into the textures are the recorded voices of the governess who accompanied Mr. Reich on his journeys and an old Pullman car worker, as well three Jewish refugees. The speeches, as transcribed with uncanny accuracy into pitches and rhythms, become another element in the music. The work is at once exhilarating, haunting and ominous, qualities arrestingly conveyed in the Kronos Quartet's recording.
John Adams was initially associated with Minimalism. A beguiling recent recording of his complete piano music, performed by Ralph van Raat, includes scintillating performances of "Phrygian Gates" and "China Gates," early scores that show the composer at his most openly and sonorously Minimalistic.
But Mr. Adams had bigger musical things in mind, like his landmark opera "Nixon in China." Though I greatly admire this work, I am especially affected by "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991), written with the same librettist, Alice Goodman, and director, Peter Sellars. The opera has been attacked for what is perceived as its sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer aboard an Italian cruise ship in 1985. But the creators think of the opera as a reflective work in the spirit of the Bach Passions, which mix storytelling and commentary. The score flows in undulant waves of luminous yet piercing harmonies, with elegiac, melodic writing and violent, searing outbursts.
The Danish composer Poul Ruders acknowledges that he has been influenced by Minimalism. The repetitive figurations, jittery thematic lines and obsessive rhythms that abound in his invigorating Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981) would seem to prove the point, though I'd be careful about labeling it a work of Minimalism, at least in the presence of its formidable composer.
BERNARD HOLLAND
REICH "Drumming." So Percussion (Cantaloupe CA21026; CD).
ADAMS "Nixon in China." Vocalists; Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79177; three CDs).
CAGE "Two2"; works for two pianos. Double Edge (Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles; CRI 732; CD).
BASIE "Complete Clef/Verve" (Mosaic Records limited edition; eight CDs).
Minimalism is a musical art that says very few things over long periods of time. This is in opposition to music that takes a long time to say many things (Mahler), music that says very little in normal amounts of time (Saint-Saëns) or music that says a great deal in practically no time at all (Webern).
Minimalism can be employed by several percussionists ("Drumming" by Steve Reich with So Percussion) or an entire opera company (John Adams's "Nixon in China"). It is also comfortable on two pianos ("Two2" by John Cage, played by Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles). Minimalism, in other words, is user-friendly.
"Drumming" is in four parts and goes on for quite a while (73 minutes 8 seconds, to be exact). It starts unpromisingly, but once the mind attaches itself, the music gathers an adhesive strength. As color and complexity of movement gradually evolve, the paradox of Minimalism sets in: Listeners enter a trancelike involvement but can answer the phone or go to the refrigerator and not miss much at all.
"Nixon in China" translates repetition into a kind of theatrical energy. Diplomatic ritual is made to dance; political and personal anxieties take on a machinelike tic. Minimalism becomes a dramatic tool, proving its further usefulness.
I like the Cage piece precisely because so little happens. It is a slow, calm appropriation of musical space. "Two2" is from 1989 and at quite a distance from the two other Cage pieces from the mid-1940s on this recording, "Experiences" and "Three Dances." Both are quite busy.
It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out. Basie's piano solos framed unspoken musical phrases with dabs of music: chords doing the work of a jazz-music continuo and fragments of melody that point at things present but unsaid. The richness of the silences — the tantalizing promises therein — were at odds with the art of Basie's colleague Art Tatum, who seemed determined to fill musical space with as many notes as possible. Minimalism, here as elsewhere, fills time with a minimum of means.
ALLAN KOZINN
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "Light Over Water." The Ridge Quartet; other performers (New Albion NA014; CD).
GLASS "Satyagraha." Vocalists; New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christopher Keene (Sony-BMG Masterworks M3K 39672; three CDs).
GLASS "Koyaanisqatsi." Western Wind Vocal Ensemble; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79506, CD; MGM 1003766, DVD).
REICH "Tehillim," "The Desert Music." Ossia; Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe CA21009; CD).
It sounds oddly conservative and spare now, but "Shaker Loops" (1978) was a bombshell in its time, and it introduced John Adams as an important voice in the still fresh Minimalist rebellion against modernist complexity. Mr. Adams offered all the repetitive energy that propelled Philip Glass's and Steve Reich's most popular scores, but his quicker harmonic development, sudden dynamic changes and other startling touches pointed toward the next step — emotional and dramatic — that this style needed to take.
Mr. Adams's later orchestration gave the work a graceful sheen, but the original chamber recording has an endearingly homespun quality. The companion piece, "Light Over Water" (1983), is a pleasantly spacey oddity for brass and synthesizers.
"Satyagraha" (1980) was Mr. Glass's move toward Romanticism, a leap from his wheezy, rhythmically intricate writing for amplified chamber band to full-fledged scoring for orchestra, chorus and operatic voices. Its stage action shows the development of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance techniques to combat racism during his early years in South Africa. But with the text drawn directly from the Bhagavad-Gita, the story of an epic clan battle, and sung in Sanskrit, the work is also a magnificent oratorio version of this classic Hindu text. Nearly three decades on, it remains Mr. Glass's most wrenching opera. Though a new recording is long overdue, this 1985 performance captures much of the work's spirit.
"Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) extended the neo-Romanticism of "Satyagraha" with picturesque scoring and a refreshed harmonic vocabulary. It also works brilliantly as the soundtrack of the first and best installment of Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy about humanity's mostly malignant influence on the earth, its alternately lyrical and vigorous movements accompanying visions of everything from the grandeur of Southwestern deserts and cloud formations to urban crowds in slow motion and sped-up film of highway traffic. The 1998 remake on Nonesuch is superb, but the way to experience this work is on the DVD.
