There’s an awful lot of fuss being made today about Alan Gilbert’s confrontation with a NY Phil patron whose cell phone went off during the final measures of Mahler’s 9th Symphony last night.  The errant twitwit aside, internet response seems to be squarely on the maestro’s side, and I concur.  I think he handled splendidly.  I don’t even blame the ushers for not stepping in — they too must have been stunned and reluctant to cause more of a stir by swooping in to discipline a patron seated in the middle of the front row as the last embers of Romanticism died away on stage.

The reports confirm everyone’s suspicions: the offender was an Older Person, so chances are this was an unwitting error on his part.  How many oldsters do you know who regularly hear their cell phone ring in a public (or private) setting?  That’s what I thought.

But just last week, I was witness to an audience disruption of a very different sort, one that the press has overlooked entirely.  Picture it: Cincinnati, 2012.  Music Hall.  The Cincinnati Symphony is on stage with Emmanuel Ax playing the Mozart 22nd piano concerto.  The charming first movement cadenza comes to a close and the orchestra re-enters.  It’s a sublime moment, smile-inducing and soul-restoring.  And it’s the very moment when some hooligan in the rafters applauds and barks out a Tim Allenesque bro-call.

Now here’s the thing: I so wish that this idiot had chosen a different concerto/cadenza for his little outburst, because given the right repertoire, I would be totally supportive of this kind of thing.  I’ve been preaching a long time about how we ought to be clapping between movements (since the composers usually WROTE their symphonies with that very reaction in mind) so why not at the end of cadenzas too, alla jazz performance practice?

Sure.  Fine.  Sounds great, but it depends on which concerto and which cadenza.  The Khatchaturian violin concerto?  By all means yes, everyone should be on their feet applauding the end of that cadenza when a violinist really nails it.  That’s what it’s there for.  I mean, that’s basically what the whole concerto is there for – it’s a virtuoso showpiece, and the cadenza takes up like half of the first movement.  Why should we just sit there?  To show reverence for one of the dumbest themes in the repertoire being played in the orchestra?  Ugh.

Dude.  Seriously.  It’s Mozart’s Eb piano concerto.  It’s not showy, it’s not splashy, it’s just gorgeous.  You know you were just trying to get attention and make a “statement” about jazz or classical or something.  Come on.

Remember a couple months ago when I came begging for money?  Well, I got it!  And then I made a recording of my new piece, which is actually like 10 months old, but so it goes.  Anyway, here it is:

And here’s more about the piece itself, my cantata setting of Psalm 46.

Me in action mode, with xmas wreath.  Photo credit Sam Greene.

The whole Kickstarter thing was a big success, and the Kickstarter site is packed with really helpful info about how to make your project work.  There are also other sites with helpful hints.  But here’s what I would say to composers looking to do a project like mine: classical music isn’t a sexy sell for a project.

(Duh.)

Unlike with other types of projects, random people on the internet are probably not going to contribute to you.  I think I got like three or four, maybe, and I’m still not convinced those weren’t my mother.  Crazy inventions, indie films, and pop records are all much more likely to attract the attention of the people who browse Kickstarter looking to get in on the ground floor of the Next Big Thing.

People singing music I wrote because other people donated money online.  Again, photo by Sam Greene.

For example, my friend Will just ran a hugely successful Kickstarter campaign for his movie “Mulligan” — he raised well over $10,000 in less than a week, and a lot of that came from people that he didn’t know.  Ironically, one of the major rewards categories was the score that I wrote for the movie and those randos were eating it up!  This isn’t sour grapes — quite to the contrary, I’m very happy with the money I raised and I’m really glad that his project succeeded too.  The point is that he had lots of people clicking on his link because they’re into indie film, because indie film is like, a thing that people are into.  I’m not sure most people who are into church music actually own mouse-compatible computers.  (I kid!)  [But, you know, kernel of truth.]

So Kickstarter is a tool — a great way to present and communicate your project and a slick interface for processing electronic payments (it’s linked to Amazon).  But you will still have to do the legwork of begging and browbeating your friends, family & colleagues into kicking in.  So good luck!!  Oh and special thanks to all my readers who contributed!!  Glad to have you as my listeners too!

1. Sufjan Stevens, Songs for Christmas

I don’t think we give Sufjan nearly enough credit in general, but certainly we should all be bowing down on our knees when December 25 comes around.  Simply put: Sufjan saved Christmas music.  All of it.  All of the familiar carols and songs, the trite lyrics, the pat harmonies.  He redeemed them, re-invented, and glorified them.  And all it took was a banjo and some oboes.

