Alex Ross's Blog, page 168

Video of the moment

Michael Beil's Blackjack, with Ensemble musikFabrik, which play Stockhausen at Lincoln Center next week.

Regie lost and found

If anyone has misplaced a set for the Council Chamber scene from Simon Boccanegra — or is it Act I of Die Meistersinger? — it's down at the end of West 29th Street. In fact, this is part of Two Too Large Tables, a work by Allan and Ellen Wexler, commissioned for the excellent Hudson River Park complex.

Ligeti at the 50-yard line

Several times, on this blog and on the New Yorker site, I've looked into the fascinating underground of drum-corps modernism: high-school- and college-age bands who venture into the repertory of the classical twentieth century. With the decay of music education in recent decades and the general indifference to classical music in mainstream media, these programs have become an improbable avenue for the propagation of post-1900 fare. Back in 2006, Matthew Guerrieri drew attention to a video of the Austin High School Bulldog Band performing Shostakovich and Schoenberg. In 2010, I wrote two more posts on drum-corps Shostakovich. The topic recently surfaced again on Twitter, when Mark Stryker highlighted a video of the Carolina Crown freely adapting Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach, with a little Zarathustra on top. Ensuing discussion revealed that quite a few bands have played Glass over the years; Ben Coleman and others pointed me toward the Drum Corps Repertoire Database, a handy resource. I wondered just how far into the fields of the avant-garde the drum-corps movement has strayed. Stockhausen? No. Babbitt? Not yet — although The Bad Plus have a highly adaptable version ready to go. But Ligeti, yes indeed, thanks to the appropriately named Santa Clara Vanguard, whose repertory has ranged all over the musical map. Their 2011 program included Barber's First Essay for Orchestra, Avner Dorman's Piano Sonata No. 2, something by Karl Jenkins, and Ligeti's Etude No. 13, "L'Escalier du diable." The Ligeti starts at around 8:20, when a guy says, "Yeah."

Writing project

Photo courtesy of Eric Chinski, supervising archmagus of the Secret Temple of Eternal Wagnerism.

My grandfather's caldera

The other day I visited Valle Grande, part of the Valles Caldera volcanic region in New Mexico. I have a personal association with the place: my grandfather, the geologist Clarence Samuel Ross, spent many years analyzing the caldera, and asked that his ashes be scattered here. Craig Martin's history of Valle Grande, which I picked up at the Valles Caldera National Preserve gift shop, reports that my grandfather first explored the area in the 1920s, on horseback, and "was the first to recognize the connection between large-volume ash flows and the formation of calderas." He also made a pioneering analysis of trinitite, the mineral formed in the first atomic blast at White Sands. I have only faint memories of him — he died in 1975, at the age of ninety-four — but I was happy to learn from my father that Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop was one of his favorite books; it is also one of mine.

Previously: Great-grandfathers.

JLA's Become Ocean

Water Music. The New Yorker, July 8, 2013.

Bonus track: Ensemble Caprice's Bach and Shostakovich.

The oboe, for example

The floor of the sky

Inexorable

Make Music 2013

A voyage westward will prevent me from seeing the 2013 edition of Make Music NY. After last year's epic broiler, the weather gods seem inclined to smile on tomorrow's affair: the forecast calls for bright sun but a high of merely eighty-six degrees. Steve Smith has a handy preview of several of the potential highlights: three R. Murray Schafer events on Central Park Lake, including a performance of his Credo, with 144 singers; a 175-keyboard rendition of Jed Distler's Broken Record on Cornelia Street (Steve promises, or threatens, that Mayor Bloomberg will be involved); So Percussion and Eli Keszler's Archway, with piano wires suspended from the Manhattan Bridge; and an ambitious mounting of Cornelius Cardew's The Great Learning, unfolding over ten hours. Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim looks ahead to the Cardew in a New York Times piece, while Lev Bratishenko has a preview of the Schafer. The Canadian master, codifier of the concept of "soundscape," has long been a pioneer in site-specific composition, notably in his Patria series. Patria 7: Asteríon will have a performance in August, as part of Schafer's eightieth-birthday celebrations.