Stories and Drones - Phil Kline

Stories & Drones

Celebrating Trickster, Polystylist John Adams @ 70

I’ve never thought of John Adams as a minimalist. For one thing, the timing wasn’t right. He arrived just after, finding his voice around the time Steve Reich had already pointed the way to post-minimalism. In their groundbreaking works, Reich, La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass practically erased the music right before them from their vocabularies, but Adams has always played with the past, from the hint of Romantic Sturm und Drang in Shaker Loops and the collected cliches of Grand Pianola Music to the full-on, excitable engagement of Beethoven in Absolute Jest.

In fact, that last title is a clue. Adams has called himself a trickster, playing around, making whirlwinds on minimalism’s “prairies of non-event.” And while he has also called himself a post-stylist, he is indeed a multi-stylist and a synthesizer of previous styles, much like other composers who came toward the end of a century or an era.

Philip Glass @ 80: A 24-Hour Birthday Celebration

What can you say about Philip Glass? That he was the first or second minimalist you ever heard or heard of? That he’s one of the pillars of the ’70s downtown scene? That he’s written 11 symphonies, scads of operas and film scores, that he’s one of the first composers to found his own ensemble, to start his own record label (three of them, in fact,) that he writes every day, seeming as unstoppable as the flow of the Amazon, probably has laid down more double bars than any composer since Telemann, has befriended, collaborated with, and/or helped more musicians and artists than anyone, that he gave birth to a sound that was once called (both with affection and derision) “deedle-deedle music?” Or that he has given me great joy?

Top New-Music Moments of 2016: Barbara Hannigan

It was a very good year for Hans Abrahamsen – and Erik Satie, for that matter – in large part due to Barbara Hannigan. First, she was the “onlie begetter” of Abrahamsen’s let me tell you, which seems to have achieved instant immortality, as if history was merely waiting for the stars to align for her coloratura to soar in Abrahamsen’s magical score. (I was at Carnegie that night in January when her voice trailed off into the ether and we all stopped breathing.) Then came her Satie recital with Reinbert de Leeuw and it’s love all over again, like we’d never really heard what that music could sound like before. What else? Lulu? Pelléas? Alice’s Adventures? Singing while conducting Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre in a vinyl dress? Yes, yes, yes, and YES! So, it’s official, as of 2016 we have yet to find out what Barbara Hannigan cannot do incredibly well.

10 Cutting-Edge Artists That Have Captured the Imagination Mid-Year: The Crossing Choir

It seems like a simple and necessary concept: a professional chamber choir devoted to new music. And yet, in these parts at least, there is only one, The Crossing Choir of Philadelphia. Thank God it’s really good and, under the direction of Donald Nally, doing great things. Founded in 2005 by friends who wanted to sing together, The Crossing has now given over 40 world premieres, with 25 commissioned works being performed this season alone. I first heard it in two spectacles — James Dillon’s 3-hour-long Nine Rivers at Miller Theatre, and John Luther Adams’s Sila at Lincoln Center, where the singers had to stand in water — but got a better feeling for its sound and spirit in warmer and more intimate works by Gavin Bryars and David Lang. It’s just unveiled the Buxtehude-inspired Seven Responses, featuring composers such as Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Caroline Shaw, David T. Little and Santa Ratniece. It hits Mostly Mozart in August.

Why Erik Satie Is Still New Music

In 1887, Erik Satie finished three piano pieces he called Sarabandes. He was 21, and they were the last music he would write under his parents roof. As he struck out on his own and moved to the Bohemian hub of Montmartre, Satie’s mysterious works soon became the talk of the avant-garde. In time they would help kindle a revolution or two.

Satie cut quite a figure, at one point he dressed only in black cassocks then later switched to gray velvet suits. He played piano in the cabaret Le Chat Noir for three years and briefly associated himself with the self-proclaimed Babylonian King and Rosicrucian sect leader, Sar Peladan. He even founded his own religion, the Metropolitan Church of Art and Jesus, the Conductor, of which he was the only member. In a typical gesture, Satie advertised the premiere of an opera, Tristan’s Bastard, which was probably never written.

Maybe it’s a good thing I began by listening rather than having his music described to me, for listing its attributes can be overwhelming. You’ve probably read the rap sheet… long-scale multi-movement works on religious themes, a lot for organ, strongly influenced by Debussy, plainsong, the music of India, Indonesia, Japan and Ancient Greece… and birds… amateur ornithologist, collected birdsongs and used them freely in his music. Oh, yes, he was synesthetic. And what the heck are modes of limited transposition and non-retrogradable rhythms?

Hearing Messiaen for the First Time and Six Illuminating Videos

Many of us have moments in our lives when we hear music that changes us, opens up new vistas, or sends us off on a different course. I vividly recall turning on the radio to listen to my local classical station when I was about 14. They were playing an organ piece, slow and hypnotic, with odd harmonies, sounding both eastern and western, at once new and very old. It felt as if i were hearing colors and incense, a ritual in infinite space. The announcer said it was Les Bergers from La Nativité du Seigneur and I immediately headed for the library to check out Olivier Messiaen. Happy to say, I’m still checking him out.

Edgard Varèse: Another Cutting-Edge Composer Over 130

Every now and then it occurs to me: Edgard Varèse! Such explosive sounds and impulses, like forces of nature, with as much visionary energy as ever existed in one composer… and hair to match! Born one year after Stravinsky, Varèse wrote his massive early tone poem Amériques in obvious homage to The Rite of Spring, and yet it sounds like the work of a composer from a generation or two later. Well, not really. It doesn’t sound like the work of anyone else. In fact, it’s only now, in the kinetic frenzy of a piece by Andrew Norman, or a sinuous soundscape by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, that I feel like the threads of Varèse’s influence are being picked up.

Varèse was born in Paris, but moved to New York in 1915 and spent most of the rest of his life there. At the time of Amériques, he lived in Harlem, and described how his view of buildings and rivers at night influenced him. When I first moved to New York, I lived uptown with a similar view and, yes, I listened to Amériques, while watching the boat lights in the distance. It was uncanny, the sense of wild fascination, beauty and danger communicated by the music.