The modern Prokofiev

Lately, I've been kind of obsessed with the music of Sergei Prokofiev, and I've been trying to explore his more modernist side.

A few weeks ago, I posted thusly at the message board of Prokofiev.org: "I noticed reading one of the interviews on this site that many Prokofiev fanatics like the Second Symphony, and I also noticed that 'Rough Guide to Classical Music' referred to the "extreme dissonance" of the second. That sounded promising, so I downloaded a copy from Emusic (the Naxos one, with Theodore Kuchar conducting) and I loved it! I like a lot of the same stuff everyone else likes, such as 'Lt. Kije' and the third piano concerto, but can anyone suggest some other Prokofiev works that are 'modern' or 'out there'?

I got several responses, the most useful from a fellow who posts as morgold and signed his note "Andrew."

He wrote, "I'd say Prokofiev's most modernist works are: (in no particular order)

"Symphony #3; The Fiery Angel; The Gambler; Pas D'Acier; Seven, They Are Seven; Five Sarcasms, for piano; Scythian Suite; Tocatta, op. 11; The Buffoon, op. 21

"Prokofiev also has a number of 'moderately' modernist works, though not quite on the same level as the 2nd or 3rd Symphonies. These would include:

"Quintet, op. 39; Symphonic Song, op. 57; Piano Concertos #2 and #5; The Love for 3 Oranges (the complete opera, not the symphonic suite); Piano Sonatas #6 and #7; Symphony #6; Visions Fugitives, for piano.

"You may also like the Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution; though it is not dissonant like the 2nd Symphony, it is the loudest piece of music Prokofiev ever wrote. If you're interested in modern (though not strictly "modernist") music, you should also check out the opera Semyon Kotko (with Gergiev conducting) and the very dark First Violin Sonata, op. 80."

I've been using his handy list as a downloading guide.

Gramley's reissued 'Deconstruction'

My copy of percussionist Joseph Gramley's "American Deconstruction" CD arrived over the weekend, and I got a chance to listen to it a couple of times. I bought it to obtain a recording of a William Duckworth piece, "Meditation Preludes." It's the longest selection on the album, clocking in at 11:05, but I discovered the whole album is rather good. The CD, reissued a few months ago, has five pieces, all by modern American composers. It's a really varied set -- the Duckworth is subtle and quiet (as befits the title, I guess), "The Anvil Chorus" by David Lang is rather noisier, and there's a fascinating piece by Steve Reich, "Nagoya Marimbas." There are also pieces by Paul Smadbeck and Dave Hollinden, composers previously unknown to me. The album held my interest throughout.
The album is not available on Amazon. The only way I know to buy it is through Gramley's web site.

Cleveland jazz history remembered

This afternoon, my wife and I went to a program at the East Cleveland Public Library devoted to the jazz photography of Frank Kuchirchuk, a retired photographer at the Ohio Veterans Home in Sandusky who took many photographs of jazz greats during the early 1950s in Cleveland. Cleveland jazz historian Joe Mosbrook provided much of the commentary as Kuchirchuk's photographs were displayed on a screen. I was pleased the event drew a big turnout, as I had helped library director Greg Reese get together with Kuchirchuk. The Plain Dealer helped with a nice advance on the show.

Rosenberg: There's plenty of recordings to listen to

As part of a roundup of new recordings of the music of Brahms, Cleveland Plain Dealer classical music critic Don Rosenberg jumps into the debate pitting Alex Ross against Greg Sandow and Norman Lebrecht over whether the classical music recording industry is declining. Rosenberg writes, " The classical recording industry can't possibly be in trouble. Compact discs keep piling up, like sonic mountains. Most of them stay put in their plastic wrappers, nonetheless ready for listeners eager to hear everything from ancient music to Pulitzer Prize winners."

It would be nice for Rosenberg to go beyond anecdotal evidence and offer a few statistics. On the other hand, Rosenberg makes the often-overlooked point that listeners matter, and that there is plenty of new classical music to listen to, regardless of how musicians and record companies are faring.

An Emusic tip from Alex Ross

Alex Ross recommends a BBC reissue of a 1998 recital by the late singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, saying, "I ran out of adjectives to describe Lieberson's singing some time before she died last year, so I'll just say this: the disc is almost certainly better than anything else you might be thinking of buying right now." The album has just become available as another cheap download from Emusic. Lots of Mahler and Handel, but also four songs by modern composer Peter Lieberson.

A jazzy 'Rhapsody in Blue'

My wife and I just went to see a Saturday night performance in Dover, Ohio, of the Tuscarawas Philharmonic, which found a fresh way to present Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." The piano soloist was Cleveland jazz musician Jackie Warren. My friend Phil, principal bassoonist with the orchestra, introduced me before the show to the conductor, Eric Benjamin. After Phil explained that "Rhapsody in Blue" is one of my favorite pieces, Benjamin remarked that while a performance of "Rhapsody" usually features a classical pianist playing a jazz-influenced piece, his concert would feature a jazz pianist. Indeed, Warren played well with the orchestra and obviously knew the score but brought her own improvisations to the piano parts. She showed off her chops with an encore performance of "Our Love is Here to Stay."

The Tuscarawas Philharmonic, which performs at Dover High School, has been in continuous existence since 1935.

Duckworth's '20 Sounds'

I've been reading William Duckworth's "20/20: 20 New Sounds of the 20th Century." It amounts to a useful education on modern music, featuring Duckworth's usual erudition and clear writing.

When I checked this book out the library, I couldn't wait to see which works made the list; I sat down in the library and looked at the book for a few minutes before leaving the building.

Here's the list:

Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun, Claude Debussy
Maple Leaf Rag, Scott Joplin
The Rite of Spring, Igor Stravinsky
Pierrot Lunaire, Arnold Schoernberg
The Concord Sonata, Charles Ives
Rhapsody in Blue, George Gershwin
Bolero, Maurice Ravel
Quartet for the End of Time, Olivier Messiaen
Appalachian Spring, Aaron Copland
Sonatas and Interludes, John Cage
Mysterious Mountain, Alan Hovhaness
In C, Terry Riley
Drumming, Steve Reich
I Am Sitting in a Room, Alvin Lucier
4th String Quartet, Ben Johnston
Einstein on the Beach, Philip Glass
Perfect Lives, Robert Ashley
O Superman, Laurie Anderson
Miserere, Arvo Part
Atlas, Meredith Monk

Duckworth explains in his introduction that while he polled other composers to help him compile the list, at the end of the day he had to choose works which meant a lot to him personally. Most of the works are excerpted in a companion CD. The list seems to be rather weighted toward Americans and toward experimental composers.

I like much of the music on the list, although I was disappointed Schoernberg was included. I suppose we are stuck with him. My biggest disappointment, however, was that nothing by Prokofiev made the list.

The best 'virtual iPod'

Thanks to an anonymous tipster who was kind enough to post a comment here a few days ago, I've found the best "virtual iPod" site yet. MediaMaster allows unlimited storage of music files (at least for now, while it's in beta test stage) and then plays the songs on a music player that's built into the site. The site requires Flash, but it doesn't seem to be specific to any particular operating system; I've used it with a Windows XP computer, a Macintosh laptop and an old laptop running SAM Linux from a live CD. More about the site here, in a column I wrote for my old newspaper back in Oklahoma. My only fear is how much money will be charged for the site when the free beta test period ends.

A few more words on Naxos

Part of the reason I like Naxos so much is the steps the label has taken to make its music available to everyone.

Naxos' decision to license its recordings to Emusic is a wonderful development for listeners; it makes an enormous amount of classical music available for purchase for a modest price. (Emusic has many other independent labels which put out classical music, of course, but getting Naxos was a big deal). And I've noticed a few months ago that the Cleveland Public Library is offering downloads of classical music. The downloads expire after a certain amount of time, but they offer an alternative way to borrow music. And it turns out those downloads also are Naxos recordings.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I have been following the debate among Greg Sandow and Alex Ross and Norman Lebrecht about the financial health of the classical music industry, and it's interesting. We should all hope that classical musicians can make a living, and that the companies which issue classical music recordings can make money. But what I really care most about is how listeners are doing.