Except for a few early works in which recorded speech was mined for its rhythmic qualities, Steve Reich devoted himself to instrumental works until 1981, largely because he didn't want his musical line dictated by the text. Biblical Psalms and a William Carlos Williams poem about the nuclear age helped him solve that problem. In "Tehillim" (1981) the Hebrew texts lend themselves to Mr. Reich's sharp-edged rhythmic style, which in turn yields a timeless, almost ritualistic quality. And in "The Desert Music" (1984; heard here in a texturally transparent 2001 chamber version), the haunting setting of the Williams text is magnified by percussion that evokes a ticking clock, and an eerie instrumental shimmer that suggests the desert after a nuclear test.
ANNE MIDGETTE
RILEY "In C." Bang on a Can (Cantaloupe Records CA21004).
GLASS "Einstein on the Beach." Vocalists; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79323; three CDs).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Amadinda Percussion Ensemble (Hungaroton 32208; CD).
ADAMS "Harmonium"; "The Death of Klinghoffer" Choruses. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by John Adams; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, London Opera Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79549; CD).
Anton Bruckner was a proto-Minimalist, the composer Ingram Marshall suggests: "He writes music like he's writing great paragraphs."
That comment helps define a musical term that has been overused, misunderstood and often rejected by the very composers to whom it is usually applied. Minimalism can be understood as a form of musical dramaturgy in which the music grows not out of the contrast between linear phrases but from the juxtaposition of building blocks of sound.
But the term Minimalism fails to connote the aural richness that can arise even in the early, most repetitive pieces, a richness that is being increasingly mined by the current generation of performers. Minimalism, in its fifth decade, is encountering the same issues of original versus modern instruments that arise with any bygone music.
The early recordings have a scrappiness, a defiance and, in some cases (like the original 1979 recording of "Einstein on the Beach"), the limitations of old synthesizers. But today the music is in musicians' fingers and ears. Just as it took a generation for pianists to conquer Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, the most intricate patterns of a Steve Reich are no longer in themselves a challenge.
I like the toughness and aura of what you might call the period instruments of the 1970s, but when it comes to choosing recordings I seem to come down on the side of opulence. Terry Riley's 1964 "In C," the defining work of Minimalism, belongs in every music library, and Bang on a Can's performance has a fluidity that brings out the depth of the repeated, interlocking patterns and the pleasure of listening to them.
"Einstein on the Beach" is another — if not the other — seminal Minimalist work. The Nonesuch recording, made 17 years after this opera's 1976 premiere, approaches it with the reverence due a masterpiece, smoothing down the rough edges and stressing the seriousness. It also restores 30 minutes of music that was cut from the original cast recording. On grounds of completeness alone, not to mention aural beauty, this 1993 recording is the one to get; here, the subtly changing kaleidoscope patterns of sound that grow out of the repeated syllables and notes only gain in color and depth.
Steve Reich himself waxes eloquent about Amadinda, a Hungarian percussion ensemble, and its performance of his seminal Music for 18 Musicians, which becomes a feast for the ears in this reading. Having expressed my enthusiasm for Mr. Reich's music sufficiently elsewhere, I have refrained from filling this list with his works alone.
"Harmonium," the first John Adams piece I heard, remains a personal favorite. Mr. Adams, unlike Mr. Glass, shows a specific awareness of vocal timbre; these settings of three Emily Dickinson poems play deliberately with the qualities of vocal sound. There is also a sense of the Americanness of this music: at once straightforward and with a kind of baroque fullness. This quality is increasingly evident in the later work of Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich as well as the work of Mr. Adams, for whom the term Minimalism is today decidedly a misnomer.
STEVE SMITH
GLASS Music in 12 Parts. Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79324; three CDs).
GLASS "Glassworks." Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Sony Classical SK 90394; CD).
ADAMS "The Chairman Dances"; other works. San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79144; CD).
GLASS "Akhnaten." Vocalists; Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies (Sony Classical Germany 91141; two CDs).
Among admirers of Philip Glass's work, Music in 12 Parts has long been considered his rough equivalent of Bach's "Art of Fugue." Written from 1971 to 1974, the extensive cycle is a four-hour compendium of Mr. Glass's early compositional concerns. Fragmentary melodies and pulsating rhythms repeated at length evoke something of a trance state, so that tiny shifts in pitch or meter feel like major events. Yet the work also pointed toward future possibilities; the vocal writing in particular seems to predict "Einstein on the Beach."
In 1981 Mr. Glass was signed to an exclusive recording contract with CBS Masterworks, the first composer afforded such a berth since Aaron Copland. "Glassworks," Mr. Glass's first CBS release (now available on its successor label, Sony), acknowledged and even partly enabled his potential for crossover success. Whereas earlier recordings had documented music from his ensemble's active repertory, the six pieces on "Glassworks" were specifically conceived as an album accessible to new listeners. Concise, evocative works like "Floe" and "Rubric" anticipated Mr. Glass's lucrative sideline as a film composer; the melancholy "Facades" remains a staple of his concerts.
The music on "The Chairman Dances," a 1987 CD of works by John Adams, might not originally have been conceived as an introduction to his work, but the disc serves that purpose nonetheless. Mr. Adams reconciled techniques pioneered by Mr. Glass and Steve Reich with the resources of the Romantic orchestra in the 1985 title work, an uninhibited explosion of succulent melody and swooping French horns inspired by the scenario of Mr. Adams's first opera, "Nixon in China." Casting his net wider still, he evoked traditional hymnody in "Christian Zeal and Activity" and summoned the spirit of Charles Ives with the lonely trumpet lines of "Tromba Lontana."
