The Naughties End - The Tweens Begin

While there's a raging debate about what to call this decade - the New York Times solicited catchy tags from readers here - has anyone noticed that the next decade will also pose a problem: teenage years don't start until 2013. So I heartily welcome the Tweens, which, according to my research into preteenism, begin at 10. A portmanteau, the wikipedia tells us "Tween is an American neologism and marketing term for preteen. A blend of between and teen, tween in this context is generally considered to cover the age range from eight to twelve years." So, by different definitions, we're either hot in the middle of the Tweens, transitioning into them, or drunk on Tween eve - whatever the rate of this decade's preadolescence. It's true that the Obama era, in all effect, came on in 2008, & eras don't always line up perfectly with even numbers. (The twentieth century, for instance, didn't really get started until The Rite of Spring & World War I, & end until September 2001 or November 2008 depending on your political leanings.)

Back to the 2000's, I was just remarking to Miss Anna Greenberg that "It says a lot for our culture that we've been living thru it for ten years & haven't really started to call it anything. How can half a billion English speakers just tiptoe around the issue for ten years!" She responded: "how can we call it something when it hasn't ended yet!" That's true, but it's an issue that's periodically come up in the periodicals. I've always favored the naughties, or the naughty-aughties. (This year would be called "Two-naughty-aughty-nine" or "Two-naughty-naughty-nine," as I say in the MC Pseudo-Dionysius song Hillelujah.) We'll see what sticks, or if people will just eternally say "that decade".

UPDATE: I say, in celebration of the breaking dawn of the Tweens, celebrate by going out to see New Dawn! It's hard to predict the future, but easy to say with certainty that the tweens are characterized by Twilight, Twitter, Obama, tea parties, Glee, & of course itwaslost artists & writers. L'Chaim! Наздравици!

(The art at the top is classic Olaf Mary college-era whales-standing-up, two-naughty-aughty-four.)

Music Review: The Pied Piper of Hamelin, by Randall Woolf

My old friend, Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith, is in a touring performing quartet, Tales & Scales, which performs “Musictelling” for children, in schools & concert halls, all over the country, homing in Evansville, Indiana, on the beautiful O-Hi-O. They have a half dozen different shows, telling stories with their instruments (flute/piccolo, oboe/sax, bass trombone/euphonium, percussion) & dance. I decided I couldn’t miss the California première of The Pied Piper, for which they commissioned hip downtown composer Randall Woolf to write the music, so I rode South on Thursday with a Coast Guard chief recruiter I found on Craigslist rideshare. I ended up seeing three of the six performances during their stay at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa. It’s the first time T&S has gone electronic, with a laptop onstage (on a pillar with wheels, doubling, like all their instruments, as a prop & an abstract dance/set piece). Most of their music & story (which is the 1842 poem version by Robert Browning) is accompanied by beats, moog-ish whirls, & scary Twin Peaks-y music coming out of the laptop. Mrs Smith also has next to her vibraphone, in her mobile artillery of auxiliary percussion, a nifty little turntable – on which, among other things, she scratches the sounds of kids laughing. In short, Mr Browning’s creaky poem has been turned into a hip-hopera for kids.

The fact that they perform this piece for children around the country in Elementary Schools, concert halls, & arts centers, & that the music is weird & modern - as a post-minimalist Bang-on-a-Can derivative, & both in a Stravinsky-esque way & in a hip-hop crossover way – shows that younger audiences can easily accept some of the avant-guard stuff many adults have trouble with. Quirky dissonances & electronic whizzes are nothing head-turning to a viewer of television cartoons; they can be a necessity for a lot of 21st century storytelling; but to adults-with-opinions these noises can be disorienting. The Pied Piper of Hamelin is a fairly messy piece of music & theater, with thick sounds & the musicians running all over the stage, reciting into wireless microphones lines like “And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered / You heard as if an army muttered.” But a cluttered telling of a dark tale, no obstacle, most kids’ faces were glued to the stage.

Mr Woolf’s music grew on me by the third show. There’s an especially beautiful moment, right after the Pied Piper has successfully exterminated the rats, when the one surviving rat reflects on what he heard that led him to the water. The action stops, & in a threepenny moment, the narrator announces: “his commentary"; the computer plays a strumming guitar. None other than Cory Dargel’s voice comes thru the loud speakers, singing:

At the first shrill notes of the pipe,
I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press's gripe: […]
And it seemed as if a voice
(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery
Is breathed) called out, 'Oh rats, rejoice!’

