Archive for the ‘Starred Items’ Category

Renaissance Composers Were Kinky Psychopaths

Posted by Brian on Monday, March 22nd, 2010

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Well, not all of them. But famed 16th century Italian prince-composer-murderer Carlo Gesualdo certainly seems to have been. (And I’m not talking about chromaticism, folks.) 10 reasons why bloggers are better than critics. What would a story about the nightmares induced by Brian Ferneyhough’s music sound like on This American Life? A look into the marching-band Shostakovich underground. Paying orchestras to play new music. Musicians in the Honolulu Symphony are not hanging loose. And an invitation to create a classical/new music viral video. We’ve got the votes for your weekly starred items.

• When we think of Renaissance music, we generally think of some very prim and buttoned-up stuff. However, a new book by Glenn Watkins about the Italian composer-prince Carlo Gesualdo, who is best known for his chromatic choral music (and oh, and murdering his wife), uncovers information that shows that he was a pretty psychotic and kinky dude. He ditched his first wife after accusing her of adultery though when he married for the second time, he got his freak on regularly. This culminated in the second wife accusing Gesualdo’s concubines of witchcraft. This quote from the testimony from the inquisition of the accused pretty much says it all: “That the aforementioned Aurelia made the prince drink her menstrual blood as a purgative is established by four witnesses to extrajudicial confessions by the defendant . . . Aurelia declared that the aforementioned Polisandra had told her that if she would take a slice of bread and place it inside her “nature” and after it was saturated with her own seed, she would give it to the prince to eat with sauce.” [Guardian]

• How does Proper Discord think bloggers are better than music critics? Let him count the ways; 10 of them. [Proper Discord]

• A small woman is about to perform Casandra’s Dream Song by Brian Ferneyhough. Before she begins she tells a story about how she had nightmares about the piece; it became known to her as Casandra’s Nightmare. For a time, she could only bear to deal with the music a line at a time and carried carved up bits of the score around with her every day. How would Ira Glass from This American Life have illuminated this story of solo musician, new music, difficulty, and fear? WWIGD? [Mind The Gap]

• Forget indie-classical, now we’ve got marching-band-classical. It’s become something of an underground cult thing for marching bands—as if marching bands weren’t cultish enough already—to play them some Shostakovich; the Scherzo from Symphony No. 10 seems to be particularly popular. [Unquiet Thoughts]

• Unhappy with the amount of contemporary music program by your local orchestra? Wanna change that? It’s apparently easy. All you have to do is call up your local orchestra, find out how much it costs them to put on a single concert, raise that amount of money, give them the money, and then enjoy the fruits of your labor (and the sneers of the grumpy orchestra members since you made them play an entire concert of new music). File under: taking the bull by the horns. [NewMusicBox]

• The musicians in the Honolulu Symphony are pissed. They presented a filing last week stating that “[based] on its history of gross mismanagement and incompetence . . . management is incapable of the task reorganization and a Chapter 11 trustee should be appointed, or, in the alternative, the case should be converted to Chapter 7 or dismissed.” You think they’re close with Christoph Eschenbach? [Adaptistration]

• New plan to save classical music: make a viral classical/new music video. This is your mission should you choose to accept it. [Mind The Gap]

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Baroque Music Not Allowed in the Pantheon After 6 p.m.

Posted by Brian on Monday, March 15th, 2010

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At least when one particular attendant is working. A concert by a Russian baroque sextet at the Pantheon in Rome was cut abruptly short because they were fixing to play past 6 p.m., when the monument was scheduled to close. Mozart is featured on the pages of Gothamist. Mark-Anthony Turnage prepares to unleash his “Anna Nicole” opera. Eighth Blackbird revises the guidelines for their much scrutinized composition competition. Elgar’s getting the boot from the £20 note. And Alex Ross schools the Royal Philharmonic Society on when to clap. Clap your hands and say yeah for your weekly starred items.

