Tag: music

May Plans

Spring time is nearly upon us. As are several cons, which is always a cause for joy. A con is like a festival, but better because there’s also stuff during the day. Music festivals are nifty, but they’re usually only in the evenings. I’m thinking it would be fun to do a small tour of the continent in May.
May 2 – 4 is Transgender Europe in Berlin. I used the feedback form to ask if they were interested in booking some music. I think they have an obligation to present work by ftm composer/performers of ‘art’ music. As I type this, I’m drining water out of a cup with cartoon of Tigger on it. I want to find out if, like Tigger, I’m the only one. Anyway, they haven’t written back yet, which is frustrating, since I’d like to try to get other gigs around Germany if they take me. And now is the time to be trying to get booked.
May 6 – 8 is the fêtes de Jeanne d’Arc in Orléans, France (an hour or so away from Paris by train). I’m several centuries too modern to play at this event, but I’ve been going to it every yar since I moved to Europe and I’d like to go again. And do some biking around the Loire. Last year, I decided not to go to Cherveney, despite it being the origin of my lap tuba – and some fine wine. I don’t know how cool it would be to do a bike tour like that by myself. I think I’m looking for people to go along with me, if I go. Joan of Arc, of course, got burned at the stake rather than dress like a girl, so she’s close to my heart.
May 25 – 31 is /ETC in Amsterdam, a feminist con that I played at last year. They’re women-only, which, obviously, makes me nervous, since I’d rather be burned at the stake than dress like a girl. I had a lot of angst about this last year also and contacted them about whether or not they discriminated against trans people. They do not. This year, the group hosting it is called “gender changers” and they’ve had FTM participation in the past. They seem supportive, and last year was super-awesome, so I hope this works out. I’m thinking of doing a duet with somebody, if they’ll take me, to sort of up the female quotient of my act. ha. I’m going to the con whether I play or not, I think, since last year was so great and I really miss Holland. I want to take Xena, but I think I can still find lodging with a buddy in Den Haag and commute in to Amsterdam on the train. I can imagine that I can find lodging for Xena easier than for myself. She’s popular.
I have a friend in Bremmen, Germany, so I’ll email him a CD shortly. There’s a strong noise scene there. And, if I’m going to be in France, I’d like to play in Paris again. Of course, that’s much, much, much easier said than done. I’m going to see what contacts I can get there through school here and California, since my contacts form living there aren’t great for gig-getting. And, obviously, I’ll see if I can play more than once in the Netherlands. Berlin to Paris to Bremen to Amsterdam is perhaps overly circuitious. I will be travelling by ferry, bike and train, to keep my carbon footprint down as that’s easier for Xena, so the best timing for Bremmen might be late April.
I’m working on a piece about gender issues and sexuality that I’d like to premier in Berlin, if they take me. It’s the drag king piece, which features a crotch-mounted joy stick and moaning sounds. I’m going to add in some videogame samples (specifically, I want World of Warcraft). I also want to use samples of people talking, of course. Because all my political pieces use speaking. Because I’m unsubtle, alas. I think I want to interview people and ask them the questions that I got asked on transgender clinic intake. “What’s your first memory of having a gender?” “How long have you known that you are a man/woman?” “What makes somebody a man?” “What makes somebody a woman?” I think these questions are actually quite stupid. Especially the last two. But the answers are potentially very interesting. I kind of think of it as performative queer theory as much as music.
So if you want to record yourself talking about how you became aware of your own gender and what that means to you, email it to me! Otherwise, I’ll be pushing microphones into other students’ faces. I just came out to them last week, so it should be delightfully awkward and stressful to do this.
Also, if you can get me a gig in France, Germany, BeNeLux or nearby, please drop me a line! I’ll have everything I need to to do electronic noise, live processing, and/or laptop pieces. And a dog! And my bike touring gear. Heh. This is managable, but insane, so perfect. If I can’t get any other gigs, maybe I’ll bike from Berlin to Amsterdam. I wonder if there’s some way to organize a bike/music tour, like, to promote environmental causes . . .