Also in 1987 CBS issued a recording of Mr. Glass's third opera, "Akhnaten," a portrait of the iconoclastic pharaoh who briefly imposed a monotheistic religion in Egypt. Compared with "Einstein" and its successor, "Satyagraha," the opera seems almost conventional in its procession of narrative tableaus. But Mr. Glass's lean, percussive score includes some of his most viscerally exciting music, and assigning the lead role to a countertenor was a bold stroke.
"Hymn to the Aten," the pharaoh's second-act paean to his deity, is one of the composer's most communicative and ineffably beautiful creations; Mr. Glass, who must have had a sense of his achievement, instructed that the aria always be performed in the native language of the country where it is being performed.
VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "The Wound-Dresser," "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Bournemouth Symphony, conducted by Marin Alsop (Naxos 8.559031; CD).
GLASS Violin Concerto; other works. Adele Anthony, violinist; Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Takuo Yuasa (Naxos 8.554568; CD).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Nonesuch 79448; CD).
REICH "City Life," "New York Counterpoint," "Eight Lines," "Violin Phase." Ensemble Modern (BMG/RCA Victor 74321 66459 2; CD).
The diverse moods of John Adams are alluringly conveyed by Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on a Naxos disc that opens with a sparkling performance of the wildly exuberant "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." In "Shaking and Trembling," the first movement of "Shaker Loops," the Bournemouth strings play as if possessed, hurling colorful arrows of sound into the kaleidoscopic dartboard of orchestral textures. The frenzied rapture builds to a dizzying fervor before melting into the eerie glissandos of the next movement. Also included is a performance of Mr. Adams's gloomy "Wound-Dresser," sung by the fine baritone Nathan Gunn.
Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is his first major orchestral work. It adheres to a traditional three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure for conventionally scored orchestra, but with its insistent opening chords, chromatically undulating harmonies and the soloist's mournful arpeggios, this theatrical work is signature Glass. On the fine Naxos disc Takuo Yuasa leads the Ulster Orchestra and the violinist Adele Anthony in a vibrant, throbbing performance. Ms. Anthony's sweet-toned, romantic playing soars over the waves of pulsating orchestral rhythms, played here with enough tension to create a taut web of sound. The disc also includes enjoyable renditions of "Company" and excerpts from "Akhnaten."
Like all masterpieces, when played with integrity and passion Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians — the seminal 1976 chamber work in which he used his broadest palette of harmonic language to date — never loses its fascination. In this 1996 recording Mr. Reich and his band of musicians build on the layers of blinding colors and hypnotic rhythms in a performance with moods veering from rhythmically energetic and vital to seductively (and deceptively) languid. This performance highlights the work's beautiful surface veneer, underlying levels of complexity and intoxicatingly therapeutic power.
Other notable works from various periods of Mr. Reich's life receive vigorous, intelligent performances by the Ensemble Modern on an RCA recording, which includes "City Life." This aural snapshot of New York streets transforms normally irritating sounds, like sirens and honking horns, into a compelling musical fabric. The turmoil of city life is also aptly conveyed in a taut, jaunty rendition of "New York Counterpoint," performed by Roland Diry, a stellar clarinetist. The disc also includes bristling performances of "Eight Lines" and, with Jagdish Mistry as the excellent soloist, "Violin Phase."
The recordings mentioned range in price from $9 to $20 for one CD, $24 to $34 for two CDs and $34 to $44 for a three-CD set; the eight-CD set is $136; the DVD is $22.44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/arts/music/10mini.html?pagewanted=print
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Just Don't Call It Minimalism By JAMES R. OESTREICH
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate -- and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the ''mystical Minimalism'' of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
August 10, 2007
Just Don't Call It Minimalism
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
BY and large musical Minimalists don't carry cards. But they do know something about guilt by association.
Most composers commonly called Minimalists have disavowed the label at one point or another, suggesting that it mischaracterizes their music, which can be mind-bogglingly intricate — and huge. And they certainly don't consider themselves part of a school. The designation arose mainly from the friendships of composers with Minimalist artists: Steve Reich and Philip Glass, for example, with the sculptor Richard Serra.
But there certainly was something new and big (however minimal the means) stirring in the second half of the 20th century. With roots in the styles of Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Morton Feldman, John Cage and others, music characterized by great rhythmic drive, simplified harmonies and hypnotic repetition blossomed in signal works by Terry Riley, John Adams, Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich. The pollen carried far and wide, even to Eastern Europe with the "mystical Minimalism" of Arvo Pärt and others as a spiritualized offshoot.
The 70th-birthday year of Philip Glass, which is being widely observed, seems as good a time as any to take stock of the Minimalist achievement by way of recordings. So the classical music critics of The New York Times have singled out favorite recordings of music by various forerunners (including the jazz great Count Basie), the early giants and those who later fell under the influence (including the Dane Poul Ruders).
None of this is likely to settle disputes about what, if anything, the various composers have in common, for the music is wildly varied. But it should at least lay out some of the terms of the argument, in addition to providing good listening. JAMES R. OESTREICH
ANTHONY TOMMASINI
REICH "Different Trains," "Electric Counterpoint." Kronos Quartet (Nonesuch 79176; CD).
ADAMS Piano works. Ralph van Raat, pianist (Naxos 8.559285; CD).
ADAMS "The Death of Klinghoffer." Vocalists; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79281; two CDs).
RUDERS Violin Concerto No. 1; other works. Rolf Schulte, violinist; Riverside Symphony, conducted by George Rothman (Bridge BCD 9057; CD).
Well before the spring of 1989, when I first heard the Kronos Quartet perform Steve Reich's "Different Trains," Mr. Reich's music had grown far beyond the confines of the stylistic label Minimalism.
