Concord Sonata Follow-up

After our brief exploration of Ives' Concord Sonata this week I found this: Jeremy Denk's essay on recording the sonata in The New Yorker. The article is called "Flight of the Concord," and here is a brief excerpt:

My Ives addiction started one summer at music camp, at Mount Holyoke College. I was twenty and learning his Piano Trio. There's an astounding moment in the Trio where the pianist goes off into a blur of sweet and sour notes around a B-flat-major chord. I knew the moment was important, but I wondered, was my sound too vague or too clear? (A recurring interpretative problem in Ives is discovering the ideal amount of muddle.) I was also puzzled about where this phrase was going. I'd been taught that phrases were supposed to go somewhere, yet this musical moment seemed serenely determined to wander nowhere.

One afternoon, the violinist of the group and I were driving off campus and happened to cross the Connecticut River. Looking out of the window, he said, "You should play it like that." From the bridge the river seemed impossibly wide, and instead of a single current there seemed to be a million intersecting currents — urgent and lazy rivers within the river, magical pockets of no motion at all. The late-afternoon light colored the water pink and orange and gold. It was the most beautiful, patient, meandering multiplicity.

Instantly, I knew how to play the passage. Even better, Ives's music made me see rivers differently; centuries of classical music had prettified them, ignoring their reality in order to turn them into musical objects. Schubert uses tuneful flowing brooks to murmur comfort to suicidal lovers; Wagner has maidens and fateful rings at the bottom of a heroically surging Rhine. Ives is different. He gives you crosscurrents, dirt, haze — the disorder of a zillion particles crawling downstream. His rivers aren't constrained by human desires and stories; they sing the beauty of their own randomness and drift.

If you don't have an on-line subscription to the magazine (as I don't) you can hear more about Ives on the New Yorker podcast.

Kyle Gann also touches on Ives and the Essays Before a Sonata in his blog PostClassic. It's all good stuff.

Avant Garde Canon Part 2

In order to start the class with a "bang" I selected a variety of different visual art pieces, theater pieces, dances, films, and animation that I considered "avant garde" and juxtaposed the pieces in a slide show. The earliest pieces were from the very late 19th century and the latest pieces were very current. I specifically avoided musical examples, although music came along for the ride in a few examples. I asked the students to just watch the presentation and take note of interesting or striking aspects of the works.

I chose a very funky Betty Boop example that featured Cab Calloway and "The St. James Infirmary Blues." Music also accompanied the Merce Cunningham dance example, and there were a couple of genre-bending pieces. (Is this Living Theater piece song? Is it musical theater?)

The one striking piece that I included was Nicki Minaj's latest video, "Stupid Hoe." (It is NOT kid-friendly.)



The video is directed by Hype Williams who has a long dossier of hip hop videos, but has also started writing and filming major motion pictures, many of which have failed in the production process.

Williams' most successful videos use fish-eye lenses which distort the performer and he manipulates the speed of the film to make dance sequences jumpy, or simply distorted in time. (See his videos for Busta Rhymes and Missy Elliott, for example.) But he also did the video for Coldplay's Viva la Vida which is a forgettable video for an unforgettable song.

What happens in the Nicki Minaj video is almost completely unprecedented in his earlier work. Yes, there are some similarities in color palette--an attribute that one commentator attributed to Williams' early interest in graffiti. But all of the other typical hip-hop signage is used with such an acute sense of self consciousness that the whole thing comes off as, well... avant garde.

It was especially interesting viewing the video in the immediate context of Andy Warhol's Marilyn, which has almost exactly the same color palette.



The video also includes references to Grace Jones, especially her album cover "Island Music" by the photographer Jean-Paul Goude.  Goude's work was avant garde in that he retouched and manipulated the photo before the digital ability to do so in order to create her impossible pose.



I also included Carolyn Schneemann's evocative photography which addresses gender identity and the roles of women in society. This photo is called "Up To and Including Her Limits."



Gertrude Stein was also featured in the presentation reading "If I Had Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso."