In other news

For those of you in the San Francisco area, Other Minds 13 is very nearly upon you! I am jealous of you, because I wish I could go. The sampler CD for the shows is awesome. There’s a lot of great music. It’s March 6 – 8 in SF. There’s a sudent discounts avilable. I think it’s possible to get in free by volunteering. This year is especially great for fans of the cello. Fracnis-Marie Uitti will be plaing. She’s a friend of Ellen. Her music is incredible. She’s playing on the 6th. If you can only go to one night, go to that one. And then leave me taunting messages about how it was sper awesome and I’ll be sad. I was going to come home for the festival, but the way my student visa ended up working out, I just couldn’t. Alas.

Fine, I’ll Stop Listening, You Win

The RIAA is now suing some guy for ripping CDs that he purchased. He’s not sharing them on the internet, he just loaded them onto his own computer to listen to them. The major labels have apparently decided that it’s a crime to put music that you paid for onto your ipod.

It wasn’t enough that they’re trying to take financial aid away from college kids. I mean, those kids were violating intellectual property rights. Taking away their financial aid is seriously an over-reaction to that and despicable, but at least the kids did something iffy. But this latest guy didn’t do anything wrong at all.
The RIAA is a member organization controlled by the major record labels. Apparently, their policy is now that they don’t want us to listen to music that we buy from them.
Fair enough. If they don’t want us to listen to their music, we can stop.
I’m toying with the idea of throwing away everything I have from a major label, but I probably won’t. I mean, I like my CDs, that’s why I bought them. And, unfortunately, some of them are probably out on majors.
But I’m completely serious about the not buying anything new on majors. This is the first xmas since I was 13 that I didn’t get any music. I didn’t ask for it and I didn’t receive it. If the major labels don’t want me to listen, I won’t. There’s plenty of great stuff out there on indie labels. I’m not hurting for CDs. Other Minds has two new releases and several of my buddies have given me their latest albums. And, of course, there are podcasts full of great music.
All of this is what’s so confusing about the major labels being such assholes. It’s not like there aren’t alternatives. They seem to think they’re Ma Bell, when that kind of monopoly hasn’t existed for years and years. Do they want to destroy themselves? Have they given up on life? Should all the record execs get on prozac right away?
There are some serious issues of power and control at play. What’s at stake is our share in our culture. Between DRM and IP and other legal wranglings, corporations want to own every aspect of our culture. They want to control information. Remember that thing where Sony installed spyware on people’s computers through music CDs. These guys think they own our computers. If we don’t secure net neutrality, they’ll try to choke off the internet as well. (Note that libertarian hero and scary, racist mofo Ron Paul is against net neutrality.)
Briefly, right now all data traversing the internet is treated equally. ISPs, who are often owned by RIAA member companies, want to make some packets privileged over others. If you go to their website, it loads fast. If you go to a competitor, it loads slowly or not at all. If they want to control all music, then it’s likely that net-surfing customers would have to pay extra to be allowed the privilege of getting to podcasts.
Which is to say that boycott is not enough, because in some sense they are Ma Bell. Does your elected representative support net neutrality?

Edit

Well, not quite. Oops. They still suck though and do make the claim that you shouldn’t rip CDs for ipod use.

Not Buying It

There are no CDs on my xmas list this year. I love music, but I’m done with major record labels. I just read that the RIAA is trying to remove financial aid from college students who file share. Enough is enough. If they want to prevent fans from going to school, I’m going to prevent my money from going to their companies.
There are enough (real) indies and podcasts and the like to keep me in great music for years. Indeed, there is also Pandora, which requires no capital investment at all and keeps me in good music by analyzing what I say I like. It actually works and they have classical music now too.
Alas, Pandora is not a real break from the RIAA because they track music based on CD barcodes. Everything they play is therefore at least somewhat corporate. So I guess I’m giving their money to the RIAA (and indies) instead of mine. (And, alas, as I have no barcodes, I’ll never turn up in a playlist.)
Frankly, I’m highly displeased with the state of media distribution in America. I purchased Battlestar Galactica from the iTunes store – because I liked the show. It has great writing and acting, etc. And then I learned from the writer’s strike that none of the creative people are seeing any money form my purchases. I have not yet decided how to proceed. If I buy DVDs, the creative people get some revenue, but too little and I’m stuck with a bunch of media when I probably only want to watch an episode once. And I’m left without instant gratification. In fact, if nobody who does anything productive is getting money from my buying it online, why shouldn’t I just pirate it? The writers are getting the same amount whether I get it from bittorrent or iTunes.
So yeah, in solidarity with the writer’s strike, I’m doing a consumer strike. Screw the media companies.

