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classical music Reinkemeyer See: Lured by the Horizon
Walking the city streets on a sunny day, the music in my ears changed from a known track to something completely unexpected. I was nearing the end of my first week with my new (second-hand) iPod mini, and I had no obvious reason to expect the unexpected. When I had first connected the mini to my office computer, I simply had the device automatically select music to download from my iTunes list. Surely I had heard everything on iTunes!
But no. What I heard was a modernist/post-modernist take on Latin music. Was this the Choros No. 8 by Villa-Lobos that I didn't yet have a handle on? It sounded quite similar. The percussion style was about right. The snatches of melody overlaying the beat sounded almost Villa-Lobosian.
I brought the iPod's screen into eyesight and looked. Nope. Not Villa-Lobos. Andrea L. Reinkemeyer.
I had forgotten that, in the middle of all my work for FinnFest several weeks ago, I had downloaded from her site a student performance of her dissertation thesis, the orchestral suite titled Lured by the Horizon. Completely forgot!
Back home I had the score she had just given me, days before, and a recorded CD performance played by a more professional orchestra, an orchestra that reads through current work to help aspiring composers. (These aren't quite polished performances, just run-throughs (readings
) made with a view to aiding younger composers. A great service. But it does mean that what I'm now hearing, as I edit this for final upload, you likely as not may not hear!) I could hardly wait to get home and play this designed-to-be-rare, "unpublished" recording.
But first: the second movement, entitled "Rust." I won't try to explain the movement titles, or the program of the piece. I don't rightly know the titling rationale. (It has something to do with the Pacific Northwest economy and culture, actually; read about it on Andrea's site.) But I can tell you that the music went from Villa-Lobosian to what Lou Harrison calls The Ruggles Idiom quite starkly. This is very good stuff, but Ruggles ain't congenial to my usual walk-around-town experience, so when the next (and even better) movement smoothed in, I was very happy.
Andrea's music is quite good. Excellent. Amazingly good. It's modernist in a pomo kind of way, fitting nicely alongide Villa-Lobos and Ruggles and That Crowd (and what a varied crowd those two make) . . . and after the accessibility of the first movement gave way to the in-your-face blasts of Ruggles-ruggedisms in the second, in the third movement she comes into her own. (Actually, the ending of the second movement is clear and crisp and in pizzicato strings, reminding me vaguely of Tcherepnin's Second Symphony. But it actually fits the style. Boy, is it hard to write about music. You've got only comparisons to go by, but at the end of the paragraph you look down and say: This work is like a thousand different things!
But it isn't. It's itself's own thing.)
There's no point in giving a play-by-play, I should just encourage others to go to her site and download the student performance of the music that might give you some glimmer of what she's accomplished.
It's late Sunday night as I type this, and I'm home again, just having hooked up a new stereo receiver. I'm listening to Villa-Lobos's Choros No. 8, now. For perspective. It's very good. And really not far from Andrea's work. But nothing in it is quite as good as the best parts of Lured by the Horizon.
Except. Honesty demands that I confess to not liking one passage of the new work. It's a trumpet de-climax prefacing the big climax that reminds me of . . . what, I'm not sure. Band music of the '20s? Movie music of the '30s? Another style of music, I guess. But the very ending of Lured by the Horizon is subtle, exquisite, redeeming from my ears that one passage.
I almost hate to mention it, actually, especially now that I've spent more space on it than the parts I've liked. But I've done the same thing with Rautavaara, mentioning over-and-over a passage of his Fifth Symphony that reminds me too much of Varese, not Rautavaara. If Rautavaara can slip up
like this, then I figure: so can my cousin Andrea.
But of course, it's probably just me. Other people probably like that bit of V-in-R best of the Fifth, and will like the trumpet section passage in Lured by the Horizon.
And perhaps, just perhaps (ha! it's likely), were an orchestra to rehearse this music properly, I'd have no objections at all. It's surely the case that the student orchestra is no match for the professional orchestra's handling of that last movement. And, had the latter really rehearsed it, the brass section would've done justice to the writing. (Andrea really puts the percussion and brass sections through wringer!)
It's Monday now, a day after I wrote the above. I've listened to the work several times on the office stereo. I've followed the score.
Conclusion: It needs to be performed by a major symphony orchestra. The exquisite third movement has not received an adequate performance yet, and the final movement really, really could use some attention by musicians with a lot of practice on the work under their belt. I'm thinking that, with a professional treatment, I'd come to love the fourth movement best. It's very odd. Andrea may be my cousin, but we've not had extended discussions on composition. And yet it's like she's composing for me. She writes my kind of music. But that's the way art happens, isn't it? One composes, creates, for oneself and the ages, or merely for a commission, and strikes the right chords among listeners everywhere.
