Category Archives: music

music

today on the blue line

from Jackson to Division, a young woman listening to Van Morrison’s ASTRAL WEEKS, on a cassette tape, on an old-fashioned Walkman. This was magical because Jessica has been working on trying to make a dance show on and around that music, but also because cassettes are always magical.

Just the way she reverently slipped the cassette into the player made me think about junior high school. So much ritual. They’re so delicate, square and dainty, and the ribbon the music’s actually printed on is right there, under your fingers. So fragile. You have to be careful not to hurt them.

I wonder if maybe that’s the way she first bought the album, and refused to upgrade it to a more contemporary format. Maybe she carries around that Walkman just for the purpose of listening to ASTRAL WEEKS.

I love cassettes because they were the first medium I bought music on – my first two albums were (and this dates me both by decade and location) Green Day’s DOOKIE and Alanis’s JAGGED LITTLE PILL. Sometimes, like the other kids at Portola, I would carry the cassettes to school with me just to look at them. I didn’t have a Walkman, but I didn’t want to be parted from the boys who were singing “She” and all the rest of it. I had to have the tape with me.

But my first cassette experience came before that. One day when I was about ten, coming home from a walk, I saw a cassette without a case sitting in one half of our half-moon driveway, by the street. I picked it up.

It was WEST SIDE STORY.

I’ll never know how it got there, but there couldn’t be a more enchanted way to be given that music – a naked cassette in the California sun. And it played perfectly, despite a few scratches on the plastic, the color of tea with milk in it. Beige, gray – there’s no word for that plastic. I wonder if someone threw it out of a car window, or it fell from a garbage truck. Either way, it was a gift. I spent my pre-teenage years choreographing elaborate dance sequences to “Somewhere” and “Something’s Coming.” When I finally saw the production for the first time, it fell so far short of what I had in my head, I had to close my eyes and just listen.

It’d be nice to have a cassette tape player now.

I just realized that maybe that experience, of the music and words without the visuals, is one of my ideal versions of a musical. It kills me that 13 WAYS is dead every way you look at it, but having it as a sound file makes it remarkably similar to that WSS cassette. What if I had found it in the street when I was ten years old? I would ask nothing more of it than what I ask now – just the sounds.

Can I tell this blog a secret that is not such a secret?

I think I should have gone into music instead of theater. Or maybe there’s no “should” about it, but maybe that’s what I’m going to do with the life I have left, in addition to (in support of, in pursuit of, in devotion to, in cahoots with) the words.

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music, quotes, Uncategorized

i don’t like repetition. i don’t like it at all.

…when my second quartet was played here at Harvard, my old teacher Walter Piston said to me, “you know, if I knew what it sounded like, I would have put the four players in separate rooms and shut the doors.”

-composer Elliott Carter, still avant-garde at 100 years old, interviewed by the Boston Herald. Via ArtsJournal. There’s also a great anecdote about my favorite composer, Charles Ives:

I [Carter] remember vividly this Sunday afternoon. I was taken to his [Ives’s] house by some friends, and we sat down and talked about music. I told him I liked Stravinsky. He sat at the piano, and I don’t think he had ever seen the score, he started playing the “Firebird.” And he said you can not repeat the way Stravinsky does. He was very angry about it, he said that’s just wrong. He thought repetition was a danger.

He didn’t really teach me anything, because I didn’t know much about music and I was just writing lousy little pieces. But I knew I had to study and I did at Harvard and such. But I admired his music. He had given up composing before I knew him. There were all these copies of his scores in the American Music Center which I went through and they were messy, and I tried to do something that I couldn’t follow up, tried to clean them up, they were awful. Like I think it was the fourth symphony, for two measures there would be six trombones playing and that’s all. I though maybe it’s all right, but it bothered me. I wanted to clean them up while he was alive, but it was too much and I couldn’t finish it. Finally Lou Harrison and Henry Cowell took over.