Talking about music

Aileen asks, “Is it just my limited experience, or is there really a paucity of sound-related terms in English?”
I’m intrigued by her question! Do she mean for describing a single sound event? I don’t speak any of my second languages well enough to give a comparison answer, but here are some technical terms in English:

timbre, tuning, tone, rhythm, tempo, loud, soft, dry, resonant, rich, rough, pure, metallic, high, low, nasal, tremolo, trill, vibrato, dissonant, consonant, atonal

If you are talking about a single sound event, most words would talk about the sound quality, so some of the above wouldn’t apply, as they refer to to multiple sound events. So you would likely want to talk about duration, amplitude, timbre and pitch. Amplitude is straight forward enough. And pitch is usually described in terms of high and low. timbre, the quality of the sound, is where you get the most words

Scientifically, any sound can be described by a finite number of sine waves. Specify their amplitude, pitch and phase and how they change over time. Timbre is strongly linked to how these sine waves are related to each other. A pure sound is one with few, harmonically related sine tones.
Harmonically related means that the frequencies of the sines are related by whole number ratios that are relatively simple. If you add the numerator and the denominator together, the smaller the sum is, the more pure the timbre. When talking about sounds this way, the lowest sine wave is often called the fundamental, and the higher ones are called overtones. (Many musical sounds have overtones that are just simple multiples of the fundamental.)
When the component sine waves of a sound are close to each other – specifically, so close that they fall within the critical band, you get roughness. (think of an instrument tuning, the sound is first rough, and then there’s a beating sound which gradually slows until they’re in tune.)
A rich sound is one with a more harmonically related overtones. If you get a whole lot of overtones (I think specifically odd ones), the sound is nasal.

Overtones that don’t have simple relationships with each other are called enharmonic. Enharmonic sounds are often described as metallic, especially if they have a lot of low or mid range frequency content and few highs and a bit of duration to them.
Noises, like twigs break, things clicking, etc, have more high frequency content, and are strong enharmonic and also very short. Sustained sounds with lots and lots of enharmonic content are called noise. Mathematically, noise can be described as the sum of an infinite number of sine waves – over an infinite amount of time, of course. Very short noise, as mentioned, is usually called “clicking.”
Vibrato is where the pitch moved up and down around a central pitch, where the deviation is too small to be perceived as moving to another note. A glissando is when it goes from one pitch to another, where the source and destination are perceived as separate notes. A trill is a sound that moved quickly between two pitches which are perceived as separate notes. A tremolo is a fast variation in amplitude, again with a specific amplitude center. Becoming louder is crescendoing or fading in. Becoming softer is decrescendoing or fading out.
Some timbrel terms describe the environment (whether “real” or “electronic”) in which a sound event occurred. A cathedral has a really long decay. If you clap your hands, the echo can go on for several seconds. a sound recorded in that environment would be described as resonant. Similarly, a sound recorded in a room with no echo would be described as dry.
There are a lot of other ways in which people describe sounds, but these are often metaphorical, describing the means of production, or comparing it to another sound. for instance a “booming” sound, is a low sound like, well, a boom. Vocal sounds are made with the voice. Screeching sounds. String sounds. Etc. some words are onomatopoetic. Crackle. Crunch. Crack. Clunk. Thunk. Boom. Whoosh. Sploosh. Splat. Vroom.
We have the most terms to talk about musical sounds, but the sounds most essential to survival are the non musical ones. A breaking twig does not have harmonically related overtones or sustained duration, but it might mean a predator is about to get you. It might not be a coincidence that so many of our onomatopoetic sounds describe these kinds of noises. Important sounds that communicate practical information.
Ok, a lot of the technical terms that I’ve named are actually italian, but are also part of the musical esperanto in that they’ve been adopted almost everywhere. (Crescendo in actual esperanto would be malsilentigxo.) I haven’t done much in other languages but dabble and listen to news podcasts, but if there’s one language that seems to never suffer from a paucity of terminology, it’s English.
I will concede, though, that English is not the best language for expression emotions, except for anger, which it, alas, excels at.
In unrelated news, tomorrow my dog goes to a kennel and in the afternoon/evening, I go to London. the day after, I fly to New York, where I still don’t know where I’ll be staying. Which I’m trying not to think too much about.

