Tag: Classical

El Amor Brujo

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

Miles Davis “Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain

1. prologue

In a weird case of repeating myself, I had another revelation recently while trying to track down the origins of a Miles Davis tune. A few weeks ago, I described my journey of tracking down the origins of a particular combination of bass and piano chords from Kind of Blue. I had a similar kind of revelation this last week.

2. the hook

“Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain was the track that most piqued my interest the first time I listened to the album. Like the rest of the album, it’s strongly driven by clipped Spanish rhythms, but there is something about the combination of catchy, modal melody and the slightly demonic harmonies in the verses that is just arresting.

After trolling YouTube, I finally realized that, like most of the tracks on the album, it is an arrangement of a piece of Spanish classical music, “Canción del fuego fátuo” from El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946).

4. a defense of ‘sketches of spain’

Sketches of Spain is one of Miles Davis’ best-known and best-selling albums, so in that respect it needs no defense. I think its accessibility means that it’s undeservedly treated differently. One album database site I visited categorized it as “easy listening!” What fascinates me about this album is the layers of subtext involved in the very creation of the album, a collection of jazz covers of Spanish classical music pieces.

Spain occupies a very strange place in the classical music economy. Although the country has a classical tradition as old as any other country in Western European, the “Spanish” sound in classical music has mostly been defined by French composers. Think Bolero by Ravel, or Iberia by Debussy, or the opera Carmen by Bizet. Part and parcel of this fascination with Spanish rhythms and folk sounds is the idea that Spain represents a liberated, and therefore savage, shadow of France. It’s the Spain of the Basque, of the Roma. It’s the Spain of Resident Evil 4. It’s the exoticized Mediterranean in the heart of Europe, and with the exotic there are always connotations of danger.

So it’s in this context that you get the music of the great 19th/20th Spanish composers, de Falla, Albéniz, Granados. Their music was nationalistic, but in a different way than is usually described by music historians. It was not an attempt to create a national identity against the forces of shifting borders, as Chopin, nor was it an attempt to establish a new musical tradition and sound where there had been none before, as Sibelius. Instead, it was an attempt to reclaim an authentic musical tradition from the realm of caricature, and to translate that tradition into the language, classical music, of the elites.

Jazz is also a musical project that gave a voice to a population that had previously only been represented in the elite culture by caricature. If you look at the language that was used to describe black musical culture and Spanish musical culture, it’s amazing how many of the same clichés surface: the music is more rhythmically obsessed, it’s more passionate, it’s vulgar. And in both cases, there was the fear that there was something corrupting in the music.

5. will o’ the wisp

Miles Davis engages directly with this web of associations on Sketches of Spain. There’s something a little…off about the arrangements. Remote. Tense. Far from easy listening. There’s plenty of idiomatic Spanish melodic and rhythmic content, and nothing of the easy caricature of French composers. I think this reflects some of Davis’ own engagement with the European classical establishment; one should never forget that he attended Juliard and there’s an alternate world where he was America’s greatest 20th century composer. There’s something about the web of oppositions that permeate the album that consistently fascinates me. It’s a mixture of two musical cultures, one white, one black, but both defined in opposition to the European classical tradition. At the same time, both the Spanish composers and Miles Davis in adapting their music decided to speak in the language of the elites.

I don’t have any answers to these apparent contradictions, however I do know that this album deserves a lot more thoughtful engagement than just dismissing it as an easy listening album of Miles Davis covering classical music.

On Sacred Ground

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

I’ll be up late writing a paper on the significance of the compositional chronology of the last section of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor,* but I wanted to link to a release of the premiere performance of On Sacred Ground, The Bad Plus’ reworking of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. Pianist Ethan Iverson is a beast on the recording, and his blog post on his creative process is a must-read. I’m also grateful to him for pointing to pianist Serhiy Salov’s album The Sacred Spring of Slavs. The album contains Salov’s own transcription of the Rite for solo piano as well as a suite of character pieces by the Ukrainian composer Igor Shamo. The transcription is rough and edgy, while at the same time showing off near-superhuman piano technique (there were several times where I had to repeat a section to try and figure out how he was producing these sounds with only two hands), and the Shamo pieces are strong in their own right, a combination of the folk melodies of Stravinsky/Bartók and the atmospheric washes of color of Debussy.