And Ives was against my going to Paris and studying with Boulanger. He thought I should stay home and be American. I one time went to visit him in Redding, and he played the “Concord Sonata” for me. He had a big vein in his neck and he held it like that, and his wife said, “Charlie you better quit now.” And she gave him a glass of milk. He was not well for years when he stopped composing.

I was involved with a music festival at Columbia, and I proposed that they do “The Unanswered Question” and “Central Park After Dark,” and I wrote to Mrs. Ives asking if they had been performed before. She said yes, some men in a New Haven vaudeville show had done it, and it would be unfair to call it a first performance.

I got this in a letter I got from her, and she said he was too sick to write back. But then I found out that he had written it, and she had copied it and added stuff. I have a whole article about things that she changed.

That last bit there relates quite pointedly to the previous post about who gets to relate whose experience. Yep.

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music, politics

maverickyest

(Via the New Yorker – always funny when print leads you to screen.) Pianist Jeremy Denk doing a mock interview with Sarah Palin.

JD: I just simply can’t believe in the midst of this intense campaign season, you could find the time to talk with me about the “Hammerklavier” Sonata.

SP: Well, ya know, Beethoven was the dude who said thanks but no thanks to Napoleon. Plus from all the mavericky songs he wrote, maybe this one could be known as the most maverickyest.

It’s the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor we would have needed so badly, to uplift our spirits, if Obama lost. Since he won, it’s just the icing on the cake.

I also really like the interview-in-dialogue / discussion format of the piece – even when done with a fictional counterpart, I would rather read almost anything at all if written like a play.

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chicago, music, politics

The idea Palin comparison with…(I tried…)

I just discovered Jason Robert Brown’s weblog, and the news that he’s writing the music for a Kennedy Center symphonic adaptation of E.B. White’s TRUMPET OF THE SWAN, with playwright Marsha Norman. These are all such good things, and remind me that there’s a world beyond Sarah Palin.

As I discovered when I was elected one of the 3 writers for the Stanford Band’s halftime shows, in 2001, I’m not really a comedy writer. I’m a punnist, whether or not they’re funny. It’s all about how words sound. To this end, here’s the Palin Pun that I think of every time I hear her name:

Sarah Palin:
Parasailing.

(a moment of silence for the pun)

T minus ninety minutes to the debate. Biden my time. I’ll be watching it with Robert and Caitlin in their Ravenswood apartment, the same place where I saw Obama’s acceptance speech. I think we’ll all remember where we saw these events for a long time.

Yours in trepidation.

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location, music, travel

co-wabolabr-ator

Last night I went to the Montrose Saloon, which has been a Chicago venue for beer and music for over 100 years, to hear my roommate Angela’s old-time string band WABOLABR play. (I know what the name means, but then I’d have to kill you.)

I joined Janna, who’s just relocated to Chicago from SF, an actress and improvisor. We met through friends of friends at a reading at the Goodman. We ate chicken, rice, and beans from next door, drank Old Style (regrettable, but a necessary experiment) and talked about the unlikely, fortuitous journeys that have brought us here.

I am another version of her, or she is of me. She got into town a week before I did. We both have 415 area codes, professional links to TJT and the 16th Street Theater, and took extended Amtrak train trips along the way. And we both agreed that this city has all the resources, artistic generosity, and open spirit you could possibly ask for. Listening to ourselves and asking what would make us most happy and fulfilled, as artists and as people, is what has brought us to Illinois.

I knew it was a trend, coming here, but I didn’t realize how much of one it was. Janna’s profile as a person is very similar to mine, and we’ve taken many paths next to each other, and now we’re both here. This is exciting. It means the collaborators I’ve been looking for are looking for me, too. There have been times in my artistic career where I’ve been afraid of finding my doppelganger, thinking that she, whoever she is, is going to take “the spot” designated for me. That comes from a more competitive point of view. My doppelganger, today, would want to work with me, because that’s all I want to do. And if she’s out there, I hope she contacts me soon. The idea is really appealing. The pie of artistic collaboration is not limited to a certain number of slices. The more you eat, the more there is.