The concept for this ingeniously complex 1988 work came from Mr. Reich's memories of childhood travels on transcontinental trains in the late 1930s and early '40s to visit his divorced parents: his mother in Los Angeles, his father in New York. The constant clacking of the train on the tracks imprinted itself on his musical imagination. While contemplating this piece, Mr. Reich realized that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe during his youth he would probably have been traveling on quite different trains.
The piece's repetitive rhythms, cyclic riffs and persistent whistles convey the nervous, hypnotic sounds and feelings of train travel. Weaved into the textures are the recorded voices of the governess who accompanied Mr. Reich on his journeys and an old Pullman car worker, as well three Jewish refugees. The speeches, as transcribed with uncanny accuracy into pitches and rhythms, become another element in the music. The work is at once exhilarating, haunting and ominous, qualities arrestingly conveyed in the Kronos Quartet's recording.
John Adams was initially associated with Minimalism. A beguiling recent recording of his complete piano music, performed by Ralph van Raat, includes scintillating performances of "Phrygian Gates" and "China Gates," early scores that show the composer at his most openly and sonorously Minimalistic.
But Mr. Adams had bigger musical things in mind, like his landmark opera "Nixon in China." Though I greatly admire this work, I am especially affected by "The Death of Klinghoffer" (1991), written with the same librettist, Alice Goodman, and director, Peter Sellars. The opera has been attacked for what is perceived as its sympathetic depiction of the Palestinian terrorists who murdered Leon Klinghoffer aboard an Italian cruise ship in 1985. But the creators think of the opera as a reflective work in the spirit of the Bach Passions, which mix storytelling and commentary. The score flows in undulant waves of luminous yet piercing harmonies, with elegiac, melodic writing and violent, searing outbursts.
The Danish composer Poul Ruders acknowledges that he has been influenced by Minimalism. The repetitive figurations, jittery thematic lines and obsessive rhythms that abound in his invigorating Violin Concerto No. 1 (1981) would seem to prove the point, though I'd be careful about labeling it a work of Minimalism, at least in the presence of its formidable composer.
BERNARD HOLLAND
REICH "Drumming." So Percussion (Cantaloupe CA21026; CD).
ADAMS "Nixon in China." Vocalists; Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79177; three CDs).
CAGE "Two2"; works for two pianos. Double Edge (Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles; CRI 732; CD).
BASIE "Complete Clef/Verve" (Mosaic Records limited edition; eight CDs).
Minimalism is a musical art that says very few things over long periods of time. This is in opposition to music that takes a long time to say many things (Mahler), music that says very little in normal amounts of time (Saint-Saëns) or music that says a great deal in practically no time at all (Webern).
Minimalism can be employed by several percussionists ("Drumming" by Steve Reich with So Percussion) or an entire opera company (John Adams's "Nixon in China"). It is also comfortable on two pianos ("Two2" by John Cage, played by Edmund Niemann and Nurit Tilles). Minimalism, in other words, is user-friendly.
"Drumming" is in four parts and goes on for quite a while (73 minutes 8 seconds, to be exact). It starts unpromisingly, but once the mind attaches itself, the music gathers an adhesive strength. As color and complexity of movement gradually evolve, the paradox of Minimalism sets in: Listeners enter a trancelike involvement but can answer the phone or go to the refrigerator and not miss much at all.
"Nixon in China" translates repetition into a kind of theatrical energy. Diplomatic ritual is made to dance; political and personal anxieties take on a machinelike tic. Minimalism becomes a dramatic tool, proving its further usefulness.
I like the Cage piece precisely because so little happens. It is a slow, calm appropriation of musical space. "Two2" is from 1989 and at quite a distance from the two other Cage pieces from the mid-1940s on this recording, "Experiences" and "Three Dances." Both are quite busy.
It is hard to leave the subject of Minimalism without mention of Count Basie, master of the art of leaving out. Basie's piano solos framed unspoken musical phrases with dabs of music: chords doing the work of a jazz-music continuo and fragments of melody that point at things present but unsaid. The richness of the silences — the tantalizing promises therein — were at odds with the art of Basie's colleague Art Tatum, who seemed determined to fill musical space with as many notes as possible. Minimalism, here as elsewhere, fills time with a minimum of means.
ALLAN KOZINN
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "Light Over Water." The Ridge Quartet; other performers (New Albion NA014; CD).
GLASS "Satyagraha." Vocalists; New York City Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Christopher Keene (Sony-BMG Masterworks M3K 39672; three CDs).
GLASS "Koyaanisqatsi." Western Wind Vocal Ensemble; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79506, CD; MGM 1003766, DVD).
REICH "Tehillim," "The Desert Music." Ossia; Alarm Will Sound, conducted by Alan Pierson (Cantaloupe CA21009; CD).
It sounds oddly conservative and spare now, but "Shaker Loops" (1978) was a bombshell in its time, and it introduced John Adams as an important voice in the still fresh Minimalist rebellion against modernist complexity. Mr. Adams offered all the repetitive energy that propelled Philip Glass's and Steve Reich's most popular scores, but his quicker harmonic development, sudden dynamic changes and other startling touches pointed toward the next step — emotional and dramatic — that this style needed to take.
Mr. Adams's later orchestration gave the work a graceful sheen, but the original chamber recording has an endearingly homespun quality. The companion piece, "Light Over Water" (1983), is a pleasantly spacey oddity for brass and synthesizers.