Weekend Report

The lounge with the electrical plugs and the wifi is shut and locked on weekends! I sat outside of it on a bench and checked a few email messages, but my laptop battery is not young, so I had to quit before I could post anything to my blog. I went inside the computer music labs and they don’t have internet access. You can get to a server, but not outside. Ok, I see why you wouldn’t want people using music lab computers to read comics, but they also can’t get to online help files either.

So I sat in the lab, waiting for my battery to recharge and staring squarely at my navel, when another postgrad came by. His name is Zack (I think) and he’s also after a PhD. He’s also a SuperCollider guy and also left behind from the Copenhagen trip. He asked me what I was up to and I whined that I was all alone in the world (woe is me), so we went out for a beer that evening.

I told him that I’d see him at school again today, but I didn’t go in. While I was navel gazing, I got an idea for a multi channel piece and I thought I’d get a stereo version working and then go add channels. But I haven’t been able to get a stereo version going.

So while I’ve been debugging my code, I’ve been trying to make a playlist of makeout music that I think Cola would like. Shockingly, this side project is not making me feel less lonely. Maybe I should write a makeout music generator to rival Nick Collins’ JPop generator. I need samples of women singing “uhgh” and “ooh” and all those sorta sexy R&B vocals. Anyway. What’s your favorite makeout music and why? Leave a comment. (Anybody that says Stimmung has to sit facing the corner for an hour.)

The piece that I’m actually working on uses feedback. It’s got a comb filter and it also feeds back into the whole synthdef. I use a InFeedback.ar and I track the amplitude with an RMS. There’s a tiny amount of noise going into the circuit and it builds up very slowly through feedback. When it gets above a threshold a bunch of envelopes start going and everything gets zeroed out. I multiply the output of the comb by zero and the input of the comb by zero and the noise by zero and set the comb’s feedback to zero. Heck, I zero the buffer that the comb filter uses. There are zeros everywhere. So when I lift the zeros, it should sound like I’m restarting it from the beginning, right? No! It very quickly builds up past the threshold and zeros again and builds quickly and zeros and builds quickly. I don’t get it.

Yesterblog

Yesterday, the first business day of my Birmingham residency, I got my student ID card and worked out how to get on the campus wifi network with my laptop, but, alas, not my n800. Given the way the network manager (doesn’t) work, I dispair of ever getting my n800 onto the network.

Then I went to the sole rehearsal for the John Cage piece Lecture on the Weather which I will be performing in on October 12. For those of you unfamiliar with this piece, it was commissioned by the CBC (Canadian National Radio) in honor of the American Bicentenial and premiered in New York in 1975. Scott, my supervisor, explained that the CBC New Music folks were a bunch of Vietnam War draft dodgers, which explains why Canada was celebrating the spirit of ’76. (America declared independence from England in 1776. “Spirit of ’76” refers to this declaration.)

The piece is made up of text and squiggly lines. The squiggly lines are treated much like Scratch Music. The text comes from Henry David Thoreau and includes random selections from Walden, Journal and Essay on Civil Disobedience. Cage points out in his preface that the last of those inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. The first of those names, especially, might explain why NONE of the Brits in the piece had ever heard of Thoreau.

One of the greatest philosophers in the United States completely unknown here. Good gods.

I don’t know how I feel about the piece. The text is ok. Actually, it’s alarming how much it continues to resonate. I just read the novel Affinity by Waters (author of Fingersmith) and it’s largely about mistreatment of women in prison in the UK, 30 years later than Thoreau. I can read that and think “thank gods they fixed those problems! It’s a great relief that it’s not like that anymore.” But when I read Thoreau, I think, “Arg, nothing has changed.” Constitutional originalists continue to plague the land. The US continues to wage aggressive wars. Our taxes are still used for evil.

But it’s just weird hearing it read in British accents. by people who have no idea what they’re reading. Who hear the phrase “Walden” and think nothing. Who say “Concord” and have no association with it.

Anyway, after rehearsal, I got access to the school studios and a bank account. Yes, a bank account on my first day here. I’d feel very proud of myself, except that they really bent the rules for me, but were unreasonably strict when it came to the many Chinese students waiting in line. Racist bastards. After I get my student visa, I’m switching banks. In the meantime, though, I need a bank.