He also wrote some great new classics from scratch:

2. Tomás Luis de Victoria, O Magnum Mysterium

3. Gian Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors

This is likely the best thing Menotti ever wrote.  Pieces like The Medium and The Telephone have so many silly melodramatic moments and text-setting gaffs that they just don’t hold together.  Amahl is simple and tunely, contains a musical setting of the line “This is my box. This is my box. I never travel without my box,” and always makes me cry right here:

4. In Dulci Jubilo

I love the tune, and I love the back and forth between Latin and Olde English.  I love how “show” is spelled “shew”.

5. Alfred Schnittke’s “Stille Nacht”

6. John Adams’ El Niño

7. “Glory to God” by Yours Truly

You didn’t seriously think I would leave this out, did you?

8. Benjamin Britten, A Ceremony of Carols

Marginal:

- “Silver and Gold” as sung by Burl Ives on the original Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer soundtrack

- The Vince Guaraldi Christmas Album

- The Little Drummer Boy

- “The Eight Days of Christmas” by Destiny’s Child

Specifically unacceptable:

- Morten Lauridson, O Magnum Mysterium

- This:

- And everything it represents.

- Everything else not specifically on one of the above lists.

Am I missing anything?

Though lyrically I may be “untouchable” and “uncrushable”, and though I do fancy myself quite the “dapper chap”, I fear to say that “ho-slapper” is NOT in my job description.  Alas folks, the author of this video is a different William White.  And given my homonym’s guarantee to be here “till the end of the age of Pisces and beyond,” I thought it best to clear up the confusion right now.

Many thanks to AG for bringing this to my attention.

In other news, this list is one of the sillier things I’ve come across, well, ever.

If you happen to have read this blog in the past few months, you know that I’ve been chomping at the bits finally to see The Skin I Live In (La piel que habito), the newest feature by the great Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar.  So did I see it?  Yes, when it FINALLY opened a few weeks ago in ‘my part of the country’ after its May premiere in Europe.  So why have I remained mute about it?  Well, it’s like this: after I saw it, the only thing I could think was, “I need to see that again.”

La piel had a strange effect on me.  Though it runs for 117 minutes, when the credits rolled, I couldn’t believe that I had just finished watching an entire feature film.  I’m hard pressed to say why.  It’s not like the pace of the narrative was dizzying or frantic.  In fact, when it was over, I had the distinct sense that there were many fewer twists and turns than in a lot of Almodóvar’s plots.

But upon further reflection, I don’t think that’s quite right.  The central plot of the film resolves into one stupendous twist so spectacular that it obfuscates many smaller revelations and surprises along the way.  But that largest of revelations comes about late in the game, and it feels slow to arrive.  Maybe the issue is that the film’s tone is so austere that we aren’t as invested emotionally in the plot’s unraveling.

But this is where it gets really tricky, because I would never say that this movie is “cold”.  It’s not.  It’s got plenty of deep, complex emotions (though no humor to speak of, a major departure for Almodóvar.)  And yet, when the movie was over, I felt numb, like I was coming out of a haze.  There’s something about this film that anesthetizes the viewer to its own content, and I can’t pinpoint what it is.  Nor do I think this is a miscalculation.  Much to the contrary, I think this is exactly what Pedro was after.

And now I’m chomping at the bits to see it again, but it only played for one lousy week in Cincinnati.  Jehovah only knows when it’s coming out on DVD.

Thankfully, the score is out on iTunes, and, as we’ve come to expect from Alberto Iglesias, it’s a humdinger.  Iglesias’ talents are simply amazing.  I don’t know how he manages to match Almodóvar tone for tone in all of his movies, though, when I think about it, maybe it’s not that hard — Almodóvar might be the most “musical” of all film directors.  The emotional landscapes he chooses to explore are the very interstitial places that are usually accessible to harmony alone.

But no, Alberto Iglesias is really pretty amazing.

ps. I just found out that Dan Tepfer, who I’m mildly obsessed with because of his exquisite work on the new Bach Goldberg Variations/Variations album (which you should all buy and listen to immediately), wrote his second ever blog post on The Skin I Live In.  It may be time to change that ‘mildly’ to ‘intensely’.  I’ll try to keep it short of ‘unhealthily’.

Once upon a time, when Eric and I were both college students in Chicago, we trekked up from Hyde Park to the Chicago Historical Society for the inaugural Contempo Double-Bill.  A Contempo Double-Bill isn’t an updated piece of Jeffersonian currency – it’s a concert that pairs contemporary classical music with jazz.

