In part two, we turn our attention to the other works on this week’s program, and Downie’s attitude to programming.
KW: Xenakis was a very prolific composer and Akrata is not one of his best known works. What is the specific interest of this piece for you? Continue reading
Composer Gordon Downie is the founder and Artistic Director of the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales. I sat down with Gordon this week and asked him to talk a bit about his music and this week’s CMEW program.
Typically, our discussion went far beyond the scope of a singly blog post, so this interview will be published in instalments leading up to this weekend’s concert.
Casual readers may be scared off by the relatively dense language of these interviews, while others may be resistant to returning to issues of the place of modernism and serialism in today’s musical culture that have been argued about for so long, but I would strongly encourage them to stick with it and be patient and thoughtful, as hopefully Gordon offers a relevant and now rarely heard perspective on music and art today. The very fact that this topic remains problematic and controverisal for so many musicians, music critics and composers tells me that our discussions need to go further, not be abandoned. In part one, I ask Gordon about forms 7:non-mediated forms, and a bit a bout his language and technique in general.
KW: Let’s start with forms 7: non-mediated forms. Thank you for trusting me with the first performance- it has been fascinating and exciting learning it. Can you talk particularly about the idea of “non-mediated” forms in this piece?
Chill the champagne Martha! This my 500th blog post on Vftp.
Just think how much I could have actually gotten done while writing the last 100 posts…..
KW
My interview with young LA music students that ran on the Classics Alive webstite has been re-run on Violinist.com here.
If you missed it the first time, have a look. The kids asked some great questions.
K
2008 Rose City International Conductor’s Workshop (www.rosecityworkshop.org).
As we prepare for our fourth summer of great music and good company in one of the most beautiful and dynamic cities in America, we’re very excited about this season’s repertoire and our guest artists.
David Hoose, Chris Zimmerman and I have worked hard to create a supportive, collegial atmosphere that stresses pragmatic and constructive approaches to teaching conducting with a strong emphasis on developing study skills. The musicians of the orchestra are deeply committed to the workshop and are intensely supportive of the students. We want our students to leave the workshop more competent and more confident. We were also one of the first workshops to put a huge emphasis on opera and concerto accompanying, and our students get the unique chance to work with professional soloists in the teaching sessions and concert.
We’ve always tried to be the greenest and most innovative workshop around- to the best of my knowledge we were the first conducting workshop to abandon tree killing bulk mailing of paper brochures and do all of our marketing via the internet, and we have also been the first workshop to accept applications, cvs and recommendations on line. This year we go one step further- conductors who have video of themselves on their webpages, YouTube or other video hosting services may use that as their audition video- you need never race to the post office to express mail another VHS taper or DVD again.
Please let our staff know if you have any questions at admin@rosecityworkshop.org
Meanwhile, some genral information on this year’s symposium follows-
Some instrumentalists still look at any and all “extended techniques” as an annoyance that originates in avante garde music of the 20th c., even though many of them have been in use at least since the music of Biber, hundreds of years back.
I don’t expect any questions or problems with CMEW, but I’m quite sure that at one time or another, I’ve heard at least one player on each wind and brass instrument tell me unequiveocably that flutter-tonguing is impossible on their instrument (of course, the vast, vast majority of orchestra musicians just get on with it cheerfully). More often, they’ll admit that it’s just that _they_ can’t flutter-tongue, but that this is the result of an unfortunate genetic mutation on their part which makes it impossible for them to flutter-tongue or roll their r’s.
Well, have no fear. The Vftp research team have been combing the internet and pouring through the archives of leading research libraries world wide to give players and conductors alike some tools for coming to grips with this fearsome technique.
Oboise Jacqueline Leclair has a good article on flutter-tonguing on her website, which begins with a promising thesis-
All this we hear about flutter-tonguing requiring a “knack”, or being a genetically endowed skill seems inaccurate to me. The tongue is by far the most agile, sophisticated and impressive muscle (4 groups of muscles) in the human body. Its flexible feats of taste, sensation, mastication and speech – performed constantly and adapting all the time (usually without us even thinking about it) — must rank the tongue as one of the all-time greatest human anatomic features. The tongue is a formidable implement, the limits of which we musicians probably only begin to test.
