After Ojai

YOUR humble blogger spent the weekend at the Ojai Music Festival. Here are a few quick impressions.

There are not many ideas we like better than a classical music festival, dedicated mostly to contemporary work, and held almost entirely outside in a verdant valley. This year, the existing Ojai template was sweetened further by a concentration on West Coast composers, especially Henry Cowell – along with the ornery Charles Ives, the original classical maverick -- and his student Lou Harrison.

I saw some sublime performances as well as a few that reinforced my mixed feelings about contemporary music. Mostly, though, the festival was a blast. (Mark Swed made better sense of the whole thing here than I think I can.)

Mark Morris, the Seattle-reared, now Brooklyn-based, choreographer, scheduled this year’s festival, and he proved a frequent presence around Libbey Park and the other festival venues.

 

Composer Lou Harrison

On Friday night, in white clothes, shorts, and scarf, he strolled across the park, attendants in tow, for a special performance, cradling a glass of red wine he sipped from but which never seemed to drain: Filled out from his original appearance as a young dancer, he came across as a vaguely Shakespearean figure, perhaps Prince Hal turned to Falstaff and enjoying the transformation. I hope the very sharp pianist Jeremy Denk, who heads the festival next year, can cut so dashing a figure.

One of the highlights was the first-ever Ojai performance of In C, the pioneering Terry Riley piece often credited with inaugurating the whole minimalist movement. There is no conventional development in this work, and at times my attention began to drift. But mostly, this was a triumph of shimmering harmonies and interlocking rhythms, with moments that reminded me not only of Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and India raga but Krautrock and Television’s Marquee Moon as well.

Composer John Adams has called In C the moment that pleasure principle, after long exile by academic music and Schoenbergian dread, was invited back into the concert hall.

Lou Harrison’s posthumous presence at the festival was a real pleasure as well – in concert music at the Libbey Bowl, in various performances on the gamelan -- an instrument he helped popularize in the U.S. -- and in the illuminating documentary by Eva Soltes that was absolutely mobbed. Harrison’s music, some of it Asian influenced, much of it quite accessible and all of it with an exploratory quality, remains far too obscure, especially on major labels; it was nice for so much of it to see the light of day this weekend.

Another highlight was the piece by Alaskan composer John Luther Adams, songbirdsongs, performed at a heavenly spot called Meditation Mount at an hour at which I prefer to be still sleeping. My morning-lark wife dragged me out, and the emulations of birdsong by percussion group red fish blue fish provoked some actual birds to join in.

Another Luther Adams piece, For Lou Harrison, had a more ambiguous reception. As I walked across the park, I heard an otherworldly sound coming from the bowl, and grabbed my young son and snuck into the rehearsal. For six or seven minutes we were transfixed by its hypnotic scale. Those who went to the concert later that night  were less captivated: As the piece approached the hour mark, with little change of key or melody, the audience grew restless. Upon its conclusion – I’m told by a fellow scribe – one wag yelled out, “Play it again!”

A final word: We briefly bumped into Morris at the festival’s green room, and when he spotted my son, we mentioned his tendency to play “air piano” to some of the pieces. He asked if the lad had been playing along to Friday-night’s performance of Erik Satie and John Cage on toy piano. (The young ‘un had rushed to the top of some play equipment and begun to move to the Satie especially.) We told him this was indeed the same kid. “Ah,” Morris replied. “I know your work.”

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. 

The Long Shadow of John Cage

ONE hundred years ago today, a child was born in Los Angeles who would go on to... well, what exactly was Cage's impact anyway? I've been trying to figure that out since I studied experimental music at Wesleyan two decades ago.

Whatever it is, part of what interests me about Cage is how his influence -- ideas like indeterminacy, his reworking of certain Asian ideas including the Tao, prepared instruments that extended the innovations of Henry Cowell -- reached outside classical or experimental music. He even inspired, albeit briefly, the Beatles.

In this story, from Sunday's LA Times, I speak to a wide range of artists, including Stephin Merritt of Magnetic Fields and Mac from Superchunk, about the composer's long reach.

Here's what performance artist Rachel Rosenthal, who knew Cage a bit in New York in the '50s, told me about him:

His presence was peculiar – unlike anyone else’s. He was always either smiling and laughing – or extremely serious. Nothing in between.

LA's New Opera Company

WHAT would it look like if Hurricane Katrina blew across an Italo Calvino fable? We might be able to find out when Crescent City, whose creators call it a "hyperopera," comes to Atwater Crossing later this week.

Recently I visited the set, much of which was designed by local visual artists, and met with director Yuval Sharon and composer Anne LeBaron of CalArts. Here's my story.

Sharon, who used to run the edgy Vox series at New York City Opera, is one of the founders of The Industry, a new company that will put together experimental performances. He's a trip, and a lot of fun to talk to, expecially about Brecht and Wagner. If all goes well, he could inject some powerful energy into the local arts scene. He reminds me in some ways of David Sefton... Very much looking forward to catching Crescent City.

I'm also enjoying the arts-oriented warehouse complex Atwater Crossing itself, and had a good time there at party for Slake magazine over the weekend.

Living by Chance With Rachel Rosenthal

IF laurie anderson was a parisian-born octo-genarian theater pioneer she might be rachel rosenthal. for rosenthal -- to whom many figures of the american avant-garde are indebted -- john cage's "indeterminacy" proved as influential as the velvet underground's dazed strum was on anderson's generation. (okay, that's enough metaphors for one paragraph.)

here is my profile of rosenthal, who extols the importance of "chance" in art and life and recalls new york in the 50s with cage/ cunningham/ rauschenberg/ johns.

she also talks about saturday's birthday party at Track 16 Gallery, her new book ("the dbd experience") and the improvisational theater troupe she launches early next year.

meeting rosenthal was a real trip -- a major iconoclast, associated with radical feminism, animal rights and her own shaved head, who is also into a courtly woman with a gertrude stein haircut and a soft, pan-european accent. (she calls herself a gay man inside a woman's body.)

my favorite quote that didnt make the article: "much of what's called performance art is not interesting to me. i'm not interested in shock -- there's enough shock in everyday living, every time you turn on the tv."

Photo credit: Michael Childers