I must have a great deal of resilience. It might be something in my nature (it certainly isn’t a product of nurture). I always try to arrive a few minutes early, be prepared, and I like to keep my glass at least half full most of the time. Most of the people that I come into contact with are of this mindset when it comes to music, and many of the people who live in my area of the midwest share a kind of political mindset that I prefer not to link to at the moment because it looms too large on my television, in my local newspaper, and, frankly, in my face.

Yes, I’m still “fired up” and “ready to go,” but sometimes it is difficult. I simply have to believe that my fellow countrypeople are intelligent and reasonable people who seek political leaders that are true public servants. I have to believe that the majority of people in this country appreciate people who do what they do because they want to make life better for people and uphold people’s constitutional rights. What I see around me tells me otherwise. It tells me that equal rights and choice for women are things that too many people (both men and women) don’t want to sign into law and protect. It tells me that religion in its most extreme form has some kind of place in American government (witness the Saddleback forum). I always thought that America had a system of government based on the idea of freedom of religion. That should also allow freedom from religion.

This past week has been like a circus, complete with distorting mirrors, charlatans, snake charmers, trained animals, creepy clowns (some wearing expensive dresses), and a bespectacled moose hunter in the spotlight on the high wire (she may or may not have a safety net, and lacks the experience to make it to the end). When the circus party in question packs up its tent and fades into the background of life instead of parading in the constant foreground, maybe I can start filling my figurative glass with something other than hard liquor.

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A reader writes to tell me they met the venerable Madame Martin, widow of Frank Martin, at a performance of the composer’s opera Der Sturm at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam yesterday. Martin is a neglected figure who was a teacher of Stockhausen for a short period. I wrote about him here last year and singled out his little known Requiem from 1972 for attention. We can only speculate how different Martin’s reputation would be today had the Swiss-born composer lived the last twenty-eight years of his life in America instead of Holland. If Frank Martin is remembered at all today it is for his choral music, and the Mass for double choir in particular, which features in my header image. But there is some very fine orchestral music which is collected on the Decca 2CD compilation seen below together with his oratorio In Terra Pax.

If your musical tastes favour tonality (and there is nothing wrong with that) but you want to explore the lacuna in twentieth century music where tonality met serialism this budget double CD is recommended. Wonderful playing from such great names as Karl Münchinger, Ernest Ansermet, L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande and Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra. The analogue sound is quite stunning, just listen to the crisp attack of the Suisse Romande players in the wind concerto. I am not going to say anything more about the sound for fear of putting off dedicated followers of digital fashion, but just let me say it isn’t stereo.

By sheer coincidence I saw details this week of a concert which the excellent Keswick Hall Choir is giving in Norwich Cathedral on February 28, 2009. Here is the exquisite programme, and many congratulations to the choir for not succumbing to a Rutter Requiem to put bottoms on seats in the cathedral.

Duruflé - Requiem
Frank Martin - Mass for double choir
Fauré - Cantique de Jean Racine
Poulenc - Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence

There is a video with sound from Frank Martin’s recording of Der Sturm with the Berlin Philharmonic and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on YouTube. More on the Keswich Hall Choir in Master Tallis’ Testament.
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Oh, the sheer elegance of synchronicity! Two recent posts here touched on musicians as literary figures and John Adams’ views on Britten’s settings of English texts. The next book after Hallelujah Junction in the pile collected last week from the estimable Norfolk Library Service was Between Each Breath by Adam Thorpe. I had been greatly impressed by Thorpe’s latest novel, but knew little about Between Each Breath. I picked it up today and read these words in the Acknowledgements:

With many thanks to John Woolrich and Jonathan Reekie of the Aldeburgh Festival of Music and the Arts, where I was writer-in-residence in 2004, and where the germ of this novel was first sown.

And these on the dust-jacket blurb:

Once ‘England’s most promising young composer’ - now living comfortably in Hampstead with his wife Milly, an heiress - Jack Middleton is no longer so young, nor has he fulfilled his remarkable promise. Between Each Breath is a rich and often hilarious critique of Blair’s Britain: decadent, bewildered, shallow, greedy, but knowing the right buttons to press; knowing the langauge of compassion and abusing it. A story … of age and youth, of wealth and poverty, of the new Europe and the old Europe, of art and compromise, of youthful ideals and cynical weariness.