Because of downloading sites such as Emusic, and CD swapping sites such as SwapaCD.com, it's much easier for a person without much money to put together a pretty good classical music collection. Whatever is happening to the classical music industry, listeners are doing better than ever.

Tiresome critic disses Naxos

Supersnob critic Norman Lebrecht is busy demonstrating once again that even when he's probably right, he's insufferable. Lebrecht, the kind of fellow who disses Mozart to generate attention, has jumped into the ongoing debate over whether the classical music recording industry is alive and well or headed for the edge of a cliff.

It's been an interesting debate. Alex Ross points out that claims that classical music recordings are vanishing are nothing new, while Lebrecht argues to the contrary, concluding that "The truth is out there - in the idle studios, in the shut-down record stores, in the shrinking space for classical debate in mainstream media." Greg Sandow agrees with Lebrecht.

In his blog post, Lebrecht takes a gratuitous slap at the Naxos record label, writing, "Naxos, based in Hong Kong, is the only label to maintain consistent classical output, but it does so without artist promotion, denying the element of interpretative individuality which has fuelled the history and tradition of classical recording."

I guess Naxos isn't allowed to find new ways to stay alive. The label has been a good friend to fans of modern music, issuing lots of music by living composers which simply isn't available elsewhere, including good recordings of William Bolcom and Margaret Brouwer.

Several folks post objections to Lebrecht's comments, including conductor John McLaughlin Williams: "Naxos doesn't need artist promotion to sell records, because it sells repertoire, not star appeal, and thankfully so, as all that gets you is another Beethoven 9th. Your third posit (...denying the element of interpretative individuality...) is an opinion you could not possibly take if you've really listened to more than several of the recordings. Can you really quantify that? Unlike those of us who are actually recording, I think you may be too hung up upon the concept of an historical classical recording tradition. I'm not."

Making MediaMax work

To follow up my last post, after I complained to MediaMax that the site doesn't work, I got some helpful, thoughful replies. A couple of suggestions: Converting my MP3 files to lower bit rates (which would make the file sizes smaller and bring them in under MediaMax's maximum 10 MB size) and converting the files to more efficient formats. I'll try the suggestions.

Trying out the virtual iPods

I've been checking out Web sites which function as a kind of virtual iPod. MediaMax and XDrive both allow free storage of MP3 music files. Both sites all0w the users to stream the files to any computer with a fast Internet connection.

MediaMax allows users to store a whopping 25 gigabytes of music, a great service. But there's a big bummer for classical music listeners: You can't stream or download any file larger than 10 MB. This is no big deal for, say, country and western fans, but many pieces within classical compositions exceed the limit. So for the kind of music I favor, MediaMax is not very useful. I also could not figure out how to get playlists on the site to work.

XDrive offers 5 GB of free storage -- puny compared to MediaMax, but still quite a bit of music. And the site seems to work really well. You can stream the music to your computer and user your own media player. Or you can open the file on XDrive's site, and XDrive will supply a media player of its own. (This function does not always seem to work; perhaps there are problems when the site is busy.) There is no limit I've been able to detect on the size of the file -- I played Terry Riley's "In C" from the site the other day -- and it's reasonably easy to put together functional playlists at the site.

Duckworth piece slated for New York City performance

The New York Times reports:

THOMAS BUCKNER (Thursday) The baritone Thomas Buckner, here presented by the World Music Institute as part of the Interpretations series (which he curates), has long been a champion of avant-garde music. He will perform new works for voice and various instruments, including William Duckworth’s “Their Song” for baritone and piano. Petr Kotik conducts the New York premiere of Christian Wolff’s “37 Haiku” for baritone, oboe, horn, viola and cello, and the world premiere of “A People’s History” by R. Chris Dahlgren for baritone, flute, clarinet, percussion, piano, celeste, violin and cello. At 8 p.m., Merkin Concert Hall, 129 West 67th Street, Manhattan, (212) 501-3330, kaufman-center.org; $10; $7 for students. (Vivien Schweitzer)

Tunes for the road

How do you listen to music when you are away for the weekend? As I type this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Columbus, Ohio, listening to The Ohio State University's radio station broadcast classical music. The radio is a Tivoli SongBook my wife bought me for my birthday. It's small enough to pack easily, but it is sensitive (handy for pulling in the local classical station, wherever I happen to be), has a good sound and has an input jack, so that I can plug my MP3 player into it. I'm sure I also could listen to Internet radio through the Wi-Fi in the hotel room and the laptop I'm using, plugging the laptop into the radio to take advantage of its superior sound.

Brouwer concerto premieres

My wife and I just got back from a Sunday night performance at Rocky River Presbyterian Church of CityMusic Cleveland, the last of a series of five concerts premiering Margaret Brouwer's new violin concerto (they also did Stravinsky's "Danses Concertantes" and Mozart's 39th symphony). I thought the Brouwer piece was really good, maybe her best so far. The use of percussion in the piece was interesting; during the first movement, the percussion played an instrument I didn't recognize, which Brouwer explained is a "Chinese opera gong." A press release has claimed the piece had elements of trip hop; that sounded strange to me, but sure enough, in the second movement the percussionist played a rhythm on the drums as the violin soloist played, and it did sound a bit like Portishead. Brouwer says a recording of the piece will become available later; more details when I have them.

Brouwer piece premieres this week

Margaret Brouwer's new violin concerto is being premiered in a series of free concerts in the Cleveland area. I interviewed Brouwer for an article about the concert which ran in FunCoast, the Sandusky Register's weekly arts magazine. The article is available here.

Boston Globe lauds Duckworth piece

The Boston Globe reviews a concert by Boston Secession, a professional choral group, and finds much to like in a performance of portions of William Duckworth's "Southern Harmony." Reviewer Matthew Guerreri writes, "After intermission came American shape-note singing: four traditional hymns -- the audience joining in on "Rock of Ages" -- followed by eight movements (out of 20) from William Duckworth's brilliant 1980-81 deconstruction of that repertoire, "Southern Harmony" (amazingly, a Boston premiere). Unlike traditional minimalism, with its process-centered surface, this music hides its complex workings deep within diatonic, vaguely repetitive textures. "Consolation" is transformed into gentle waves of notes; the familiar tune of "Wondrous Love" is layered and stacked in an uncanny recall of Renaissance style. In "Rock of Ages," pulsing "la-la" patterns are reminiscent of a doo-wop backing track loosed from its record. Initially tentative, the performers settled in with ease."

Leroy Jenkins dies

Jazz Times posts an obiituary on the death last month of free jazz violinist Leroy Jenkins, 74, and notes that he had worked with many modern classical ensembles. "Jenkins earned grants and commissions to compose for chamber ensemble, orchestra, dance and theater. Such illustrious outfits as the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Albany Symphony, the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, the Kronos Quartet, the Dessoff Choirs, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and the New Music Consort performed many of these pieces."

Start over? Maybe the future is now

Alex Ross has an arresting quote from Joshua Roman, principal cellist of the Seattle Symphony: "I would love to see the classical-music industry crumble, just absolutely fall to bits. Because I think then we'd have to start over. We'd have to say, well, what is it? What is classical music? Is it this concert hall, is it these tuxedos? No, it's this music. And then we could start over from the beginning, build it up, find people who like the music. Like rock and roll started, like the punk movement started."

