The veteran Da Capo Chamber Players have a knack for programming, and on October 10 at Merkin Concert Hall they showed that flair yet again when they opened their 41st season with “Cool Britannia”– an innovative program featuring contemporary chamber music by composers born in the British Isles.

Wigmore Hall in London might be a typical venue for this program, but it transplanted beautifully to the upper westside of Manhattan. The young, appreciative audience had a chance to hear the work of musicians across the pond too rarely performed here, including Luke Bedford, currently the first composer in residence at Wigmore Hall, as well as Sir Richard
Rodney Bennett, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Thomas Adès, and others.

Luke Bedford’s Self-Assembly Composition No. 1 was a spirited highlight of the evening. Like Terry Riley’s In C, the piece is written to be played by any number of instruments. “It’s up to the group to create the structure of the piece from the written suggestions in the score,” Mr. Bedford says in the program notes.

“The duration is entirely up to the performers.” In this performance, the music created by the players was fast, intricate and lively, as though a Conlon Nancarrow piece for player piano had been turned into tumultuous, virtuosic chamber music.

Each selection of the evening was introduced by a flute solo played by Patricia Spencer from Sir
Bennett’s Songs for the Instruction of Singing Birds that evoked the calls of the starling, woodlark, canary, bull finch, and nightingale. The bird calls, which sounded nothing like Messiaen’s, were stretched and molded by the jazz idiom that the composer, who once supported himself playing jazz piano, has used to effect in his film scores.

The program also featured an unusual, powerful piece from the opera The Tempest, composed by Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes, and transcribed by Mr. Adès for violin, clarinet, cello and piano. The music changed moods swiftly, an occasional sweet strain floating into dissonance and then reappearing lyrically.

“Cool Britannia” was the occasion not only to celebrate modern British music, but to salute a departing member of the players: Andre Emelianoff, who has played with the group since 1976. James Wilson is the new cellist. In honor of Mr. Emelianoff, the American composer Stephen Jaffe wrote Cameo, a short, striking jewel of a piece that featured both cellists at the October performance. “I was honoring the passing of the torch,” Mr. Jaffe said.

The theme of the lovely, haunting piece is heard in a call and response pattern as the two cellos answer one another across the stage. Mr. Jaffe, who is a professor at Duke University, said that the theme of Cameo originated in a piece he’d written earlier for Da Capo called Partito, for cello, piano and percussion that he wanted to revisit as part of the occasion.

The music was playful and elegant. “Contemporary music is often so severe,” Mr. Jaffe said. “I wanted the cellists to have fun with this.”

By Leann Davis Alspaugh

You know you’re in a theatre full of science geeks when the line “What is this Death…is it a form of entropy?” gets a big laugh. Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera made its American premiere in March 2011 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre, a co-production of American Repertory Theater, MIT’s Fast Arts Festival, and Chicago Opera Theater. The production brought together composer Tod Machover, poet laureate Robert Pinsky as librettist, director Diane Paulus, and Gil Rose conducting the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). The MIT Media Lab assembled high-tech forces on stage and off, ranging from remote-controlled Operabots and video-infused periaktoi to “sound-producing Hyperinstruments.” A bank of 40 computers and a wireless network ran the software that controlled the robot choreography and coordinated the sound and video environment. Puppeteers were stationed on the catwalk above the stage to assume manual control in case the robots ran amok.

In the abstract setting of the opera’s prologue, the robots tilt their triangular-shaped heads and wonder about such baffling concepts as suffering, memory, and the lessons of the Organic Age. Their elegiac opening is also tinged with irony as they introduce the evening’s program: “Units assembled for the ritual/Performance at command,/As the Human Creators have ordained,/In memory of the Past.” They whiz away and morph into the opera’s human characters, the four members of the Powers family.

The wealthy Simon Powers (James Maddalena) wants to cheat death by immersing himself in the System, technology that will enable him to stay in touch with the physical world after his death. He is abetted in this project by his protégé Nicholas (Hal Cazalet). If the Borg-like black cladding on his left arm is any indication, Nicholas is already in the process of being assimilated. Simon’s wife Evvy (Emily Albrink) and daughter Miranda (Sara Heaton) each have different reactions to Powers’ transformation. Evvy tries to accept her husband’s latest caprice and is eventually, according to the libretto, absorbed into the System. To this viewer, her transformation was a descent into madness rather than an apotheosis. Miranda’s reaction, on the other hand, is a refusal to accept the unnaturalness of her father’s fate. She is so insistent in her need for her father that she even convinces him to return for a short time.

Audiences have been much preoccupied with the technological elements of this opera. Indeed, the stagecraft is mesmerizing – the Venus-flytrap-like armature described as a chandelier is especially beautiful. But once the in-the-moment effect has worn off, there isn’t much left to sustain an impression of real originality. Instead of being provocative, these innovations often seem to work against the rich characterizations of, in particular, Maddalena and Heaton.

What prevents Death and the Powers from reaching the kind of vividness that makes opera really work is its music. Known as “America’s most wired composer,” Tod Machover is deeply interested in experimentation and pushing the boundaries of opera. With Death and the Powers, Machover has said that he wants to use technology to bring the audience closer to the performers. There is no question that he achieves an accomplished level of integration between the electronic soundscape, acoustic music by the 15-members of BMOP, and the programmed stage effects. Without a convincing musical bridge between the props on stage and the people delivering the story, however, the connection is lost.

Machover’s score is layered with energy and affecting passages, but it fails to achieve a dramatic trajectory. The composer’s reliance on repetitive phrases along with electronic sounds and processed vocalizations disrupt the opera’s momentum. Instead of a whole coalescing from “the meeting of organic and the inorganic,” the opera’s disparate parts become dead-end iterations that work against the magnetism of its human elements. Anyone who has ever felt the deflation at the end of a movie too reliant on computer generated effects knows the feeling.

Part of this failing lies with Pinsky’s libretto. Seeking clever word play, he falls back on tired puns: “I am a producer./And business is my wares./Lady’s Wear, Software,/ Hardware—Artware,/Warware, Peaceware—/I am in Every Ware:/Or you might call it Being Ware—.” Looking for accessibility, he resorts to tin-eared colloquialisms: “What does it matter?/Simulation, place,/Medium, voice,/ Face, shmace.” The best lines come from other poets, as when Simon sums up the opera’s theme by quoting May Swenson’s “Question”:

“Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt . . .
when Body my good
bright dog is dead.”

Death and the Powers centers on the kind of “human perfectability” trope that has become a speculative fiction standby in everything from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Matrix trilogy and the man-machine hybrids of Star Trek’s Borg. An operatic treatment of this idea in a highly-technological age offers fresh possibilities of insights into ideas about the self, performance, identity, and authenticity. However, if these ideas are at work in Death and the Powers, they are buried under layers of enervating technology and soulless effects.

Early spring productions at American Repertory Theater also included two new works adapted from Greek plays. Both Sophocles’ Ajax in a new translation by Charles Connaghan and the rock musical of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound reinterpreted well-known themes in startlingly modern ways. The good news is that neither Ajax as a desert warrior suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder nor Prometheus as a leatherclad victim of tattooed tyrants sacrificed classical power to contemporary polemics.

To be sure, the creators of Prometheus Bound didn’t miss the chance to exploit a play that portrays a god punished for his kindness to mankind. Best known for his work with the metal band System of a Down, composer and social justice activist Serj Tankian seized on the theme of tyranny in Steven Sater’s new translation. Director Diane Paulus reinforced this point by partnering with Amnesty International. During the show’s run, eight Amnesty appeals were highlighted, ranging from victims of sexual violence in Africa to prisoners of conscience in Vietnam; the performance I saw urged action on behalf of Reggie Clemons, a prisoner on death row in Missouri.