*Don’t worry–I’m putting myself to sleep.

The Cleveland Orchestra & the "Local Orchestra"

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
One of Portland artist Trixie Biltmore's impressions of Portland Opera's production of Hansel and Gretel. http://www.meencomics.com

 

Greg Sandow in the Wall Street Journal on Enrique Fernandez, the Cleveland Orchestra’s new “critic-in-residence”:

Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on “blog,” is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra’s performances: “Online everybody’s a critic…. Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it’s your ticket, rave on, pan on.”Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the “online communities” that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums (an especially good example is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Unframed,” which is at lacma.wordpress.com). Classical-music organizations, by contrast, seem ill at ease with the openness and interactivity of blogging, and even the best of their efforts, such as the St. Louis Symphony’s STL Symphony Blog (stlsymphony.org/blog), tend to be one-way operations that aren’t open to comments or email from readers.

As much as I usually disagree with Sandow, he’s absolutely right in questioning “new media” ventures that don’t engage in a thoughtful way with their audience. An orchestra blog without a personal perspective or engagement with commenters and other bloggers is nothing more than a glorified press release. It’s also true that only the biggest players in the game can afford–as in, “stop losing your audience” afford–to not participate (and it should be noted that the big players can get away with not directly engaging with their audience because there’s a cohort of bloggers who are willing to translate and comment upon press releases).
One of the best organizational efforts that I’ve come across trying to really understand a local audience and reach out a build a new audience is the Portland Opera’s Comic’s Night. From their press release (ok, sometimes this works):

In an effort to reach out to new audiences and new communities, Portland Opera is pleased to announce its first-ever Comic Artist Night @ the Opera on Monday, September 20.  Taking advantage of Portland’s wealth of comic talent, the Opera has invited 20 artists to attend a dress rehearsal and draw whatever inspires them about the production.  They’ll also receive a backstage tour prior to the show and front row seats during the show so that they can see every single operatic expression on stage.  The artists will share the results of the evening with their online communities and Portland Opera will share the artist’s work with our patrons at the theater as well as posting the work online at www.portlandopera.org.

I thought this was a fantastic venture, for a few reasons:

  1. It showed an understanding of the local audience. One of the most consistently frustrating things about regional classical music organizations is that there is often a distance between the organization and their city. Yet at the same time, we’re asked to support the local symphony, or opera house as a civic symbol and representation of our city. This was a real, genuine, smart play to one of Portland’s strengths.
  2. It attracted different press, therefore different readers. I actually read about Comics Night in comics blogs and the local alt-weekly (the same paper that will show classical listings on its music page, but would never promote a classical concert). That’s huge exposure to an audience–young, local, in to music–that classical organizations desperately want.
  3. It provided an entrance point for first-time operagoers. Opera is intimidating and weird. Many of the artists address that in their comics. Somebody whose curiosity is piqued by the comics will not be so discouraged by the newness of the experience.
  4. It solves the problem of promotional materials. On the internet, there’s an abundance of promotional materials that give some idea of what you’re getting yourself into if you want to see a live show. Curious about a standup comic? Check YouTube. What else has this artist done? Check the portfolio on their website. Band you’ve never heard of? You can be sure that any band getting started today has an online media presence before they play their first live show. At any point, these promotional materials can get picked up by other aggregators and go viral. Classical music doesn’t have that. This is partly a practical constraint; it would be impossible to have an opera trailer ready months before a performance, and orchestras have similar conditions. The comics produced by the local Portland artists, however, provide a subjective (in perspective) and objective (they are free to draw whatever they want) hook to draw in an audience. And this is mostly because…
  5. The comics produced were really cool. This is the most important part, and also the hardest to fake.

We now have a large population of people that grew up as the internet matured as a technology. The share of the population that grew up with internet access will only increase. This creates a new kind of media literacy, an intuitive sense that gets really excited by a group of artists invited to share their impressions of an opera preview, a sense that skips right by an astroturf-filled “blog” without even reading it.
More comics inspired by Hansel and Gretel can be seen in Portland Opera’s Facebook album.

