Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Transfiguring the Night

The only person who can help poor Schoenberg now is a psychiatrist.

-Richard Strauss

"You're a slouch not to like it," he said to me one day.  "Studying ordered relationships is ultimately the best there is.  Order is everything."
-Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus

When I was in high school, the curriculum included a mandatory music appreciation class.  In addition to being mandatory, the class marshaled all the worst features of classroom instruction to make its case:  a huge amphitheater of a classroom, an otherworldly teacher who wasn’t able to communicate his love of music to the class, and an approach of pure lecture with the odd bit of listening thrown in.

Slouching Toward Lachenmann: Who Cares If I Listen?

 Schoenberg is dead.
-Pierre Boulez

Boulez is alive.
-Judd Greenstein

Milton Babbitt, 1916-2011.  In Memoriam.

I’ve been affected, in writing this post, by the Ecstatic Music Festival going on in New York City (through March 28, 2011).  I was able to attend only a small part of the opening day’s Marathon, but the part I attended was sublime.  The Chiara String Quartet played Jefferson Friedman’s String Quartet No. 3, and the NOW Ensemble played Judd Greenstein’s City Boy.  Both pieces were superb, the musicians excellent, and the composers were in attendance.  I was, yes, ecstatic, to be able to attend two more concerts that week.

Slouching Toward Lachenmann: John Cage, In Silence and in Sound

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
-William Butler Yeats

I love John's mind, but I don't like what it thinks.
-Pierre Boulez

I remember once, in my college days, going with friends to a posh art gallery in Chicago.  Down the middle of the gallery floor were piles of dirt and stone.  We drifted past, reaching down to touch the piles.  We thought we’d come too early, that the show wasn’t yet up, and the gallery was still under construction.  I’d been to Chicago’s Art Institute many times, so I knew what art looked like, and this gallery had no art.