I assume that if the industry crumbles, big city orchestras would tend to look more like Cleveland's CityMusic and Cleveland Chamber Symphony, excellent musicians who play part time and need day jobs to live on, rather than groups like the Cleveland Orchestra, which has musicians who can actually make a living with the gig. So I suppose if Greg Sandow is right and the big orchestras are about to die off, folks like Roman are out of a job. On the other hand, as a listener, I very much like the intimate concert experience I get when I go to hear the Cleveland Chamber Symphony play at venues like the Baldwin-Wallace College auditorium. When I go to see the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall, my wife and I can only afford the balcony seats, far away from the performers. Speaking as a listener, if Sandow turns out to be right, I think life would go on. In any event, the kind of grassroots groups Roman seems to be talking about are already here in Cleveland.

Two shows in Cleveland

There are two noteworthy free concerts in Cleveland in the next couple of weeks for modern music fans. Cleveland Chamber Symphony will perform at 7 p.m. Friday at Westlake United Methodist Church in Westlake (a western suburb of Cleveland.) Then on March 28 through April 1, CityMusic Cleveland will play a series of concerts featuring a new violin concerto by composer Margaret Brouwer. (The program also has Stravinsky and Mozart). More details on the calendar.

Duckworth live in Boston, northern California

Composer William Duckworth gets live performances on opposite coasts for two of his signature pieces, "Southern Harmony" and "The Time Curve Preludes."

"Southern Harmony" will be performed 8 p.m. Friday (March 16) at First Church in Cambridge, Congregational, by Boston Secession; Arvo Part, Gavin Bryars and Ruth Lomon also are featured on the program. More info here. The promotional postcard has a photograph of four women who are easy on the eyes, next to a headline announcing the name of the show, "Surprised by Beauty."

Then at 8 p.m. March 24 on the opposite coast -- Arcata, Calif., on the campus of Humboldt State University, not far from the Oregon border -- pianist Robert Elfline performs "The Time Curve Preludes." (Well, nine out of 24, according to the program.) Duckworth shares the show with Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Janacek and Cowell.

Both Duckworth pieces are available from Emusic.

New radio station launches

The American Music Center has apparently figured out that Internet radio is one of the few ways for living composers to at least have a chance to obtain listeners. It has launched a new radio station, Counterstream Radio, focusing on modern American composers. Here's the key quote from the official statement: "Mixing the work of composers such as Elliott Carter, John Cage, Bill Frisell, Kid 606, Abbey Lincoln, Milton Babbitt, Philip Glass, Morton Feldman, Laurie Anderson, and hundreds more, the station streams influential music of many pedigrees 24 hours a day." It officially launches March 16 but seems to be working fine now. The station is hosted by the Live365 folks. (News tip via the fine folks at Sequenza21 and New Music ReBlog).

New hope for Linux users

I recently installed Linux on a castoff old laptop computer. Linux is a great way to turn an old machine into something useful and it can be downloaded free from the Internet. I recommend Ubuntu and Kubuntu.

But there's a downside. Linux folks are ideologically predisposed against the proprietary MP3 format the rest of the world uses, and I discovered I couldn't tune in to most Internet radio stations. By default, most Linux distributions support Ogg Vorbis, a free software alternative to MP3 and Windows Media file formats.

There is apparently some difficult, geeky Unix command stuff I could learn to enable MP3 support, but I found another way to get Internet radio: A site which provides a directory of radio stations using Ogg Vorbis streams. The directory includes several classical radio stations, including Cleveland's WCLV. I clicked, and soon a WCLV broadcast was coming from the speakers of my old computer.

A musician and his birds

My article on Cleveland Chamber Symphony musician John Stavash has run in Funcoast, the weekly entertainment supplement of the Sandusky Register newspaper. Read the article to see why Stavash is holding two birds on his hands.

Where's the audience? Blame the music, composer says

Composer Jeff Harrington, in a comment responding to this Sequenza 21 item about a new CD featured at Starbucks, tackles the vexing question of why there's so few listeners for modern classical music and argues that it's the music's fault.

"It’s us who have to prove our case! Not the audience. Audiences don’t have to prove shit. Music should be adored, obsessed over, manically disputed and acclaimed. It doesn’t need marketing if it really excites people.

"It is our music that is at fault. Not our marketing."

I think Jeff has part of a point here -- no amount of marketing is going to create a mass audience for many modernist composers. But I still think composers such as Arvo Part and William Duckworth and Frederic Rzewski could attract many more listeners if only there was a way for people to be exposed to their music in the first place. How that will happen, I don't know.

Ah, yes, I commissioned that work....

The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has found a method to allow even small donors to contribute to commissioning a new piece of music. The orchestra's Public Commissioning Initiative invites donors to contribute one or more measures of music for $25 a measure. "Contributors will receive a printed copy of their measure or measures and be invited to the gala premiere celebration." The money is being used to hire composer Marta Ptaszynska to create a new work that will be premiered in 2008.

We're gonna party like it's 1607

The current (March 9) issue of The Week magazine mentions that Italy celebrated the 400th birthday of the opera with a new staging of Monteverdi's "Orfeo," first staged in Mantua in 1607. "Orfeo" was a very early opera, not the first or the second, The Week explains, but "the first to be adopted by performers elsewhere." The Feb. 24 performance in Arizona of William Duckworth's "iPod Opera 2.0" (also based on the Orpheus myth), noted earlier in this blog, was timed to fall on the 400th anniversary of that first performance of "Orfeo." If you missed the earlier posting, information here.

Violinist exits Cleveland Orchestra

The Plain Dealer reports that associate concertmaster Ellen dePasquale has resigned as the orchestra was preparing to create a new position that would change her rank behind concertmaster William Preucil from No. 2 to No. 3. The PD's story follows an article in Scene magazine, one of the local alternative weeklies, attacking Preucil for alleged abuse of power and nepotism. (The online version of the article has many gossipy comments added by readers.)

Quick! Download the MP3s

I got interested in Cleveland composer Jeffrey Quick when I heard his "Divertimento in C" on the radio. He's just posted MP3 files of the piece on his blog. If you like it, there are also podcasts of some of his other music available at the blog in the entries labeled "Podcasts."

La Monte Young: Where are the recordings?

I recently finished reading William Duckworth's "Talking Music," a collection of interviews with 17 American experimental composers such as John Cage, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca and so on.

For me, the heart of the book was a very long interview (the longest in the book) with La Monte Young (and his partner, Marian Zazeela). I admit I knew little about Young until I read the interview, but he's an amazing guy. He arguably invented minimalism with his "Trio for Strings" in 1958 (his friend Terry Riley has acknowledged Young's influence). He apparently presented the first series of loft concerts in Yoko Ono's New York loft in 1960. When he was quite young, he played jazz on the saxophone and had a jazz band in the 1950s that included prominent musicians such as drummer Billy Higgins. (He also defeated Eric Dolphy in a competition for a chair on the L.A. City College Dance Band.) His early group in New York City featured John Cale (from the Velvet Underground). He became very interested in Indian music years before George Harrison and the Beatles popularized Indian music in the western world.

So naturally, I wanted to hear this guy's music and started to look for it. Well, he's not available on iTunes or eMusic. Want to hear his recording "The Well Tuned Piano," apparently his signature work? $750 on Amazon. (Robert Gable at aworks searched for "five years" for a copy.) How about "Dorian Blues"? I think the "Just Stompin': Live at the Kitchen" album has it, but it's $52.

After so many years, this can't just be an oversight. There seems something old-fashioned about deliberately deciding that only rich people or people who live in a certain area will get to hear your music.

Duckworth's iPod Opera 2.0 completed

As promised, the Cathedral site released the 26th and final episode of William Duckworth and Nora Farrell's iPod Opera 2.0 podcast. There's a podcast for video episode and and a separate feed for MP3 files.

The podcast was created for Apple iPods; Apple folks can easily subscribe to it on iTunes.

But it's also easy for Windows computer owners to obtain the podcast. I got my copies of the files by right-clicking the podcast URLs at Cathedral and then pasting them in to Google Reader.