I feel disappointed with myself. I should have probably told them to fuck off. But, complicating my perceptions, the gate keeper who was giving a hard time to the Chinese students was white, but the guy who actually opened my bank account was black and had Jamaican parents. He was wearing a wrist band praising Marcus Garvey, one of the 117 national heroes of Jamaica.

Today: cell phone unlock, household crap, make posters advertising music commissions.

I’m raising my prices to £10 ($20.25-ish). Order before the prices go up! celesteh.etsy.com

Horrifying Moments

Redaction

One of the most horrifying moments in film is the crucifix scene in The Exorcist. That scene stands out of one of extreme drama, and, indeed, horror. I’m talking about it non-specifically because I haven’t actually seen the movie. But I want to, because it’s reputed to be an excellent film and a classic in it’s genre. And there’s a famous scene involving a crucifix which invokes horror in the audience.

The reason that I bring this up is because I fell victim to knee jerking even as I tried to resist it. Horrifying is not the same as horrible. Saying that Beethoven’s 9th is a horrifying depiction of violence does not mean that it’s horrible. Nor does it mean that the horror lies in people’s enjoyment of the piece. Instead it means that McCleary would like to put an additional genre description on the 9th. In addition to it’s musical form and it’s time period, she would like to add the label “horror.” A label worn by excellent works in other genres.
This sort of generic description is not often applied to musical works and so McCleary is often misconstrued. Including by me. Which is why I should not blog about books that I haven’t actually read.

But what about porn?

(Musicology is so much more exciting than one might think!)
The director of The Exorcist created a film about demonic possession. However, I wouldn’t say that he was advocating for the same or trying to encourage it in any way. I’m guessing most Beethoven scholars would assert that Beethoven wasn’t advocating for rape. However, pron occupies a somewhat different realm in society. For starters, unlike demons, we all agree that it exists. Secondly, unlike rape, it’s legal.
So I think most of my questions from my previous post still stand: Does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it (“the male audition”)? Does intent matter? Does usage matter? What are the implications of whether or not they matter? Does the amount to which they matter vary over time?

Questions in Feminist Musicology

Instrumental Music

To call Susan McClary‘s book Feminine Endings “controversial,” is an understatement. It inspires not just controversy, but also outrage. One guy I knew said of it and her, “she should stop writing.”

Those of you who are not in the music world may be unfamiliar with this book. What it could it say that would cause folks to want to mute the author? “The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the [Beethoven’s] Ninth [Symphony] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.” (found here) (Let’s leave aside that this sentence doesn’t actually appear in the book, she did write it and the book has a rephrased version of the same sentiment.) Note that she is speaking metaphorically about the piece of music, not literally about Beethoven. She speaks of his creation, not of he, himself. Still, that’s provocative as hell. Is there anything to it?
I kind of like the 9th and the drama of it, so rather than knee jerking about how I don’t consume that kind of pron, I want to instead address the idea underlying this oft quoted sentence: Are ideas of sexuality and violence expressed through instrumental music? One place to search for the answer to this query is to look at how instrumental music is paired with words and actions in cultural product that seeks to express those same ideas. That is, does Hollywood assign certain sexualities or actions to certain musical idioms? If, for example, woodwinds and especially saxophones were often used as musical cues attached to the sexual other, such that they came to stand as a character note, that would suggest that instrumental music could carry those sort of cues. And indeed, the saxophone’s association with jazz and thus black people (an alien other) lead it to be associated with other alien others like queers (as Norman Mailer wrote, “the white negro”) and fallen women. It is the case that certain instruments and tonalities tend to have cultural baggage rooted in their history. A sax playing a ‘blue’ note invokes all the baggage of jazz music. A drum and bugle corps playing in major invokes the baggage of military pride. Indeed, it would be more surprising if these associations did not exist as it would mean that people had no connection to their cultural history.
Lest anyone argue that the newness of ‘talkies’ means that poor Beethoven was writing before associations came to be attached to musical cues, I have two answers to that. 1. The term “feminine ending” is an archaic musical term, referring to cadential weakness. (wikipedia) This shows that ideas of assigning sexuality to musical structures pre-date hollywood. And 2. She’s using present tense not past tense. “The point of recapitualtion” means not the intention, but the moment: the place where the theme returns and is restated. She asserts that it “is one of the most horrifying moments in music” now. I have to disagree, purely on aesthetic grounds. However, she’s talking about what it means to a listener now, not what it meant to the composer or people in his time period.