• A shocking YouTube video taken at the Pantheon in Rome captures an attendant stopping a concert of Vivaldi music to the jeers of the crowd. [fig. 1] Have you ever heard of people crying for more early music? Well, it happens in Italy. [Guardian]

• Mozart got a boost with the Gothamist set as a result of dispute between Gothamist founder Jake Dobkin and the New York Times. Let’s recap this in a nutshell: Dobkin said he was way better than the NYT and that the NYT stole some of his ideas. Then the NYT made Gothamist its bitch by plastering a huge ad on the site [fig. 2], which featured this Dan Wakin article about two piano works that were attributed to very young Mozart. [Gawker]

• Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek has signed on to sing the lead in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s upcoming “Anna Nicole” opera. Though the real question is: how long was the LA Times waiting to write that headline? [Los Angeles Times]

• After coming under some seriously crazy scrutiny (like, a 114 comment type of scrutiny; swoon…) for their self-funded commission composition competition, the Grammy-winning new music sextet Eighth Blackbird has decided to postpone the competition until June while they revise the submission guidelines. (And refund everyone’s application fees.) If ur a Grammee-winning newmusic 6tet do you need entry fees to subsidize your commissions? [Sequenza 21]

• Elgar’s 11-year run as a face on the £20 note will come to an end on June 30, 2010 with all of the Elgar pounds being rendered absolutely worthless from that date onward. Poor Elgar’s sacking will leave the Bank of England’s legal tender void of any musical representation. Some are calling for Sid Vicious to be the next musical face on the £20 note. Who would yall vote for? [Guardian]

• To clap or not to clap? That was the question—well, one of them—that Alex Ross posed during a lecture delivered to the Royal Philharmonic Society. The answer? Yes, go ahead and clap if you want; the composer may have even intended you to clap between movements. But just be careful not to clap between the movements in pieces where the composer didn’t intend you to. Tee-hee. [Guardian]

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Figure 2.
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Who The Hell Stole Vijay Iyer’s Watch At The Stone?

Posted by Brian on Sunday, March 7th, 2010

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This guy did. Video footage surfaced this week from a Vijay Iyer show at John Zorn’s LES club The Stone, which shows some dude totally ripping off Vijay’s watch. [fig. 1.] Renée Fleming gets an indie makeover. The New Statesman is sponsoring a Young Critics Competition. Some UK classical taste-makers weigh in on how to sell classical music to the masses. And gays should be able to marry because of all the beautiful music they’d give birth to. Relax and take it all in: your weekly starred items.

• The best part about this Vijay Iyer watch heist video is what you might imagine this guy was thinking as he carried out the act. Like, he’s standing there text messaging something at first. Maybe his txt was like, “I m gonna jack this watch. TTYL.” And then he’s all, “Hey, yeah, I’m gonna check this piano out. Oh cool, I love playing chords in the really low register.” Then the quick glance around the room before snagging the watch and then gesturing that like “this is totally mine. I left it here before Vijay started playing. He asked me to.” when he realizes he might have been spotted. The little finger point is classic. But then! But then he’s like, oh, I’m gonna go to the bathroom and the door is already open because some girl was coming out when he was grabbing the watch. I love the little fumble as he tries to pocket the watch when he realizes this happened. What do you think he did when he got into the bathroom? Did he txt his friend again and say, “Just stole VIs watch. I m the man”? [Mind The Gap]

• The Peoples’ Diva Renée Fleming will release a new indie album called Dark Hope this summer featuring the music of Arcade Fire, Death Cab For Cutie, and The Mars Volta, among others. This has raised many important questions about the ‘burgeoning’ indie classical movement, including is it all over now? No word on what the album cover is going to look like yet though you are encouraged to speculate openly. [Guardian]

• The New Statesman, in association with the Royal Academy of Music, launched a brand new Young Music Critics competition this week. The competition is open to kids under 30 with an equal passion for music and the written word and hopes to cultivate a new generation of classical music critics who aren’t smug musicologists bent on telling you how much smarter they are than you. Among the members of the star-studded jury are BBC Radio 3 presenter Suzy Klein, tenor Ian Bostridge, and “America’s Own” Alex Ross. [New Statesman]

