Category: Music

El Cordero Pascual

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“El Cordero Pascual” from La Pasión según San Marcos by Osvaldo Golijov

Some background on the music:

In 2000, to celebrate the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach’s death, the Internationale Bachakademie Stuttgart commissioned four composers from different countries (Germany, Russia, China and Argentina) to write four Passions in the tradition, but not necessarily the style, of Bach. One of these was La Pasión según San Marcos (The Passion of St. Mark).

Passions evolved from the tradition of singing through the text of the four gospels during Holy Week before Easter. By the time of Bach, a Passion was an oratorio depicting Jesus’ life using the gospels for text. An oratorio is a piece for orchestra, chorus, and vocal soloists that musically tells a story. In the case of the passions, the chorus might serve as the crowd, or reinforce the story told by the narrator. The vocal soloists might narrate, and also represent individual characters in the story as is needed to represent key dramatic moments. Bach wrote passions for all the gospels, but only two survive: St. Matthew’s Passion and St. John’s Passion.

Osvoldo Golijov is an Argentine composer (who now lives in Massachusetts) with Eastern European Jewish heritage. In La Pasión según San Marcos, he uses musical elements from the African culture in Latin America, mostly Cuban and Brazilian rhythms, as well as Middle Eastern and Arabic elements, and tells the story of Jesus through a constantly shifting web of characters and narrators. Sometimes soloists represent characters, sometimes the entire chorus speaks for Jesus, or Judas. The words are mostly in an Africanized Spanish, but at least one section is in Arabic.

It’s really an amazing piece of music, and in addition to all of the elements I mentioned above, there is a dance component to a full performance, and also many avant-garde musical techniques in the work. Golijov’s website has lots of information about the piece and its conception, and there is a commercial recording available, as well as another one to be released this year.

Also, if anybody is in the greater LA region in late April, the LA Philharmonic will be hosting two performances of La Pasión performed by the group that rehearsed and premiered the work under the oversight of the composer. That will be April 24 and 25, and there is information here.

Modest Mouse

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There’s video up at the Disney Parks blog of a scoring session for one of their new live shows at California Adventure in Anaheim. It’s a reworked version of “Night on the Bare Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky, which was used for one of the segments in Fantasia. That piece has always fascinated me because of the dramatic difference between the circumstances in which it was written and the place it occupies now in our culture. The piece was reworked over and over again by Mussorgsky, and it was never played during his lifetime (in fact, the arrangement that is usually played in concert and in Fantasia was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov). He is remembered only for “Night…” and Pictures at an Exhibition, and yet the music of this fairly minor and obscure Russian composer is heavily promoted by the Walt Disney Corporation, and people who have never gone to a classical music concert can hum its theme. It’s deeply tragic that the composer of one of the most widely recognized piece of classical music never heard it performed.

There are other examples of this. “A Lover’s Concerto” was a hit in 1965 for the girl group The Toys (it was later recorded by The Supremes); it’s a fairly literal translation of the Minuet in G Major from the Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach. I was playing some Brahms, and one of my friends recognized the Violin Concerto from There Will Be Blood. I guess the strongest example is Also Sprach Zarathustra, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

On a more current front, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has blogged (in a post focusing on David Byrne and Los Angeles Opera’s staging of The Ring Cycle) about a Bach 12-tone phrased used as the opening of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video.

New Gorillaz Track

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Even though their marketing campaigns and style seem to be aimed at 13 year old nerds, I have a deep and abiding love for Gorillaz, and any Danger Mouse produced project in general. I seem to like most Damon Albarn projects as well, so perhaps it’s this convergence that inspires such devotion. What I like most about Danger Mouse, and a small number of other artists (the Andre 3000 side of Outkast comes to mind), is the futuristic way that his music sounds by virtue of it’s complete disregard of genre and style barriers. Songs like “Ghost Train”, “Dare” or Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” and “Gone Daddy Gone” are uncategorizable. Their music is permeated with energy, the styles that they borrow from are many, and every time you listen to it, there’s something you notice for the first time.

The first thing I noticed about “Stylo” (featuring Mos Def and Bobby Womack) the first single (or at least the first released track) from their new album, Plastic Beach, is that it’s relatively downtempo. On the last two albums, the first singles were epic, frenetic songs (“Clint Eastwood” and “19-2000” from Gorillaz; “Feel Good, Inc.” and “D.A.R.E” from Demon Days), and while “Stylo” has a propulsive beat, it doesn’t command the same attention as those other singles.

The second thing that jumped out at me was that Damon Albarn is actually singing on the album. He seems to have abandoned the Garage Band megaphone distortion that was really effective on the Gorillaz albums, but is now becoming an Albarn cliche.

I was actually a little bored with the track, but that all changed when Bobby Womack started singing. There’s something about the soaring, powerful voice singing above an unchanging, metronomic beat that amplifies the drama of the vocal line, and also changes the beat into a subtle antagonist. It reminds me of both B.B. King’s sample in Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” and the sample of the preacher in “Help Me, Somebody” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. In that moment, it captures the simultaneously despairing and joyful pathos that I’ve come to associate with Gorillaz.

Vampire Weekend: Contra

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

I spent a whole lot of time last weekend defending Vampire Weekend’s debut album to my friends, so I was really hoping that their new album would be something special. I just finished listening to their second album, Contra, with mixed-to-disappointed feelings.

I had heard that this album was California influenced, and I really liked their stylish mixture of African rock ideas and American punk pop. I was interested to hear new musical ideas incorporated into their sound. Instead, it sounds to me like they’ve retrenched that musical diversity into more Graceland imitation. I started laughing when “White Sky” began to play because it sounded like a Paul Simon outtake.

I think there are some real energy problems with this album. Part of the reason Vampire Weekend was such a good album is that all of the tracks had tremendous internal, propulsive energy that sounded –to me– punk-ish. That’s why the sound felt new. Contra dials down that energy a bunch. “Cousins” was released as the first single; likely because it’s one of the few songs with the energy of the last album (unfortunately it’s a weak song). This has consequences. It changes the style of the band. What sounded like reinterpretation of African polyrhythm now sounds like flaccid imitation. It also changes my perception of the lyrics: while they may be not significantly different than those on VW, they sound significantly more twee. On the first album, you felt that the precious lyrics were delivered as much with a snarl as a smile.

It’s not all bad. The only songs that make me want to skip them are “Horchata” and “Cousins.” “Taxi Cab” is a beautiful, downtempo, reflective song that would have been a standout if it was the only one of its kind on the album.

I’m not willing to go so far as to believe that Vampire Weekend was a happy accident, but I would like to see them branch out into different material, or explore more complexities if they’ve decided to stick with the same idiom.