"Satyagraha" (1980) was Mr. Glass's move toward Romanticism, a leap from his wheezy, rhythmically intricate writing for amplified chamber band to full-fledged scoring for orchestra, chorus and operatic voices. Its stage action shows the development of Gandhi's nonviolent resistance techniques to combat racism during his early years in South Africa. But with the text drawn directly from the Bhagavad-Gita, the story of an epic clan battle, and sung in Sanskrit, the work is also a magnificent oratorio version of this classic Hindu text. Nearly three decades on, it remains Mr. Glass's most wrenching opera. Though a new recording is long overdue, this 1985 performance captures much of the work's spirit.
"Koyaanisqatsi" (1983) extended the neo-Romanticism of "Satyagraha" with picturesque scoring and a refreshed harmonic vocabulary. It also works brilliantly as the soundtrack of the first and best installment of Godfrey Reggio's film trilogy about humanity's mostly malignant influence on the earth, its alternately lyrical and vigorous movements accompanying visions of everything from the grandeur of Southwestern deserts and cloud formations to urban crowds in slow motion and sped-up film of highway traffic. The 1998 remake on Nonesuch is superb, but the way to experience this work is on the DVD.
Except for a few early works in which recorded speech was mined for its rhythmic qualities, Steve Reich devoted himself to instrumental works until 1981, largely because he didn't want his musical line dictated by the text. Biblical Psalms and a William Carlos Williams poem about the nuclear age helped him solve that problem. In "Tehillim" (1981) the Hebrew texts lend themselves to Mr. Reich's sharp-edged rhythmic style, which in turn yields a timeless, almost ritualistic quality. And in "The Desert Music" (1984; heard here in a texturally transparent 2001 chamber version), the haunting setting of the Williams text is magnified by percussion that evokes a ticking clock, and an eerie instrumental shimmer that suggests the desert after a nuclear test.
ANNE MIDGETTE
RILEY "In C." Bang on a Can (Cantaloupe Records CA21004).
GLASS "Einstein on the Beach." Vocalists; Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79323; three CDs).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Amadinda Percussion Ensemble (Hungaroton 32208; CD).
ADAMS "Harmonium"; "The Death of Klinghoffer" Choruses. San Francisco Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by John Adams; Orchestra of the Opéra de Lyon, London Opera Chorus, conducted by Kent Nagano (Nonesuch 79549; CD).
Anton Bruckner was a proto-Minimalist, the composer Ingram Marshall suggests: "He writes music like he's writing great paragraphs."
That comment helps define a musical term that has been overused, misunderstood and often rejected by the very composers to whom it is usually applied. Minimalism can be understood as a form of musical dramaturgy in which the music grows not out of the contrast between linear phrases but from the juxtaposition of building blocks of sound.
But the term Minimalism fails to connote the aural richness that can arise even in the early, most repetitive pieces, a richness that is being increasingly mined by the current generation of performers. Minimalism, in its fifth decade, is encountering the same issues of original versus modern instruments that arise with any bygone music.
The early recordings have a scrappiness, a defiance and, in some cases (like the original 1979 recording of "Einstein on the Beach"), the limitations of old synthesizers. But today the music is in musicians' fingers and ears. Just as it took a generation for pianists to conquer Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, the most intricate patterns of a Steve Reich are no longer in themselves a challenge.
I like the toughness and aura of what you might call the period instruments of the 1970s, but when it comes to choosing recordings I seem to come down on the side of opulence. Terry Riley's 1964 "In C," the defining work of Minimalism, belongs in every music library, and Bang on a Can's performance has a fluidity that brings out the depth of the repeated, interlocking patterns and the pleasure of listening to them.
"Einstein on the Beach" is another — if not the other — seminal Minimalist work. The Nonesuch recording, made 17 years after this opera's 1976 premiere, approaches it with the reverence due a masterpiece, smoothing down the rough edges and stressing the seriousness. It also restores 30 minutes of music that was cut from the original cast recording. On grounds of completeness alone, not to mention aural beauty, this 1993 recording is the one to get; here, the subtly changing kaleidoscope patterns of sound that grow out of the repeated syllables and notes only gain in color and depth.
Steve Reich himself waxes eloquent about Amadinda, a Hungarian percussion ensemble, and its performance of his seminal Music for 18 Musicians, which becomes a feast for the ears in this reading. Having expressed my enthusiasm for Mr. Reich's music sufficiently elsewhere, I have refrained from filling this list with his works alone.
"Harmonium," the first John Adams piece I heard, remains a personal favorite. Mr. Adams, unlike Mr. Glass, shows a specific awareness of vocal timbre; these settings of three Emily Dickinson poems play deliberately with the qualities of vocal sound. There is also a sense of the Americanness of this music: at once straightforward and with a kind of baroque fullness. This quality is increasingly evident in the later work of Mr. Glass and Mr. Reich as well as the work of Mr. Adams, for whom the term Minimalism is today decidedly a misnomer.
STEVE SMITH
GLASS Music in 12 Parts. Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Nonesuch 79324; three CDs).
GLASS "Glassworks." Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by Michael Riesman (Sony Classical SK 90394; CD).
ADAMS "The Chairman Dances"; other works. San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Edo de Waart (Nonesuch 79144; CD).
GLASS "Akhnaten." Vocalists; Stuttgart State Opera Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies (Sony Classical Germany 91141; two CDs).
Among admirers of Philip Glass's work, Music in 12 Parts has long been considered his rough equivalent of Bach's "Art of Fugue." Written from 1971 to 1974, the extensive cycle is a four-hour compendium of Mr. Glass's early compositional concerns. Fragmentary melodies and pulsating rhythms repeated at length evoke something of a trance state, so that tiny shifts in pitch or meter feel like major events. Yet the work also pointed toward future possibilities; the vocal writing in particular seems to predict "Einstein on the Beach."