I likened this moment to a part of the movie “The Darjeeling Limited” (2007, dir. Wes Anderson). It’s also a cluttered, always-in-motion piece of art, telling a complex story, & at one point the action stops & an out-of-place guitar accompanies an extremely slow-motion shot of the three brothers, in all white on their way to a funeral, walking thru an Indian village, past old men who sit as still as statues, looking for all the world like a Renaissance painting. The Kinks’ song “Strangers”, & the now reflective pace, releases an ocean of emotion:

Where are you going, I don’t mind,
I’ve killed my world & I’ve killed my time, &c…

Similarly, putting the perspective on its side, understanding what the rats heard as they followed their messiah to their annihilation, somehow needed the commentary of a strumming guitar.

In this version, also, the children do not return to Hamelin, but are led mysteriously into a cave, &, in the end, it is rumored that there is a strange tribe in Transylvania that dresses differently. It’s a sad ending for the corrupt elders of Hamelin, but the recruited kids from the audience who followed the piper conclude the play in party mode, dancing jubilantly on stage. It’s actually a common theme in a lot of children’s art: Let’s get out of here, go some place cooler, & never come back. Mrs Smith told me that one venue in Florida canceled the show when they heard that the children don’t return to Hamelin. I wouldn’t either, with its euphonium-playing mayor. I’d rather be inside the song the rats heard.

Saturday night, I went with Tales & Scales to hear the Pacific Symphony play Michael Daugherty's Fire & Blood Violin Concerto, with Ida Kavafian, in that performing arts center's beautiful new hall. The orchestra was pretty good, & there was a lot of energy from the podium. I love that second movement from the concerto, where mariachi trumpets, harps, & two marimbas evoke Frida Kahlo's longing for Mexico, while she waits for two years in Michigan for Diego Rivera to finish the "Detroit Industry" mural. After the symphony, we went back across the street to the hotel, & lo, there was the composer playing the Frida theme on the piano in the lobby, with a rollicking hotel bar in the background. Not bad lounge music.

Music Review: Covering Songs

While everyone else is drunkenly commenting on the new Radiohead album - (which, for anyone not paying attention, is being sold for "what you want to pay", which includes nothing, an economic principle called "tipping", & so far has made a ton of money, because people don't mind giving on average eight dollars to a filthy rich rock band for a mediocre later album) - I was thinking about covering John Denver songs & John Lennon songs.

Several thoughts: First, Julie Taymor gets a bad rap, & her Beatles movie is a lot of fun & looks beautiful. I think of her still as an opera director, & after she's gone mainstream, she's still doing what opera directors do: play us music we've heard ten thousand times, with new singers, & dazzle us with expensive set pieces. Stringing overplayed Beatles songs together into a plot, like she's done with a Disney movie, Kahlo's paintings, Shakespeare, & Stravinsky, allows us to enjoy as fresh, & relive some greatness in what we're otherwise sick of. I also think of her as like Terry Gilliam, managing to push thru the system huge imaginative bizarre projects with large puppets & dense colors, which the critics love to hate. So the movie has some cheezy singing, & is maybe best appreciated by stoned sixteen-year-olds, let's just enjoy what's good about it.

Another thought: I just bought Mary Alice Amidon's beautiful new solo album, Keys to the Kingdom. The title track, Keys to the Kingdom, is a song I have on a 1929 recording by Washington Phillips, the elusive zither-playing preacher. His flash-in-the-pan field-recording career is supposed to be the earliest example of gospel text set to blues chords & structure, then he disappeared entirely from recorded history. I was thrilled to hear Gillian Welch play an extremely powerful version of this song (it got humongous) at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park last weekend; then, we went home & listened to the old recording; then, two days later, Mary Alice sent me her new album in the mail - one of those coincidences where different versions of a song can suddenly appear on different fronts. Washington & Gillian both sing about Daniel & the lion, & "the devil can't do me no harm", but Mary Alice sings about John & Gabriel & "the world can't do me no harm." I guess maybe they don't believe in the devil in Vermont. She says she first heard the version by Lillie Knox from the Alan Lomax Collection. I don't have much of a point, except I'd like to know more about the history of this song, & that both Gillian & Mary Alice know how to sing it. This YouTube Video says it's from The Dame in Lexington:



Also, relatedly, here's David Rawlings singing "Girls just want to have fun", which I'm told he sung two years ago at the Hardly Strictly:

E-mail: Communicating with Danny Curley Holt, & some highschool news archives

Date:	Wed, 7 Mar 2007 11:20:29 -0800 (PST)
From:	"James Welsch" <______@itwaslost.org>
Subject:	Little Miss
To:	"Danny Curley Holt" <________@yahoo.com>

D.C.