This intense and exciting production gained much from being performed at Oberon, A.R.T.’s nightclub-style space. Just as the season-opening Cabaret had immersed the audience in Berlin’s Kit Kat Klub, so Prometheus patrons found themselves up close and personal with every minute of the god’s travails. Seating was available only around the perimeter of the room, while those with dance floor tickets dodged a rolling dais and huge ladders – not to mention actors climbing over patrons’ tables.

Being a rock musical about “a damned god in chains,” the production design leaned heavily on goth, punk, and urban grunge. Tattoos were obligatory as was glittery makeup. Hermes’ gold-winged Nikes were an especially witty touch. As always, the A.R.T.’s technical elements were perfect. The head mics worked without a glitch, and the sound mix was well-balanced.

The vocal settings called for high-volume belting as well as delicate harmonies. Uzo Aduba was affecting as Io, the maiden seduced by Zeus and turned into a heifer. The power ballad “What I Think of Myself” was a heart-rending attempt to understand why fecklessness should have such freakish consequences. Gavin Creel’s Prometheus was strong and subtle. Gabe Ebert’s Hermes was by turns menacing and comic – “Who does a god have to smite to get a cocktail around here?!”

The stage proper was occupied by the eight-member Choke & Jerk Band. They deftly charged through Tankian’s score, executing an impressive array of musical ideas from the self-righteous anthem, the ethereal ballad, the anguished lament, and the head-banging rock song. Surely, no straight-play treatment of Aeschylus could match the thrill of hearing Prometheus’ famous monologue, which culminates in “All human culture comes from Prometheus,” as a stadium-size rock anthem.

By Mark Zuckerman

Start the idea of great Twentieth Century Russian composers and three names likely spring to mind: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Of the three, only Shostakovich spent his entire creative life in the Soviet Union. He came of age just as Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924 and navigated Stalin’s 30-year reign, surviving him by almost a quarter century. He is probably best known internationally for his large works – 15 symphonies, 6 concerti, and two operas – and in Russia for these, numerous film scores, and incidental music. Not as well-known are his chamber works, including 15 string quartets.

While a career as a composer is rarely a bed of roses, pursuing one in Stalinist Russia was particularly thorny, especially for someone with Shostakovich’s gifts. Today’s composers might gripe about their inability to attract sufficient attention or about getting an unflattering notice. However, none risk scrutiny by a despot whose bad review could have dire effect, not just on their careers but on their lives – and a ruthless paranoid like Stalin proved he had no compunction about banishment, imprisonment, torture, or even murder for people who displeased him.

Shostakovich learned early on that his high-profile pieces would attract the attention and criticism of the regime, so he fit his symphonies with narratives that resonated with Soviet objectives and became circumspect in his utterances, public and private. His chamber music had a more specialized audience and attracted much less attention from the authorities, so perhaps in these pieces Shostakovich felt he could let his hair down and be self-revealing.

At least that’s the premise behind Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser, published by Yale University Press. The idea of interpreting a segment of Shostakovich’s body of work as autobiography provides an intriguing framework for a penetrating biography. The book’s structure mimics Quartet No. 15, Shostakovich’s final quartet; the chapter titles (Elegy, Serenade, Intermezzo, Nocturne, Funeral March, Epilogue) are from the quartet’s movements.

Lesser discusses each of the quartets chronologically but organizes the biography thematically by what she presents as the composer’s personal subject matter for each quartet. Some of the evidence is concrete, such as the extended silence by the second violin opening No. 12 as a tribute to the recently deceased second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet (the group for which Shostakovich wrote almost all of his quartets). Interpretations of other quartets are more speculative. But even if it were simply a conceit, and the purported evidence entirely discounted, the organizing principle proves effective in illuminating a fascinating life.

The reason is Lesser’s obvious love for and involvement with the music, which spurred considerable research and motivated her immersion in Shostakovich’s private and public life. She writes in a warm, engaging way, effortlessly managing a breadth of events, vignettes, and observations that shed light on a wide assortment of facets belonging to a complex personality, including, but not limited to, the facts of his life and his musical interactions. For example, she encourages us to compare the career of Shostakovich, who toiled as a servant of the Soviet state and adopted (or was forced to adopt) attitudes of great subtlety, with that of Alisa Rosenbaum, a contemporary from the same home town (St. Petersburg) who left Russia for America to become Ayn Rand, a chief exponent of libertarian absolutism. She describes the poignant friendship between Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, two composers who were quite literally worlds apart but who had great admiration for each other’s work. And she describes delicately, but frankly, the combination of passion and practicality in Shostakovich’s love life. Her subject emerges as multi-layered, befitting a creative personality whose life circumstances resist superficial analysis.

Worthy as this biography is on its own, the book also delves into the music. In addition to a valuable discography as an appendix, there are descriptions of each quartet interspersed with the biographical material. Lesser is a skillful writer with an impressive body of literary work but no formal musical background, making her attempt to explain the musical essence of each of the 15 Shostakovich quartets ambitious, if not audacious. She is up front about her approach, setting the bar pretty high nevertheless:

I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism. I have tried to remain faithful to the specific demands of music… Still, my approach … is essentially that of a writer, and this entails certain pitfalls… The line between correct interpretations and incorrect ones is bound to be fuzzy and inconstant… But there are wrong interpretations, wrong assumptions, wrong pathways in approaching an artwork…

Readers of New Music Connoisseur undoubtedly would appreciate that there are musically rigorous forms of music criticism where the language ventures into the realm of “impressionistic response.” Presumably, there are “academic” forms of literary and art criticism (that may be just as dry as “academic music criticism”) but these aren’t the ones whose languages Lesser is appropriating – so it’s hard not to read this as an evasion, at least in part. But perhaps we can appreciate Lesser’s precarious position and, in view of her close listening and her courage in venturing into this territory, allow her the leeway to communicate what she hears in her own way.

Ultimately, though, however valiant the attempt, the result is disappointing. Portraying each of the 15 quartets as if it were essentially a work of drama ignores a wealth of information – some of it essential, even as an introduction to the uninitiated – and wears thin after the first few quartets. The lack of musical sensibilities hides even the most basic formal aspects of these pieces – ones that could be described without resorting to technical vocabulary – an irony, considering Shostakovich was known (and criticized by the Stalinist commissariat) for being a formalist. There are some observations that betray limitations in aural acuity. And there are flights of fancy into the opaque, as in this comparison from the description of Quartet No. 5: “The repetitions are both obsessive and probing, not reassuring as they are in Bach…”

Given the reward a reader gets from the biographical sections, it’s extremely tempting to allow Lesser the privilege to include what amounts to a personal diary. However, she occasionally undermines her credibility by violating her own criteria, as with this passage excerpted from a multipage comparison of Shostakovich to Schoenberg:

Whereas Arnold Schoenberg invented his arithmetical serialist technique to break the hold of Romanticism on music, Shostakovich is using a variant of the technique to do something very different… Perhaps he even believed that twelve-tone serialism, as strictly practiced by Schoenberg and his most obedient acolytes, could hamper the composer’s creative role. What Shostakovich was doing in the Quartet No. 12 was not to capitulate to serialism’s rigid rules, but to adopt certain aspects of the twelve-tone approach as an enhancement to his available palette.

This is by far the longest comparison with another composer in the book (most are throwaways, like the Bach comparison quoted above) and the only one so hostile. It’s also, quite simply, wrong – at least about twelve-tone music, Schoenberg, and his “acolytes” – and betrays an ignorance of both the aesthetic and the music of these composers. This parroting of received wisdom (in this case, not so wise) is incompatible with a work of serious scholarship.