Tape Music

I meant to just have an intro paragraph on McClary, but I got carried away, as one so often does. (I have to confess that I haven’t actually finished reading the book. I can’t even swear that I finished the first chapter, but I can’t say for certain as it’s in California and I am not.) Anyway, my point of bringing it up was to make the assertion that if the use of certain instrumental sounds can reference particular ideas, this must also be the case for musique concrete. That is, if a certain schmaltzy sax line implies a sexual encounter, a musician playing a sample of a moan from a porn movie must also have certain baggage. It unarguably conveys sexuality. To say otherwise would be silly. And with it, I think, it brings all the baggage associated with pron.
The first piece that I know of which uses the sounds of a woman experiencing orgasm is Tiger Balm by Annea Lockwood. This piece is feminist in intent. And the sample reflects that. It sounds like a home recording and while the fact of it’s inclusion is a bit shocking, the sonic effect does not carry the titilation that one would expect. I communicated as much to Lockwood over email, after she sent me the record (I met her by volunteering for the Other Minds festival, but that’s a longer story). Her reply acknowledged this.
Since then, I’ve heard orgasm samples used in (at least) three pieces by two male composers. Both used what sounded like recordings of commercial pornography. The first one was by Jascha Narveson, who was a colleague at Wesleyan. He played it in class and I remember it using mostly porn-y sounds. I was dismayed, but then he explained that the piece was feminist in intent. The other two pieces were both by Alvin Curran. One he performed this last spring at the Royal Conservatory. He has a large keyboard loaded up with samples and he improvises playing them, building up dense and often unexpected textures. The first inclusion of the woman moaning was a surprising juxtaposition and a funny moment, but when it returned, the humor was lessened until it was gone. The other piece was on a podcast which I just listened to and which inspired this post. It sounded like he was using the sample sample in the same keyboard. I suspect that it’s a sound that he uses often, as are, probably, all the sounds in his keyboard. Therefore, it’s affect cannot be merely novelty or it wouldn’t bear repeating in multiple pieces and would instead wear thin as a joke that gets old.
So does a pron sample carry the male gaze with it? The production values and sound quality are as instantly recognizable as pictures of Barbie-smooth skin and shaved pubic hair. Can one speak of a male audition to compliment his gaze? And does intent matter?
If intent does matter, then McCleary seems to have slandered Beethoven. (*) I can imagine that his primary conscious desire was to create a compelling piece of music. Certainly, he had unconscious goals, firmly tied to his time and place. But even then, when women’s roles in public life were less than they are now, rape was still far out of bounds. (I presume. Scholars are free to correct me.) If intent doesn’t matter, then Narveson’s piece would be perpetuating our hypothetical male audition. Or does it matter how the music is used? I recall that the music was composed for a feminist benefit of some kind. Does the importance of intent change over time? Beethoven’s intent doesn’t matter because he’s long dead and we’re modern listeners, so therefore, over time, the importance of the intent and original use of Narveson’s piece will gradually fade and it will slowly fall into the male audition. If the intent and usage is a deciding factor in how one regards a piece, do the program notes then become an integral part of the composition? What you hear is always colored by what you know (or think you know), so, to avoid the male audition, would it be necessary to insist that everyone acquaint themselves with the program notes?
How much importance to composers should this be anyway? There is (or was) a group in the San Francisco area called the Porn Orchestra. They played live music to accompany muted porn films. Sometimes with the fast forward button firmly pressed. Amusing, certainly. When I first learned of them, it was via the internet and their information spoke of the “universal” experience of hitting the mute button while viewing porn, because the sound so often sucked. I polled my female friends and almost none had participated in this “universal” experience. So it’s universal for who? (We all know the answer to this question.)
So what about using pron samples? I hope for discussion in the comments, as I don’t have answers to these questions.

Edit

Something just occurred to me. There will be a followup post shortly.

