Alex Ross's Blog, page 205

The new ISSUE

A glimpse of the new ISSUE Project Room space at 110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn. Allan Kozinn has a review of the opening-week Gaudemaus festival in the Times; I'll have a brief item in The New Yorker next week.

Glass = 75

On the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, Philip Glass occupies the front page of iTunes: a recording of his Ninth Symphony — which had its world première on New Year's Day, in Linz, and which the American Composers Orchestra will play at Carnegie tonight — is now available. The Carnegie concert looks to be sold out; if you lack a ticket, go instead to the World Financial Center, where Bill Morrison's hugely moving film The Miners' Hymns will be shown, with the Wordless Music Orchestra playing Jóhann Jóhannsson's score live. It's difficult to imagine that achievement without the precedent of Koyaanisqatsi. Today let's recall not only the peaks of Glass's career but also his extraordinary, quiet generosity to hundreds of fellow composers and musicians. Happy birthday!

Mahler at the Neue Pinakothek

Best Music Writing update

The fundraising campaign for the new, independently published edition of Best Music Writing is in its final days, and inching closer to its goal. As I wrote last month, it's imperative that this series continue, not least because it allows writers from so many different genres to mingle together, creating a borderless conversation about the present state of music. Daphne Carr, who bravely undertook to carry on Best Music after Da Capo Press dropped the title, has announced the editorial board for the 2012 edition: Adam Curley, Jewly Hight, Miles Marshal Lewis, Bongani Madondo, Michaelangelo Matos, Anupa Mistry, Ann Powers, Mark Richardson, Victoria Segal, and yours truly. The final selections will be made by next year's guest editor, yet to be chosen. Here is a form for submissions.

George Eliot on new music

Those who are familiar with the history of music during the last forty or fifty years, should be aware that the reception of new music by the majority of musical critics, is not at all a criterion of its ultimate success. A man of high standing, both as a composer and executant, told a friend of mine, that when a symphony of Beethoven's was first played at the Philharmonic, there was a general titter among the musicians in the orchestra, of whom he was one, at the idea of sitting seriously to execute such music! And as a proof that professed musicians are sometimes equally unfortunate in their predictions about music which begins by winning the ear of the public, he candidly avowed that when Rossini's music was first fascinating the world of opera-goers, he had joined in pronouncing it a mere passing fashion, that tickled only by its novelty. Not indeed that the contempt of musicians and the lash of critics is a pledge of future triumph: St. Paul five times received forty stripes save one, but so did many a malefactor; and unsuccessful composers before they take consolation from the poohpoohing or 'damnation' of good music, must remember how much bad music has had the same fate, from the time when Jean Jacques' oratorio set the teeth of all hearers on edge.

                               — "Liszt, Wagner, and Weimar," 1855

München im Schnee

A Munich ritual: no matter how sleepless I feel on the first day, I go to the Alte Pinakothek, perhaps my favorite museum, and revisit familiar sights one by one. Today I walked down slowly down the great central corridor, attempting to minimize the noise that my boots made on the wood floor and keeping my eyes fixed on Dürer's "Four Apostles" at the far end. The museum felt like a vast theater created for this one fearfully potent painting, and it held the stage.

January overload

The new-music schedule in New York becomes exceptionally hectic during the last week of January. To wit: 1) Tonight, the Austrian Cultural Forum and Manhattan New Music Project's Emancipation of Re:Sonance project continues with Sarah Weaver's meditation on Das Lied von der Erde. 2) Beginning tomorrow night, ISSUE Project Room officially inaugurates its new Livingston Street space with a New York edition of the celebrated Dutch festival Gaudeamus Muziekweek. Participating are Wet Ink, ICE, Ensemble MAE, Iktus Percussion, and others; Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes caps the series. 3) There's a David Lang portrait concert at Zankel Hall on Friday night, pairing his instant classic The Little Match Girl Passion with a new piece called death speaks. Shara Worden, Owen Pallett, Nico Muhly, and Bryce Dessner perform the latter. 4) As noted below, Juilliard's John Cage festival kicks off that same night. 5) Eve Beglarian's reaches its conclusion on Friday and Saturday. 6) either/or celebrates Horaţiu Rădulescu on Saturday night. 7) Eliza Garth plays Cage's Sonatas and Interludes at Merkin on Sunday — not part of the Juilliard Cage series, which will feature Part III of Sonatas on Feb. 1. 8) On Jan. 31, Carnegie marks Philip Glass's seventy-fifth birthday with the American premiere of his Ninth Symphony. 9) That same night, the World Financial Center begins its survey of the hypnotic films of Bill Morrison with The Miners' Hymns, its potent Johánn Jóhannsson score performed live by the Wordless Music Orchestra. 10) That same night, Peter Evans and Wet Ink explore works of Peter Ablinger. Meanwhile, Rienzi and Götterdämmerung play almost back to back. Quite a week!