• Twelve British classical taste-makers were asked by The Times Online what they would do to start selling classical music to the masses. The responses ranged from the practical (make concerts later (10 p.m.) and/or earlier on the weekends) to the strange (keep the lights low so they can focus on the stage. N.B. that one was from Nicola Benedetti). My personal favorite, however, came courtesy of Marcus Davey, chief executive of the Roundhouse: “Authenticity is essential. If you’re doing Mahler’s First Symphony don’t put a rock band in the first 20 minutes just because you think it would engage a younger audience.” Glad to hear somebody else thinks that’s pretty much the dumbest idea ever. [Times Online]

• In the midst of California’s Prop 8 trial, there’s been a call for Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears to become the unofficial mascots of the same-sex marriage movement. Although same-sex couples can’t reproduce together biologically, their chemistry can result in the birth of lots of really beautiful music. There’s definitely not anything wrong with that. [SFist]

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The Beatles’ Urgent Request For Use of Stockhausen’s Mug

Posted by Brian on Saturday, February 27th, 2010

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It took a little while for the Beatles to make contact with Karlheinz Stockhausen regarding his cameo on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Although they definitely tried to dot all their i’s and cross their t’s—legally speaking—maybe they should have checked their spelling. The Dirty Projectors have indie rock’s most highly educated backup band. Cyclists in Los Angeles ride for new music. Modern composers’ brains are more developed than yours. Christoph Eschenbach calls the Philadelphia Orchestra management a bunch of incompetent liars. And we contemplate what the musical theme of the 2012 Olympics should be. Now read this: your weekly starred items.

• Karlheinz Stockhausen was probably never more visible to the general public than from his cameo on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band album—his post-9-11 remarks notwithstanding. But he seemed to be a hard guy to get a hold of. Archived on the official Stockhausen website are several bits of correspondence between the Beatles and Herr Stockhausen, including a very formal initial request for the use of his likeness and a much more urgent telegram after his failure to reply. What if Stockhausen didn’t reply? Would that have altered the history of rock and roll? [Unquiet Thoughts]

• David Longstreth and his band Dirty Projectors got classy at the Allen Room courtesy of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series, which presented the DP’s pseudo-contemporary-indie chamber opera last week with support form the conservatory-trained pit band Alarm Will Sound. Does this make Alarm Will Sound more indie than the NOW Ensemble? [NY Times]

• The Los Angeles-based new music series Monday Evening Concerts mounted a performance of Mauricio Kagel’s Eine Brise for 111 cyclists. Though LA Times critic Mark Swed didn’t think it was much for the ears—and surely he meant an Alpe d’Huez ascent—you gotta give props to the series for organizing over 100 cyclists without the promise of $20 cash premes and podium girls. [Culture Monster]

• In his new book The Music Instinct, author Philip Ball draws on the latest neuroscience research to explain why most people seem to hate modern classical music. The reason? They’re not smart enough. Well, sort of. It’s more that the brain finds patterns enjoyable, and modern classical music makes the brain have to work too hard. The most disturbing finding of this research: tone sequences in music by Schoenberg and Webern were LESS PREDICTABLE than random tone sequences. So much for logic and order. [Telegraph]

• In an interview with the German publication Die Welt, it appears that former Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Christoph Eschenbach forgot one or both of these two things: 1) that some English speakers—even Americans—can speak/understand German, and 2) they invented this thing called an online translator. Had he remembered either of those two things, he might have given a little more thought to publically calling out the Philadelphia Orchestra management as “incompetent” people who “lie” and whose mismanagement directly led to the orchestra’s current economic situation. [fig 1.] The moral of the story here is to check yourself before you unexpect yourself. [Adaptistration]

• The 2010 Winter Olympics may be coming to an end this weekend, but that just means you can start thinking about the 2012 games. Charlotte Higgins is taking a survey about what the musical theme of the next summer games should be. “London Calling” by The Clash? [Guardian]

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