West Coast Minimalism at Ojai

ONE of the best things about spring in Southern California is the Ojai Music Festival, which turns the little valley town in Ventura county into the site of a risk-taking weekend of classical music with an emphasis on chamber music and contemporary work. Since its founding in the ‘40s, everyone from Stravinsky to Eric Dolphy (!!) has performed there. It kicks off Thursday.

This year’s music director – in recent years this chair has included Salonen, Kent Nagano, Dawn Upshaw and Leif Ove Andsnes – is choreographer Mark Morris. He’s selected a schedule heavy on work by West Coast mavericks, including Cage, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, Alaskan John Luther Adams and that Connecticut Yankee Charles Ives, whose radicalism and searching spirit make him for me an honorary West Coaster. (Disclosure: My ardor for Ojai predates the brief stint I did for the festival writing a newsletter essay for last year’s bash.)

A concert we’re especially excited about here at the Misread City is In C, the 1964 piece by Bay Area composer Terry Riley which is sometimes described as the first important work of minimalism. 

In the mid-‘70s, the late great music critic Robert Palmer called the piece “the single most influential post-1960 composition by an American,” describing its impact on not just Philip Glass and Steve Reich, but John Cale, Brian Eno, and jazz as well. I’ll let Palmer describe the piece here:

“’In C’ consists of 52 melodic/rhythmic motives, most of them as short and simple as a whole note or a group of six or eight sixteenths. It can be played by an ensemble of any composition and size. The musicians begin by playing the figures consecutively, but each one proceeds at his own speed, so that the melodic kernels soon begin to overlap in wild profusion, forming constantly shifting prismatic relationships with each other.”

The piece, then, as wildly new (and hippie-ish) as it would have seen in the ‘60s, also echoes the collective improvisation of early New Orleans, and opens up some possibilities that musicians are still pursuing in the 21^st century.

Despite having seen performances of Riley’s work, and knowing a New Albion recording of In C about as well as one can know such an elusive piece, I’ve never seen this one live. So I spoke to Dustin Donahue, part of the San Diego percussion ensemble red fish blue fish, about the Ojai performance his group will be a part of on Saturday morning.

“This one is pretty special,” he said, “because these groups from all over the country will come together to play this piece,” including members of Morris’s group and the jazz trio The Bad Plus. “With string and brass players, it’ll take on a whole new identity – we can’t really predict what it’ll sound like.”

Since all the musicians need to play – whatever their instrument – in the key of C, red fish blue fish will have to pick instruments that make sense. “We have to focus ourselves in the pitched percussion world – vibraphones, xylophones, glockenspiels, celestes. And there this particular part, where people are repeating a tone in C: We find idiosyncratic objects tuned to C – gongs, pipes, found objects”

Donahue – who says his group tends to look for “composers who are trying to discover something new or exploring other sound worlds” – is also looking forward to performing pieces by John Luther Adams, for his gift of isolating instruments in unusual harmonies, and John Cage, whose piece for six percussionist varies times for starting and time elapsed while playing.

As for In C: “So much of the measure of a good performance of In C is how much fun the performers are having… I can enter into a canon with the person next to me. You can be struck with a musical idea and see where it takes you. The more musical ideas you get from each other, the better. It can be an occasion for spontaneous joy. Whoever is in the room with you makes it its own special version of the piece.”

I was luck enough, about a decade ago, to interview Riley by phone before a performance in Orange County. I was struck that someone whose early explorations involved tape loops had become disillusioned with the use of technology. "It looked in the beginning much more promising than it's turned out," Riley told me from his ranch in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

While growing up, he and his peers heard mostly acoustic instruments and few things more high-tech than the radio. "Just hearing a tape recorder played backwards was startling to me in the '40s and '50s. " These days, though, technology is hard to escape. Riley says it's "eating up the souls of the musicians. People think they have to have the newest instrument or it will stifle their creativity. That's what the ads tell them -- and it's just nonsense. "

Only with acoustic instruments, he says, can he really feel like he's really engaging with the music.

This all said, very much looking forward to the 2013 Ojai Festival. 

Chamber Group Salastina Society

THE other evening I saw a sextet performance of Transfigured Night. To say that I have mixed feelings about its composer, Arnold Schoenberg, is about the only way I can put it: The dude wrote some lovely and powerful music, but also left the state of western classical music, especially in the academy, a smoking ruin for about two generations after his 120-stone and serial systems. He was clearly a complex dude, with what seemed like good reasons at the time for his formal shifts. (A stranger once asked him, "Are you that Arnold Schoenberg?" -- he offered back, "Well, no one else wanted to be, so I had to take the job.")

But I want to talk about this piece specifically, and Saturday night’s rendition of it. Transfigured Night was written when he was still quite young, and still a Wagner-drenched late romantic. The piece take tonality and chromaticism about as far as it can go, and the music and its poem are very much works of Germanic romanticism. I've always loved the piece in its sextet recording -- it's put on more often, I suspect, with orchestra -- but have never seen a chamber group version of it until last weekend.

The show was a performance by the Salastina Music Society, a mostly youngish Los Angeles group only a few years old that performs typically at the Broad Stage in Santa Monica, Zipper Hall at the Colburn School in downtown L.A., and elsewhere. I always love seeing chamber music, which I often prefer to orchestra concerts, so I'm hardly an unbiased judge here. But I can't imagine a better interpretation of this piece, which was remarkably warm and saw each voice fully integrated with the others. 