On this concert were works by George Crumb, Chen Yi, and Jonathan Harvey, along with the piano stylings of Brad Mehldau, riding high on his fame as “that jazz pianist who plays Radiohead covers.” (This was in 2004, well before every classical new music performer started doing the same.)

What I remember most about this concert is a group of four high school boys sitting right in front of us who had clearly come for the jazz portion of the evening (these were the Eric Bensons of a quarter-generation later), and that they erupted into laughter when the soprano Valdine Anderson began singing Jonathan Harvey’s “Song Offerings”.

I, obviously, was supremely annoyed, and much more so because these boys were sitting in front of us where my famed Half-Turn Glare was rendered useless.  Looking back on it now though, it’s hard to blame them, because a) they were probably high, and b) they came to hear this*:

but what they got was this:

Of which the latter may be a perfectly interesting piece, but it’s hardly the former.  This was a case of a classical presenting organization (and New Music, at that) carelessly assembling a double bill in an effort to draw in new audiences without in any way managing the expectations surrounding the event.  What did Brad Mehldau’s music really have to do with any of the pieces on the program?  Mehldau announced from the stage that he was a fan of George Crumb.  So what?  I like Rihanna, but people would be PISSED if they came to one of my concerts expecting to hear “Only Girl in the World”.

A stylistically heterogeneous double bill can surely work if the two musics are sharing the same conversation, which brings me to one of the best albums I’ve heard all year (thanks to Eric), Dan Tepfer‘s recent release of the Bach Goldberg Variations, in which he intersperses the Bach variations with his own improvised responses.

This isn’t Crossover – it’s just high order musicianship.  What I found so interesting about this album is that Tepfer is able to manage three musical streams simultaneously: first, the thoughtful, affecting renditions of the Bach originals; second, the astonishing array of transformations that he works on each of these works; and third, the way in which he develops these improvisations into a new, autonomous set of musical pieces.

What’s more, it would be a mistake to call Tepfer’s improvisations “jazz”. [In a similar way, it's almost silly to call the Bach originals "classical", seeing as there existed no such category when Bach wrote them, not to mention the fact that they transcend any label we try to affix to them.]  Yes, some of his variations are jazzier than others, but really, this is music about music, drawing from Ellington and Reich in addition to Bach.

So, EB: got any other great examples of successful jazz-classical collaborations (excepting the current co-blogging experience, of course)?

Help a composer out?

Much like Funky Dineva, my hair is layed like Donation.

This will be the last you hear about it on my blog, but I am raising funds for a big project, a professional recording of a new church cantata that I composed for brass, choir, and organ.

You can help me out by donating to the Kickstarter project HERE.  Plus, there’s all kinds of rewards if you do.

Thanks one and all, and Namasté.

What drew me to classical music?  It’s hard to say for sure.  As a young child, I loved rock music, especially Elvis, The Beatles, and Nirvana.  I spent many hours singing along with their songs, but I also played a stringed instrument (the viola) in school, and I started to develop a taste for, and an imagination about, the music we played in orchestra.  My mother was an appreciator of classical music if not an avid listener, and with the tapes and records that she kept in our basement, I got into the habit of listening to classical music at home.

I was about 12 or 13 years old when I got hardcore into classical music.  I learned later from my composition teacher in college, Easley Blackwood, that this was a very common age for such a pronounced taste to develop.  He said that it was usually prompted by the performance of a Big Work – something like Beethoven’s 9th or Verdi’s Requiem.  I can’t pinpoint my interest to any single event or piece, from that point on, classical music was an all-consuming passion for me.

In 7th and 8th grade, I felt a certain reluctance to divulge my taste in classical music to my peers.  Though my taste seemed perfectly natural to me, I knew that it was not exactly normal and that it would cast me as a bit of an oddball (as if I needed any more help with that).  I can even recall one of my friends telling me to keep it a secret, because classical music wasn’t cool.  I guess that says something about classical music’s place in a society based entirely on social capital.  Or maybe just something about a bunch of lame suburban middle-schoolers c. 1995.  [Eric: Were you ever reticent as a boy to out yourself as a jazz aficionado?  My guess would be not.]

Even in the world of average, ordinary adults, classical music doesn’t always hold a lot of social capital.  In fact, it often doesn’t hold much social capital in the world of literate, sophisticated adults.  These are the so-called “culturally aware non-attenders“: people who read contemporary literature, dine out, frequent museums and art house cinemas – but steer clear of the concert hall.