Critics convene

Last week I participated in the inaugural edition of the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism at Oberlin, an experiment in fostering future practitioners of an endangered art. Stephen Rubin, a publisher with a sharp musical ear, engendered the project, and David Stull, dean of the Oberlin Conservatory, fleshed it out. It was partly a symposium of present and former critics (also present were Anne Midgette, John Rockwell, Heidi Waleson, Tim Page, Don Rosenberg, Charles Michener, Daniel Hathaway, Mike Telin, and Brian Alegant) and partly a workshop for student fellows (ten young writers from the Oberlin community). Oberlin set up a starry array of concerts for the student critics to judge: performances by the Cleveland Orchestra, Jeremy Denk, Apollo's Fire, and ICE. On Sunday, we selected one winner (Jacob Street) and one very honorable mention (Megan Emberton). The generous prizes that they receive are designed to enable travel abroad.

I didn't know until the proceedings were under way that the prize was partly inspired by one of my own crucial early experiences as a critic. When I started out as an exceedingly junior, free-lance critic at the New York Times, in the early nineties, I had traveled once to the British Isles but had never been to continental Europe. One day in 1994 I was talking to John Rockwell, who had just returned from a stint as the Times's European cultural correspondent, and he more or less commanded me to go abroad — not just a five-day jaunt to Salzburg, or what have you, but an extended trip. I remember John telling me that it was the kind of thing I could do only when I was still young. I persuaded the Times to buy me a rail pass and give me a thousand-dollar advance; somehow, I survived on that amount for the entire summer of 1995, sleeping in various fleabag hotels and on various friends' couches. I went to Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Dresden, Hamburg, Prague, Terezín, Garmisch, Lockenhaus, Vienna, Paris, London, Aldeburgh, Glyndebourne, Helsinki, and Tallinn, sending in reports to the Times. At the end of the summer, I wrote an essay on musical observances of the fiftieth anniversary of the end of World War II; that article, edited by James Oestreich, became the germ of The Rest Is Noise. I'll always be grateful to John for giving me a life-altering piece of advice.

In my address at Oberlin, I quoted E. M. Forster's lecture on criticism at Harvard in 1947: "The critic ought to combine Mephistopheles with the archangels, experience with innocence. He ought to know everything inside out, and yet be surprised."

The Cage year begins

The official John Cage site has an increasingly vast list of events marking the composer's centenary year. Among them are a day of Cage at the University of Iowa (Feb. 12); a Musicircus at English National Opera (March 3); various Cage offerings amid Carnegie's American Mavericks series in late March; and a Cagefest in Washington, DC (Sept. 4-10). Much more remains to be announced, including two more festivals out west. The first big event of the Cage year is Juilliard's FOCUS! Festival, which begins this Friday. The final program, on Feb. 3, includes Fourteen, Litany for the Whale, The Seasons, the Concerto for Prepared Piano, excerpts from Sixteen Dances, and Concert for Piano and Orchestra with Aria. All concerts are free.

Noise at Southbank

In the modernist centennial year 2013 — a century after the premiere of The Rite of Spring, the Schoenberg "scandal concert," the birth of Britten, and the birth of Lutosławski, among other events — the Southbank Centre, in London, will stage a festival inspired by my book The Rest Is Noise. Some details of The Rest Is Noise Festival are being announced today, with more news to follow in the fall. I was not involved either in the programming of concerts or in the booking of artists, but I'll travel to London several times in 2013 to deliver lectures. Because of the association, from now on I will refrain from covering both Southbank and the London Philharmonic, which is at the heart of the series. Briefly, though, I'd like to thank the Londoners for taking inspiration from my work, and, more important, for lavishing attention on a gloriously chaotic century of music. When I began writing The Rest Is Noise, more than a decade ago, I could not have imagined any of this.