Were only more people to take notice, to listen!
I bet there are many, many works like Andrea L. Reinkemeyer's Lured by the Horizon, works that haven't really been given a proper chance. In a culture that tends to devote its attention to the strummings of half-talented drug addicts* to the elegant, structured compositions of trained, serious and virtuous professionals, it's no surprise that truly amazing works of refinement and complexity and even deep emotion go begging.
But it is something of a tragedy, no?
A cultural renaissance of fine art music awaits us, still on the horizon. The allure of that horizon is strengthened by works such as that of Andrea Reinkemeyer.
*I should note that Andrea herself wouldn't write anything so categorical as that. She is a fan of more popular music than I, and when I was ranting one day about the simplicity of popular music and rock-n-roll, she lectured me about the harmonic complexity of grunge rock and the ingenuity of the style's use of modal subversion.
My reaction? Well, sure, if you're talking about Nirvana! But I was thinking of
. . . [list of innocuous pop stars followed, of no major consequence then or now]
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 7, 2006 | permalink
classical music Stravinsky See: Agon
Igor Stravinsky's Agon is music for dancing. It is also absolute music,
in that the work doesn't pretend to tell a story. It is one of his many ballets that are masterworks, but on the list of his best, it strikes me as the odd one out. Consider Stravinsky's best ballets:
The Agon differs by being one of his first excursions into serialism. The work switches from neo-Renaissance to neo-serialist, section by section. In character it could hardly be more different from Apollo, which is all loveliness and serenity. In a sense, it harks back, just a bit, to the brutality of the Rite.
Lesser works, such as The Card Game and Orpheus, don't quite meet up to the standards set in the works listed above — or work as well as Stravinsky's non-ballet works that have become ballet standards, such as the Symphony in Three Momvements or the Danses Concertantes.
But the thing that most impresses me about Agon is that, while most performances are pretty bad, the work itself — as composed by Stravinsky and sitting, patiently waiting in the nuosphere as a kind of Platonic ideal — is very, very good.
The first performance I ever heard was conducted by Stravinsky himself. It was by no means persuasive,
by which I mean, good. It didn't quite fit together.
The thing is, however, is that I somehow knew
that the thing did work. It's just very difficult to perform well. At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Though I have since heard better renditions, no performance has completely persuaded me of its first-rankness.
There appear to be some clumsy passages. Indeed, I could be wrong: the work may be of the second rank, placing Orpheus and others down to Stravinsky's third rank of works.
But there's so much that's so good in it, so much to suggest that, with the right ensemble and conductor, this, too, will appear to all reasonable listeners as a Great Work, worth listing together with Petrouchka and the Rite and Apollo, etc.
I was reminded of this puzzle while listening to some non-polished performances of a recent work for orchestra. I had my hunches to go by, and to some extent the score, that indicated that this new work was really quite excellent, amazingly good. The truth is, the performances were not up to snuff.
Yesterday I was listening to William Schuman's Seventh Symphony. Absolutely rivetting, tight performance. And yet, for all the work's merit, for all the recording's merit, the music isn't as congenial to me as the obviously non-tight performances of Lured by the Horizon, a new work I wrote about a few days ago.
This is a matter of taste. Just as I prefer early Schuman to late Schuman, I prefer (early!) Reinkemeyer to late Schuman. There is no arguing about this. De gustibus
and all that.
But there is room for argument about the unexplored and as-yet-unrevealed glories of the new work, because, so far, it has not quite got its due. Similarly, one can argue about various performances of Agon. This one I say is obviously better than that; Tilson-Thomas or Salonen may prove better than Stravinsky himself at conducting the work. But in an extended dicsussion we could elucidate what it is in each performance and recording that elicits this or that judgment from me . . . or you.
We could, with profit, discuss in detail which sections and which lines of music work better in this recording or that. We might even get a long way to understanding what it is about Agon that impresses, even when every performance doesn't quite cut it.
There are only a few works that I have strong enough intuitions about to seek out and purchase multiple recordings, just to satisfy my urge to find the ideal
performance. Sibelius's Fifth Symphony is one; I often disagree with the way conductors handle the final series of chordal blasts, the faux-Beethoveenia. Beethoven's Seventh Symphony is another; the first movement is so easy to botch up (though the great slow movement appears indestructible). Works by Chavez, Hovhaness, Copland, Poulenc and Hindemith also fit on the list. Sometimes one performance heard once makes the work click,
but other performances don't click. Gloria, by Poulenc, is one that is usually messed up, made horrible hash of. I love Hindemith's Clarinet Sonata largely because my little sister performed it so well years ago, not because I really appreciate the weak-sounding clarinet work I've heard from some professional clarinettists!