Lesser wants to portray Schoenberg as the real totalitarian composer while promoting Shostakovich as the embodiment of personal expression. In reality, Schoenberg was the one who held fast to his artistic convictions, come what may; he was (to pursue Lesser’s earlier comparison between contemporaries Shostakovich and Ayn Rand) Howard Roark (of Rand’s The Fountainhead) to Shostakovich’s Gail Wynand, who knuckled under to the Ellsworth Tooheys of the commissariat.

The further Lesser gets from Shostakovich’s life, the shakier her ground. In the Epilogue, where she attempts to discern the appeal of Shostakovich’s quartets and why Shostakovich wrote the way he did, she wanders underinformed into the terrain of Euro-American musical history of the 1950’s:

Shostakovich was in many ways less isolated than his Western counterparts. For whereas he was patently eager to communicate with his audience … many mid-century European and American composers were at best uninterested in and at worst virulently disdainful of the people who came to listen to classical music. In 1958, … Milton Babbitt published a piece in High Fidelity [“Who Cares if You Listen?”] that became a kind of credo for the rest of his profession… This kind of breathtaking but far from atypical narcissism did not, I think, end up being very helpful to either American composers or their potential audiences.

First Schoenberg and now, not surprisingly, Babbitt, pilloried here yet again for his High Fidelity article with the sensationalized title that most critics never get past. Lesser actually quotes from the article itself, although she proves no different from other critics by missing the import of what Babbitt says. By now, with the passage of more than half a century, we might expect a more dispassionate reading of this article that appreciates Babbitt’s actual message – which is, essentially, three things, none of them so unreasonable:

First, that composers ought to be provided with environments where they can develop their art free from commercial and social pressures – in other words, to enjoy the kind of support and access to resources the Soviet system provided Shostakovich (whatever the related perils), to pursue the kind of internal artistic direction Lesser believes Shostakovich followed in writing his quartets. The success of composers making their living as faculty in institutions of higher learning has gone a long way toward realizing this objective.

Second, that composers writing highly specialized music would attract niche audiences of highly specialized listeners, more like the specialized audience for Shostakovich’s string quartets (albeit somewhat smaller, perhaps) than the mass audience for his symphonies. Babbitt was shrewd in choosing his audience for this proposal: readers of a fledgling magazine for audiophiles. Audiophiles were a brand new, specialized group who cared about the enhanced listening made possible by recent advances in audio technology (e.g., the development of commercial stereo recordings, which was just months old when Babbitt’s article appeared) and who wanted to turn their living rooms into listening spaces superior to the concert hall. What better source for potential recruits? Given the current ubiquity of individual listening devices with personalized playlists, and today’s proliferation of niche musical markets, we should credit Babbitt with prescience.

Babbitt’s third point was that he considered musical dilettantes useless, at best, or at worst, actively harmful. In his view, they perpetuate romantic yet unrealistic myths about the world of music and engage in uninformed, imprecise chatter that is accepted as meaningful musical discussion. It’s understandable that Lesser might take umbrage at this. However, in a way, her simplistic assessment of the complex musical culture of the 1950’s proves Babbitt’s point. At the very least, after arguing quite eloquently that Shostakovich was the victim of unfair criticism – and backing it up with careful, thorough investigation and perceptive analysis – she would do better to respect that the same treatment might be due the topic she dismisses with such casual disdain. Ditto for her editors at Yale University Press.

Despite these flaws (and doubtless there are those who consider them not all that serious), Music for Silenced Voices is a worthwhile book, written by a music lover mostly for other music lovers. Those readers who come to it unaware of the Shostakovich quartets likely will want to get to know them and will be grateful for the introduction.

On the Cover:
Back Street Ballet, silkscreen, by Meredith Mayer.

IN THIS ISSUE

+++

Contributors, 4

+++

LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

Cool Brittania by Anne Eisenberg, 6
Nico Muhly, Dark Sisters by Ben Yarmolinsky, 7
Spring for Music by Barry O’Neal, 8
Song and Dance from a Scottish Master by Barry O’Neal, 10
Gods and Robots by Leann Davis Alspaugh, 12
Private Lives: Double Bill at the Glimmerglass Festival by Leann Davis Alspaugh, 14
Brave New Works by Amanda Keil, 16
Thoughts on Trying to Make Music That Matters by Leonard J. Lehrman, 18

+++

CD REVIEWS

In Brief by Andrew Violette, 20
Poul Roders by Andrew Violette, 22

+++

BOOK REVIEWS

Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser review by Mark Zuckerman, 24

Librettist/director/teacher Stephen Wadsworth had two big debuts in NY this past fall, first at the Met, then at City Opera. At the former, he took over the staging of Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov when German director Peter Stein refused to subject himself to the indignities US customs imposes on foreign visitors in the name of security. At the latter, his collaboration with the late Leonard Bernstein, A Quiet Place, finally came home, though staged by Christopher Alden.

[The Met was tackling Boris in Russian for only the second time. (I well remember my own debut there, conducting the chorus backstage on a 16-foot ladder, as part of August Everding’s production in 1977.) René Pape was almost as impressive as the late Martti Talvela in the title role, but the staging was a lot cruder and crueler this time around. Instead of emphasizing the Russian people’s desire for liberation, Wadsworth had them wallowing in Cossack pogrom-like torture. The definitive Boris remains Feodor Chaliapin, whose recordings are worth studying, as they make a strong case for Rimsky-Korsakov’s once-popular and now unjustly scorned version. In the Act II Monolog, for example, the upward scalar motif is a perfect 4th higher (in C-flat, rather than G-flat major), and the climactic high G-flat is saved – by Chaliapin, not Rimsky – for the very end of the aria, rendering it the heartbreaking expression of soul it deserves to be, but usually isn’t.]

The phrase “a quiet place” may have its origins in Morris Rosenfeld’s “Mayn Ruhe Platz,” a favorite Yiddish song used extensively by Howard Zinn in Emma, his play about Emma Goldman. “Quiet,” however, was a perennial theme in Bernstein’s oeuvre, from the trio of that name in Candide, to his song for Phyllis Newman “Walk Right In” - which defines “friends” as “people who can give each other quiet”– and especially in his one-act masterpiece Trouble in Tahiti, which he had dedicated to his friend and mentor Marc Blitzstein, shortly before his own marriage to Felicia Montealegre. Credit Wadsworth with having sketched and then co-written the libretto for a sequel to it, which was then (on John Mauceri’s suggestion) expanded to three acts, with the original one-acter divided into two flashbacks in the middle.

As the late Jack Gottlieb (Oct. 12, 1930-Feb. 20, 2011) [see the excellent obituary of him by George Robinson in Jewish Week] pointed out: There is a quasi-Wagnerian motif that permeates Tahiti: a seven-note theme, of which the first three come directly from the Prize Song in Meistersinger, melting, however, into a very American blues mode. That fourth note, the augmented fourth, and its upward resolution would play an even greater role in West Side Story. (Bernstein called the unresolved augmented fourth added to the major triad “the Tahiti chord,” which Gottlieb identifies as “a cousin of” Stravinsky’s “Petrouchka chord.”) The jazz riff that introduces the commercial quasi-Greek chorus trio is in fact a 12-tone row. All these seeds were developed at great length in the new work, perhaps too great; Humphrey Burton pointed out in a pre-conference lecture that much of the unity was lost when Bernstein found it desirable to make considerable cuts. This had been true of Marc Blitzstein’s Regina also, which Mauceri restored, with Bernstein’s blessing. In both cases, however, less really was more: most of Blitzstein’s cuts were not worth rescuing, and neither were Bernstein’s.