Are words the new music?
Header image is from The Police’s album Synchronicity. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as “fair use”, for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

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If you were my height, you’d know that finding someone who’s shorter than you is always a delight, and watching them achieve artistic marvels is even better. So, meet my new favourite find, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the pint-sized principal conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic and now also the principal guest conductor of the LPO. He’s lovely. He’s terrific. He’s tiny.

Yannick took up his London podium the other night and did a fine job of steering the orchestra through its backing to the not-inconsiderable antics of Christian Lindberg, Swedish trombonist par excellence. Lindberg’s performance in a concerto by Sandstrom based on Don Quixote required him not only to play the instrument but also to execute some superb balletic sautés, shout in Spanish, sing very loudly and strip down to his, er, leopard-spotted leggings. Blimey, guv. Lindberg also transformed a Leopold Mozart rarity from what could have been computer-generated multipurposeclassicaltwaddle to a jewelled butterfly of sweetness.

Topping and tailing the Swedish showstopper were two wonderful Ravellian warhorses, La Valse to start and his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition to close.

Yannick is a joy to watch: he moves with grace, enthusiasm and eloquence, the band appears able to follow his beat and he’d memorised Pictures to perfection. There’ll be lots to look forward to from him in future. Yet…

…I couldn’t help missing Vladimir in the Mussorgsky. I don’t need to tell you, dear readers, that Mussorgsky is one of the darkest of all self-destructive Russian romantics and that there is a demoniac quality to those pictures - the horrible ox-cart with its drunken driver, the disgusting antisemitism of the wheedling trumpet solo, the witch herself flying from the chicken-legged hut…and the towering Great Gate of Kiev is an idealised vision of something that never matched up to its plan (I’ve seen the real thing, and it is quite sad by comparison). But the other night we enjoyed a sort of musical stroll through the National Gallery’s impressionism section, relaxed and very colourful, but not remotely disturbing. I could nearly taste the choc-ice. It was nice. Very nice. Too nice.

One final moment to remember: our own Tomcat, not being required for the Leopold Mozart, was backstage munching a sandwich, lost track of the time and wasn’t quite expecting to see the orchestral manager hunting for him with a cattle prod. He ended up receiving a round of applause to himself before the Sandstrom began.

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Growing up as a child of a musicians who came from families of musicians themselves, I always understood the concept of “working” as practicing, playing concerts, and teaching. I knew that my father worked in a “lab” before he worked as a musician (he was a chemist for what was to become NASA before he started playing in the Boston Symphony), but that was during a time when I was too small to have really noticed. My youngest childhood memories of family life always involved a great deal of music.

My window to the world of work was always a musical one. My friends’ parents (all of them, I guess) worked, but I never really understood what any of them did. I know my paternal grandfather made picture frames for a living, but he was a violinist. My maternal grandmother taught piano lessons, and I’m pretty my maternal grandfather (who was also a violinist) did something else for a living, but I never knew him. The only conversation I remember having with him was on the telephone, and in that conversation he told me that he wanted to give a violin to my brother. Oh well.

Anyway, when I started out in music I had every intention of working as a musician. Even as a flutist I had the “American Dream” mentality that if I worked hard enough, I would succeed. I got into Juilliard, which was a version of success, I suppose. I got a pretty good teaching job at a music school in the Bronx. I had pretty good social skills, and was able to get some lower-tier musical work in New York. There were mountains to climb as a musician in New York, but I had every intention of climbing them because I knew that I had the capacity for hard work and the desire to succeed.

Then the work in New York kind of dried up, and like many musicians trying to find work in the 1980s, I went to Europe to find a job. I was very lucky to find one (though the circumstances of the job made it impossible for me to stay in my little alpine Austrian town). Returning to America after my short stint in Hong Kong, I found myself faced with an economy that did not support professional musical life the way it had in the past, and I had to find a way to support myself.

I spent a summer in New York. I investigated the world of work, and applied for the kinds of jobs that didn’t require typing (I didn’t know how to touch type) like working in stores and restaurants. I did manage to get a part-time job reading to a blind stockbroker who liked employing musicians, and I found a few students, but (along with playing on the street and a little freelancing) I couldn’t make enough money to pay rent in New York.

I used to ask musicians how they supported themselves. Some did it by collecting unemployment insurance for playing seasonal jobs like the Ballet. One person told me that he supported himself (seriously) as a small-time criminal. And there were always people who worked as “call girls.” And then there was temporary office work, which involved knowing how to type at least forty words per minute. I decided that it was time to learn to type.