When I downloaded the final track, "The Moresca," I burned an audio CD of all of the tracks in order. Whether by accident or design, the entire 26 tracks fill up almost all of a homemade audio disk -- 78 minutes and 53 seconds of a CD disk limited to 80 minutes of music.

If you want to watch the video versions of the tracks on a Windows computer, you'll need to download a copy of Quicktime.

In other Duckworth news, one of the composer's solo albums, "Southern Harmony," has just become available on Emusic.

Messiaen's feathered fans

If you're into modern classical music, you've likely heard some of the works French composer Olivier Messiaen composed using melodies from birdcalls. But did you ever wonder how birds feel about Messiaen's pieces?

I interviewed longtime Cleveland Chamber Symphony clarinetist John Stavash for a newspaper story today, and I asked him about playing on Messiaen's Oiseaux "Exotiques (Exotic Birds)," which as I've written here just won a Grammy. According to the liner notes for the album, birdcalls from 47 different types of birds are featured in the piece.

Stavash told me that when he practiced the piece at home, his two pet birds, a cockatiel and a peach front conure, apparently were listening.

"As I was practicing, the birds were getting very excited," Stavash said. "Finally I got them out of the cage and plopped them on each knee and they listened to me while I practiced."

"They were enjoying it. I could tell the way they were acting."

Cathedral live broadcast is Saturday

Cathedral, the music site/online artwork created by composer William Duckworth and graphic artist and software designer Nora Farrell, on Saturday will present a live concert over the Internet and also will reach a notable milestone.

The concert, a performance of the Cathedral Band, which features Duckworth, Farrell and other musicians, will be in Phoenix at 7 p.m. Saturday Mountain Standard Time. Video of the show will be webcast from the Cathedral site, and a "hear the webcast" link will activate on the site a few hours before the broadcast.

Also Saturday, the 26th (and final) episode of Duckworth and Farrell's iPod Opera 2.0 will be premiered at the concert and released at the Cathedral site. All 26 MP3 music files and MP4 video files will then be available at Cathedral as a feed subscription.

Cathedral maintains a e-mail list for announcements; here is the official e-mail on the concert which is supposed to go out today:

February 19, 2007

Hello All,

If you have been following The iPod Opera 2.0—The Myth of Orpheus, The Chronicler, and Eurydice—you know that the 26th and final podcast occurs this Saturday, February 24, 2007.

To celebrate, we’re going to Second Stage West in Phoenix for a live performance of Part II of the opera, Orpheus, The Myth Retold, with

William Duckworth-music

Nora Farrell-parallel worlds

DJ Tamara-digital mix

VJ Paris-live video

William Barton, didgeridoo

AJ Sabatini, as The Chronicler

and introducing the IAP iPod Continuo

If you are in Phoenix, the concert begins this Saturday night at 7:00 pm MST. If not, you can watch us live on the web at

http://cathedral.monroestreet.com

As you may know, The iPod Opera 2.0 began a 2-year trilogy about the Orpheus myth that expands the experience from personal and in your ear, to in concert in Phoenix, to in public over 5 sq kms of the South Bank Parklands in Brisbane, Australia.

Below are the details of the journey. We hope you will be able to join us, either live or online.

Best wishes to all,

William Duckworth and Nora Farrell

* * *

The iPod Opera 2.0

* * *

Part 1

The Myth of Orpheus, The Chronicler, and Eurydice

Podcast at 2-week intervals: April 10, 2006 to February 24, 2007

Video and audio: http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/rss/ipo204.xml

Audio only: http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/rss/ipo203.xml

If you prefer, you can subscribe to the opera from the music category in the podcast section of iTunes.

And no iPod? No problem. You can also see the opera online at:

http://cathedral.monroestreet.com/ipo20/

Incidentally, the final episode of the opera will be podcast on Saturday, February 24, 2007, 400 years to the day since Monteverdi first staged Orfeo.

Part 2

Orpheus: The Myth Retold

Second Stage West, Phoenix, Arizona

Saturday, February 24, 2007, 7:00 pm

We will celebrate the conclusion of the podcasts and the anniversary of Orfeo with a live performance and retelling of the myth at Second Stage West in Phoenix featuring VJ Paris, AJ Sabatini, DJ Tamara, William Barton, and an 8-voice iPod Continuo, plus Nora Farrell and me. For those of you not in the Phoenix area, a video feed will be available online at

http://cathedral.monroestreet.com

Part 3

iOrpheus

A Public Opera for South Bank Parklands

Brisbane Australia

Friday, August 31, 2007, time TBD

Finally, we will be mounting an outdoor version of the opera in the streets and promenades of South Bank Parklands, Brisbane, Australia on August 31, 2007. Comprising a Fanfare, 5 Acts, and 5 Ribbons of Sound, it will be performed on iPods, cellphones, and laptops, along with interactive installations and live performers. We expect several thousand people to take an active role, and thousands more to participate as observers. The opera will also be webcast live. Performers will include students from the Queensland Conservatorium of Griffith University, as well as a number of surprise guests.

Our juicy scandal

Classical music has a new scandal, and believe it or not, it's almost as good as the astronaut with the diaper. Have you heard about Joyce Hatto? Despite struggling with terminal cancer, she was able somehow to record "the complete solo keyboard works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Prokofiev, not to mention virtually complete runs of Chopin and Liszt, as well as all of Brahms', Saint-Saäns', and Rachmaninoff's piano concertos," as Stereophile explains. Then again, maybe she got a little help from all of the other recordings of the same pieces her husband apparently stole for his record label. Hiperhip is all over this, including the wonderfully-named if mysterious "National Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra" which shares co-credit with Hatto on one disc.

The piano lessons worked

One more photo related to the Grammy Award the Cleveland Chamber Symphony won for recording a Messiaen piece: Here is another photo of Angelin Chang, taken when she was getting piano lessons in France. The woman behind Chang is Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, her teacher. The old guy with the glasses? Olivier Messiaen.


The Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a nice article Sunday on the Grammy. The paper's Chang interview is here.

A Cleveland guy, a Cleveland gal

Angelin Chang won a Grammy Award Sunday for "Best Instrumental Soloist with Orchestra" for a recording of Olivier Messiaen's "Oiseaux Exotiques" with the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, conducted by John McLaughlin Williams. The Grammy goes to the soloist and the conductor, so it went to Chang (of Cleveland State University) and Williams (who lives in Shaker Heights, a Cleveland suburb).

Here is a photo of Chang after she got her award.



I don't have a photo I can use of John McLaughlin Williams getting his Grammy, but here is a still. Isn't it annoying when someone takes a good picture?


Critic Alex Ross hailed the Grammy on his blog. Ross wrote, "Among various worthy people who won Grammys last night, I'd like to single out John McLaughlin Williams and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, who won for a recording (with pianist Angelin Chang) of Messiaen's Oiseaux exotiques. The Cleveland group recently sprang back to life after having been declared dead, and Williams is a long-time advocate of unsung composers. In 2003, he led a performance in Cleveland of Ervín Schulhoff's jazz oratorio HMS Royal Oak — a delightfully quirky piece that deserves to be on recording...."

Happy birthday, John Adams!

Alex Ross, the great classical music critic, wishes "Happy birthday to the great John Adams."

Adams is 60.

Listening to cassette tapes of "The Chairman Dances" and the "Nixon in China" highlights in the late 1980s helped me get interested in modern classical music.

Hearing Red: The Zappa show

Red (an orchestra) seems to have figured out how to get lots of publicity for a modern music group -- collaborate with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on a program promoting a rock star's music. The orchestra is getting a wave of publicity for its Saturday show of the orchestral music of Frank Zappa, with the Cleveland Plain Dealer alone providing a ton of publicity, including this piece by the paper's rock critic and this one by the classical music critic. I've been quite jazzed by the coverage and I've been listening this week to one of my favorite Zappa albums, "Chunga's Revenge." Meanwhile, Alex Ross gives this shoutout to one of our other local orchestras.