The plot of A Quiet Place was close to Bernstein’s heart, and is a plea for love and understanding of love in all its – and his – heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual expressions and manifestations. The rebellious character of Junior (descended at least as much from Junior Mister in Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock as from Bernstein’s own son Alexander) takes up with a French-Canadian bisexual named François, who later marries his sister Dede. The self-hatred and hostility that permeate this dysfunctional family is seen as pre-existent in the marital strife of their parents Sam and Dinah. (Sam was the name of both Bernstein’s father and Blitzstein’s, Dinah having been the name of Bernstein’s grandmother. There’s also a scat-singing reference in Tahiti to Blitzstein’s mother-in-law Lina Abarbanel.) Wadsworth’s own autobiography also entered in, as his sister Nina was killed in a car crash, as is Dinah, shortly before Quiet Place opens.

Alden’s busy staging had her silently haunting her own funeral as a ghost, and utilized the 9 new characters of the larger work, along with the chorus, to populate – or overpopulate – the intimate indoor and outdoor scenes of Tahiti. Most obtrusive, to this viewer, was the pantomimed blow-job given Sam (Christopher Feigum) in his office by his secretary, after he has, according to the libretto, just told her to leave. But ingenious was the re-use of the three singers playing Junior, Dede and François (Joshua Hopkins, Sara Jakubiak, and Dominic Armstrong) as the commenting Jazz Trio. The most affecting music is still Dinah’s, from the original one-act, sung movingly by Patricia Risley. The tempi were slow enough (conducted ably by Jayce Ogren) to impart at least a modicum of grandeur to her, as Bernstein wanted (he told me, after I conducted the show in his presence, a little too fast for his taste, at Harvard in December 1970).

Another classic American opera on the theme of unappreciated love is the 1971 Summer and Smoke by Lee Hoiby (Feb. 17, 1926-Mar. 28, 2011) with libretto by Lanford Wilson after the play by Tennessee Williams. Steven Osgood conducted and Dona D. Vaughn directed a moving student production at the Manhattan School of Music in December, 2010, with the composer in attendance, just a few months before his death. The work had originally been staged at NY City Opera by Frank Corsaro, who then obtained the musicalization rights to perhaps Williams’ greatest play, The Glass Menagerie, for which he watned to write the libretto, and asked Hoiby to write the music for what could have been his best work of all. Hoiby refused, however, to work without his companion and librettist (for such pieces as The Tempest and many others, including his last opera, yet to be performed, Romeo and Juliet) Mark Shulgasser. So the collaboration unfortunately never happened. Once again this viewer was startled by a bit of staging not in the original: the hot-blooded Latina Rosa (Maria Leticia Hernández) simulated fellatio on the hero (Nickoli Strommer) at the close of Act I. (As MSM president Robert Sirota quipped at intermission: “The curtain goes down and she goes down.”) Other than that, the staging was exemplary, with Anna Viemeister a standout as the female lead.

Symphony Space, which had hosted several Hoiby operas in the past, played host to several new operas early this year. Richard Wilson wrote his own witty, prose libretto for Aethelred the Unready, cleverly staged by Drew Minter and conducted by the composer in January. A paean to monarchical failure, it featured a cast of seven in seven scenes and an orchestra of fourteen. Nathan Carlisle as The Publicist nearly stole the show with his yo-yo, while Curtis Streetman was miscast in a role too low for him as The Hypnotist. Robert Osborne sang the strenuous title role and was strongest in the furious sections: his voice is really at its best depicting evil characters like Captain Bristlepunkt in I’ve Got the Tune (on Original Cast Records) and Prosecutor Katzmann in Sacco and Vanzetti (on YouTube).

In March, the venue presented a double-bill of Peter Winkler’s Fox Fables (libretto and staging by Rhoda Levine) and Sheila Silver’s The Wooden Sword, both in conjunction with SUNY-Stony Brook, which also presented two performances of each. Of these, the Winkler was the more successful, as the librettist/director persuaded the composer to pare and cut to exactly the right size and shape. The Silver opera was notable for the lovely singing of Risa Renee Harmon whose soprano soared above the sometimes heavy orchestration that covered most of the other singers. Like the Wilson, Fox Fables’ primary theme seemed to be the foolishness of those who trust in authority, but an ominous reference to the presence of tracks leading into the lion’s den but not out could not help but cause at least this listener to think of Auschwitz.

About 300 operas with consciously Jewish themes are among the listings in Kenneth Jaffe’s 437-page Solo Vocal Works on Jewish Themes: A Bibliography of Jewish Composers, published this year by Scarecrow Press. A 13-year labor of love, it is highly recommended to anyone interested in vocal music by Jews, especially for the Yiddish theater, but also living composers like (to list those most prolific) Miron, Kingsley, Adler, Davidson, Steinberg, Kaufman, Sargon, Schidlowsky, and this writer. The 2006 Merkin Hall premiere is listed of the “video opera” Mosheh by the Israeli-born Yoav Gal (1966- ), presented 8 times in the performance space Here in Jan.-Feb. 2011, and billed as “the world premiere of the original opera.” Danced and sung in Hebrew with English supertitles, the work starred Nathan Guisinger in the nearly nude mostly mimed title role with Heather Green, Beth Anne Hatton, Judith Barnes, and Hai-Ting Chinn as the women in his life, the latter also joining Wesley Chinn in duet as The Voice of God, together with 8 instrumentalists and 8 performers on video, directed by Kameron Steel, conducted from the piano by Yegor Shevtsov. The often high, taxing music generated power, but not much hope, especially in its conclusion concentrating on the Ten Plagues.

Another more hopeful and optimistic musico-dramatic work on a Jewish theme was Korach, a play for and produced at The Living Theatre by Judith Malina with a cast of 26 and music by Steve Taylor, Carlo Altomare, and Sheila Dabney, who also music-directed, Dec. 8, 2010-Feb. 28, 2011. The work begins with a video of Malina herself playing Emma Goldman, extolling anarchism as a great tradition, and Korach as the first Biblical exponent of it. This is appropriate, since Emma’s last portrayal in NY was in fact at The Living Theatre. (See Linda Pehrson’s review.) Solidarity and resistance were the themes throughout, as the cast chanted, among other things, the great Jewish partisan melody by Vilna ghetto songwriter Hirsh Glik, “Shtil, di Nakht iz oysgesterent” – without, apparently, knowing what they were singing! The cast irresistibly inspired the audience to dance with it onstage at the end, much in the spirit of the troupe’s great epic of the 1960s, Paradise Now, though without the nudity of that era.

Nudity, of a sort, featured in the Transport Group’s revivals of Michael John LaChiusa’s Hello Again, his 1994 musical adaptation of Artur Schnitzler’s 10-character 10-scene play Reigen, aka La Ronde. That is, if bare male assholes turn you on, as they seemed to, for about 3/4 of the audience. Schnitzler’s original 10 heterosexual overlapping couplings have been re-cast here, with 6 men and 4 women, and the most affecting music sung by two gay men in bed, transitioned to and from by bisexual individuals sandwiched by straight couples. No lesbians, though you’d think they’d be there, for symmetry. In Jack Cummings III’s direction, the action all takes place between and on ten tables at which the audience is seated, thus giving a literal in-your-face feeling to the sex acts being performed (the most amusing of which was yet another blowjob—this one embellished by popcorn). Except of course they’re not being performed, but simulated, with breasts, genitals, and in fact all but the male anuses quite covered. Programs were not handed out until the end, so it was hard to follow who was who, which was I suppose part of the point: sexual partnering as impersonally interchangeable. Not very satisfying, however.

