Making
music ought
not to be
agony:
semantics
sixteenth notes
studies

So I went to see the Intersections concert at the Conrad Centre–and actually as a paying patron, can you believe it? And so and so and so I got to see the whole thing and so and so and so I am going to write about it.

This Intersections was “Nico’s Choice” featuring “music that he digs”–he being Nico Muhly whose blog I friggin’ love. And man! Good taste, sir. Proper respect. The first piece was music from a film called “Drowning By Numbers” by Michael Nyman which–get this–was one of the first pieces I ever had on my computer. Before I was in music, before I became obsessed with minimalism, before everything when all else in my collection was Switchfoot and Final Fantasy, I listened to “Fish Beach” and “Knowing the Ropes” kind of obsessively, actually. So when they started playing I got one of those jolts of recognition like “Holy crap!” So knowing those pieces like I do–in a backwards and simple sonic-jacuzzi familiarity kind of way–and then listening to them with my newly trained ears was pretty amazing.
The thing about Michael Nyman’s music, and these pieces in particular, is that it is so ordinary. It’s what we’re expecting, the motives are film-soundtracky and mundane–but it doesn’t resolve, it doesn’t really progress, it just sits in this kind of perpetual motion and then just…stops. It is a piece that gets so much of its substance from how it moves (or how it doesn’t move) and how it ends (or how it doesn’t end). It’s so unsubtle that it’s kind of profound.

I made a lot of orchestration notes at this concert–the first one I made, during the Nyman, was this moment in the winds where something about the blend of trumpet and flute and something else sounded MIDI-like.

Then Edwin and Nico chatted to us for a while and my notes are all things like “I totally have a shirt like that except I wear it partially buttoned” and quotes like “I don’t want to sound like a big gay muppet,” and “Piles of things that are the same” which is what this concert was programmed around (not the muppet thing, the piles thing). And there was Powerpoint, making it seem like the most charming lecture ever.
“Piles of things that are the same” refers to the repeating bassline (passacaglia) idea that pervaded the whole concert. People’s different concepts of time–Nico showed us a bunch of different calendars–was also a part of it, how everyone divides things differently.

We heard a Philip Glass piece next–the third movement of his third symphony which was on my listening tests in high school music! MORE jolts of recognition. (What was this, Esther’s musical subconscious night or what?) There was some fantastic segmentation happening (I think I’m going to have to spend some time with the score to figure it all out), but you know, I’d never thought of Glass as a brilliant orchestrator before, but he did things in the strings that I admire: breaking them down so that everyone is a soloist. I loved too how every so often I’d become aware of the bass–that repeating thing–in the stereo effect of listening to one thing which is multiple things.

I still have no idea how Nico’s father’s turkey fryer fit into this concert, but we spent a few minutes on it after the Glass. It was kind of fun, though, you know? Endearing.

Then there was a snippet of Purcell (which would’ve been better at the beginning of the show I think Nico was right), followed by Richard Reed Parry’s piece, “For Heart Breath and Orchestra”! The musicians had stethoscopes and Edwin barely conducted–the idea was that each musician used their own heartbeat for a pulse (get it get it) and the result was shattered and individual and cascading and I felt that everything made sense, but there were dozens of senses. It was contemplative and sparkling at the same time.
In FIRE (the student improv group at WLU), we spend a lot of time focusing on deep listening to the ensemble. This was more about deep listening to oneself. It was so good, though. I could listen to that all day.

One thing I was upset about: they played the David Lang chamber piece during intermission! What Is Up With That, I would like to know. I would’ve liked to hear it while everything was quiet, where I could see the musicians, and where I would’ve known to listen from the beginning. It was wonderful anyway, pointillistic and shifting. Edwin said it is called “Sweet Air” and is what Lang thought his son was feeling during a visit to the dentist which involved laughing gas.

What followed intermission was arrangements of Byrd pieces “Miserere mei, deus” and “Bow thine ear, o Lord”, both arranged for chamber orchestra by Nico. The orchestration was simple, it made sense, there was some neat instrument-coupling-timbres which I made note of for future reference (trumpet and viola, trombone and violin, violin and clarinet), but the coolest colour was the piano! Way up in its high register plinking along under the broad strings! It shook it out of its comfort zone a little (and speaking of comfort zones and not being in them, Jim was playing English Horn. Since when does that ever happen?).

And then and then: “From Here on Out,” Nico’s piece, originally the score for a ballet, and fit with the passacaglia theme; it was so, so great. Edwin said a while ago in a talk at the school that good music expresses emotion, and I love when it’s the complicated emotions that are explored, and that is what I got from this piece. The beginning sounds like quiet wonder feels: not “Wow!” but that feeling that comes when you can see the curvature of the earth in the sky, when something huge just clicks. I got impending excitement later: that tense feeling in your stomach when you’re excited and worried, and later the disconnected feeling that comes when something bad has happened but not yet sunk in, that “I should be sad but I can’t feel anything”.
I expect I’m crazy for getting all this, but even the title says it: “From Here on Out” is one of Nico’s usual idiomatic titles, but it makes *sense* because the thing is a journey. And the orchestration! It was “section” orchestration (strings/winds/brass), but like…SO much colour. I felt like I’d fallen into a bucket of paint. Like it should be a Sony Bravia ad, or something. There was so much happening, and yet somehow the texture was transparent; the changes were sudden, but they felt organic.

Okay, so this is more a “HOLY CRAP AMAZING” entry rather than serious criticism (I’ll leave that to Marcia), but I do have one crit: Jim’s oboing in “From Here on Out”. It was out of place, it stuck out, it was too Strauss and not enough Muhly, and the tone was pointy where it needed to be round and warm and blendy. I am disappointed!

But not really because I am much too happy about music right now to be disappointed.

(SPEAKING OF WHICH I had like 20 pieces played in concerts last week and now have a Giant Pile of recordings, so maybe my next blog will explore those a little.)