Alex Ross's Blog, page 143

An Ibert moment

Hilda Paredes

The Mexican-English composer has a website here. She is well served by a 2005 Mode disc, which features superb performances by the Arditti Quartet, Ian Pace, Ensemble Modern, and Neue Vokalsolisten Stuttgart. In 2012 she appeared in Miller Theatre's enduringly vital Composer Portraits series; needless to say, Steve Smith was there.

Miscellany

This year's Pulitzer Prize for Music has gone, most deservedly, to John Luther Adams, for Become Ocean. Here is my review of the premiere. I also deeply admired J. C. Adams's Gospel According to the Other Mary, cited as a finalist. I missed Christopher Cerrone's Invisible Cities, but reputable sources praised it strongly.... Louis Andriessen on pop: yes to the Supremes, early Janet Jackson, hip-hop, no to the Beatles.... Some very lively programming at this year's MATA Festival, starting tonight.... Annie Gosfield is back at the Stone on April 29, curating a week of concerts.... How did Steve Reich come to conquer the Big Ears Festival? Ben Ratliff and Chris Weingarten discuss... What possessed the Birgit Nilsson Foundation to give a million dollars to the Vienna Philharmonic? Neil Fisher of the London Times aptly calls the prize "ludicrous." ... A new blog, en français, by the superb Laurent Slaars.... Fiona Maddocks gives a remarkable report of the Abbado memorial in Lucerne. Andris Nelsons conducts; the rendition of the Mahler Third finale is overpowering indeed.... Ethan Iverson zeroes in on Ralph Shapey. I've long concurred with Kyle Gann in seeing Shapey as the great underrated modernist, the one who fulfilled William Billings's mission statement for New World music: "I think it best for every composer to be his own carver."

Rupert Brooke's Munich agenda

"Fifth Symphony tonight. Tomorrow Lohengrin. Friday Debussy. Saturday Schnitzler. Sunday Valkyries. Yesterday the Wild Duck. On Sunday I saw Ghosts for 6d: played as a farce. Mr. Wedekind turns out to be a music hall singer: & has coffee at the next table after lunch. No other news."

                       — Letter to James Strachey, 1911

Woolf as Cage

“‘There’s no such thing as silence,’ [Mr. Erskine] said positively. ‘I can hear twenty different sounds on a night like this without counting your voices.’”

                — Jacob’s Room

“Miss La Trobe stood there with her eye on her script. ‘After Vic,’ she had written, ‘try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows, etc.’ She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality. But something was going wrong with the experiment. ‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered.”

                — Between the Acts

An Internet search shows that Woolf's startling premonitions of Cage have already been noticed: David Toop quotes the Jacob's Room passage in his 2010 book Sinister Resonance, and the experimental dimensions of Miss La Trobe's pageant in Between the Acts have been explored by Patricia Laurence and Melby Cuddy-Keane, among others.

Noted

Analytic philosophy often spreads the atmosphere of denunciation and investigation by committee. The intellectual is called on the carpet. What do you mean when you say ...? Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you. We shall teach you to say what you have in mind, to "come clear," to "put your cards on the table.” Of course, we do not impose on you and your freedom of thought and speech; you may think as you like. But once you speak, you have to communicate your thoughts to us—in our language or in yours. Certainly, you may speak your own language, but it must be translatable, and it will be translated. You may speak poetry—that is all right. We love poetry. But we want to understand your poetry, and we can do so only if we can interpret your symbols, metaphors, and images in terms of ordinary language.

                 — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

A similar paragraph could be written about neuroscientific approaches to the arts.

The Roerich cornerstone

The Master Apartments, 310 Riverside Drive.

Igor Levit plays late Beethoven

Séance. The New Yorker, April 14, 2014.

Noted

"Can a society which is incapable of protecting individual privacy even within one's four walls rightfully claim that it respects the individual and that it is a free society?"

                    — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man

Sangfroid