A more satisfying performance, even though the work is still unfinished, was experienced at Turtle Bay Music School Dec. 17, 2010, in Judith Sainte Croix’s Visionary Dance performed by the Sonora Trio, Mark Degamo, projections and dancers. Students became part of the performance, and an ecstatic mood prevailed. More when the work-in-progress is complete!

Also satisfying were the eloquent performances by Amanda Crider and (on short notice) baritone Michael Kelly of songs by David Sisco and Elie Siegmeister, sensitively accompanied by Liza Stepanova, Feb. 17, 2011 at the Lincoln Center Library (postponed from Jan. 27 due to the snowstorm). Two of the 3 Lorca Elegies by Siegmeister were transposed up, slightly disturbing the tonal unity of the set, but the singing of both soloists was nearly flawless and so much in the spirit of MC Paul Sperry’s “Joy of Singing.”

Meanwhile, Howard Pollack, definitive biographer of Piston, Copland, and Gershwin, now at work on a book on Blitzstein, came out with a lengthy review in MLA Notes reviewing the Siegmeister bio-bibliography which I co-authored with Kenneth Boulton, published in 2010 by Scarecrow Press. Pollack called the work “a landmark in American music scholarship that deserves to be a part of any serious music library’s collection”. The inaugural issue of North American Opera Journal also includes a lengthy article on Siegmeister. Subscription details (and the opening pages of the articles from the first issue) can be found here. Access is free for subscribers (including libraries) to the magazine Opera America.

Other song recitals of note included the NYFOS series at Merkin Hall, Beth Anderson’s Women’s Work series at Greenwich House, and LICA’s “Love of the Art Song: Art of the Love Song” at the Steinway Gallery in Melville.

The first of these was the most accomplished, introduced by Steven Blier, alternating with Michael Barrett accompanying Sari Gruber, Liza Forrester, James Martin and (briefly) Christopher Tiesi on Feb. 15 & 17, 2011 in a collage of American songs by Bernstein, Ives, Weill, Bolcom, Rorem, Hoiby, Cole Porter, Paul Fujimoto, Michael Sahl, Hugh Martin, Hall Johnson, Leiber & Stoller, and Steven Marzullo. Ms. Gruber progressed from a growly chest voice to a lovely high soprano, while Ms. Forrester impressed with a wide vocal and dramatic range throughout. The texts were especially well chosen, to reflect a kind of cycle of NY life from morning ’til night. “Love, Lust and Longing in Poetry and Song” was the title of soprano Eileen Strempel’s Greenwich House recital, accompanied by pianist Gilya Hodos Mar. 24, 2011. The promising program opened with Pauline Viardot-Garcia’s Pushkin settings (in German) and continued with settings by women composers of texts by Margaret Atwood and E.E. Cummings, all composed for Ms. Strempel over the last 6 years. Judith Cloud (1954- ), who had a song in each group, was there to talk about her music. So did Libby Larsen, along with Lori Laitman, Elisenda Fábregas and Amanda Harberg in the Atwood; Christine Donkin, Regina Harris Baiocchi and Jocelyn Hagen in the Cummings. Applause from the small audience was scant, as many of the songs ended buttonlessly, fading out on a dominant chord, or otherwise unresolved. The program is to be streamed and available for viewing, and certainly worth watching, at least in segments.

It seems almost unfair to critique the Feb. 11, 2011 LICA concert honoring Valentine’s Day this year, since one of the performers tapped at the last minute is still an undergraduate. But a full house responded well, especially to soprano Michele Eaton’s performances of songs by Jane Leslie, Patricia King, Joel Mandelbaum, Herbert Deutsch, this writer, and impresario Laurence Dresner, accompanied variously by Stephanie Watt, Paul Hefner, and Ms. Leslie. Even more unfair would it be to come down harshly on the ambitious Airheart, a musical (really a play with music) about Amelia Earhart by Roslyn High School vocal music teacher Brad Frey, sumptuously produced at that school in a production to rival the technical proficiency of his first musical on Tiananmen Square, 15 years ago. Only this time the dialogue and lyrics were written by a student. When they didn’t rhyme, they sounded as though they should; when they did rhyme, tritely, one wished they didn’t. An original cast recording is available for the curious.

by Barry O’Neal

The pool of fine young musicians at The Juilliard School that Joel Sachs draws upon for his New Juilliard Ensemble is genuinely inspiring. Their first concert of the new season on Saturday night, September 25 drew a large and enthusiastic crowd to a program that included music from three European countries as well the United States. All were worthy and at least two of unusual merit.

First on the long program was a fourteen-minute piece by English composer Philip Cashian. Skein, composed in 2005, was given its first performance in the Western Hemisphere. Scored for flute (doubling bass flute), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), bassoon (doubling contrabassoon), horn, trumpet, percussion and single strings, Skein showed Cashian’s sure command of instrumental writing. The work is generated from a ruminative viola solo that gradually draws the other members of the ensemble into a restless, rhythmically charged exploration of various textures in which the viola and marimba play particularly significant roles. There was a wispy but mercurial character to this music with much feeding of ideas from player to player at a sotto voce dynamic level. Near the end, the original viola idea was audible in the midst of the urgent, virtuosic instrumental exchanges. It was a fine opening to the program and an exciting discovery.

Poul Ruders’ twenty-two minute Kafkapriccio (2007-2008) is described by the Danish composer as “…a distillation for fourteen instruments from the massive forces of my opera, Kafka’s Trial. ” It was written for the Athelas Sinfonietta, Copenhagen and the five movements had many vivid moments of instrumental writing. Each of the first four movements was sort of a character sketch. The opening section, “Franz,” has a noisy carnival-like atmosphere colored by a touch of the klezmer style. “Felice” is a quiet, intense slow movement that begins in a fragmented way but becomes more sustained, ending with an angular Shostakovich-inflected violin solo. The music for “Leni,” a character described in the composer’s program notes as an “uncommonly horny and sluttish female factotum,” is insouciant, flippant, mercurial and reminiscent of Kurt Weill. The scoring features a siren and a slide whistle. The fourth part, “Joseph,” a portrait of the protagonist of the Kafka novel, after his arrest, is appropriately grotesque but the final movement, “The Execution,” is the most startling and affecting, with a beautiful English horn solo and the trumpet player blowing his instrument into the piano, creating a lovely, hazy overtone effect. Overall, Kafkapriccio betrayed its theatrical origins and made one anxious to hear the original opera from which the material derives. The work was brilliantly performed by the group, under Mr. Sachs’ able leadership.

After the intermission the audience was treated to an unusually witty recent work by Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino, L’Archeologia del Telefono (2005). Scored for solo winds, horn, piano, 2 percussionists, and single strings, L’Archeologia del Telefono explores, in a very charming way, the sounds produced by the devices available to us in a society dominated by technology. The music was full of bleeps, honks (a particularly overblown sound produced by the bassoonist is the Ur-busy signal), whispers and chirps. On the verge of silence much of the time, the piece provokes a smile from the listener, and the audience clearly enjoyed the “onomatopoetic” character of the music. At ten minutes it was just the right length for a piece primarily dependent on ear-teasing sounds. Harold Meltzer’s Virginal (2002-2010), which followed, is a recent revision of a work originally written in 2002. It was inspired by the keyboard works of John Bull and William Byrd and the way in which their sequential sectional charater is defined by differing styles of keyboard figuration. Scored for single winds, horn, trumpet, harp, guitar, harpsichord, 2 percussionists and single strings, Virginal begins with a grazioso harpsichord solo. The harpsichord, played by Aya Hamada, is soon joined by guitar and harp, and the instrument is used more as a part of the ensemble than as a prominent soloist. It was a fascinating and continually engrossing work that had a Stravinskian feeling to it with the ensemble frequently employing overlapping rhythmic ostinati. A stopping and starting repeated-note passage shared alternately by winds and strings was especially beguiling, as was a trio for harpsichord, guitar and harp, with subtle percussion commentary, to which the strings were gradually added. One remarkable feature of the scoring was the care Mr. Meltzer took to make sure the un-amplified harpsichord and guitar were always audible. Ms. Hamada, Mr. Sachs and the Juilliard musicians are certainly to be commended for their clear and ravishing account of this delightful piece.