OUR Grammys: Cleveland musicians win

The Grammys are on TV as I write this, but I had to log on to the Internet to check the awards I cared about. Cleveland State University pianist Angelin Chang and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony have won the "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance With Orchestra" in the Classical Grammys, for Messiane's Oiseaux Exotiques (Exotic Birds), a track from "Cleveland Chamber Symphony: Music That Dares to Explore, Vol. 6." Complete Grammy Awards list here. Osvaldo Golijov won "Best Classical Contemporary Composition" for "Fountain of Tears," and a recording of the work won an opera Grammy.

Katsumata performs Duckworth on YouTube

Japanese violinist Ritsu Katsumata has posted her performances at the Buffalo Biennial of Duckworth6: Sea of Dreams, her invention based on No. 6 of Duckworth's "Time Curve Preludes." The music will be featured on her album, "Voodoo Bach," which will be released in May. Take a moment to look at these videos and let her win you over.

Alex Ross: Glass, Menotti and evidence classical music lives

In the last few days, as I was mostly away from the computer, Alex Ross demonstrates why his blog is essential for everyone who listens to classical music. Within a few days, he touches on all of the major news, noting Philip Glass' 70th birthday, discussing the death of Gian Carlo Menotti ("He was a complex and inconsistent figure whose place in American opera history is nonetheless secure") and offering evidence classical music isn't quite dead, after all.

NPR embraces postminimalism!

Last week, I would have been happy to write "NPR embraces John Adams," but my consciousness has been raised. NPR has been running a series on their news shows called "Crossing the Divide," about how everyone should get along and make nice. My favorite part about the series was that NPR has been using a snippet from John Adams "The Chairman Dances" as a rather arresting theme song. Composer and critic Kyle Gann lists the piece as an example of postminimalism, and in a rather long post, explains why he applies the postminimalist label to quite a bit of modern music. The post has drawn plenty of comments, but see also composer Jeffrey Quick's observations.

Cleveland Orchestra (finally) recording again

The Cleveland Orchestra will begin recording again after a seven-year absence reports Donald Rosenberg in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, although it's not clear yet when recordings will start coming out or whether the orchestra will release any music written by living composers. The first work, already recorded, isn't exactly a bold programming choice -- Beethoven's Ninth. The article says the orchestra doesn't have a record contract yet but is talking to Deutsche Grammophon and EMI Classics.

O rare Ben Johnston

Composer Ben Johnston has become a hot item on the new music blogs. NewMusicBox has posted a long interview with Johnston conducted by Frank Oteri (curiously, you can't find the interview if you start at the home page) and reprints an essay, "How to Cook an Albatross." Johnston has a new book out, "Maximum Clarity and Other Writings on Music."

Words are fine, but my main interest in music, so I'd like to take the opportunity to recommend one of my latest purchases on Emusic, "Ben Johnston: Music for Piano" by pianist Phillip Bush. The combination of Johnston's just intonation tuning and melodies and Bush's playing makes for an album that's unusual but also very listenable. (If you like Thelonius Monk's "sweet and sour" melodies, you might find the album interesting.) I was encouraged to download a copy for myself by the rave reviews posted by other Emusic listeners; I agree with the fellow from London who called it " a most strange, beautiful and compelling sound."

Downloading the Emusic version means you don't get the liner notes, but see Bush's Ben Johnson blog posting.

Warning: Explicit music

One of the most vivid and interesting novels I've read in the last couple of years is FROST THE FIDDLER by pianist Janice Weber. It's a good read if you like witty, well-written fiction about classical music.

The plot concerns a secret agent who is also an acclaimed violinist. There's quite a bit of fairly explicit eroticism in the book. Those passages are an example of Weber's artistry. If you think it's easy to write interesting passages about sex, you haven't read much modern fiction.

But my favorite passages are what might be called the "explicit music," the passages where Weber writes about classical music and what it's like to play it. There's a very funny scene (chapter 4) where a recording engineer tells the heroine, Leslie Frost, that he and the record producer he works with have recorded Beethoven's Fifth Symphony 30 times.

Asked why he records the same piece over and over, the engineer replies, "The beer. Harry and I will only record the piece in countries with great beer." The engineer drinks his beer and adds, "We hate Beethoven."

The irony is that while for classical music folks Beethoven's "Fifth" may be what "Stairway to Heaven" has been for rock listeners, the piece you can't get away from, the passage may not make much sense for younger readers. How many people under 30 in the U.S. have heard the Fifth all the way through, from beginning to end? It can't be many.

And here's a bit of black humor for you modern classical music fans: The gang Frost battles in Weber's novel secretly smuggle data by including hidden tracks on CDs of music by an obscure modern composer. The CDs offer perfect cover since nobody notices or listens to them.

I've spent a lot of time the last couple of months listening to two excellent Weber CDs, her recordings of Leo Ornstein's piano music and her performance of Ornstein's piano quintet, so I've been getting a pretty complete Weber experience.

A wheelbarrow by any other name....

Cleveland homeboys eighth blackbird (they all went to Oberlin, close enough for us to claim them) reveal that before they settled on their name (after a Wallace Stevens poem), they considered other names, such as "red wheelbarrow" (after the Walter Carlos Williams poem) and "tastes like chicken" (no literary citation offered, but perhaps a tribute to the hazards of touring.)

Duckworth recording becoming available

American composer William Duckworth has written more than 200 pieces, but the amount of music available on recordings is frustratingly small. Bit by bit, though, more of his work is becoming available. Percussionist Joseph Gramley is re-releasing his 2000 album, "American De-Construction." The longest piece on the album is Duckworth's "Meditation Preludes." The release also has pieces by Steve Reich, David Lang, Paul Smadbeck and Dave Hollinden. The re-release doesn't seem to be available yet -- at least on Amazon -- but the original is on Gramley's web site, which also offers a 6 minute, 21 second stream of the "Meditation Preludes" and sound samples of the other pieces.

CCS premieres Taddie, readies Plain

Went to a Cleveland Chamber Symphony concert Sunday afternoon at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and noticed that the pieces I liked were by the two composers I'd never heard of. The orchestra played Charles Ives' "Symphony No. 3," which was OK, and Tan Dun's "Concerto for Orchestra: Yi," which had a lot of colorful clangs and thuds but didn't really cohere for me as a piece. But "Amazonia II" by David Taddie was exciting and the "Concerto for Recorder & Chamber Orchestra" by Gerald Plain was beautiful. The Taddie was the world premiere of a brand new piece by a Cleveland native.

The CCS is recording the Plain concerto on Monday. Mark George, board president of the symphony and the band's piano player, says the orchestra has already recorded "The Bird of Four Hundred Voices" by the late Dennis Eberhard, a prominent Cleveland composer, for the same release, which will come out next year.

Emusic has eight Cleveland Chamber Symphony albums. I can recommend "The New American Scene III." I downloaded "New American Soloists" after the concert but haven't had time to listen to it yet.

Addendum: Jeffrey Quick weighs in with a long review. He liked the Taddie, too, wasn't so thrilled with the Plain. Like everyone else in the known universe, he likes Charles Ives better than I do.

More: Donald Rosenberg, the Plain Dealer's classical music reviewer, discusses the concert in the Tuesday paper. He's not the world's biggest fan of the Plain piece, either. If the academics and the newspaper writers don't like it, does that mean Plain's concerto is destined for immortality?

Cleveland Composers Guild announces new concerts

Cleveland composer Jeffrey Quick, the webmaster for the Cleveland Composers Guild, has posted new dates and information for a series of concerts planned for the Cleveland area. The member links page (biographies and information for Cleveland area composers) also has been refreshed and enhanced. I've also posted the dates on my concert calendar.