I'm sitting at work, googling, & I just found something crazy. Put this into google:

"Danny Holt" site:http://listserv.american.edu/

It's quite an artform, Google, like mining, but for treasures more mysterious.

You know, they're getting in trouble with publishers & copyright hawks, because they're scanning every book. They want to make every book ever published searchable.

I was thinking how impossible that would be with music. How could you scan an audio recording & make it searchable? Like googling for "L'homme arme".

I'm sorry we never spoke on the phone when you called months ago. I'm very flakey with my cellphone, but not flakey with other mediums, like talking to someone in person, or even electronic mail. What's the address to your new house? Is you piano white, black, or pink? I know you zip around at 90 miles per hour while talking on your cellphone, but I try & keep mine as far from my reproductive organs as possible. You know 200,000 Americans have died in car crashes since the invasion of Iraq, where, relatively, 3,000 Americans have died.

I keep my iPod on "random album" at work, & then skip the album if it's inappropriate. Bela Fleck playing classical music is playing right now, he's playing The Moonlight Sonata with Edgar Meyer. Who knew? Have you recorded "Wed"? I wish you'd send your latest recordings to 1985 Ashby Ave, Berkeley, CA 94703.

Well, I long to attend one of your salons. There are complicated issues involving why I never go South anymore.

Watch closely the new Alarm Will Sound DVD of live Reich. Yours truly is in the front row the audience, sometimes right under Caleb's armpit.

Speaking of whom, Alarm Will Sound plays Berkeley this weekend. I think it's all Nancarrow.

I live in this beautiful apartment. We have a guest futon & another couch, so you could theoretically arrive with a vanload of hippies & I could accommodate - so, if you're ever near the bay area with a vanload of hippies, they have a place to stay.

I was just ten feet from John Adams's butt the other day, conducting his new opera. I reviewed it here.

Why don't you play that first interlude from that sonata? It's so beautiful, & the world has no idea. I have issues with closure, which my therapist advizes me to get the fuck over. Actually, my therapist never swears, except when I'm [doing something offensive to] her from behind. I don't have a therapist, but if I did, she'd be a [derogatory slang for attractive female human].

Stravinsky's Symphony in C just came on now. Who knew?

Who's your girlfriend?

Love,
James

______________________________________________________________________

In regards to the above suggestion for Mr Holt to google himself in that listserv website: Someone has posted some selected archives of the E-NEWS from my high-school, the Interlochen Arts Academy. O, some fond memories can be found, mostly the listings for concerts we gave, during our young creative salad days. For instance, from March 10, 1999:

Composers Forum:  Thursday, March 11, 8:30 p.m., in the Chapel.

Featuring **world premieres** of works by Ayaka "Kew" Nishina,

Danny Holt, James Welsch, Steve Whipple, and faculty member Elaine

Broad.

From February 16, 2000:

CONGRATULATIONS: Seven Academy students were named finalists in the Arts Recognition and Talent Search (ARTS) program and received additional awards following a week of workshops and presentations in Florida. Writing student Onnesha Roychoudhuri, who received a level II award, was also invited to compete for a Presidential Scholar in the Arts Award. Other awardees include: Jaren Philleo (oboe) Level II; Shea Scruggs (oboe) Level I; James Welsch (composition) Level II; Bonnie Whiting (percussion) Level II; Jamie Polychronis, IAA '99, (flute) Level III; and Jessie Iott (writing) Level II. In addition, Academy students received seven Honorable Mentions and 15 Merit Awards prior to the January event. ARTS is a national program designed to identify, recognize, and encourage talented high school seniors who demonstrate excellence in dance, photography, theater, jazz, music, voice, visual arts, or writing.

From February 11^th, 1999:

Composers' Forum:  Friday, February 12, 8:00 p.m. in the Chapel.

Will feature works by Danny Holt, James Welsch, Ashley Fure, David

Stinson, Levi Taylor, Mr. Joe DeFazio, and special guest Dr. Doy

Baker.  If you always wanted to know what a THEREMIN was, this is

your chance to find out (and hear it played!).