In 1981 Mr. Glass was signed to an exclusive recording contract with CBS Masterworks, the first composer afforded such a berth since Aaron Copland. "Glassworks," Mr. Glass's first CBS release (now available on its successor label, Sony), acknowledged and even partly enabled his potential for crossover success. Whereas earlier recordings had documented music from his ensemble's active repertory, the six pieces on "Glassworks" were specifically conceived as an album accessible to new listeners. Concise, evocative works like "Floe" and "Rubric" anticipated Mr. Glass's lucrative sideline as a film composer; the melancholy "Facades" remains a staple of his concerts.
The music on "The Chairman Dances," a 1987 CD of works by John Adams, might not originally have been conceived as an introduction to his work, but the disc serves that purpose nonetheless. Mr. Adams reconciled techniques pioneered by Mr. Glass and Steve Reich with the resources of the Romantic orchestra in the 1985 title work, an uninhibited explosion of succulent melody and swooping French horns inspired by the scenario of Mr. Adams's first opera, "Nixon in China." Casting his net wider still, he evoked traditional hymnody in "Christian Zeal and Activity" and summoned the spirit of Charles Ives with the lonely trumpet lines of "Tromba Lontana."
Also in 1987 CBS issued a recording of Mr. Glass's third opera, "Akhnaten," a portrait of the iconoclastic pharaoh who briefly imposed a monotheistic religion in Egypt. Compared with "Einstein" and its successor, "Satyagraha," the opera seems almost conventional in its procession of narrative tableaus. But Mr. Glass's lean, percussive score includes some of his most viscerally exciting music, and assigning the lead role to a countertenor was a bold stroke.
"Hymn to the Aten," the pharaoh's second-act paean to his deity, is one of the composer's most communicative and ineffably beautiful creations; Mr. Glass, who must have had a sense of his achievement, instructed that the aria always be performed in the native language of the country where it is being performed.
VIVIEN SCHWEITZER
ADAMS "Shaker Loops," "The Wound-Dresser," "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." Bournemouth Symphony, conducted by Marin Alsop (Naxos 8.559031; CD).
GLASS Violin Concerto; other works. Adele Anthony, violinist; Ulster Orchestra, conducted by Takuo Yuasa (Naxos 8.554568; CD).
REICH Music for 18 Musicians. Steve Reich and Musicians (Nonesuch 79448; CD).
REICH "City Life," "New York Counterpoint," "Eight Lines," "Violin Phase." Ensemble Modern (BMG/RCA Victor 74321 66459 2; CD).
The diverse moods of John Adams are alluringly conveyed by Marin Alsop and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra on a Naxos disc that opens with a sparkling performance of the wildly exuberant "Short Ride in a Fast Machine." In "Shaking and Trembling," the first movement of "Shaker Loops," the Bournemouth strings play as if possessed, hurling colorful arrows of sound into the kaleidoscopic dartboard of orchestral textures. The frenzied rapture builds to a dizzying fervor before melting into the eerie glissandos of the next movement. Also included is a performance of Mr. Adams's gloomy "Wound-Dresser," sung by the fine baritone Nathan Gunn.
Philip Glass's Violin Concerto is his first major orchestral work. It adheres to a traditional three-movement, fast-slow-fast structure for conventionally scored orchestra, but with its insistent opening chords, chromatically undulating harmonies and the soloist's mournful arpeggios, this theatrical work is signature Glass. On the fine Naxos disc Takuo Yuasa leads the Ulster Orchestra and the violinist Adele Anthony in a vibrant, throbbing performance. Ms. Anthony's sweet-toned, romantic playing soars over the waves of pulsating orchestral rhythms, played here with enough tension to create a taut web of sound. The disc also includes enjoyable renditions of "Company" and excerpts from "Akhnaten."
Like all masterpieces, when played with integrity and passion Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians — the seminal 1976 chamber work in which he used his broadest palette of harmonic language to date — never loses its fascination. In this 1996 recording Mr. Reich and his band of musicians build on the layers of blinding colors and hypnotic rhythms in a performance with moods veering from rhythmically energetic and vital to seductively (and deceptively) languid. This performance highlights the work's beautiful surface veneer, underlying levels of complexity and intoxicatingly therapeutic power.
Other notable works from various periods of Mr. Reich's life receive vigorous, intelligent performances by the Ensemble Modern on an RCA recording, which includes "City Life." This aural snapshot of New York streets transforms normally irritating sounds, like sirens and honking horns, into a compelling musical fabric. The turmoil of city life is also aptly conveyed in a taut, jaunty rendition of "New York Counterpoint," performed by Roland Diry, a stellar clarinetist. The disc also includes bristling performances of "Eight Lines" and, with Jagdish Mistry as the excellent soloist, "Violin Phase."
The recordings mentioned range in price from $9 to $20 for one CD, $24 to $34 for two CDs and $34 to $44 for a three-CD set; the eight-CD set is $136; the DVD is $22.44.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/arts/music/10mini.html?pagewanted=print
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Sunday, August 05, 2007
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
August 5, 2007
Music
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
LONDON
EDWARD ELGAR’S eminence in British music, 150 years after his birth, is assured.
During this anniversary year his music is being played up and down the land, from January to December: rare as well as familiar works, as a glance at the Elgar Society Web site (www.elgar.org) shows. There are many broadcasts, celebrations, major publications. But exactly what Elgar stood for and what is unique about his music are more than ever being questioned.
Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences, with Americans as well as his countrymen taking part. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. And in a welcome development, the major festival is in America, which Elgar visited several times to conduct his music. Over the next two weekends the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., will devote its annual Rediscoveries series to Elgar and his world.
Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.
