Carl Stone confronts the meaning of cliché - in his case, his desire to use some recordings of ocean waves, which he thinks are a cliché. While his ruminations are interesting, the responses seem to miss the mark. (in NewMusicBox)

With so many musical ideas in use, and overuse, it can be hard to avoid the neighborhood of any given cliché. This is especially true when it comes to sampling sounds. I tend to hammer on my students when they get too close to one, but often they don’t hear it the same way. Mostly this is due to a different level of experience, but the ensuing discussions too often make me sound like an old lunatic.

I have to thank WordPress for this one. Their automatically generated “possibly related posts” feature helped me find a post on Entrepreneur the Arts with Barack Obama speaking about the importance of the arts. It was linked to my post on race and the arts. While he mentions some of the usual stuff about the arts improving your math scores, he stresses the bigger picture, the value of learning to be creative, and learning “to see the world through other people’s eyes.” It’s these other aspects that I find very important, both for the arts and especially for politics. You don’t always get an easy answer for every problem. Some actions don’t have an immediate, tangible benefit. But those activities still have value.

Trying to write about an event that you’re working always turns out hard for me. Rather than let the event pass with only one measly post, I’m going for a post-post-mortem review or two.

Friday night’s concert might have been the most whiplash-inducing mix of styles I ever experienced. It certainly encourages some thought about whether to “ghetto” styles or mix them together. (”ghetto” referring to lumping together pieces of one style or instrumentation.)

Tending towards the soft and gentle side of new music were works by Alexander Nohai-Seaman, Derek Healy, Richard Brooks, and Michael Young. Young gave an impressive performance of his work. Healy’s work is part of a set of Chinese folk songs that my colleague Mei Zhong is releasing on CD.

Tending towards the modern were works by Eric Nathan, a gorgeous chamber ensemble work title Onement, Tom Wells’ Kisa, and of course, Elliott Carter. Notably different about the Carter guitar work, Shard, was its interpretation on electric guitar by Derek Johnson.

The work that generated the most discussion was Jeff Stanek’s Love and Aggression, for electric guitar and amplified cello. What was interesting to me was the reaction by the college students, who seemed to be against the very idea of a cello playing through an amp, and playing with distortion. Many people have written about the connection between certain avenues of experimental rock and new music among younger composers, as exemplified by the Bang on a Can All Stars, the Wordless Music concerts, and others, but the connection seemed to be lost in this locale. Knowing the success of the above groups, it says more to me about the culture of young people locally.

In advance of two concerts, the New York Times has an article on Frederic Rzewski. It’s an interesting piece.  Rzewski, known for composing a number of pieces with strong left political references, completely downplays political ideology. While his political beliefs come through clearly in the body of his work, he understands that classical music isn’t really a strong platform for political and social change.

The 38th annual Festival of New Music is underway, with guest composer Thomas Wells giving a talk to our composition seminar yesterday. Wells is particularly interested in pedagogical and historical aspects of composition, and provided some fascinating history about his student days at the University of Texas, Austin.

I might be more interested in this than most, since I was also a student there, but I tend to see the development of institutions as being similar to composition. Both are combinations of planned decisions and serendipitous discovery. You try things out, you revise along the way. Sometimes you don’t move on to new material soon enough. Some institutions are monothematic; others diverse collages of style and idea that you can navigate.

Wells’s talk reminded of how much international exposure the university has provided to the community, and for how long. As a high school student Wells heard a talk by Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1963, and said that listening to Kontakt “blew my mind.” He studied with Stockhausen in 1968 and 1972.

I’ll be posting more about the festival during and afterwards, and posting pictures to my Flickr stream, as well as the Facebook event page.

Barack Obama’s speech on race was one of those rare political occurrences where the discourse was elevated. If you haven’t yet read it, you should.

While the speech and the subject is being discussed and dissected virtually everywhere you turn on the net, it isn’t surprising that the arts neighborhood is uniformly silent. It’s just one sign of how so many aspects of the arts, especially music, are disengaged from culture.