I believe I was playing the theremin in an improvised improvisation with Nicole DeLaittre.

Is this boring for you yet? I’m still having a blast. From November 11^th, 1999:

COMPOSERS' FORUM: The first student Composers' Forum of the year is on Saturday, November 13, at 8:00pm in the Chapel. Come hear new music written by Ashley Fure, Steven Whipple, David Stinson, Jonathan Shapiro, Victor Giraldo, James Welsch, and faculty member John Boyle.

MISSING GLASSES: Kelly Greenfield is missing a pair of glasses in a green Lenscrafter soft case. If you find them, please return them to Kelly in Counseling Services, or contact her by email (greenfieldkk) and she will come to you. "The computer screen is much more difficult to read without them!" Kelly says.

MISSING NOTEBOOKS: Cassidy Barnes is missing two notebooks. His lab notebook is a dark green spiral and has his name on the inside, with Physics and Chemistry written on the first page. His chem binder is a lighter shade of green and has the Interlochen logo on the front and his name on the inside. If found, please contact Cassidy in Hemingway.

[…]

ROAD TO WELLNESS THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Someone asked the other day, "Where is the music we used to hear in the cafeteria?" The inquiry prompted an interest in what actually led to the practice of music being played over meals. Research indicates that it all started a long time ago...in England. When he wasn't beheading wives, Henry VIII kept a court band of 79 musicians on hand for his royal entertainment. Meanwhile, his daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, made popular the whole idea of dinner music. Word has it that she could not eat supper unless she was being serenaded. So, there you go. While not answering the original question, it is interesting. One should also note that more Thoughts For The Day are needed! Email your ideas to Michael Haynes (haynesma).

TODAY'S MENU: Lunch - beef barley soup, plain and flavored wing dings, vegan chop suey, brown rice, snow pea pods, deli. Dinner - vegetarian vegetable soup, pork chops, vegan stew, scalloped potatoes, baby carrots, hot cinnamon applesauce, deli.

Music Review: A Flowering Tree, by John Adams

Last Friday Night, I was less than ten feet from John Adams’s butt as he conducted the American premiere of his new opera, A Flowering Tree, with the San Francisco Symphony in Davies Hall. I had bought the tickets months ago, & was psyched about my second row seats, but when we arrived for the pre-concert talk, I realized they were way to the left side. The way the stage was set up, the orchestra was on the left, & the percussion & platforms for the singers & Javanese dancers was on the right – so that far forward, we would only be able to see three violinists & the conductor! So right as the lights dimmed, we moved front & center. It was intense being that close to the composer conducting his own work, not to mention the opera singers, who can be deafening at that proximity. As for nearness – relative in its importance depending on the level of celebrity one is near – I was once closer to Mr Adams, as he walked down the aisle before Dr Atomic in 2005. My friend Mrs Bonnie Anne Whiting Smith was once physical shook by the shoulders by John Adams, something approaching annunciation for her. At Oberlin Conservatory, she had told him that she played the difficult drum part for his Chamber Symphony, &, apparently moved by so infamously tricky a multi-percussion part being conquered by such a petite young redhead, rapturously embraced & moved her. I believe, so I’m told, she was osmosisally impregnated with triplets.

A Flowering Tree was beautiful, a welcome relief after the abstract density of Dr Atomic, & his Pulitzer Prize-winning 9-11 piece, On the Transmigration of Souls, both of which seemed to be moving in the dark direction of some of Krzysztof Penderecki’s “Sound Mass”-style compositions of the ’60s. If you don’t know what that means, read: huge, dissonant movements of sound. Adams’s music of the 1980s always had a pulse, & his orchestration has gotten denser with thick, Stravinsky-esque textures & difficult asymmetrical rhythms. However, the groove & lushness of the texture made his sound very approachable & fun. Somehow, in the past decade, he’s completely lost his groove (except in some amazing clearings, like one prophetic aria in El Niño, “And I will shake the heavens….”). So this density of atmospheric texture became more & more what the music was about, & some of us were sad about that. Don’t get me wrong, when it is modal & beautiful, like the Love Duet in Dr Atomic or the guitar solo in Naïve & Sentimental Music, it's almost transcendent.