To the many Americans now writing about him, he may seem no more familiar than Brahms. Young British academics are applying rigorous analytical techniques to his music as if he were Debussy or Schoenberg, unencumbered by images of the Malvern Hills or the British empire. His sayings are being taken less at face value and scrutinized as defensive coverups. Scholars who have studied other composers before Elgar — Julian Rushton, after Mozart and Berlioz; James Hepokoski, after Verdi and Sibelius — come to him freshly.
It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.
Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.
His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.
During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)
The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”
Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.
Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.
Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.
A tougher man might have drawn strength from such diversity. Elgar was by no means the only creative artist of his time to rise socially. James Barrie and Thomas Hardy, like Elgar, all started life with few material advantages. All three rose to fame in the first half of the last century; all three were loaded with honors; all three were awarded the Order of Merit. Class-conscious though England may have been, people with outstanding ability and perseverance could rise to the top.
But for the thin-skinned Elgar, such balancing acts meant insecurity, and he made it worse by his determination to live, once established, only by his composing. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proudly refused to seek a salaried professional post. He never achieved a stable personality but was subject to violent despondencies, and he made some shockingly bitter remarks that need to be set in a sympathetic context. In later life he could adopt irritating poses, like rating horse racing above composition.
For all that, he had devoted, tenacious friends. He was also one of the great letter writers of all time, pouring out ridiculous puns next to heart-rending confessions and thoroughly practical instructions for the printing of his music.
He saw himself as disadvantaged by having been self-taught. Yet without undue early influence he developed his noble tunes, aspirational sequences and vigorous rhythms into an instantly recognizable style. He worked in the provinces as organist, accompanist, arranger, violinist (solo and orchestral), conductor, bassoonist and teacher, to say nothing of composer. He could hardly have acquired a finer practical training anywhere.
His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.
His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.
That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.
Elgar was never parochial. His technique owes much to Wagner, his orchestration to French composers. It was Hans Richter, who had given premieres of works by Brahms, Wagner and Dvorak, who introduced the “Enigma” Variations to London. The first truly successful performance of “Gerontius” was in Düsseldorf under Julius Buths. In Elgar’s heyday he was taken up by Artur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner; and by Theodore Thomas in Chicago and Frank and Walter Damrosch in New York. Mahler conducted the “Enigma” Variations in New York in 1911.
Unlike the generation of British composers that followed him, Elgar did not find inspiration in folk song. The only charge England might lay against him is that his genius overpowered his lesser but still fine near-contemporaries, until the advent of Vaughan Williams and Britten. The great merit of the Bard festival which begins on Friday, is to place Elgar in that wider context.
In 1899 Horatio Parker’s oratorio “Hora Novissima” was given in Elgar’s hometown, Worcester, the first American work to be performed at a Three Choirs Festival. In 1905 Professor Parker, initiating a tradition, performed the “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 at Yale when an honorary doctorate was conferred on Elgar.
Elgar was introduced as a composer “honored for his genius” in an art that “voices the profoundest spirited emotions and the deepest longings of the heart.”
“Commanding the homage of the musicians of Germany, of France and of America,” the commendation went on, “he is heartily welcomed among us.”
Diana McVeagh is the author of “Elgar the Music Maker” (Boydell Press).
Music
Elgar, Beyond Pomp and Circumstance By DIANA McVEAGH
LONDON
EDWARD ELGAR’S eminence in British music, 150 years after his birth, is assured.
During this anniversary year his music is being played up and down the land, from January to December: rare as well as familiar works, as a glance at the Elgar Society Web site (www.elgar.org) shows. There are many broadcasts, celebrations, major publications. But exactly what Elgar stood for and what is unique about his music are more than ever being questioned.
Recently in Britain there have been several scholarly Elgar conferences, with Americans as well as his countrymen taking part. Old assumptions are being challenged, clichés rejected. And in a welcome development, the major festival is in America, which Elgar visited several times to conduct his music. Over the next two weekends the Bard Music Festival in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., will devote its annual Rediscoveries series to Elgar and his world.
Critical opinion about Elgar is far less settled than it was at his centenary in 1957. Fifty years ago he seemed a grand phenomenon. At a greater distance he is more of a historical figure, less of a living presence.
To the many Americans now writing about him, he may seem no more familiar than Brahms. Young British academics are applying rigorous analytical techniques to his music as if he were Debussy or Schoenberg, unencumbered by images of the Malvern Hills or the British empire. His sayings are being taken less at face value and scrutinized as defensive coverups. Scholars who have studied other composers before Elgar — Julian Rushton, after Mozart and Berlioz; James Hepokoski, after Verdi and Sibelius — come to him freshly.
It was never true that Elgar was universally regarded simply as a Colonel Blimp, epitomizing England, Empire and Establishment, his music confident and grandiloquent. Certainly, “Land of Hope and Glory” (better known to Americans from the “Pomp and Circumstance” March of countless graduations), the once-in-a-lifetime tune that entered the national consciousness and brought him popular fame, also acted partly as a barrier.
Some people, though always a minority, saw little beyond it, beyond the bristling mustache and the cultivated military appearance. Perceptive listeners, right from the start, heard the nervousness beneath the swagger. The pendulum may indeed have swung too far the other way. Emphasizing the melancholy, tormented undertow to Elgar’s music has brought a danger that his life-affirming, exuberant, glowing side is now underestimated. He may have wished to “curse the power that gave me gifts,” as he once said, but he also knew the “Spirit of Delight” invoked in the epigraph to his Second Symphony.
His range is great. At one extreme are his charming light pieces, like “Salut d’Amour.” They are not negligible, for their melodic appeal and the finish of their workmanship are enduring.