The Cleveland Orchestra & the “Local Orchestra”

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
One of Portland artist Trixie Biltmore's impressions of Portland Opera's production of Hansel and Gretel. http://www.meencomics.com

 

Greg Sandow in the Wall Street Journal on Enrique Fernandez, the Cleveland Orchestra’s new “critic-in-residence”:

Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on “blog,” is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra’s performances: “Online everybody’s a critic…. Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it’s your ticket, rave on, pan on.”Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the “online communities” that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums (an especially good example is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Unframed,” which is at lacma.wordpress.com). Classical-music organizations, by contrast, seem ill at ease with the openness and interactivity of blogging, and even the best of their efforts, such as the St. Louis Symphony’s STL Symphony Blog (stlsymphony.org/blog), tend to be one-way operations that aren’t open to comments or email from readers.

As much as I usually disagree with Sandow, he’s absolutely right in questioning “new media” ventures that don’t engage in a thoughtful way with their audience. An orchestra blog without a personal perspective or engagement with commenters and other bloggers is nothing more than a glorified press release. It’s also true that only the biggest players in the game can afford–as in, “stop losing your audience” afford–to not participate (and it should be noted that the big players can get away with not directly engaging with their audience because there’s a cohort of bloggers who are willing to translate and comment upon press releases).

One of the best organizational efforts that I’ve come across trying to really understand a local audience and reach out a build a new audience is the Portland Opera’s Comic’s Night. From their press release (ok, sometimes this works):

In an effort to reach out to new audiences and new communities, Portland Opera is pleased to announce its first-ever Comic Artist Night @ the Opera on Monday, September 20.  Taking advantage of Portland’s wealth of comic talent, the Opera has invited 20 artists to attend a dress rehearsal and draw whatever inspires them about the production.  They’ll also receive a backstage tour prior to the show and front row seats during the show so that they can see every single operatic expression on stage.  The artists will share the results of the evening with their online communities and Portland Opera will share the artist’s work with our patrons at the theater as well as posting the work online at www.portlandopera.org.

I thought this was a fantastic venture, for a few reasons:

  1. It showed an understanding of the local audience. One of the most consistently frustrating things about regional classical music organizations is that there is often a distance between the organization and their city. Yet at the same time, we’re asked to support the local symphony, or opera house as a civic symbol and representation of our city. This was a real, genuine, smart play to one of Portland’s strengths.
  2. It attracted different press, therefore different readers. I actually read about Comics Night in comics blogs and the local alt-weekly (the same paper that will show classical listings on its music page, but would never promote a classical concert). That’s huge exposure to an audience–young, local, in to music–that classical organizations desperately want.
  3. It provided an entrance point for first-time operagoers. Opera is intimidating and weird. Many of the artists address that in their comics. Somebody whose curiosity is piqued by the comics will not be so discouraged by the newness of the experience.
  4. It solves the problem of promotional materials. On the internet, there’s an abundance of promotional materials that give some idea of what you’re getting yourself into if you want to see a live show. Curious about a standup comic? Check YouTube. What else has this artist done? Check the portfolio on their website. Band you’ve never heard of? You can be sure that any band getting started today has an online media presence before they play their first live show. At any point, these promotional materials can get picked up by other aggregators and go viral. Classical music doesn’t have that. This is partly a practical constraint; it would be impossible to have an opera trailer ready months before a performance, and orchestras have similar conditions. The comics produced by the local Portland artists, however, provide a subjective (in perspective) and objective (they are free to draw whatever they want) hook to draw in an audience. And this is mostly because…
  5. The comics produced were really cool. This is the most important part, and also the hardest to fake.

We now have a large population of people that grew up as the internet matured as a technology. The share of the population that grew up with internet access will only increase. This creates a new kind of media literacy, an intuitive sense that gets really excited by a group of artists invited to share their impressions of an opera preview, a sense that skips right by an astroturf-filled “blog” without even reading it.

More comics inspired by Hansel and Gretel can be seen in Portland Opera’s Facebook album.