These are, ostensibly, the kinds of people that Greg Sandow has been talking a lot lately about in his posts on outreach in classical music.  He notes that we tend to focus a lot of our efforts on underserved communities, mainly comprised of ethnic and cultural minorities.  But, he asks, why not spend more of our time trying to recruit people “like us” who would be a more obvious target demographic?

Mr. Sandow’s goal may be to ensure the future of classical music, but I think there’s more behind this notion: namely, a desire to inflate the social capital of his own taste among his peers.  I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that – in fact, I’d say it’s as natural an inclination as you’ll find – but perhaps this says more about where classical music IS than where it’s headed.

Musical taste sits at this weird nexus of personal feeling, universal aura, and the social friction in between.  On an individual level, we each enjoy “our” music viscerally, deeply, emotionally.  Carl Wilson makes sure to point out in his book that musical enjoyment is a very real phenomenon.

Ironically, it’s because of this palpable, physical experience of enjoying music that we assume our music should – nay, must – be enjoyed the same way by other people.  Music is one of those rare media that really can break the boundaries between peoples’ souls and shed light on the experience of what it actually feels like to be someone else.  (David Foster Wallace always talked about this phenomenon with novels).

But this can create a frustrating dissonance when other people don’t share our passions and proclivities.  I have seen people get their feelings sorely hurt when their friends mock their taste in music – or even hint that they might not share them.  Musical taste seems to require social validation like few other brands of taste.

I think I got off topic there (or maybe on)… so, why do you like jazz?  I’d say it’s just because you like it, because it makes you feel good.

But if I were to play Dime Store Psychiatrist (and isn’t that really the point of this entire series?) I might look at it this way: you grew up New York City, but you lived in a Manhattan apartment on the Upper West Side, and you attended an all boys private school.  So despite the fact that you were in one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, your person experience of growing up in New York wasn’t all that much different than a boy growing up in, say Leonard Bernstein’s New York of the 1940′s.

In other words, by sheer coincidence of birth, you became part of the one demographic that still held onto the romanticized view of jazz clubs as louche dens of cool.  Not to mention, the only demographic for whom such connotations even held any appeal.  Where else were you going to get your kicks and establish your independence?  Your taste in jazz is merely a manifestation of half a century’s worth of cultural boundary crossing.

A brief response to your claim about classical music institutions: It’s true, we classicists do have a leg up on you jazzers, in that our institutions have clobbered the public with the idea that classical music is somehow good for a person, and that classical concerts are somehow enriching.  We even send our school kids on field trips to the concert hall.

It seems to me like a big problem with jazz is that it’s neither promoted as being “good for you” nor is it commonly viewed as being “bad for you”.  Would you agree?  I’d also like you to imagine an elementary school field trip to a jazz club matinee and what the educational benefit of that would be.

OK gang, it’s time for some Halloween fun: which of these five fabulous divas makes the best Pirate Jenny?

1. Lotte Lenya

2. Nina Simone

3. Marianne Faithfull

4. Bea Arthur

5. Hildegard Knef

Before you cast you’re vote, I would just ask that you not to be swayed by the fact that three of these ladies have videos, one is singing in German, and one is singing an alternate (and far superior) translation of the text.

Only an evil genius would pit these ladies against one another.  Happy Halloween.

Making a recording takes a lot of money, so I’ve started a Kickstarter campaign to try and raise some funds.  Perhaps some of my readers would consider kicking in.  I’d certainly be grateful, and at the very least, you’d get your own mp3 copy of the piece!

Here’s the link: Recording of Psalm 46, a new cantata

One of the interesting things I learned from reading the credit roll is that Björk came up with the concept (if not the execution) for all of the newly invented musical instruments on this album except for one: the Sharpsichord:

The Sharpsichord, also known as the Pin-Barrel Harp, is the invention of an English musician and engineer named Henry Dagg (duly credited on bjork.com, I might add).  He invented the instrument for a folk music sound installation in Kent, after which it seemingly had no further use, and could no longer stand to live in the out of doors.

If you’ve listened to Biophilia as many times as I have now, the sound of the instrument will no doubt be familiar from the song “Sacrifice“.  The instrument is basically an enormous, many-geared music box that activates a set of harp-like strings, and, strangely, has a sort of shamisen-like vibrato.  It’s shocking that this instrument wasn’t custom-engineered for Björk, given that it incorporates all of her favorite things.

Here is Mr. Dagg himself performing on the musical saw with sharpsichord accompaniment.  I’m hard pressed to think of a stranger music video on the internet.  His eyes tell the whole story: