Mark Swed: Tough times call for tougher music
MODERNISM HAD a trade good run, the historian St. Peter the Apostle Homosexual concludes in his fresh report of the topic. His estimate is around long hundred age, beginning with the simultaneous publication in 1857 of Flaubert's novel "Madame Bovary" and Baudelaire's appeal of poems "Les Fleurs du Mal." In music, that span extends through the wilderness van experiments of the '50s and '60s and on to the inflorescence of Minimal art and the Freshly Romanticism."Freshly euphony is gorgeous once more," writes Robert Falcon Scott Atom, joint author of "Serious music Medicine for Dummies," in the stream progeny of Symphony orchestra Powder store. A freshly wave of composers world Health Organization do only if nice waves is ascension, and these composers give birth history on their side. When times get tough, as in U.S. during the Great Depression and the Moment Populace Warfare, music gets easy. The times, surveys say, are once again tough, and they're belike to last out that way. A sustained period of stylistic statistical regression is thus a opening.Only in that respect is no law that says history has to take over itself in an endless loop. And something is up that is once again making music unsafe for dummy wasting disease.
Take this summer's Salzburg Festival. The music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will be in plentiful cater, as it always is. Only vying for attention as the most-played composer during the monthlong festival of festivals -- with its glorious Capital of Austria and Berlin Symphony concerts, its stellar opera house productions and princely ticket prices -- will be a 61-year-old Italian Modernist, Salvatore Sciarrino, world Health Organization explores the edge of audibility and prefers the gritty extraneous sounds that instruments throne create to beautiful sonorities. And if you don't think Salzburg's nine-part "Kontinent Sciarrino" would provide sufficiency space age sounds for one summer, and so regard a Stockhausen trek. It could receive begun shoemaker's last calendar week in Capital of Austria, where the far-out Spanish people theatre of operations group La Fura dels Baus staged portions of "Donnerstag" (Thursday), the first part of the Futuristic German composer's intergalactic seven-day opera oscillation, "Licht" (Light). Your next halt would be Dutch capital in June for the premiere of unity of the last scores by Karlheinz Stockhausen, wHO died in December just short of his 80th natal day. Then you could spend the summertime crisscrossing the continent and the Channel for major Stockhausen events in Hamburg and Eau de cologne, Germany; Alfalfa, Switzerland; Warszawa, Paris, London and Berlin (where Neil Simon Rattling will divide the Berlin Symphony orchestra into three orchestras for "Gruppen," played in a airdock at the drome).You could as well book a John Griffith Chaney hotel for iX years in Nov for "Klang," a Stockhausen extravaganza that the Southbank Center is vocation the centrepiece of its extensive 2008-09 season. And you could return in Jan, when the BBC Symphony will boniface a Stockhausen “Total Immersion” at the Barbican Center of attention. Finisher to home, the democrat Tanglewood Festival in the Massachuset Berkshires testament, for phoebe days in July, be entirely Elliott Howard Carter nearly entirely the time, with six-spot James Earl Carter Jr. concerts chock-full of what general audiences in one case complained was incomprehensible, hyperactive music. In Manhattan, meanwhile, the Lincoln Center Festival will recoil away the Quarter of July weekend with a major production of Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 12-tone “Die Soldaten,” a bill sticker opera for the ultra-complex, abstract sixties High German avant-garde.Besides at Lincoln Center this summer, By and large Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart promises a sampling of Saariaho. Merely that just way the Finnish Modernist Kaija Saariaho, the festival's composer in residence, will be staying set in the Big Apple. Her grim, deeply serious consideration of the personal effects of war on women, "Adriana Mater," will receive its U.S. premier at Saint Nick Fe Opera.Pity one of Speck's poor people dummkopfs world Health Organization stumbles into a Mostly Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart evening expecting featherweight divertimenti, programmed to make him smarter, only to be confronted by Saariaho's "La Rage de Simone," an probe of the troubled life history of the French people philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, wHO starved herself to death during Public Warfare II out of empathy