Kyle Gann cutting new album, writing new book

Composer and writer Kyle Gann reports on his blog that he has just finished a two-day recording session with pianist Sarah Cahill for his upcoming album on the New Albion label. No release date has been announced yet. In the meantime, Gann includes a link to an eight-minute rough edit of a piece from the new album, and a previous collaboration with Cahill, "Long Night" is available on Emusic.

Meanwhile, the Poughkeepsie Journal reports that Gann has received a $40,000 grant for his book, "Music After Minimalism."

"Gann said the funds will enable him to take a semester off to work on the book, which focuses on composers such as Glenn Branca, William Duckworth and John Luther Adams," the news item explains.

Duckworth announces new recordings, performances

Composer William Duckworth has announced that two new recordings of his music will be issued this year.

With help from Duckworth, Japanese electric violinist Ritsu Katsumata has created "Sea of Dreams" a 20-minute version of Prelude 6 from Duckworth's "Time Curve Preludes," perhaps his best-known piece. The album will be released in May, but excerpts are available now here. ("Time Curve Preludes" is widely available at the various music downloading services such as iTunes, Emusic etc.)

"Beyond that, the Japanese marimba virtuoso Mika Yoshida is planning to release my 'Writing on Water' for live and prerecorded marimbas later this year, but I don't think a definite date has been set yet," Duckworth writes. This will apparently be the first-ever available recording of the work.

Duckworth and his collaborators, the Cathedral Band, will be onstage performing "The Myth Retold" at 8 p.m. MST Feb. 24 at Second Stage West in Phoenix; the performance will be available as a video and audio stream at Cathedral.

Duckworth and Nora Farrell are going to Tokyo in March for "for 3 concerts and 3
workshops focusing on cell phones as musical instruments."

Later in the year, it's off to Australia for iOrpheus a "public opera" which premieres Aug. 31 at South Bank Parklands in Brisbane.

"It is expected to include 2000 participants. Nora and I will be there for 3 months
to plan and carry out this project," Duckworth explains.

More information later as these various events draw closer.

Brilliant band recording Plain piece

The Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes a nice piece by Donald Rosenberg on Sunday's Cleveland Chamber Symphony in Berea, Ohio. The story includes the news that the chamber symphony, the top new music group in the area where I live, is about to record Gerald Plain's "Recorder Concerto." (Plain's an American composer, but I can't find an official web site or even a decent biography to link to.)

Rosenberg's piece has one mistake: The symphony's new CD, nominated for a Grammy, isn't on Naxos, it's on a Las Vegas record label TNC Recordings.

Sandow: Classical music era ending

Greg Sandow has been putting up a series of posts on why he believes "the classical music era may be ending," including statistics on the aging and disappearance of the audience, the financial crisis at institutions such as our major orchestras and changes in the culture. He seems to see a shift in the classical music establishment similar to what happened to jazz in the 1940s, when the big bands largely went away and jazz lost much of its mass audience.

More evidence for such a shift: Phillip Bush notes in a posting late last year that no matter what is happening to the big, expensive orchestras, small groups are prospering. "But whatever your view is on the proper role of the American orchestra in the 21st century, it is undeniable that at the moment I write these words, in the United States today we are truly living in a golden age of the string quartet as a professional music entity. Never before have so many quartets made a decent-to-good living in this country, and never before have so many quartets existed who play at such a high technical and artistic level."

Michael Brecker, Alice Coltrane die

Breaking bad news from New Music reBlog: Alice Coltrane and Michael Brecker have both died. Sad news for jazz fans and music fans in general.

Oh, I forgot that masterpiece

Pianist Phillip Bush reports (Jan. 12 entry) that a CD of the music of Michael Sahl has just been released that he had completely forgotten he'd worked on.

I'm sure I won't soon forget Bush's interesting "Ben Johnston: Music for Piano" album, about which more soon. In his Oct. 12, 2006, entry on Ben Johnston (Bush says the recording of Johnston's No. 2, 3, 4 and 9 string quartets by the Kepler Quartet is the "CD of the Year"), Bush mentions his own Johnston album, and complains "Yes, I think the disc has gone out of print .... but folks are working on it."

In fact, it's still "in print" on Emusic, the music downloading service. I bought it yesterday on Emusic, which is a great source for cool CDs which otherwise have become unavailable. I listened to the album as I was fixing lunch Sunday and it's fascinating.

Aesthetic tip

Has anyone else noticed that listening to modern classical music works great with watching football with the TV sound turned off? You don't need to hear the announcers to follow the game, and football is less distracting from the music than trying to read or write while you listen.

Stockhausen's rep gets rehab

This is old news, but it was new to me, so I'll pass it along: Karlheinz Stockhausen apparently isn't an American-hating worm after all, as was widely reported after 9/11.

As you may recall, after Arab terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans, the German composer was quoted as saying the attack was a huge work of art composers couldn't match. When the comment was widely reported, Stockhausen was quoted as having to climb down while under attack and "clarify" he didn't mean to suggest killing Americans was so cool, after all. The way the clarification was quoted made him sound almost as bad as the original statement.

Thanks to a blog posting from Joseph Drew, it's now clear Stockhausen's original comment was badly misrepresented at the time. It turns out that Stockhausen (who Drew says is "deeply religious") had described the attack as an artwork by Lucifer, a bit of context left out in the press reports I saw.

Drew has links to back up his interpretation of the event. Also, Drew actually studied with Stockhausen in Germany, so he would seem to know the guy and the way he thinks better than your average avante garde, trumpet playing New York City musician.

"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes." (Mark Twain).

12-hour Cage performance set in Cleveland

The last time New York musician Joseph Drew performed John Cage's ASLSP (As SLow as Possible), he made the piece last for nine hours.

That was too fast.

Drew is performing the piece again in Cleveland on Feb. 6, and this time he'll spend half a day on the work.

The free performance, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 6, will be held on the organ of Epworth-Euclid United Methodist Church, 1919 E. 107th Pl. in Cleveland, Ohio.

The performance is in "artistic solidarity" with a performance taking place in Germany over the next 639 years.

Drew, a member of the ANALOG Arts Ensemble, is a graduate of Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio. His previous performance, over a mere nine hours, took place at ANALOG's ARTSaha! festival.

"Listeners came and went over the course of the event. Students did their homework, some people ate their dinners in the hall, or took a nap. The organ's timbral possibilities create a really exciting, almost limitless, range of choices. When you get one of those sonorities going on a particular setting, the interaction between the overtones can sound otherwordly. One person in the Omaha audience asked me on a break if I had some kind of sound processor switched on," he said. (Audio from the last hour of the performance available here.)

"As you can imagine, if you've looked at the score, the sonorities last for minutes at a time. When you get inside the piece as a performer, it actually wasn't a lot of time per sonority; so, I'm looking forward to the chance to stretch it out a bit," he said.

I was confused about the upcoming performance. Did Drew mean he would "conduct" the piece, and supervise a rotation of other musicians?

Nope.

"It's just me playing the piece for 12 hours," he said.

Drew, playing trumpet, also will lead the ANALOG ensemble in a concert at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 3, at Church of the Saviour, 2537 Lee Road, Cleveland Heights, Ohio. Tickets are $8 for adults, $5 for students, available at the door.

A press release explains:

"ANALOG arts ensemble performs a narrative recital titled Ordo Superman, after the legendary morality play by Hildegard. Premiered in 1192, Ordo Virtutum tells the tale of a Soul defended against the Devil by a troop of Virtues, such as Humility,and Chastity. Hildegard's chants will be performed by members of the Church of the Saviour Chancel Choir, while Drew performs an intoxicating mix of contemporary solo works, many written expressly for him. Included in the program will be two rarely-heard works from Karlheinz Stockhausen's massive seven-opera cycle LICHT, along with the music of Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Anderson, and Radiohead."

