Tag: Classical

Steve Reich – "Piano Phase"

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

No matter how difficult it is to define Minimalism, it is undeniable that it is a very exciting time to be listening to and thinking about it. The very actions we take, listening to the music, buying CDs, writing about the music, reading about the composers, are still changing the history of the movement. All of the comfortable labels we have for historical movements were coined long after they were over, and it is possible that the greatest Minimalist composer is someone we’ve never heard of. Furthermore, there is great danger in establishing a narrative. It can cause us to reject composers, and their music for fear of upsetting a comfortable set of ideas that we have become invested in.
If there is a Minimalist canon, however, Piano Phase is in it. I want to look at three different facets of Steve Reich’s 1967 composition Piano Phase and explain how  Piano Phase’s roots in mechanical delay opened the door for experimentation in the difference between sound production and the final acoustic product, it pioneered the idea of musical process as iterated function, and it was the first acoustic work with shifting, yet not cleanly divided, sections. This particular composition contains the ideas that Reich has expanded upon in his instrumental music, as well as provided a new theoretical framework for experimental music.


Continue reading “Steve Reich – "Piano Phase"” →

Steve Reich – “Piano Phase”

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

No matter how difficult it is to define Minimalism, it is undeniable that it is a very exciting time to be listening to and thinking about it. The very actions we take, listening to the music, buying CDs, writing about the music, reading about the composers, are still changing the history of the movement. All of the comfortable labels we have for historical movements were coined long after they were over, and it is possible that the greatest Minimalist composer is someone we’ve never heard of. Furthermore, there is great danger in establishing a narrative. It can cause us to reject composers, and their music for fear of upsetting a comfortable set of ideas that we have become invested in.

If there is a Minimalist canon, however, Piano Phase is in it. I want to look at three different facets of Steve Reich’s 1967 composition Piano Phase and explain how  Piano Phase’s roots in mechanical delay opened the door for experimentation in the difference between sound production and the final acoustic product, it pioneered the idea of musical process as iterated function, and it was the first acoustic work with shifting, yet not cleanly divided, sections. This particular composition contains the ideas that Reich has expanded upon in his instrumental music, as well as provided a new theoretical framework for experimental music.

Continue reading “Steve Reich – “Piano Phase”” →

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.

The Future of the Orchestra: Part Two

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Finding a place for classical music in a new social and technological era.

Part One.

Before I begin, I want to point out that I am not an authority on this subject. I have never run an arts organization or worked as an orchestra administrator. All I am is a student and a young person that feels like classical music is his vocation. If I didn’t think that the music was worthwhile and that there is unexplored territory within it, I wouldn’t be studying it. On the other hand, I’m still trying to figure out what I think. These are my thoughts now.

One thing that I hear a lot when I talk about the future audience of classical music (classical in the vernacular sense) is the idea that the classical music audience will always refresh itself because as people mature, they look for music with more “substance.” I don’t know if that has been ever true (I suspect that there is some truth in that, as the median age of classical audiences has been old for longer than it should be if it were a single population), but I do know that if people are looking for serious art music that builds on tradition and rewards experience, there are plenty of other avenues available to them apart from classical.

This has to do with an idea that I’ve been puzzling over for a while: the idea that music falls in a spectrum between functional and art music. There is clearly some music that is purely functional: think dance music. This is completely independent of musical idiom or style; a Donna Summer extended mix might be in the disco style with disco form conventions, but musical decisions are made to make people’s bodies move. A great dance mix is one that facilitates a good time. On the other hand, there is a lot of music that is purely non-functional (“art” for lack of a better term). It’s not trying to make its audience move, or happy, or even entertained. Perhaps it’s an intellectual experience. Perhaps it’s exploring a spiritual theme. The best part about music is that there is everything in between those two extremes (in fact, probably all music is).

There’s a couple of strategies that we can extrapolate from looking at music this way. The first is: any argument about the relative merits of art and functional music is a waste of time. If I’m looking for people to have a good time at my party, I’m not going to put on Mahler. Conversely, if I feel like exploring new musical ideas, or hear a new musical perspective, I’m going to listen to an artist or composer that operates more on the art music side of the spectrum. This is what I mean on a practical level: laptop created music, death metal and hip-hop are not going to kill music, just as swing and rock and roll did not kill music. I am not trying to strawman here; I don’t know any prominent cultural critic or music critic that will claim that, but I have heard that kind of thing from devotees of classical music, the exact people who might reinforce negative stereotypes about the closed nature of classical music audiences. If you badmouth a whole style of music, you reinforce an antagonistic relationship between the audiences, and makes them feel like they are not welcome to listen an explore your music. That is not the way to grow your audience.

The second thing that we should realize about this spectrum between functional and art musics is that you can find it in many types of musical idioms. Jazz may have started as a street music, a functional music, but spend five minutes with a devoted fan and you’ll encounter music as experimental as any modernist composition. I think the indie explosion of the 2000’s is a sign of rock’s transition into an idiom with a substantial experimental branch. There’s a discussion going on right now at PostBourgie about the parallels between Jazz’s trajectory and hip-hop. As time goes on a musical idiom amasses a substantial body of work, and a new generation explores it and reinterprets it, changes it, and often takes it into a more arty direction.

I think that anyone who doubts me should look at some of the different forms within classical music itself: mazurkas, sarabandes, minuets, waltzes were all dances that actual people actually danced. Over time, these forms became more stylized, and the masterpieces that bear those names might be far removed from the music that people danced to.

The point that I’m trying to make here is that if people want experimental, or spiritual, or “substantial” music, they have options other than classical music. If classical music administrators and marketers assume that mature or curious listeners will inevitably make their way to classical music, they are sorely mistaken.

I’ve been talking about what orchestras and classical audiences shouldn’t do, now let me talk about what they should do. One of the ideas that I most agree with Greg Sandow about is that orchestras need to be more deliberate about their programming. If classical music is going to align itself towards a musically and intellectually curious audience, then they need to make sure that every concert tells a story or explores an idea. Much like a good playlist, an imaginative program can amplify the pieces within it. If you can sell your concerts as an evening long musical and intellectual journey, you can tap into a whole new audience.

In my next post, I’m going to discuss why orchestras need to start expanding their arts programs now to have a prayer at being viable in 15 years.