A nice bonus to this and some other Salastina concerts include an introductory interpretation by the KUSC deejay and general classical man-about-town Brian Lauritzen. I'm very fond of Brian's delivery -- here is my story on him -- and by asking the group to play brief passages from the piece, he brought out far more than I knew about the piece, the poem it's based on, romanticism, and Schoenberg's life story.  

My only regret is that poor Arnold -- at the time a 25-year-old in love with the sister of his music teacher -- did not write more pieces in this idiom.

I'll keep my eye out for more offerings from Salastina Society.

UPDATE:


Three thoughts came to me last night. First, how certain passages or phrases of the piece remind me of film music. As scary as Schoenberg can be, some of his stuff can be very cinematic. (I think Mark Swed has written how bits of serialism have shown up in movies, especially, if memory serves, horror movies.)

I usually groan when any event is opened up to audience questions. But the brief post-concert Q+A here was really illuminating, including the part where each musician spoke about his or her instrument, some of which were quite old. (As the owner of several guitars I could share their pride even though my instruments are not Venice-made or 19th-century.)

Finally: Composers like Schoenberg -- and this starts with Wagner and Liszt, I suspect -- felt the need to move beyond traditional major and minor keys, since tonality was supposedly confining. The musical innovations of the 20th century were supposed to allow you to do more. But listen to Transfigured Night, especially the way it was played the other night, with its moments of terror, guilt, uncertainty, pastoral, romantic sublime, and open-hearted forgiveness. It covers an enormous amount of emotional terrain.

When we listen to much contemporary music -- including all but a few pieces from Schoenberg's Second Vienna School -- the emotional palette is vastly narrower. You can do more technically, perhaps, and it gets alienation real well, when you "liberate" all twelve tones in the octave. But with the musical language that came after this early piece, you can say far less about human experience.

Brilliant Chamber Music Series

SINCE I first fell hard for classical music in my mid-20s, my favorite style to see live is chamber music. Early on, I think that came from my love of seeing rock n roll and small-combo jazz in small clubs. The intimacy of a string quartet in, say, an old stone church had some of the same energy and directness.

In recent years, perhaps the best venue for chamber music I've found is the Clark Library which is and isn't part of UCLA. (Okay, it's part of the university but on an archipelago closer to USC's campus than to Westwood.) I'll probably always remember the performance by the Takacs Quartet, especially their Janacek.

The Clark itself is a long and fascinating story -- lovely old Italianate building, built by local eccentric, now known for its holdings of 17th/18th c. British materials as well as more stuff on St. Oscar (Wilde) than you can believe. It's worth strolling the grounds, checking out the architectural details, and staying after for the receptions with the musicians.

But go for the music (and the acoustics.) The release and schedule is here. (NOT easy to get into -- there's a lottery.)

I'm especially pleased to see the series commitment this year to Shostakovich, one of my favorite composers and one who could turn pain into beauty and perhaps vice versa. (The Russians have a knack for that.)

And here is a video on youtube.

See ya there, gang.

The Return of Steve Reich

ON Tuesday I saw a fascinating concert by Steve Reich and Bang on a Can at Disney Hall. Once considered a minimalist with few ties to the mainstream, Mark Swed wrote in his review, Reich is now one of the most important and influential composers alive.

I sat down with Reich a few years ago and found him very accessible and easy going. My article starts by referring to the landmark "Music for 18 Musicians," which he led on Tuesday night. I've heard this piece perhaps more than any other piece of music not by the Beatles, and it was a thrill to see it and get a sense of exactly where all those shifting sounds emerged from.

The concert led off with the classic early Reich piece, "Clapping Music." Here is Swed's full review.

The Classical Violin and Heavy Metal

RACHEL Barton Pine walks both sides of the fence -- a classical violinist who plays a 1740s instrument but also rocks out to Black Sabbath and Guns N Roses. I get into her wide range of musical passions in the latest of my Influences column in the Los Angeles Times.

The violinist, by the way, plays this Sunday at one of the most amazing places I've ever seen chamber music -- UCLA's Clark Library in the West Adams district. Most of the time, the place is an important repository of rare books, 18th century English history and material related to Oscar Wilde. But the wood-lined room in which the chamber series takes place is intimate and resonant -- and very hard to get into.

Classical Underground Vs. The Philistines

IN my decade and a half writing about artists and cultural figures, i never met anyone as passionate, committed and outright insane for art as alexey steele, a soviet born painter who runs a monthly "classical underground" series in his artists loft. (here's my piece.)

but at first, i thought the whole thing might be a joke -- that alexey, who comes on a little bit like borat (check this out) might be putting me on. "i am overloaded!!" he shouted when i came to see him in an elaborate loft not far from LAX one night. he was wearing a fedora, reeking of sweat, and holding a hammer which he gestured with widly as he made points about art, malevich, the marketplace, and within a minute or two, the power grid was overloaded too: the fan and all the lights in his loft suddenly shut off.

a few minutes later, power restored, he runs off to get us some glasses and a bottle of the excellent angel city beer. cue broken glass. "sonofabitch!" i hear from the next room.

besides some fascinating (and overheated) conversations, alexey also showed me one of the most memorable classical concerts i've ever seen -- a chamber music show that included the first bach cello suite and a prokofiev piano sonata, in a casual warehouse space with near-perfect acoustics. my only hope is that the exposure my times piece brings does not change what alexey and his co-conspirators have labored to offer.

Photo credit: HighArtForever