Andrea L. Reinkemeyer's Lured by the Horizon now gets placed in that same company. I've heard two performances. Neither were polished. Both suggest the work's brilliance. Looking over the score, I can see places where I'd handle the conducting differently. But the ideal the score points to, and the performances hint at, is obviously there
in the sense of a permanent potentiality. (I will not get too metaphysically weird, here.)
Orchestral music is an amazing emprise. It takes a lot of talent and a lot of rehearsal to get new works up to snuff and ready for a concert outing. It's amazing that anything new comes out. When you realize the vastness of the available, established repertory, the idea of adding to it can seem daunting.
But temptations to fall back on the intertia of the established works must be resisted. As long as civilization exists, great new music will continue to well up. That's one of the glories of humanity.
And even if we determine that Agon isn't as lovely as Apollo, or as exciting as the Rite, its own quirky charms suggest that one standard cannot handle all that's been written since . . . Handel, or Brahms.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 9, 2006 | permalink
New York, July 1968
Britannica Wikipedia See: Wendy Carlos
Feeling nostalgic, I bought three compact discs yesterday:
Walter Carlos was one of the people who turned me on
to classical
(fine art) music. Before that my interest in music had been limited to hymns, the occasional pop song, and what I improvised on the piano. He switched
a lot of people, I'm sure. But it wasn't just his Baroque arrangements that impressed me.
My cousins Laura and Diane had an LP of the soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, and were both suitably impressed by one particular piece of music on that album, Timesteps by Walter Carlos. That may be the first piece of synthesizer music I ever noticed, and I really, really enjoyed it.
I haven't heard it in years. I'm sure I'll get a copy soon, unless this passion for nostalgia dissipates before my next sashay through the aisles and locked cases of Bach'n'Rock (or similar record store).
But, reading the liner notes, I decided to go online to Britannica and see what more I could learn about synthesizers. What I found was an interesting article, but . . . what it said about Walter Carlos was inaccurate.
It did indicate the most obvious fact, though not explain it: that Walter had, at some point, become Wendy. I gathered that Walter's successful albums had financed his sex change, from male to female. It's odd to see this rather momentous personal event listed only as Walter (later Wendy) Carlos.
The inaccuracy was more musical. Consider this passage discussing the Switched-On Bach album:
The record displayed technical excellence in the sounds created and made the electronic synthesis of music more intelligible to the general listening public. This is useful so long as it is realized that the materials on the record are arrangements of familiar music, not original compositions. (Carlos later created an original electronic score for the science fiction film Tron.)
This passage does more than merely suggest that Carlos was primarily a performer, and that his/her own compositional efforts were of negligible value, or at least derivative of his/her performing and recording efforts.
The truth, of course, is that Carlos had studied composition in college, had composed electronic music before taking up Bach on the Moog, and that, well, his work Timesteps was used in film ten years before Tron; in the great movie A Clockwork Orange, for example.
So I went to Wikipedia, for a spot comparison. Its article on Wendy Carlos is, if not comprehensive, at least far more exhaustive than Britannica's bare mention. It makes no insinuation about Carlos's compositions, but makes no analysis or special note of them either.
Still, hands down Wikipedia comes far ahead in terms of quality. The Britannica, in another spot check, is shown to contain less information, and to inaccurately skew the presentation of the information, leading one to wonder what kind of quality checks go on at the great encyclopedia.
Wikipedia's effort, though not perfect, is far, far better.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 12, 2006 | permalink
Pried into the interstices of my life these past few weeks have been a few movie outings. It won't take much prodding or prying to get judgments out of me:
Oh, and at Wal-Mart I purchased a two-DVD special set of The Interpreter and Inside Man only to discover (when I got home) that the special sets were special because they were Full Screen, not Widescreen, formatted DVDs. As a twist of the knife, the director of The Interpreter has a special segment on how awful it is that studios produce and people buy pan-n-scan (Full Screen) versions of widescreen works. Well, thanks a lot.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 15, 2006 | permalink
Neil Armstrong howler See: One giant blunder for mankind: how NASA lost moon pictures
Slips of the tongue aren't exactly rare with me. I've started playing with an iSight camera and mic, and I know this now better than ever.
There's at least one conference tape in which I appear that I wish would go missing.
This came to mind when NASA's recent screw-up hit the news. It seems that NASA can't find the original moon landing recordings. Everything we have is second-generation, lower-quality TV video.
