Thursday, February 26, 2004
Giacinto Scelsi - Miller Theater - 2/26
First things first: I came into this show amazingly pumped. A free ticket miraculously was given to me at the box office (someone couldn't make the show, and they wanted their ticket to go to another student), and I'd had a great as usual dinner with Chris at Taqueria y Fonda (108th and Amsterdam, out of control good).
Holy fuck was it disappointing. The pieces played were as follows:
Kya (1959) - for solo clarinet and seven instruments
Khoom: 7 episodes.... (1962) for solo soprano, horn, percussion and strings
intermission
Okanagon (1968) - for harp, tam-tam and contrabass
Ko-Tha - Three Dances of Shiva (1967) - for solo guitar
Anahit (1965) - for solo violin and 18 instruments
Let me again preface this by saying that I have the Scelsi disc on Kairos, and the recording of Anahit on is up there with my favorite recordings. This performance of it seemed so much different. On the Kairos disc, it feels like the individual voices in the ensemble are sacrificed to create this field against which the solo violin moves. It becomes huge and epic, and gives me that hovering feeling. But, the reading in this performance seemed so much academic. Every voicing was brought to the fore, every melody within the ensemble was emminently clear and distinct. And, while the were balanced against each other well, what was emphasized was the lyric quality, rather than the dialectical one, which is, IMHO more important. But, in a way, it was informative, and hence kind of worthwhile.
Okanagon was also nice. If you're familar with the piece, it sounded like it does, lots of niceness, but the harpist was too quiet. And even a few parts of Khoom were pleasant: mostly gossamer. But, vocal music without words is always tough, and the best that I can say about the soprano (Elizabeth Farnum) was that she was
What totally ruined the concert, for me was the solo guitar. Oh my god. I've never heard such an entirely worthless piece of music in my life. First, the guitarist is to sit, with the guitar (acoustic, of couse) on their lap, while sitting cross-legged (I guess this is supposed to be some allusion to yoga, or some such.) Then they play the guitar either by strumming the strings like a dulcimer, hitting on the body of the guitar, and plucking occasionally....this would be fine, would the end result not sound like some stupid hippie jam. I don't know how to justify that statement, it just did. I've seen a little footage of Son House playing on the Teevee, and he did everything that this guy did, and a thousand times more, while being relaxed, instead of achingly uptight. While I'm sure there was lots of formal trickery in the Scelsi (funny time changes, and some odd tuning stuff), but man, was it awful.
And the first bit, "Kya" was unremarkable, probably because I slept through a sizeable chunk of the first two movements.
-----
The big problem was that I was expecting great, not nice. Maybe it's just a problem of expectation? I don't think it has to do with the fact that I've heard some of the pieces before. During the Adorno lecture at Miller Theater, the pianist played a piano sonata by Schoeberg that was much more beautiful in performance than on record. But, this Scelsi was just nice.....nice music played to nicely dressed people, some of whom were saying stupid things behind me. But, I dunno......I wonder if you can witness the Great at somewhere like Miller theater? Maybe the context has to match something inside of you....that'd explain why I've liked so much of what I've seen at Tonic and Galapagos. Huh. I dunno.
Holy fuck was it disappointing. The pieces played were as follows:
Kya (1959) - for solo clarinet and seven instruments
Khoom: 7 episodes.... (1962) for solo soprano, horn, percussion and strings
intermission
Okanagon (1968) - for harp, tam-tam and contrabass
Ko-Tha - Three Dances of Shiva (1967) - for solo guitar
Anahit (1965) - for solo violin and 18 instruments
Let me again preface this by saying that I have the Scelsi disc on Kairos, and the recording of Anahit on is up there with my favorite recordings. This performance of it seemed so much different. On the Kairos disc, it feels like the individual voices in the ensemble are sacrificed to create this field against which the solo violin moves. It becomes huge and epic, and gives me that hovering feeling. But, the reading in this performance seemed so much academic. Every voicing was brought to the fore, every melody within the ensemble was emminently clear and distinct. And, while the were balanced against each other well, what was emphasized was the lyric quality, rather than the dialectical one, which is, IMHO more important. But, in a way, it was informative, and hence kind of worthwhile.
Okanagon was also nice. If you're familar with the piece, it sounded like it does, lots of niceness, but the harpist was too quiet. And even a few parts of Khoom were pleasant: mostly gossamer. But, vocal music without words is always tough, and the best that I can say about the soprano (Elizabeth Farnum) was that she was
What totally ruined the concert, for me was the solo guitar. Oh my god. I've never heard such an entirely worthless piece of music in my life. First, the guitarist is to sit, with the guitar (acoustic, of couse) on their lap, while sitting cross-legged (I guess this is supposed to be some allusion to yoga, or some such.) Then they play the guitar either by strumming the strings like a dulcimer, hitting on the body of the guitar, and plucking occasionally....this would be fine, would the end result not sound like some stupid hippie jam. I don't know how to justify that statement, it just did. I've seen a little footage of Son House playing on the Teevee, and he did everything that this guy did, and a thousand times more, while being relaxed, instead of achingly uptight. While I'm sure there was lots of formal trickery in the Scelsi (funny time changes, and some odd tuning stuff), but man, was it awful.
And the first bit, "Kya" was unremarkable, probably because I slept through a sizeable chunk of the first two movements.
-----
The big problem was that I was expecting great, not nice. Maybe it's just a problem of expectation? I don't think it has to do with the fact that I've heard some of the pieces before. During the Adorno lecture at Miller Theater, the pianist played a piano sonata by Schoeberg that was much more beautiful in performance than on record. But, this Scelsi was just nice.....nice music played to nicely dressed people, some of whom were saying stupid things behind me. But, I dunno......I wonder if you can witness the Great at somewhere like Miller theater? Maybe the context has to match something inside of you....that'd explain why I've liked so much of what I've seen at Tonic and Galapagos. Huh. I dunno.
Sunday, February 22, 2004
Benjamin, L'Ennui, and the Weather
How can so many of my preoccupations be turned around into a single aphorism? Benjamin haunts my thoughts, always.
"The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and most genial manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more characteristic that that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affari, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between the weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic* Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining. Or Goethe: how he managed to illuminate the weather in his meteorological studies, so that one is tempted to say he undertook this work soley in order to be able to integrate even the weather into his waking, creative life." - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 102
* splenetic - relating to the spleen, see Baudelaire's Paris Spleen
"The mere narcotizing effect which cosmic forces have on a shallow and brittle personality is attested in the relation of such a person to one of the highest and most genial manifestations of these forces: the weather. Nothing is more characteristic that that precisely this most intimate and mysterious affari, the working of the weather on humans, should have become the theme of their emptiest chatter. Nothing bores the ordinary man more than the cosmos. Hence, for him, the deepest connection between the weather and boredom. How fine the ironic overcoming of this attitude in the story of the splenetic* Englishman who wakes up one morning and shoots himself because it is raining. Or Goethe: how he managed to illuminate the weather in his meteorological studies, so that one is tempted to say he undertook this work soley in order to be able to integrate even the weather into his waking, creative life." - Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 102
* splenetic - relating to the spleen, see Baudelaire's Paris Spleen