Alex Ross, in the New Yorker last November, writing about the Vienna premiere, declared that A Flowering Tree was “unlike anything that the fifty-nine-year-old composer has written”. He, & many other critics, have seen it primarily as a response or palinode to Dr Atomic, & wasted time comparing them. (It was written in less than a year immediately following the premiere of Dr Atomic.) I think it sounded a lot like El Niño, his nativity oratorio from 2000, & I view the music as an expansion on many of the ideas he developed there. His vocal melodies this decade are blander & less direct than his 1980s’ operas, but they all share a certain shape & style. The orchestration for A Flowering Tree was incredible from beginning to end, the whole thing just sparkled.

I’ll let Alex Ross describe the plot:

A Flowering Tree, for its part, takes off from The Magic Flute. In both operas, the love of a prince and a maiden endures after a long separation and painful trials. There is also a kinship with Richard Strauss’s autumnal masterpiece “Daphne,” based on the ancient Greek myth of arboreal metamorphosis. But, where Daphne’s transformation is permanent, Kumudha, in the Indian tale, can move in and out of her tree shape when pitchers of water are poured on her body. The Prince falls in love with her and marries her. The trials begin when the Prince’s sister exploits the magic for public show and neglectfully leaves Kumudha trapped in a grotesque hybrid state, whereupon she crawls away from her husband in shame. Only when the Prince recognizes her voice in a travelling band of minstrels is she restored to humanity.

The environmental themes are there without his having to muck with the text or spell anything out. I see Kumudha as a representation of our interconnectedness with Nature, even especially trees – we understand that better now than when the fairy tale was written, but we feel it less. When the Prince’s sister exploits her & mutilates her, it defiles both the human & the arboreal, & there is somehow a direct connection to that mutilation & the poverty & misery immediately following. Exploiting nature leads to the debasement of humanity, which leads to the Prince’s despair & consequent asceticism.

Here’s what John Adams wrote about it in the Guardian:

The libretto is written in English and Spanish. I knew that the chorus in the first performance would be the remarkable Schola Cantorum of Caracas, and I wanted them to sing in their native tongue. Using two languages is also a reaffirmation of my feeling that we are living in a time of global cultural awareness, with all its pain and wonder. In the US, there is a panic response to immigration that has recently expressed itself in "English-only" ballot initiatives. I suppose my pleasure in writing a polyglot libretto is a means of reaffirming my feeling that the best culture is the one with the richest variety of sources. And, of course, Spanish is a terrific language for singing.

[…]

My previous opera, Doctor Atomic, first performed in San Francisco in October last year, is about the most threatening matter in our contemporary lives - man's new-found ability to destroy not only himself but his natural environment. One can think of the atomic bomb not only as an immensely destructive weapon, but also as a metaphor for the power to corrupt our "nest", Earth. In the opera, there is a disconnection between feminine and masculine types of energy. The atomic scientists, all male, are absorbed in their invention, caught up in a race to build the weapon. I do not criticise what they did, because it was wartime and they began their work in the belief that they were saving civilisation from the threat of Hitler. But we see the invention take on a sinister life of its own, and even Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the project, becomes aware that the weapon will eventually threaten all human life. The women in Doctor Atomic are in a powerless situation, but they have a moral consciousness, able to see into the future, like Cassandras.

In A Flowering Tree, the male/female relationships begin as traditional class and gender inequality - a rich prince dominating a poor peasant girl - but what follows is a story of self-discovery and humility that resolves in an image of wholeness and love. And I loved the fact that, after three years of working on an opera about plutonium and high-energy physics, the most advanced technology in my new opera is an elephant.

I don’t read in that that John Adams is becoming a Luddite: he uses technology to compose, & electro-acoustically in performance. What I’ve always loved about his music is that breadth of assimilation. He lets himself be inspired by the whole gamut of Classical Music from Mozart thru Schoenberg & Glass, along with world & popular musics. The result is a kind of twenty-first-century Americana – not in a postmodern way, with its leveling of hierarchies, but in the cultured multi-culturalism felt on the streets of the San Francisco Bay Area.

My biggest complaint is Peter Sellars, the opera director & Adams’s collaborator for twenty-five years. He likes to keep the stage busy with dancers & baroque accouterments, as if our attention spans have been reduced to the pithiness of the so-called MTV-generation. Also the self-conscious multi-culturalism which subtly blends in the music, Sellars thinks he can cheesily glorify on stage, with Javanese dancers & the like. I loved those dancers, but something about it didn’t mesh. The constant movement was distracting. I think it’s just time for Adams to move on from Sellars, whose innovation may have peaked in the ’80s. And my god he was schmaltzy in the pre-concert talk.