The National Archive had borrowed the tapes in the early '70s, but returned them. Now NASA is searching through paperwork to find out where they got put.
It's rather like trying to find the Ark of the Covenent . . . in Washington, DC, after The Raiders of the Lost Ark. But this bureaucratic mystery was not planned. It was accidental. (Or else an act of theft, which most reports don't even mention.)
I wonder what Neil Armstrong thinks. I remember the moon landing, when I was a kid. I watched the first moon walk, and heard Armstrong make his instantly famous proclamation, One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
I remember thinking, what does that mean?
because while he distinguished between man
and mankind,
he didn't place an article before man
to carry the distinction through. As he said it, it was preciously close to gibberish.
He later confessed that he meant to say One small step for a man,
but forgot to say the a.
Oops. You only take the first step on the moon once. But better a verbal slip than a physical one.
The available second-hand recordings show his mistake. Think he's looking for better recordings to prove it all the more clearly?
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 20, 2006 | permalink
NASA modest proposal See: Eggheads ankle committee as NASA takes Giant Leap at a rolling donut
NASA's robots and waldos do great research. Unfortunately, our pickled politicians and fickle populace prefer manned missions, so getting more money means throwing more money down the risky and unprofitable wormhole of manned space exploration.
There's a reason to put people in space, of course: for sheer fun. That's why space tourism is such a good idea, as Paul Jacob frequently mentions in his Common Sense spots. There's no reason for taxpayers to fund something so fun and so risky. Leave it to rich adventurers and the entrepreneurs (and Russians) who can make it happen. It's on their backs (and, er, burnt-out corpses) that the future of manned space flight rests.
But NASA seems to be caught in a whirlwind of nostalgia. Three scientists have recently resigned in a fracas over how to spend tax money, the scientists belittling the recent goofy notions of Project Orion and the like. On Hit and Run, Tim Cavanaugh puts such notions in their proper perspective:
Could anything be more pointless than Project Orion, which will send a four-person capsule back to the moon? That's a feat somewhat like demonstrating that by using a Telex machine you can send a document across town in only a half-hour.
But what Mr. Cavanaugh misses is that people want a human story. Science is not on most people's minds. Science, after all, is about conjectures and refutations, public testing, and being proven wrong more often than not . . . and still, somehow, coming out ahead. Science is simply beyond the imagination of most of our video-watching nation.
So, with this reality in place, and with what we know about the tastes of our television viewing audience, the answer to NASA's problems is clear: send felons condemned to death to Mars. One way.
Give them just enough to land and carry on (some experiments?) on the surface of the Red Planet. If they become slackard, or truculent, they die. If they are cooperative enough, we send up more rockets after them, with food, supplies, etc. And we can watch them make Mars habitable.
And we get the ultimate Reality Show back here on Earth.
Sell feed rights to the various networks. Each can put on its own show, each with a distinct take on the adventure. Live talk shows could compete with game shows could compete with comic comment shows. NASA could put itself into the online gambling biz, and make a killing. So to speak — the point of the betting would be how long will these bozos survive?
At the end of Tim Cavanaugh's post, he added Libertoid boilerplate: Of course, doing scientific research with taxpayer funds is worse than the Holocaust, all NASA administrators should be tried for crimes against humanity, etc etc.
My solution gets around this problem, except for anarchists (and who cares about them?) Execution, after all, is a government function if anything is. NASA might be able to fund manned expeditions and even get a little science done in between the drama of postponed death and the ribaldry of interplanetary anal probe jokes. Everyone would be happy. And the Mars colonization would proceed with more humanity than the British colonization of Australia.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 21, 2006 | permalink
brinksmanship anti-imperialism See: On Remaining Unashamed of Anti-imperialism
War really excites most people. It's fun to get the blood up, and dream of killing people en masse. And feeling justified in doing so! What a rush.
The great danger, of course, is overkill: retaliation so beyond measure that a strategy billed as a response to an attack becomes justification, in the eyes of others, to up the ante to repeat attack and counter-attack ad infinitum.
This is so elementary that you'd think normal people would blanch when pushing for the strongest possible responses to an attack. But in America, this is still quite popular.
Yesterday I received a rather hysterical email from a pro-war fanatic, and responded to it on Instead of a Blog. Taking a step back, I realize that by devoting thousands of words to such a trivial piece of nonsense I exacerbate the friction already between the two of us. But, oh well. This is metaphorical war about real war. And I can't help but continue my defense of anti-imperialism in a world filled with vile and unthinking pro-war nonsense.