It was the first time I’ve really gone out just to enjoy myself in Chicago, and it was wonderful. The band’s voices echoed like Superballs. I walked Janna to the train station and we felt the windy chatter of the trees and air around us. The air moves so much here that you can’t walk down a street in silence, even when there are no people around – the trees are always, always talking.

I think what they might be saying now is, “Autumn is coming.”

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music, theater

newsicals

Signature Theater acquires $30K for new musicals.

The recipients of the “Next Generation” grants are composers in their 20s and 30s whom Signature identified as songwriters of considerable potential and who already have had their work produced or recorded. The three are: Adam Gwon, a composer-lyricist whose musical “Ordinary Days” receives a premiere this summer in Pennsylvania; Matt Conner, who set the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe to music in Signature’s 2006 premiere of “Nevermore”; and Gabriel Kahane, a composer whose “Craigslistlieder” is a song cycle he fashioned from classified ads on the Web site Craiglist.

Via Artsjournal.

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music, quotes

nobody said opera was supposed to be easy

“It’s so much work. You spend years on this sucker. Then you have to deal with casting, and you have to deal with all of the egos and all of that. And yes, indeed, you do have to work with the singers, you have to work with the stage director, you need to work with the scene people, the lighting people, the musicians, the conductor, all of these extra people. And then it probably will be staged once, get ho hum reviews, and disappear forever. Uh, I don’t know. There are other things I guess I’d rather be doing.”
– composer Christopher Rouse, in an interview at Newmusicbox.org, via Artsjournal.

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music, theater

Poetic Salon @ Theatre of NOTE, Tues July 8

Here’s the info for the reading I’m directing next Tuesday the 8th, of Ron Allen’s short play, x restrung cortex. Our first and only rehearsal is tomorrow, since the play is only 5 pages long. We’re doing something really fun and surreal with it – we’re staging the play three times in a row, interspersed with songs from Ron’s band, Code Zero.

*****

Poets and Predators, Ladies and Lovers,
Guitarists and Gentlemen, Singers and Seducers –

On Tuesday, July 8th, at 9:30 pm,
in the guts (or the bowels) of Hollywood,
on the corridor of Cahuenga,
remove your inhibitions and put on your fedoras for the

POETIC SALON
@ Theatre of NOTE

Password: “naked rodeo”
(no one gets in without the password)

presenting
X RESTRUNG CORTEX
a one-act play
written in the poetry of the liberated tongue
about nothing and tuxedos

by Ron Allen (playwright of this year’s EYE MOUTH GRAFFITI BODYSHOP at NOTE)
(mis)directed by Dara Weinberg
featuring actors Michelle Hilyard, Jo D. Jonz, Jemal MacNeil, and Wendi West

performing with live music by
CODE ZERO
a performance group, a band of poetic theory and magnetism:
a manifestation of that which comes before name and form:
a hyper-creative juggernaut, a point of origin
featuring musicians Randy Bellfield on drums, Tony Parker on bass, Cinjez on keyboard, Ron Bodhidharma Allen on vocals, and Sarah Cruse on vocals

Location:
Theatre of NOTE
1517 N. Cahuenga Blvd (between Hollywood and Sunset)

Date: Tuesday, July 8th

Time: 9:30 pm

Admission: Free (with the password)

Dress Code: Formal, sensual, and poetical. Please wear tuxedos, strapless dresses, high-heeled shoes, ties, bustiers, lace, paisley, and others clothes appropriate for a poetic salon.
If you’re going to wear flip-flops, please put on a lot of makeup, even if you’re a man (especially if you’re a man.)
Jeans are acceptable as long as they are so tight and so low-cut that nothing is left to the imagination.

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