Edit 2

Ok, I knee jerked a bit. Sorry. followup is here

Organ Concert Review

The Organ
The Grote Kerk in The Hague is having an organ festival right now, which explains why I keep hearing organ music while walking the dog. Last night, I saw a very small flyer for it posted to the church door and decided to check it out. I really like organ concerts and I can name one organ composer off the top of my head (Henry Brant), but I’ve never written for the organ and don’t know too much about the instrument. As a former resident of the Bay Area, though, I was pretty lucky as there are two Mighty Wurlitzer organs installed in local movie theatres. One is in the Grand Lake in Oakland and the other is in the Castro. Also, Wesleyan University, where I was in 2003-5, has a pretty nifty organ which was brand new when I was a student, so I got to hear a lot of organ music, including a new piece by Christian Wolff. This whole paragraph is a long way of saying: I don’t know much about the organ (factoid: invented by ancient Romans), but I dig it.

The performer last night was Leo Van Doeselaar of Amsterdam / Leiden. There was a pre-concert talk of which I understood nothing and then he went up to the organ loft to play. Church organs are often located in the back of churches, which is the case in Den Haag’s Grote Kerk or sometimes on the side. Almost never does a listener actually face the organ (Wesleyan is an exception to this). However, the chairs were arranged, so the audience sat facing the back of the church and hence the organ. Also, it’s often the case that the organist can’t be seen. They had set up a screen and a projector so that there was a camera pointing at the organist and the image was projected where we could see it. Kind of strange, but also interesting.
This particular organ has two panels of stops on either side of three manuals (keyboards). the stops control which pipes are getting air in them and they’re a bunch of knobs which can be pulled out or in (hence the expression, “pulling out all the stops.”). The organist had an assistant who was a page turner, but also did a lot of stop manipulation. The music would switch manuals without a break and while one manual was being played, the busy assistant would re-set the stops for the return to the original manual. Interesting to watch.
The first two pieces were from the 17th century. Which, alas, is not my favorite century. Also, note in the first paragraph that most of my organ listening has been with theatre organs, which often play a more popular repertoire. So the music just seemed kind of . . . sedate. The organ was not punching through and not filling the space. I could see the performer and I could tell he was playing is heart out, but it just wasn’t translating for me. So I wondered if it was the music or the organ. “Well, they can’t all be Bach’s Toccata in d.” (You know the piece. It’s a very dramatic and cliche organ piece. Nicole associates it with horror movies.)
Even as my mind wandered, certain sonic effects were occasionally interesting and I wondered if I might want to exploit them by writing an organ piece. (Well, why not?) Then, the organist started on the third piece, Gioco by Peter-Jan Wagemans (wikipedia). I do not need to write an organ piece, as Wagemans used all the cool bits that I had noticed and several I hadn’t. The piece was astoundingly amazing. The composer is an organist himself, so he is able to write as somebody who really, really knows the instrument. And as he’s a local guy, it’s very well-suited to the sort of organ they tend to have in Holland. It played off the reverb in the cathedral very well, using short notes played quickly to create textures. There was a section where a certain flourish was repeated a few times and each time there was a note repeated afterwards like an echo. The stops for that note were really mushy sounding, not cutting through at all, so it was hard to tell when it started and stopped. It was more of a presence. And I swear, it sounded like a real echo. One that boldly defied physics: believable and slightly disorienting!
There was no clapping between pieces, but the audience was all abuzz after that one. Organists, take note: you can make people very happy if you depart from the 17th century. There are composers alive today and some of their work is amazing.
Then, alas, we returned to the dusty past. But, much to my delight, the last piece actually was Bach’s Toccata in d. Man, I love that piece. It’s great. So unapologetically dramatic! And it’s got these huge parts that should just, imo, shake the fillings out of your teeth. There’s a piece for an organ, something that fills a space! A gigantic installed behemoth, an ancient roman excess! Crashing and pounding like the ocean! Huge! but. It just wasn’t. Ok sure, it was dramatic. And it had a couple of moments that were kind of big. but. Maybe I’ve been conditioned by Mighty Wurlitzers to expect something too big, too much. Maybe what I expect is gauche and ostentatious and not what Bach had in mind at all. Maybe I’m crass. But crass is great fun but this was restrained and smallish.
I think the organ is just too small. It’s also kind of recessed, which can’t help.
I also think that I just must be crass, because the audience gave the organist a standing ovation and then rushed to the CD table. I do think he was a really good performer (especially the new piece was fantastic), so maybe they’re used to the organ and I’m not? I’m probably going to skip the rest of the series, however it also includes carillon recitals (no wonder the bells have been so interesting lately), so I will definitely listen for those.