The Cleveland Orchestra & the "Local Orchestra"

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
One of Portland artist Trixie Biltmore's impressions of Portland Opera's production of Hansel and Gretel. http://www.meencomics.com

 

Greg Sandow in the Wall Street Journal on Enrique Fernandez, the Cleveland Orchestra’s new “critic-in-residence”:

Despite his resounding title, Mr. Fernández is not a critic in the ordinary sense of the word. His blog, which you can visit by going to clevelandorchestramiami.com and clicking on “blog,” is an online magazine that runs feature pieces about the orchestra and its activities in Miami. In addition, Mr. Fernández invites concertgoers to post their own thoughts on the orchestra’s performances: “Online everybody’s a critic…. Comment on the concert you are about to experience. Review if you wish, if you must. Hey, it’s your ticket, rave on, pan on.”Mr. Fernández and the Cleveland Orchestra are clearly trying to come up with an institutional equivalent of the “online communities” that spring up around homemade blogs. This kind of blogging is still relatively new in the world of art, and to date the only institutions that seem to have embraced it wholeheartedly are museums (an especially good example is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Unframed,” which is at lacma.wordpress.com). Classical-music organizations, by contrast, seem ill at ease with the openness and interactivity of blogging, and even the best of their efforts, such as the St. Louis Symphony’s STL Symphony Blog (stlsymphony.org/blog), tend to be one-way operations that aren’t open to comments or email from readers.

As much as I usually disagree with Sandow, he’s absolutely right in questioning “new media” ventures that don’t engage in a thoughtful way with their audience. An orchestra blog without a personal perspective or engagement with commenters and other bloggers is nothing more than a glorified press release. It’s also true that only the biggest players in the game can afford–as in, “stop losing your audience” afford–to not participate (and it should be noted that the big players can get away with not directly engaging with their audience because there’s a cohort of bloggers who are willing to translate and comment upon press releases).
One of the best organizational efforts that I’ve come across trying to really understand a local audience and reach out a build a new audience is the Portland Opera’s Comic’s Night. From their press release (ok, sometimes this works):

In an effort to reach out to new audiences and new communities, Portland Opera is pleased to announce its first-ever Comic Artist Night @ the Opera on Monday, September 20.  Taking advantage of Portland’s wealth of comic talent, the Opera has invited 20 artists to attend a dress rehearsal and draw whatever inspires them about the production.  They’ll also receive a backstage tour prior to the show and front row seats during the show so that they can see every single operatic expression on stage.  The artists will share the results of the evening with their online communities and Portland Opera will share the artist’s work with our patrons at the theater as well as posting the work online at www.portlandopera.org.

I thought this was a fantastic venture, for a few reasons:

  1. It showed an understanding of the local audience. One of the most consistently frustrating things about regional classical music organizations is that there is often a distance between the organization and their city. Yet at the same time, we’re asked to support the local symphony, or opera house as a civic symbol and representation of our city. This was a real, genuine, smart play to one of Portland’s strengths.
  2. It attracted different press, therefore different readers. I actually read about Comics Night in comics blogs and the local alt-weekly (the same paper that will show classical listings on its music page, but would never promote a classical concert). That’s huge exposure to an audience–young, local, in to music–that classical organizations desperately want.
  3. It provided an entrance point for first-time operagoers. Opera is intimidating and weird. Many of the artists address that in their comics. Somebody whose curiosity is piqued by the comics will not be so discouraged by the newness of the experience.
  4. It solves the problem of promotional materials. On the internet, there’s an abundance of promotional materials that give some idea of what you’re getting yourself into if you want to see a live show. Curious about a standup comic? Check YouTube. What else has this artist done? Check the portfolio on their website. Band you’ve never heard of? You can be sure that any band getting started today has an online media presence before they play their first live show. At any point, these promotional materials can get picked up by other aggregators and go viral. Classical music doesn’t have that. This is partly a practical constraint; it would be impossible to have an opera trailer ready months before a performance, and orchestras have similar conditions. The comics produced by the local Portland artists, however, provide a subjective (in perspective) and objective (they are free to draw whatever they want) hook to draw in an audience. And this is mostly because…
  5. The comics produced were really cool. This is the most important part, and also the hardest to fake.

We now have a large population of people that grew up as the internet matured as a technology. The share of the population that grew up with internet access will only increase. This creates a new kind of media literacy, an intuitive sense that gets really excited by a group of artists invited to share their impressions of an opera preview, a sense that skips right by an astroturf-filled “blog” without even reading it.
More comics inspired by Hansel and Gretel can be seen in Portland Opera’s Facebook album.