I’ve just finished reading Alex Ross’s excellent book, The Rest is Noise. Ross compellingly shows how black composers were systematically denied opportunities at the beginning of the century in the U.S. Most either became bitter (and)or migrated towards popular music. Once white America took notice of successful blacks, and invited them to their classical world, many blacks declined.

Paul DiMaggio has written (”Cultural Entrepreneurship in 19th-Century Boston”) about how the upper class developed arts institutions in this country as a means to isolate themselves from society at large, particularly the growing immigrant population.

As composers continue to struggle with the notion of relevance in terms of broader culture, most turn to binary discussions of whether popular is good or bad. The bigger issue for me is how we can become relevant when we (historically) have done so much to be exclusive.

Counterstream radio has placed a streaming link to its interview with Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh, which I mentioned in a previous post.

Counterstream is a wonderful online radio station for contemporary American music, mixing heavyweights and newcomers in equal measure. It also has a number of interviews available for streaming.  It’s “ON DEMAND” series links artists from different genres, so far pop and concert music, who themselves have some link. Besides the Carter/Lesh program, there is also an interview with Meredith Monk and Björk. The Special Programs page has links to other interesting broadcasts, but you must tune in at specified times to listen. (no archive)

Announcements for two interesting radio programs just crossed by inbox.

On Friday, March 14th at 3pm (ET), Elliott Carter and Phil Lesh will be interviewed together on Counterstream radio, the online radio station of the American Music Center. On Sunday, March March 16 at noon PT (3pm ET), UCLA radio will feature experimental electronic(a) composer Carl Stone.

The show should be interesting, and more than a little mind-bending for people who rarely venture outside of their personal pleasure genres. Carter is a titan of 20th/21st-century modernism, whose music features beautifully layered material highlighted by complex metrical relationships. Lesh is best know as the bass player for the Grateful Dead, whose live shows spawned legions of faithful “Dead Heads” that followed the band across the country. But Lesh has a significant background in contemporary art music, studying with Luciano Berio at Mills College in the early 1960s. Along with classmate Steve Reich, he formed an improvisation group that blended acoustic and electronic music with theater. According to Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise, he dropped out of composition to play bass for a band the would become the Grateful Dead after listening to Mahler’s Sixth Symphony while tripping on LSD.

The Ball State University School of Music will hold it’s 38th Festival of New Music, March 20 - 22, 2008, featuring guest composer Thomas Wells, and guest performers Benjamin Sung and Jihye Chang. It’s a healthy dose of mostly regional new music, with a strong mix of acoustic and electronic offerings.
More information, including a complete schedule, is available through the festival website. On a personal note, the Saturday night concert features another incarnation of my barely-controlled laptop piece, Bent Metal.

Jonny Greenwood, guitarist with Radiohead, has been garnering some solo attention recently. He’s the composer for the soundtrack to There Will Be Blood. The movie has garnered Oscar attention (and nominations), although not for the music. Time magazine had a brief, positive blurp about the music. The BBC review of the soundtrack (pre-movie release) was mixed. From what I’ve seen of the trailer, the music is very effective.

Wordless Music produced the U.S. premiere of Greenwood’s Popcorn Superhet Receiver last week (which a great deal of the soundtrack for Blood is based on). There was a pre-concert article in the NY Times, and a concert review.

Wordless Music delves into genre mixing, with a philosophy that there is common ground between experimental classical and experimental rock and jazz. Usually there is a pairing of rock with classical chamber music. This concert made the juxtaposition of Greenwood’s works with two early minimalist pieces by John Adams and Gavin Bryars. While this pairing might not have made the most sense (Greenwood’s piece isn’t really minimal at all), the concert series has been a success. It’s also worth noting that Greenwood isn’t dabbling, like a Paul McCartney or a David Byrne (of the Talking Heads). Greenwood is trained violist with an avid interest in the music of Olivier Messiaen. While he sometimes develops his orchestral works through multi-layered improvisations in the recording studio, he handles all aspects of orchestration and notation himself. And the genre mixing seems to be paying off. The concert review notes the most recent performance was “packed.” And as I’ve posted before, younger audiences are interested in classical concerts that feature music by composers closer to their age, not the mindless classical pop that older symphony boards think will draw them in.