Free music: Kyle Gann

I discovered Kyle Gann mainly through my interest in William Duckworth; Gann apparently is the world's leading authority on Duckworth's music (see my Dec. 18 post.) But reading Gann's comments made me curious about Gann himself, and I went from his blog to his official site, and discovered that it contains a great deal of Gann's music, freely downloadable as MP3 files. Gann's site is amusingly unhindered by modesty. I tried some of the files and found out Gann's music is very listenable, indeed. I'll download "Long Night," his only work available at Emusic.com, when my monthly subscription renews in a few days.

I've been reading Gann's book, AMERICAN MUSIC IN THE 20th CENTURY. (By reading, I mean jumping around and reading about various composers who interest me, while skipping over the music theory stuff which I don't understand.) The book includes an entry on one Kyle Gann. My guess is Gann is probably a leading authority on Gann, too, so let's quote the entry:

"Another composer heavily influenced by American Indian music is Kyle Gann (the author, born 1955 in Dallas, Texas) whose works are also drum-driven; specifically, he has developed a rhythmic language of changing tempos from the beat-shifting music of the Hopi, Zuni and Pueblo Indians. In this respect his ensemble music (such as "Astrological Studies," 1994) is similar to Michael Gordon's, but smoother, more consonant, and more melodic, in a style once referred to by the "New York Times" as "naive pictorialism." Oddly (since postminimalism provides such a clear context for microtonal perception), Gann is the only totalist or postminimalist composer working in just-intonation tuning; his electronic works use purely tuned pitch systems of up to thirty-seven pitches per octave. An example is "Custer's Ghost to Sitting Bull" (1995), on a text imagined as spoken by General George Custer after the Little Bighorn debacle."

Fine guide to 2006 jazz

I'm assuming music lovers like jazz as well as classical, so let's sneak in a jazz post. Jim Wilke, host of the NPR show "Jazz After Hours," has posted his "best of" list for 2006 jazz CDs. The guy has excellent ears, and I look at his list every year.

"Jazz After Hours" is heard late night Friday and Saturday on many NPR stations -- ideal late night listening for romantic couples, although Wilke seems to miss this marketing angle. I was able to keep listening to the show after I moved from Lawton, Oklahoma (KCCU) to the Cleveland, Ohio, area in 2003 (WCPN). The web site posts a list of stations at the web site.

Don't miss the Cleveland Chamber Symphony

I've added several events to my Cleveland Modern Classical Calendar. In particular, I want to point to the Cleveland Chamber Symphony concert at 4 p.m. Sunday Jan. 21 at Gamble Auditorium on the Baldwin-Wallace campus in Berea. It's a free concert, and the symphony will be fired up from its Grammy nomination last month. The Cleveland Chamber Symphony recently announced that composer Marta Ptasynska has been selected for its Public Commissioning Initiative.

Classical music is hot!

Alex Ross notes (via a tip relayed by Troy Peters) a Nielsen SoundScan press release on recorded music sales in 2006. Overall sales were up in 2006, with a small decline in CD sales made up for by a sharp increase in downloadable music sales. But the most interesting news is that classical music showed the biggest category gain, up 22.5 percent. New Age music was the biggest loser, down 22.5 percent. Rap music also fared poorly.

Year's best lists

A couple of the year's best listings have caught my eye. Robert Gable at aworks provides a top ten list of "mind-bending recordings this year" and says Player Piano 1: Conlon Nancarrow Vol. 1. by Jurgen Hocker is "probably the best CD of the year." Alex Ross likes Peter Lieberson's "Neruda Songs" (which also gets a very strong recommendation from Donald Rosenberg at the Cleveland Plain Dealer) and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra recording of Magnus Lindberg's Clarinet Concerto, which is available on Emusic.

The role of the blogs

Alex Ross noted in a recent posting that Entertainment Weekly had published a massive "best of" end of the year issue without mentioning classical music. I noticed that, too. And I noticed that "The Week" magazine published a list of obits for 2006 that didn't mention Ligeti. And I noticed that the two local "alternative" magazines published year-end music issues which mentioned jazz as well as rock but which didn't mention classical music at all. And I've noticed that NPR's "Fresh Air" interview show seldom mentions modern classical music (Steve Reich was a very rare exception) although it doesn't show the same animus toward jazz. Many other examples could be offered.

It's interesting to contrast the miserable support structure for modern classical music with various ways jazz fans are supported and nurtured. When I became more interested in jazz a few years ago, I discovered there were national broadcasts of jazz that promoted recordings of modern musicians (NPR's "Jazz After Hours") for example, magazines such as "Downbeat" which made it easy to keep up, and recordings that somehow didn't need grants from foundations and the government to persuade record companies to issue them. (Would a "Downbeat" for modern classical fans be able to circulate and stay in business?)

I think what this illustrates is that classical music fans cannot rely on the "top down" model of classical music news and criticism -- articles in publications such as the "New York Times" and "New Yorker" which rely on critics such as Ross. I hasten to add that such criticism is very important and I myself follow it religiously. When the Cleveland Plain Dealer's Donald Rosenberg mentions modern classical music, I try to note it here. But with the decline of circulation at newspapers, and the limited amount of news they can cover, and the limited number of people they can reach, newspapers and magazines can't do the job alone. There is a role for blogs, which can provide "grassroots" coverage. Even small blogs such as this one!

Alex Ross corrects the record

Critic Alex Ross offers this wonderful clarification on his blog: "With deep regret I had to inform them that this is not in fact a picture of Messiaen with a bird on his head, nor to my knowledge are there any pictures of Messiaen with a bird on his head."

RIP Daniel Pinkham

Last month's death of composer Daniel Pinkham was noted by Cleveland area composer and blogger Jeffrey Quick.

"I never liked Pinkham's music as much as I would like to. It often seemed to me that his pitch choice was a bit sloppy for his expressive ends, as if he were deliberately avoiding the most effective choice because it was a traditional choice," writes Quick, who himself writes church music. "But he was an inspiration to all of us who believe that liturgical music is not dead, and that new music doesn't have to be an act of penance. And he definitely died with his boots on, with a premiere less than a day pre-mortem."

Just call Duckworth Mr. January

One of my favorite composers, William Duckworth, hasn't updated the news on his official web site lately, so I don't know what he's going to be up to during 2007. But I'm pretty sure he's all too aware of how the passage of time puts pressure on today's creative artist. He's serving as the month of January for Spoken Days, a verbal calendar that's apparently an Internet project for artist Jerry King Musser. Duckworth recites "Monday, January 1" and so on, with various audio in the background, including dripping water. Disappointingly, the audio is supplied by Musser, not Duckworth, although Musser's site shows a range of interests and is worth a look.

Cleveland new music highlights

This is the time of the year when the newspapers write end-of-the-year news highlights (I wrote the "Top Ten News Stories" piece for The Sandusky Register) so the Cleveland Plain Dealer's classical music critic Donald Rosenberg weighs in with a roundup of the biggest local classical music news. Some of his items will interest fans of modern classical music.

Rosenberg doesn't mention the Grammy nomination announcement late in the year for Cleveland State pianist Angelin Chang and for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony (see previous post), but he does mention the death of local composer Frederick Koch.

Rosenberg also mentions Kent State University's Halim-El Dabh, under a brief piece headlined, "Opera Circle transcends time." He writes, "The tiny local opera company did a lovely job juxtaposing Mozart's incidental music for 'Thamos, King of Egypt' with an original score by Halim-El Dabh. The result melded the 18th and 21st centuries into an opera of universal delight." (El-Dabh's web site bio explains, "Halim El-Dabh is internationally recognized as Egypt's most important living composer of classical music.")

Cleveland's Grammy nomination

After I posted the Grammy nominations for best new composition, I went through the comments on my blog and discovered I'd missed something very exciting: The Cleveland Chamber Symphony has been nominated for a Grammy Award! It's for a recording of Messiaen's "Oiseaux Exotiques" (Exotic Birds), made by Cleveland State University pianist Angelin Chang and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. More information here. More on Chang here and also here. The recording is available cheap from the label's web site. List of Grammy nominees in the category here (it's category #100).