A friend stopped by for a visit yesterday, and she asked me what I thought the result of our war policy was going to be. I said that I suspected that, some day, a radical Muslim group would explode a nuclear device within U.S. boundaries. (Actually, I think that it is more likely that they will grab dirty nuclear waste and spread that; but, well, same difference.)
She then asked what I think would be the proper response. I'm not sure I ever answered her, because the main thrust of all my argumentation is that we should avoid bringing the war to such a level. But she carried on: we should bomb Mecca.
I've brought this very idea up before, soon after 9/11. I brought it up as the only way to possibly win a full-out war on terrorism with Islam. I brought it up, howevere, as sort of the reductio ad absurdum, the place we don't want to go: killing thousands and thousands of people who are innocent.
Now my friend argued that this was a response best advertised in advance, as a way to influence Islamic radicals to cease and desist, and to influence Islamic non-radicals to restrain their radicals.
The risks of such a strategy are great, however. If the U.S. were actually to do such a thing, there's a good chance that a whole sector of Islam would go utterly ballistic, and we'd have to go the next step to maintain our political stability: genocide.
So, the end of all this talk of war is genocide.
Which is why I think that the smarter method of dealing with radical Islam (which I've brought up before, and which I briefly reiterate on Instead of a Blog) is much more low key and less outright in provocation.
Think about it, though: people so enjoy war that they contemplate blowing up Mecca with a dirty bomb! So what if innocents die? So what if a center of religious worship is desecrated? It's not my religion!
Oh, yes, war is fun to contemplate.
It's just not so fun to endure. The United States itself is risking dissolution and even destruction by engaging mid-East fanatics in the current manner. Undertaking regime change in an area where regime change by conquest is less appreciated than it would be in our own country . . . and still, some people eagerly contemplate further brinksmanship and even genocide.
I am not impressed.
It is worth mentioning that my friend is a Christian. She hates Islam, surely, as much as I do. But I don't think she respects its danger. She still believes that God is on her side. I, on the other hand, believe in the Thomas Theorem: imagined causes can be real in their effects. Believing strongly in a vicious, vindictive God like Allah has consequences. I suspect that their imaginary god is stronger than the Christians' imaginary loving
one. I suspect this based on the evidence of the level of fanaticism; when I see Christians eagerly strap on bombs and kill themselves in order to kill others, I'll consider changing my opinion here.
It's my belief that civilized Westerners must fight back the potential hordes of Muslim Imperialists with subtler means than coarse deities imagined millennia ago. Or bombs invented decades ago. There are alternatives to never-ending warfare.
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 29, 2006 | permalink
20/20 extinction See: Changes in Our Solar System: Is Trouble Coming? Hawking Answers
Last night's 20/20 was simple, sensational, and yet my kind of TV. Eight distinct endings to the world. ABC counted the list as seven, but really, the show provided eight. The last two (listed first last night, but last here, just to confuse) were listed as one. No biggie; even the ancient Hebrews had trouble seeing that their Ten Commandments really numbered 13. Here's the death list:
children,that is, by super-intelligent robots.
Readers of science fiction are, of course, pretty well acquainted with more than a few of these. All were pretty well explained. The talking head scientists were rather fun, though not very technical. I was unsurprised to see the haunting visage of Stephen Hawking. I was a little surprised to see James Lovelock listed as just a scientist, and given such a low-key thing to say.
The final note by the scientists was almost witless, of course: something to the effect that if we can put a man on the moon, surely we can solve this problem.
But they are very different kinds of problems, and curbing CO2 output would require a lot more sacrifice than anything humanity has faced so far . . . though not, perhaps, as much sacrifice as allowed civilization to start up in the first place.
The scientist who should have been included? Thomas Schelling. Why? Well, game theorists are at least somewhat realistic about what human beings can achieve by applied coöperation.
Of course, minor versions of several of these likely-to-un- end-time scenarios could cause some of us horrible problems, like, er, death. I just picked up a book last month on the Orphan Tsunami noticed in Japan in the 18th century, and the identification of that tsunami to a Richter Scale 9+ earthquake in Cascadia, where I live. The authors of the booklength study (which I highly recommend) believe the earthquake/tsunami is periodic, and that we're due for another any time now. My favorite hang-out, the Long Beach Peninsula, will be leveled, if not by the quake, then by the resulting tsunami.
Such shows give us a lot to think about. Since most people aren't reading the right literature, they need shows like this to spark interest.
As for the likeliest scenario, well:
dwarf planetPluto, which will be swung into a fast trajectory towards the Magellanic Cloud, where it
T i m o W i r k m a n V i r k k a l a | August 31, 2006 | permalink | ThinkingMatters
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