So, rather than jumping to pre-emptive conclusions about our tongues’ INABILITIES, let us assume that our tongues will do just about any articulation we imagine including flutter-tonguing…especially if we work at it.
Even better is the Philharmonia website, where some of the worlds best orchestral instrumentalists demonstrate the finer points of flutter-tonguing technique. You might try trombone (which is a brilliant racket), or the flute, which tends to be the most flutter friendly of instruments.
Fluttering on the bassoon should be much more challenging, but Meyrick Alexander makes it look easy in this clip (not surprising, given that he was the man who got me to like the Mozart Bassoon Concerto).
However, without rival for the best clip is the contrabassoon demonstration. He may think it “always sounds a bit of a mish-mash,” but you can hear a lot of contrabassoon fluttering this weekend in Cardiff.
Is this the face of a man who wrote the St Matthew Passion, father 25 kids and could bend hardened steel with only his mental powers?
And I just said science hadn’t done so much the last 30 years….
Read about the reconstruction of Bach’s face here.
I’m going to attempt to tread carefully in today’s post, so as to minimize the hate mail.
A collection of words can have devastating, world changing power when we allow them to be perceived as “truth.” The fundamental level of social discourse in our time is that “it is true because I say it,” and the true power is in whose voice is heard the loudest, not in the merits of what it says.
I began this thread with Xenakis’ quote from 1955 because it belies what I think have become the two (incestuously connected) ideas about the recent history of music.
Authoritative voices (or at least the voices of authority) are re-writing the history of music, and have been since the beginning of the Thatcher/Reagan era. Let’s call it the “New History of 20th C. Music.”
For those of you who have already read my Xenakis quote from yesterday, you may be wondering why I chose it. Given that there are plenty of series on this week’s concert, doesn’t the quotation of such a statement seem a bit self-defeating from a marketing standpoint?
Over the last ten years or so, we’ve seen something of a move to dismiss modernist music as a historical aberration. The problems with this movement are too numerous to count in a single blog post, but one of the primary problems is that the very notion that one can describe vast chunks of music of the 20th c. in one word and dismiss all of it in two sentences is patently absurd.
(Xenakis and Messiaen)
Xenakis was a composer as much “in the hood” as anyone of his generation- like Boulez and Stockhausen, he studied with Messiaen and his music figured prominently in the concerts that established the modernist repertoire. This little quote however gives us a gentle reminder that even in its heyday, serialism was never the one true path, that creative artists argued and debated and fought for their own voices. Even in its supposed heydey, good friends argued strenuously over what it meant to be a modernist.
The writer is Iannis Xenakis
The year is 1955
“[…] the serial system is thrown into question on its own two bases, which embody the seed of their own destruction and inadequacy :
the series;
their polyphonic structure.
A series (of any sort) is the result of a linear “category” of thought. It is a string of a finite number of objects. […]
Combinatory calculus is but one generalization of the serial principle. Its origin is found in the choice of how the 12 tones are arranged. […]
Linear polyphony is self-destructive in its current complexity. In reality, what one hears is a bunch of notes in various registers. The enormous complexity prevents one from following the tangled lines and its macroscopic effect is one of unreasonable and gratuitous dispersion of sounds over the whole sound spectrum. Consequently, there is a contradiction between the linear polyphonic system and the audible result, which is a surface, a mass.
This inherent contradiction with polyphony will disappear only once sounds become totally independent. In fact, since these linear combinations and their polyphonic superpositions are no longer workable, what will count will be the statistical average of isolated states of the components’ transformations at any given moment. […] .” (“La crise de la musique sérielle”, from Kéleütha. Ecrits, L’Arche, Paris, 1994, p.40-42, previously unpublished in English).
Re-blogged from iannis-xenakis.org