I have never been a fan of hip hop and I readily admit that I don't "get" a lot of the hip hop references and images in the video. I understand enough to get that it's a typical "diss" song against some unnamed rival (Lil Kim?) but beyond that I didn't get references to other videos. (I saw Madonna in "Express Yourself" instead of Amber Rose caged and eating bling. But that is my age, my gender, and my ethnicity speaking.) But I do get the references here to the avant garde, and I think they are intentional. There's the obvious Warhol colors, but there is also the huge furniture, reminiscent of the work of Robert Thierren:



The distorted female forms (like the faux yoga pose a la Grace Jones) felt provocative instead of erotic. The weakest image was the caged animal image. Yes, perhaps Minaj and Williams are poking fun at the stereotypical hip hop hunny, but it either isn't pumped up enough to really come off as satire, or it's just too tired altogether. (Grace Jones was also famously photographed in a cage.) MTV's Sam Lansky wrote in a letter to Nicki:

"When a parody of something is virtually indistinguishable from the thing being parodied, the whole point has a way of getting lost, and everything ends up just self-cannibalizing."

(Read his harsh critique of the video here.)


The different personae in the video were striking, especially the Japanese character that Minaj calls "Harajuku Barbie." This character references a very particular Japanese fashion sensibility which involves Japanese girls dressing in stereotypical western costumes such as "Gothic Lolita,"



or "Cute Lolita."



More on the "cuteness" of the avant garde later.

Popular and avant garde signifiers are packed into this short video cheek by jowl and there's much more to "unpack." After a first viewing in class (and before I said a word) a student commented that the video made him think that perhaps there really was indeed an avant garde canon--a set of shared pieces that are widely known, and in the Nicki Minaj/Hype Williams video, widely referenced.

Avant Garde Canon?

Over the last few days I have been struggling to put together a required listening list for my course, "The American Avant Garde." The process reminded me of part of my work on John Cage's HPSCHD. Cage and Hiller chose canonic pieces from the keyboard canon after Mozart as source material for the composition. Part of my argument regarding the selection of works is that what became "canonic" in the keyboard world was to a certain degree a result of happenstance. Certain works were published, performed, widely distributed, and some had individual champions (like Gottschalk's "The Banjo" and Ives' "Concord Sonata" which were both championed by John Kirkpatrick).

In the selection of "required" listening I used the following criteria:

1. If a piece was featured as a Listening Example in Kyle Gann's American Music in the Twentieth Century (our former text, now sadly out of print) then I did my best to...

2. Locate the score and recording in the music library. If that was impossible...

3. I searched YouTube and other video delivery services for either an excellent live performance or a recording of the piece with scrolling score.

4. In some cases I was unable to locate the pieces featured in the text. In such cases I tried to find a similar piece by the same composer that demonstrated the same techniques, form or process.

5. Some pieces that I decided to require in the syllabus are not featured by Gann. These pieces are either personal favorites or pieces that I personally think are important historically, aesthetically, or stylistically.

There are some intrinsic dangers here, the most obvious of which is that by selecting just one or two pieces from a composer that students tend to believe that this is the total nature of the individual's work. Composers like Stockhausen are especially difficult to fairly represent with just one or two pieces.

The process was surprisingly difficult. While the library does have an extensive collection of twentieth century scores and recordings, there were many works that I wanted to require which were not part of the collection. In some cases a score was available (but no recording), but more often, a recording was available, but no score.

As the list of required pieces grew quite long I had to start editing. One composer that I wanted to feature was Julius Eastman. He is a remarkable character of the avant garde scene who actually grew up in Ithaca, NY and attended Ithaca College for some time, although he did not complete his degree in Ithaca. He is an African American in an almost exclusively white world. He struggled with drugs and mental health issues and was homeless for some time. Unlike Mozart, he really did die penniless and forgotten.

His compositions are minimalistic and he was a notable performer, best remembered, perhaps, for his role in Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King. What I really enjoy about Eastman is his ability to cross over genre boundaries performing with rock/disco ensembles as well as famous experimental music ensembles both in Buffalo and in New York. Check out his work on YouTune, include this piece, Crazy Nigger.

Does Eastman warrant a position in the "canon?" His total output is smaller than his contemporaries. He did not teach--although he was promised a position at Cornell that never materialized. The recordings of his music are few, but important. And he does have some champions, including Kyle Gann. In the end he didn't make the cut, which I think is too bad.

The entire process of creating the required listening list pointed up the difficulty of identifying and capturing an American, twentieth-century, avant garde canon. Hold your protestations that the entire idea should be thrown out! I understand the postmodern tendency to eschew the canon. But the reality is that canons are useful. They are a kind of short hand to a shared cultural experience, which I highly value. Something is lost when we do not have common aesthetic touchstones by which we can measure the relative merit of new work.

Let the adventure begin!