Typing seemed like an oasis of stability, but office work was a mystery to me. I found that people working in offices spent a lot of time on their personal social lives while at work. I also found that a lot of people who typed in offices did “other things.” There were lots of visual artists typing around Boston, and there was a sharp line between “professionals” and “support staff.” The professionals around Boston seemed to enjoy having “support staff” who were “cultured” and “educated.” I think that it made some of them feel that their professional status (and salary) was raised by having impressive underlings.

I played jobs on the weekends, but had a hard time getting musical work because my “day job” required me to be at an office from 8 to 5 every day. There was also not enough time to practice, so I had to try to squeeze it in during my lunch hour, if I could find space somewhere to do it.

It was then that I realized that the “American Dream” for musicians is a myth, especially during tough economic times. We work hard, we practice, we write, we arrange, we teach, we reach out to new audiences, we create new and innovative ensembles, we make recordings through improved and cheap technology, and we drive great distances for jobs, but it seems that the idea of an “American Dream” just isn’t something that could apply to “classical” musicians anymore.

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My first year in college (1974-5), we were treated to an exhibition of the original score pages selected by John Cage and Alison Knowles for their highly influential 1969 book Notations (currently available as a free PDF download at UbuWeb).

For young composers at the time, these bits and pieces of anything-but-standard notation were eye- and ear-opening, sent us scouring the library stacks for more, and led us all to go a little crazy trying to mimic or out-write what we saw there.

Then as sequel this year, Theresa Sauer carried the idea up to our own time with Notations 21, an updated compendium of all the fruit that’s come from those first flowers.

I’m mentioning this because down here in Houston I just received a little whiff of that wonderful déjà vu this afternoon. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston has a show up and running through December 7th, titled Perspectives 163: Every Sound You Can Imagine. It’s kind of a mix of both Cage/Knowles-old and Sauer-new, with a scattering of more traditional scores by some of the recent “big names” (Lou Harrison, Rorem, Glass, Reich, Riley, Dresher, Adams — John and John Luther –, Bryars, Crumb, Nyman, etc.).

The list of old mingling with new is long: Steve Roden (image above right), Wadada Leo Smith (image left), Cage, Brown, Bussotti, Feldman, Ashley, Mumma, Brandt, Stockhausen (dad and son), Xenakis, Wolff, Dick Higgins, Knowles, Yasunao Tone, Subtonick, Cardew, Curran, Per Norgard, Phill Niblock, La Monte Young, Stephen Vitiello, Kaffe Mathews, Maja Ratkje, Nancarrow, Daniel Lentz, Elena Kats-Chernin, Jennifer Walshe, Stephen Scott, Wallace Berman, Marina Rosenfeld, Christian Marclay… etc., etc….  If your travels take you down this way, be sure to make room for a visit.

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Concert details here. Music of black Africa here and Sahara here. Ngoni player Bassekou Kouyate features in the video below.

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Oppenheimer’s Act I aria from Doctor Atomic, sung by Gerald Finley in rehearsal with the Met Orchestra under Alan Gilbert. Audio courtesy of the Met. Live transmission on Oct. 13.

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Quick! While it is still the word of the day over at the OED:

muso, n. slang.

1. Austral. A musician; esp. a classical one.

1967 Kings Cross Whisper (Sydney) XXXIX. 9/1 (headline) Musos blow cold… Members of the Sydney symphony orchestra will work to rule. 1978 Melbourne Truth 18 Mar. 28/2 Davis ended up doing four numbers{em}and the musos backed him beautifully right off the cuff. 1993 Sunday Mail (Brisbane) 21 Nov. 141/2 Musos of the calibre of Eric Bogle and Jeanne Lewis joined a choir of talented high-school students and the result is a cheerful collection of ditties telling the story of the gumnut babies and their adventures.

2. Brit. A musician or music enthusiast, esp. (freq. mildly depreciative) one who takes himself or herself too seriously.

1977 Melody Maker 26 Mar. 10/5 Among the many musos who heard him at the Seven Dials in Covent Garden last Thursday was brassman Alan Littlejohn. 1989 Empire Sept. 108/3 It’s hard to imagine many people, apart from die-hard musos and dedicated Gabriel fans, would want to listen to this in the comfort of their own home. 2000 Evening Standard (Electronic ed.) 1 Nov., This is in serious breach of his job description, viz, Slightly Dumb Cook. He is not a muso–he is not cool enough.

(Thanks Michael!)

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