Grammy nominations for new works

About: Classical Music lists the Grammy Award nominations for "Best Classical Contemporary Composition."

They are:

-- Boston Concerto, Elliott Carter (Oliver Knussen)
-- Golijov: Ainadamar: Fountain of Tears, Osvaldo Golijov (Robert Spano)
-- The Here and Now, Christopher Theofanidis (Robert Spano)
-- Paul Revere's Ride, David Del Tredici (Robert Spano)
-- A Scotch Bestiary, James MacMillan (James MacMillan)

I'm Stravinsky. Who are you?

A friend of mine, F. Brett Cox, recently directed me to a site which asks a series of questions and purports to tell the visitor which science fiction writer or composer he most resembles. (It also answers pressing questions such as "Which house paint are you?" and "Are you a Republican?") I tried the science fiction quiz first, and it told me I'm "Hal Clement," a writer I've never paid much attention to. I tried the classical composer quiz next, and it told me I'm Igor Stravinsky, who has pretty much been my favorite composer for decades.

New Ornstein released

Good news for fans of composer Leo Ornstein (such as myself): a new CD of Ornstein's collected works for cello and piano has just been released by New World Records.

Severo Ornstein, the composer's son, reports that it's a "superb recording" which has several works never recorded before.

Mr. Ornstein could be accused of bias, but his recommendation is good enough for me. He recommended the piano quintet to me as one of his father's best works. I've been listening a lot lately to the recording of the quintet made by Janice Weber and the Lydian String Quartet and it's a great record.

Brouwer: Cleveland, New York, Columbus

Composer Margaret Brouwer's calendar on her official site reports performances early next year in New York, Columbus and Cleveland, including two premieres of new works. The Cleveland performances, March 28 through April 1, will offer a new violin concerto. I have information about the dates in my Cleveland calendar.

William Duckworth revealed

I few days ago, I mentioned I had discovered William Duckworth by listening to a piece called "Mysterious Numbers" on an album by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony. Not that I'm a music expert, but it was interesting to hear such a wonderful piece by someone I'd never heard of. I tried to find out more about him but had trouble finding useful information on the Internet.

I finally found a weblog posting by composer and critic Kyle Gann provides useful insight into Duckworth's music and a handy list of works to look for. (I downloaded the "Time Curve Preludes" from Emusic a few days ago, and it's just as great as Gann says it is.) Here's a key quote from Gann's posting: "If there is any composer from the 1980s and '90s whose music is sturdy, enduring, and universal enough to go into the standard repertoire, it is Duckworth's."

Rosenberg's modern Top 35

Donald Rosenberg, the classical music critic and correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, gets the cover of the arts section Sunday with a primer on classical music, an article about the "beloved staples" which form the foundation of classical music. The headline graphic lists the usual suspects -- Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach.

The big shock is when you turn the page and see a huge graphic accompanying the article listing Rosenberg's picks for a representative sampling of the repertoire. Rosenberg lists just three works from the Baroque period and only four from the Classical period. The Romantic period lists 19 works, but for the 20th Century, Rosenberg lists 35 separate composers and works, including Ligeti, Lutoslawski, and Messiaen. It's a really impressive effort on Rosenberg's part to educate readers about modern music. Subversive, almost.

Of course, the fun part about such lists is being able to argue with them. I would have dropped Charles Ives from the starting lineup and inserted Arvo Part, with perhaps "Tabula Rasa" as the representative work. But Rosenberg's list is really well done. The list of recordings is heavy on Cleveland Orchestra efforts, but it's kind of hard to quarrel with his choices, such as Pierre Boulez conducting Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."

I checked out Margaret Brouwer's "Light" CD from the library recently -- she is possibly Cleveland's most significant composer -- and noticed that Rosenberg penned the liner notes for the album.

David Byrne, neurological theorist

The latest Richard Powers novel, "The Echo Maker," which just nabbed a National Book Award, has a scene in a noisy bar with two characters, Gerald Weber, a neuroscientist and author, and Barbara Gillespie, a hospital aide.

"She leaned across the table and shouted into his ear, " 'You may ask yourself, how did I get here?' "
"How's that?"
She looked at him, checking if he was serious. "Nothing. Talkin' bout my generation." (Page 322).

The reference is to a particularly brilliant Talking Heads song, "Once in a Lifetime," about the shock of looking at the world with new eyes, pretty much the theme of Powers' book. The song has lines like "How did I get here?" and "How did I get this beautiful wife?" Gillespie is a woman in her 40s, mysteriously well-read and well-informed for an ordinary hospital aide. No doubt she remembers the cool video on MTV. Of course, her comment also references the famous Who song, "My Generation."

Powers is a classical music expert but references to rock music don't pop up often in his works, so I wondered if the exchange in the book came from a real-life exchange he had with someone.

The modern classical music connection (you knew there would be one, didn't you?) is that Powers teaches writing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, also the home of a talented composer named Stephen Andrew Taylor (tantalizing sound samples from "Seven Memorials" here, but no CD yet).

Taylor says he hopes "to be collaborating with him [Powers] on a
quasi-operatic project sometime this year."

William Duckworth

I've been listening to an album by the Cleveland Chamber Symphony called "The New American Scene III." The album overall is pretty good, but the real surprise for me was a piece about 20 minutes long called "Mysterious Numbers," a composition in three movements by a guy named William Duckworth. (My wife heard it and asked me, puzzled, if it was "Rhapsody in Blue," if that gives you an idea of the work's charm.) Has anyone else noticed this dude? What else should I hunt up? Cathedral, his "work of music and art for the web," is here.

Addendum: Steve Layton suggests an album on Emusic, "The Time Curve Preludes"; Robert Gable at aworks recommends hunting up a copy of a piece called "Imaginary Dances."

Copland great? Oh, I guess so ....

Cleveland area composer Jeffrey Quick weighs in on whether Aaron Copland is the Great American composer and offers a mixed endorsement. Excerpt: "Personally, I have reservations about Copland's music. It doesn't have the emotional range I like, he couldn't write a good solid tutti, I can't think of a memorable Copland tune that he didn't steal. But there's so much good stuff happening there that yeah, we can cede the title."

I happened upon Quick by listening to a WCLV radio show, "Not the Dead White Male Composers Hour," which broadcasts music by Cleveland composers every Sunday night at 9 p.m.; his "Divertimento in C" caught my ear. There are no Quick CDs available yet, but the blog has a few podcasts for downloading.

Sergei's cool web site

I've been listening to a lot of Sergei Prokofiev's music lately, and thought I'd pass along a cool site I just discovered: a Prokofiev site which features a great deal of interesting material, including interviews, a long biography and many reviews of CDs. (Apparently Kuchar's version of the complete symphonies is considered quite good, which is fortunate for me because I can download them cheaply from Emusic.)

Last year, when I was on a Beethoven jag, I read a short biography called "Beethoven: The Universal Composer" by Edmund Morris. It seems to me if there were a "universal composer" for the 20th century, he would be Prokofiev -- melodic enough for traditionalists, yet interesting enough to catch the attention of modernists.

New Brouwer piece to debut next year

CityMusic Cleveland, a chamber orchestra that performs free concerts in the Cleveland area, will debut a violin concerto by composer Margaret Brouwer in a series of concerts scheduled for March 28 through April 1 next year.

Brouwer is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers, difficult to categorize easily and always interesting. Lately, I've been listening a lot to her and to Leo Ornstein and Igor Stravinsky. Two recent albums make much of her music available. A Naxos release issued early this year, "Aurolucent Circles," is a collection of orchestral music. It's also available on Emusic. "Light," on New World Records, is an anthology of her chamber music.