During the decade in which Delius composed his agnostic “Mass of Life” to Nietzsche’s text, Elgar turned to Cardinal Newman for his searing oratorio “The Dream of Gerontius” and offered glimpses of eternity. (The critic Michael Steinberg rates “Gerontius” as the greatest religious work between Verdi’s Requiem and Stravinsky’s “Symphony of Psalms.”)
The exhilarating but elusive Introduction and Allegro for strings is a bridge between the 18th-century concerto grosso and Vaughan Williams’s “Tallis Fantasia” and Tippett’s Double Concerto. Then there are the enchanting Edwardian-style stage works, “The Starlight Express” and “The Sanguine Fan”; great part songs, still underperformed; and strange miniatures like the song “Submarines.”
Elgar’s two symphonies are psychologically complex, and they explore the harmonic hinterland behind their ostensible keys. Elgar can use limpid scales to express innocence, but at anguished climaxes — in the opening movement of the First Symphony or the Rondo of the Second — the distortion approaches Expressionism.
Commentators argue whether this “typical” Englishman was overemotional or repressed. But it is exactly this tension between passion and inhibition that makes him so compelling.
Elgar was uneasily poised between cultures. Born and rooted in Worcestershire, in verdant central England, he has been seen as primarily a pastoral composer. The American-born Elgar scholar Jerrold Northrop Moore most persuasively argues for this. But as soon as Elgar could afford it, he made a bid for London, and he was at his most carefree vacationing in Bavaria and Italy. He was a Roman Catholic who never composed a mature Mass, and he spent much of his life among the three great Protestant cathedrals of the Three Choirs Festival, accepting an invitation for an Anglican Te Deum and Benedictus. He was born into trade, married into a county family, then leapfrogged over that rank to mingle with the aristocracy.
A tougher man might have drawn strength from such diversity. Elgar was by no means the only creative artist of his time to rise socially. James Barrie and Thomas Hardy, like Elgar, all started life with few material advantages. All three rose to fame in the first half of the last century; all three were loaded with honors; all three were awarded the Order of Merit. Class-conscious though England may have been, people with outstanding ability and perseverance could rise to the top.
But for the thin-skinned Elgar, such balancing acts meant insecurity, and he made it worse by his determination to live, once established, only by his composing. Unlike his English contemporaries, he proudly refused to seek a salaried professional post. He never achieved a stable personality but was subject to violent despondencies, and he made some shockingly bitter remarks that need to be set in a sympathetic context. In later life he could adopt irritating poses, like rating horse racing above composition.
For all that, he had devoted, tenacious friends. He was also one of the great letter writers of all time, pouring out ridiculous puns next to heart-rending confessions and thoroughly practical instructions for the printing of his music.
He saw himself as disadvantaged by having been self-taught. Yet without undue early influence he developed his noble tunes, aspirational sequences and vigorous rhythms into an instantly recognizable style. He worked in the provinces as organist, accompanist, arranger, violinist (solo and orchestral), conductor, bassoonist and teacher, to say nothing of composer. He could hardly have acquired a finer practical training anywhere.
His contrapuntal technique is essential to the integration of his symphonic movements and is the very web and woof of his “Falstaff.” Yet he wore his hard-won learning lightly. His “Enigma” Variations, which catapulted him to fame in 1899, sound absolutely spontaneous but can bear strict analysis. The eighth variation (‘‘W. N.”), a portrait of a delicate country household, is a tissue of extensions, chromatic inflections and rhythmic and melodic reversals, all ingeniously derived from the theme. Into the bluff, emphatic fourth variation (“W. M. B.”), he nonchalantly tossed a couple of bars of close canon.
His Violin Concerto, given its premiere in London in 1910 by Fritz Kreisler with Elgar conducting, marked the peak of his career. His Second Symphony, of 1911, brought a more puzzled response. Change was in the air. Edward VII was dead; Stravinsky was composing “The Rite of Spring”; the Great War was coming nearer.
That war destroyed Elgar’s world. As it ended, he withdrew inward, composing chamber music and his poignant, haunted Cello Concerto. Was that a requiem for the war dead, for the cultural world he knew, for his own increasing age, even for a lost early love? It could be none or all of these.
Elgar was never parochial. His technique owes much to Wagner, his orchestration to French composers. It was Hans Richter, who had given premieres of works by Brahms, Wagner and Dvorak, who introduced the “Enigma” Variations to London. The first truly successful performance of “Gerontius” was in Düsseldorf under Julius Buths. In Elgar’s heyday he was taken up by Artur Nikisch, Fritz Steinbach, Bruno Walter and Felix Weingartner; and by Theodore Thomas in Chicago and Frank and Walter Damrosch in New York. Mahler conducted the “Enigma” Variations in New York in 1911.
Unlike the generation of British composers that followed him, Elgar did not find inspiration in folk song. The only charge England might lay against him is that his genius overpowered his lesser but still fine near-contemporaries, until the advent of Vaughan Williams and Britten. The great merit of the Bard festival which begins on Friday, is to place Elgar in that wider context.
In 1899 Horatio Parker’s oratorio “Hora Novissima” was given in Elgar’s hometown, Worcester, the first American work to be performed at a Three Choirs Festival. In 1905 Professor Parker, initiating a tradition, performed the “Pomp and Circumstance” March No. 1 at Yale when an honorary doctorate was conferred on Elgar.
Elgar was introduced as a composer “honored for his genius” in an art that “voices the profoundest spirited emotions and the deepest longings of the heart.”
“Commanding the homage of the musicians of Germany, of France and of America,” the commendation went on, “he is heartily welcomed among us.”
Diana McVeagh is the author of “Elgar the Music Maker” (Boydell Press).
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