The concert ended with the New York Premiere of Chamber Concerto III: Another View (2006-7) by Elliott Schwartz, performed in celebration of the composer’s 75th birthday year. A mini-concerto for piano, Chamber Concerto III was dazzlingly played by soloist Hui Wu and an ensemble of single winds, horn, trumpet, trombone, 2 percussionists (including timpani), and single strings. The work begins with a lively, but ruminative piano solo that gradually draws in the rest of the ensemble. The writing becomes increasingly vigorous, with much feeding of motivic fragments from instrument to instrument. A warmly melodic middle section makes much use of a hymn-like fragment and the main climax of the work for the full ensemble was richly sonorous and a made a fine finish for this excellent concert.

Joel Sachs has always been one of the most adventurous programmers around, both with the groups he directs and the festivals he presents at Juilliard and with his professional ensemble, Continuum. This concert by the New Juilliard Ensemble was substantive, entertaining and beautifully performed. One looks forward eagerly to their next appearance.

By Cornelius Dufallo

Violinist and composer Ana Milosavjevic presented a program of violin music at Le Poisson Rouge on February 16, in celebration of her new CD, Reflections (Innova Recordings). Ms. Milosavjevic performed five recent compositions, the oldest of which dates from 2006. The small, hip venue was packed with enthusiastic listeners.

Ms. Milosavjevic, originally from Serbia, has lived in New York City for more than a decade, and she is becoming a regular presence in New York’s new music scene. She plays both amplified acoustic violin and electric violin, and uses her laptop computer to create live electronics and to trigger pre-recorded samples. Ms. Milosavjevic is one of a growing number of young performers who program their own compositions alongside the works of other composers.

Ms. Milosavjevic began the program with Aleksandra Vrebalov’s The Spell III, an austere, spooky piece for amplified violin and computer. Vrebalov’s work combines pre-recorded voices and digital looping to create an otherworldly background texture, over which the violinist layers mournful glissandi and arpeggiated tremoli. The result is closer to a soundscape than a concert piece: rather than following the development of musical material over the course of a recognizable structure, the listener is immersed in a sonic atmosphere that changes slowly over time.

Ms. Milosavjevic followed this with her own composition, Reflections (the title track of her CD), a lyrical, heartfelt set of variations for violin and piano inspired by the Serbian folksong, Djurdjevdan. Kathleen Supové contributed a subtle and sensitive piano accompaniment.

In another of her own compositions entitled Zajdi, Zajdi, Ms. Milosavjevic was joined by Kristen Arnold and Kile Hotchkiss, two dancers from the TAKE Dance company, who performed choreography of Takehiro Ueyama. Ms. Milosavjevic used a solid-body electric violin for this piece, on which she produced persuasive distortion and delay effects.

Eve Beglarian’s I’m worried now, but I won’t be worried long, for amplified violin, electric bass, and electronics, was unfortunately obscured by a loose cable connection that caused repeated glitches in the sound production. Technical problems such as this are a well-known risk of technology – heavy concerts. Ms. Beglarian (who performed the bass part) and Ms. Milosavjevic fielded the situation with poise and professionalism, and the strength of Ms. Beglarian’s music was evident despite the pops and crunches.

Ms. Milosavjevic seemed beautifully in her element during Svjetlana Bukvich-Nichols’s composition, Before and After the Tekke. Scored for amplified violin, keyboard, electronics and voice (Ms. Bukvich-Nichols provided the keyboard, electronics, and vocals), the work fuses driving rhythms and non-western microtonal tunings with a groove – filled background track that at times crosses into the genre of ambient electronica. The result is a pleasing blend of Eastern European flavors and vibrant urban energy. Ms. Milosavjevic and Ms. Bukvich-Nichols delivered a compelling performance, bringing out the sensuality, exoticism, and vitality of the music.

by Anne Eisenberg

The stage at Symphony Space, the performing arts center on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was just as you might have expected it to be on May 6th, just before the evening performance of the Cassatt String Quartet and pianist Ursula Oppens. There was a gleaming ebony grand piano ready for Ms. Oppens, and four seats near it for the quartet.

But that’s about all that was standard in the auditorium as people filled the hall in preparation for the concert. Scattered through the audience was a welcome novelty to the usual chamber music concert: dozens of youngsters, some teen-aged students of the Manhattan-based quartet, others children of the musicians. The young people talked, jumped up and down, exchanged toys, and created an excited, laughing din in the hall.

But when the five performers took the stage at 7:30 p.m., silence fell, just as it should (punctuated by the occasional parental “shh”) – and an imaginative program opened.

All four of the evening’s pieces were quintets, and all four were executed with the precise, angular playing of the Cassatt strings and the dashing piano passagework of Ms. Oppens. The first half of the program offered three contemporary pieces; the second half, the familiar Johannes Brahms piano quintet in f minor, op. 34.

The opening quintet, Ghosts in the Dream Machine, composed in 2005, is a two-movement work by Gabriela Lena Frank, inspired, she says in the program notes, by the artwork of Simon Dinnerstein and his “themes of mystery, night, and wonder.” The piano opened and closed the piece, leading with dreamy, fractured arpeggios in long, syncopated sequences and ending with fading, single notes from the keyboard. The composer effectively juxtaposed the percussive power of the piano with the
smooth strokes of the strings throughout the haunting piece.

The misty mood of Ghosts in the Dream Machine was instantly dispelled when the second piece, Images of Lake Erie by Fang Man, opened with a burst of pounding, propulsive piano. Commissioned by Symphony Space for the Cassatt Quartet and Ursula Oppens, Lake Erie had its premiere at the concert.

Ms. Fang, known as Mandy to her friends, but more formally in the program notes as Man, said that Lake Erie is the first of five movements of a proposed quintet. “The idea is for each movement to represent one instrument,” she said. The first movement focuses on the piano. “Ursula is a fantastic pianist,” she said of Ms. Oppens, “and so I composed the movement with her in mind.”

Ms. Oppens had her hands full with the virtuosic piano passages in the piece, but she had other musical roles, too, during the concert. To evoke the sounds of winter, she shook a set of sleigh bells that lay ready nearby on the piano. And she was not alone as percussionist. The violinist Muneko Otani occasionally laid down her violin and took on the triangle or the water phone, an acoustic instrument with a circle of
crown-like, upright metal rods that she struck with a drumstick.

Ms. Fan, an admirer of Sergei Prokofiev and Bela Bartok, said that both composers were inspirations for the propulsive Lake Erie. Ms. Fan is also the composer of Resurrection, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra in 2008.

The first half of the program closed with the somber Dumbarton Quintet, composed in 2008 by Joan Tower. The piece, which has a more traditional melodic base than the earlier pieces in the program, featured lyrical solos for the violin. Ms. Tower, like Ms. Fan before her, was present for the concert and took a bow with the musicians.

After the intermission, during which the cellist, Nicole Johnson, talked with some members of the audience – and explained that some of the young people at the concert were students of hers – the program ended with a spirited rendition of the Brahms quintet, delivered with strong, precise playing from the Cassatt ensemble.

The concert was recorded, and can be heard at the website www.symphonyspacelive.org, the program notes say, in its entirety – except for the bursts of youthful cheer from the audience, which probably can’t be captured there.

On the Cover:
Don Giovanni all’inferno, Found objects/mixed media assemblage made from bed springs with other materials and artist pigments by Renzo Oliva

In this Issue

+++
Contributors, 4

+++
LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS
Cassatt String Quartet, Ursula Oppens, 6
Ana Milosavjevic at Le Poisson Rouge, 7
New Chamber Music in Paradise, 8
A Dream Fulfilled, 9
Fantastical Sounds From Near and Far, 11
20th Century Operas in the 21st Century, 12 (Complete web version in 2 parts.) [part 1] [part 2]
Let There Be Light Et Al, 15

+++
FEATURE
nmc talks with Tobias Picker, 16

+++
CD REVIEWS
Oldies But Goodies, 18
In Brief, 19

+++
BOOK REVIEWS
Kenneth Silverman / Kyle Gann, 22
The Hollywood Film Music Reader, 28

Previous Issues, 31

by Mark Zuckerman

Terry Riley’s In C (1964) is widely regarded as the seminal work in the minimalist canon. Its score is lean: one page of music and about a page and a half of performance advice. The music is a sequence of 53 modules: numbered linear fragments ranging in scope from a single note to an extended phrase (there’s exactly one of these, Module 35); most are short, oscillating sixteenth note patterns.

In C is an ensemble piece for an unspecified number of instruments of unspecified type. The composer recommends a group of about 35 players, but smaller or larger groups are acceptable. (The first performances, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in November, 1964, involved 13 players.) The tempo is also unspecified, but the performers are directed to use the same one throughout. To keep everyone together, an ensemble can use a piano or a mallet percussion instrument as an eighth note metronome on high C’s. There are few other constraints. Each ensemble member plays through the entire sequence of modules in order, but may start the next module at any time and repeat each modulead libitum, making an effort to interlock with modules played by others while being careful not to get too far behind or ahead. Once everyone has reached the final module, the ensemble crescendos and diminuendos a few times before members drop out, one at a time.

There are no dynamic markings, articulations, or phrase marks. These are determined during performance, through the interaction of the players. None of the modules demands any virtuosity, but an effective performance requires the kind of musical sensitivity you’d expect at a good jam session. Since In C envisions a limitless set of performances -– indeed, it’s extremely unlikely any performance is repeatable, except with a recording -– its performance practice is as important as its score.

Although a rendition at a moderate tempo of all 53 modules played end to end without repetitions lasts under 5 minutes, a typical In C performance lasts about 45 minutes to an hour or more. Changes occur very slowly – almost imperceptibly – producing an effect admirers find unpretentiously hypnotic and detractors find simplistically mind-numbing.

In C has become immensely popular all over the world and, as the herald of a new musical genre, has had a profound influence on composers and music critics. But does it belong in the same company with musical monuments like Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata, “Appassionata” Sonata, and Diabelli Variations? Or with Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Debussy’s Ibéria, Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, and Strauss’s Elektra? Should it and Vaughn Williams’s Ninth Symphony together represent the significant music from the second half of the Twentieth Century? Malcom Gillies, editor of The Oxford University Press series Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation, believes so, with composer Robert Carl’s ambitious, elegantly written book in the series, Terry Riley’s In C, making the case.

Its blurred boundary between structure and interpretation makes In C an intriguing addition to such a series. Given the nature of the music and the sparse public record of its first realizations, any serious attempt to fulfill the series mission would involve extending the frontiers of conventional scholarship and musical analysis. Blazing such a trail requires courage, dedication, and no small amount of work. For the most part, Carl rises to the challenge. His treatise is a labor of love: the result of prodigious effort and wholehearted veneration.

To build a history of Terry Riley’s development and process, and to reconstruct the circumstances of In C’s public introduction, Carl interviewed not only Riley, but also a number of his friends and acquaintances, including many of the participants in the 1964 premiere performances and in the first recording, released on Columbia Records in 1968. He studied and analyzed the pieces Riley composed leading up to In C. He analyzed by ear 15 recordings of In C, including an in-depth analysis of the 1968 premiere recording.

There is a great deal to admire in the outcome. The bulk of the book focuses on Riley’s development as a composer and on In C itself, and this is where the book is strongest.

The chapter on Terry Riley’s Life and Art before In C succinctly explores Riley’s musical biography, tracing the development of Riley’s musical thinking and process and identifying influential people and circumstances. The narrative is illustrated frequently with reminiscences by Riley and his friends. We get a picture of Riley’s musical personality – a gifted natural musician with ability on a number of instruments and eagerness to learn from and collaborate with teachers and colleagues whom he respected, regardless of their point of view. One of these mentors/collaborators was La Monte Young, whom Riley met while pursuing a master’s degree at UC Berkeley and whose influence on Riley was pervasive: from exposing him to modern jazz (particularly John Coltrane), Asian music, and Young’s own musical aesthetic to introducing him to marijuana and peyote. Riley went to France in 1962, earning his living playing ragtime and jazz piano. Although he spent most of his time in Paris – where he became absorbed in the expatriate Beat culture – his gigs took him all over Western Europe and northern Africa, where he encountered music from non-Western cultures.

Interspersed through the narrative are brief analyses of Riley’s music from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s that map his progress as a composer and identify common elements of his practice. There is a fascination with pedal tones, a gradual reliance on diatonic modes, and a refining of some “modernist” practices. There are conventionally-notated pieces, improvisatory pieces, and pieces using magnetic tape technology: sound-on-sound and loopback.

Thus Carl effectively sets the stage for the In C world premiere, to which he devotes a chapter. In a flash of inspiration almost Mozartian in character, Riley composed In C over a 24-hour period after returning to San Francisco in early 1964 when his source of income dried up in Europe. The premiere in November was the second half of a program devoted to Riley’s music. The group Riley assembled to perform In C included close friends and collaborators, many of whom went on to significant careers as composers and performers. Riley was also a pianist in the ensemble, and although he supervised the preparation and performance, there were contributions from the other players. Perhaps the greatest of these, attributed to composer Steve Reich (coincidentally, Riley’s neighbor), was the metronomic pulse – often cited as a basic feature of minimalist music – which was added during rehearsal as a practical means of keeping everyone together. Carl relates a number of colorful anecdotes surrounding the rehearsals and the performances, and quotes the entire glowing review from the San Francisco Chronicle.

The historical narrative is resumed in a later chapter on the 1968 Columbia Records recording, which brought In C to national prominence. In the interim, Riley had moved to New York City and had taken up the saxophone. At the time, Columbia Records was looking for new and unusual music for its catalog, and, serendipitously, a young composer on leave from his day job as a producer for Columbia came across Riley and his music and so made the match. Columbia Records was major league: it provided experienced, professional, sympathetic musicians; almost six months’ rehearsal; and state-of-the-art eight-track recording technology, allowing Riley to overdub recording sessions. Columbia also provided eye-catching cover art and sophisticated marketing. Riley supervised the recording and played soprano saxophone in the ensemble. The release was an instant success, remained in print for the life span of LP records, and remains in print after being reissued on CD.

The real meat and potatoes of the book are in the analyses of In C: the Analysis chapter, which contains an abstract analysis, and the Analysis section in the chapter on the Columbia recording. Carl borrows terms from microbiology in calling these “endogenous” and “exogenous,” respectively; i.e., “from within” and “from outside.”In Carl’s usage, the endogenous analysis deals with the structural elements contributed exclusively by the composer, while exogenous analyses incorporate interpretive and improvisational choices by the performers. Ideally, we keep the endogenous analysis in mind as we experience a performance or recording – that is, as we perform an exogenous analysis in real time.

It’s a brave dichotomy as applied to this kind of music, calling for a mixture of innovative analytic criteria and creative yet (hopefully) careful use of traditional concepts and terminology. The purpose of any musical analysis should be to provide a plausible, if not convincing, accounting that encourages paying closer attention. In this, Carl achieves a qualified success.

The endogenous analysis introduces structural elements of In C in a progression requiring increased degrees of discrimination and attention. Each of these elements is in a layer that can be experienced independently, but becomes more vivid if added with the other layers in the order presented. “Pacing” is explored in two layers – “harmonic density” and “rhythmic materials” – each depicted in a chart of the modules’ relative information content with a description of the musical shapes it illustrates. “Motivic transformation”is a valuable discussion of how the modules interrelate that overheats – more to burnish In C than to illuminate it – by asserting a profound connection to well-formed notions of motivic development in Beethoven and Brahms (sort of like claiming In C and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony are alike in their being “in C”).“The significance of Module 35”draws special attention to by far the longest and most melodic module – one that emerges in performance, even in the midst of competing modules, because of its character and because it contains the highest notes in the piece – as a way of recognizing large-scale symmetries in In C’s structure. “Harmonic analysis” primarily discusses the succession of diatonic modes indicated by the score and perceivable in performance, even with module overlap. Except for its single overreach, the endogenous analysis is remarkably illuminating and generally reasonable, even accommodating the kind of variation that can occur in performance.

The exogenous analysis in the chapter on the premiere recording required a considerable amount of effort – it charts the first entrance and last exit of every module – but isn’t as illuminating as the endogenous analysis. Its important conclusions are that the performers lingered over harmonic ambiguities at transition points and that Riley (who supervised the recording) “shows a taste for gradual, carefully controlled pacing, which causes the work to morph almost imperceptibly from one state to another (p. 93).” The balance of the chapter consists of quotes from and comments on three reviews of the recording, including one from Glamour – an indication of the success of Columbia’s marketing. An analytical discography of 14 other recordings of In C is in the Appendix.

The final chapter discusses In C’s legacy, with remarks by the participants in the premiere performances and recording, comments by composers and musicians from the generation following Riley’s, and a summary of the performance/recording practice following the premieres. It ends with a section of Carl’s own musings on In C, a prerogative well-earned by the hefty work leading up to it. However, he concludes with a bizarre speculation reminiscent of Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s apocalyptic science fiction novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz. The imagined situation is the aftermath of the collapse of civilization as we know it, with humanity returning to a primitive state – but, strangely, retaining the ability to read music. In Carl’s words (p.109):

But if the score to In C survived, … it is perhaps the one piece of “art music” that any group could gather to play. Standard instruments are not even necessary… In short it would be a seed from which a new creative tradition could grow. It’s hard to think of any other work that could serve this purpose so neatly, fully, inclusively.

It’s tempting to forgive this rhetorical excess, in view of the importance of the book and the effortspent writing it. This is not, after all, the claim made by some advocates that minimalism has revived musical culture from the apocalypse of modernism. But it does place In C on a pedestal of such a height that it may distort the view below.

This could explain problems in the first chapter, which purports to define In C’s historical context. Carl posits four characteristics one or more of which “new music” in the 1960’s “was assumed” to share: research, formalism, experiment, and information density. Leaving aside that, in Carl’s estimation, George Crumb and Milton Babbitt share the first characteristic – possibly the first and only time these two composers have been considered in any way similar – and that it misconstrues what both Crumb and Babbitt are about. None of these categories sounds very appealing musically; we might well wonder why anyone aspired to be a composer in those days. This view posits a group of “assumers” who had the power to determine what music was properly “new,” a genteel version of the wearisome revisionist trope, run out all too often by minimalist and neoromantic partisans alike, that “modernism” exercised hegemony during this period to their heroes’ detriment. Here, it comes off as a straw man set up to enhance the revolutionary stature of In C.

The truth, however prosaic, is far more interesting and more revealing of In C’s relation to the musical world of the time. The 1960’s were years of great musical diversity (in the pre-politically correct sense). Witness the wide-ranging catalog of nearly 150 pieces recorded in the decade before In C’s premiere by the Louisville Symphony Orchestra, perhaps the greatest performance outlet ever for American music: everything from Elliott Carter to Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco to Carlos Chavez to Chou Wen-chung to Aaron Copland to Henry Cowell to Paul Creston – to name just the composers in the C’s. The avant-garde during this period was particularly varied, with composers much closer to Riley than modernists in approach and aesthetic, like Earle Brown and Morton Feldman. It would be interesting to see an investigation of how In C compared to these, and to, say, Conlon Nancarrow.

This diversity was spurred by advances in technology, as significant in their day as the cell phone and Internet are today in increasing the ability to capture and preserve ephemera, enlarging the number of creators and consumers of music, and expanding access among consumers and creators. The expanding availability of reel-to-reel magnetic tape equipment made it possible to share recordings and provided a new means to make music. Performances could now more easily be preserved, pressed onto phonograph records, and played over the radio. The commercial introduction in 1948 of long-playing (LP) records, the improvements in audio technology to meet the demand for “high fidelity” in the 1950’s, the introduction of commercial stereophonic recordings in 1957, and the development of inexpensive, high-quality, portable audio equipment using transistors starting in the late 1950’s resulted in an explosion of, and hunger for, all kinds of music – classical, jazz, folk, rock, and genres never heard before and some never heard since – from mainstream to exotic. Popular interest was particularly attracted to music at the edges that blurred boundaries. The Swingle Singers’ jazz-inspired Bach’s Greatest Hitswon a Grammy in 1963; Wendy Carlos’ Moog Synthesizer realization, Switched-On Bach, released by Columbia Records in 1968, was a huge hit.

All this had a profound effect on the complexion of classical music and especially on who became a classical composer. The increased presence of popular music genres and the expansion of college and university music departments enabled and encouraged a widening of what was studied as “music” and attracted a more varied group of music students. This led to crossover, as musicians from jazz, rock, and world music joined the ranks of concert music composers.

However revolutionary its content and impact,In Cwas a product of its time, squarely in the midst of the artistic, social, and practical effects of the contemporary advances in technology. University-trained, jazz-performing Terry Riley was influenced by exotic recorded music, and his experience with magnetic tape directly informed his composition of In C. Most important, though, was the slipstream of LP production and marketing in the late 1960’s that put In C on phonograph turntables in living rooms, bedrooms, and dorm rooms around the world. Perhaps In C would have caught on without the 1968 Columbia recording, but its good timing makes that speculation unnecessary. As with so many musical success stories, In C’s triumph took both genius and luck.

The crossover effect worked in both directions. Most of the early minimalists – Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass, in particular – played their own work with ensembles of loyal musicians well versed in the music. This bears a closer resemblance to rock bands, who adopted the singer/songwriter model from folk music, than to classical music ensembles.

But all this may work better as topics for other books, ones that would build upon the ground-breaking foundation laid in Robert Carl’s Terry Riley’s In C. We should hope for this book’s success and for others like it to follow, perhaps even as additions to the Oxford Studies in Musical Genesis, Structure, and Interpretation that fill some obvious voids in its catalog of music from the past century.