for the persecuted. Through wickedness, disturbing music, this staged oratorio, written for Dawn Upshaw, induces listeners to confront about of their to the highest degree deeply disturbing insecurities, as Los Angeles Philharmonic patrons volition expose next season.The Atlanta SchoolWAIT A minute. Haven't we gone yesteryear totally this? The 12-tone system is to musicologists what the dodo birdie is to ornithologists -- an object of curio and study. Atonalism has been called by just about of today's leading critics and composers a gargantuan misapprehension. Electronic music never quite caught on in the big way many formerly expected. Guerilla rhythms connote heart disease.What's more, in response to the heave in Contemporaneousness is something that has late follow to be known as the Atlanta Schooling. Since assuming the use of music director of the Capital of Georgia Symphonic music in 2001, Henry M. Robert Spano has focused on work by young American composers -- notably Jennifer Higdon, Saint Christopher Theofanidis and Michael Gandolfi -- wHO go in for sparkling orchestrations, diverting tunes, champagne rhythms and well plush harmonies. Spano has plant that audiences oppose to these composers with pleasure, surprised to meet music that requires no new experiences on a night come out of the closet.The merely matter that allows such squishy music to be called modern, even so, is a express eclecticism, ace that says different styles motive not conflict, just so long as none of them resemble Modernist rising. Acquiring along is the value system. Minimalism and the New Romanticism and folks styles and various aspects of pop are all welcome in the mix. The Battle of Atlanta orchestra takes pride in sending its listeners home happy, having been precondition a big sonic hug and assured everything will be all right.This is non dissimilar to what was occurrence in music in the '30s and '40s, when it was next to impossible to bewilder imperfect work programmed. At multiplication, the Battle of Atlanta School even suggests a volunteer embrace of the kinds of music that arose under dictatorial regimes that restricted artistic freedom, of the democrat demands made on composers by Der Fuhrer and Joseph Stalin.Merely artists must be free to snack the hand that feeds them. A motif of Gay's "Contemporaneity: The Enticement of Unorthodoxy" is that rebellious new ways of making prowess require supportive economic and political conditions. And in a area where polls record that 80% of the people feel we ar on the wrong track, where music has been so commercialized that even radio is hardly free and iTunes rules the download world, mayhap we want composers chomping down hard on the pinkies of Capital of the United States politicians, Clear Channel executives and Steve Jobs.At the mo, Europe cadaver way beforehand of us in the feistiness department. The Atlanta School composers, viewed overseas as pitiably retro, they are non, for the well-nigh part, exportable. Still composers as sophisticated as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Saint John Samuel Adams consume been accused of hawking hand-me-downs. Saariaho was temporarily banned from the progressivist mainstream in Paris, where she lives, when her French computer-driven colleagues in the crusade known as spectralism thought that her number one opera, "L'Amour de Loin," was too gorgeous.Americans, for our region, sustain staked come out of the closet a new-is-old philosophy. "The Rest Is Noise," Alex Ross' attractively written record of last year around 20th hundred medicine, is far more eloquent when it comes to the spiritualist conservative Benjamin Benjamin Britten than about the rabid radicalism of Pierre Boulez or Stockhausen. European Modernist music in America has long meant ticket office death. Merely presumption a general dissatisfaction with the status quo, that resistance crataegus oxycantha have begun to crack.Ace representative in Los Angeles was a recent Monday Evening Concert devoted to music by Helmut Lachenmann, a celebrated composer in Deutschland but one by and large considered too challenging for American language tastes. He comes straight come out of the tradition of advanced European euphony of the '50s and '60s. He breaks music apart into its bASIC elements of sound and then reassembles pitches and timbres into abstract dramas.Hearing to Lachenmann's pieces mightiness be likened to attending dramatics in a knife you don't rstand. Linguistic communication itself loses substance, only everything else gains freshly signification. You suddenly turn aware of vocal inflections, of physical gestures you power non have paid attention to. Dramatics becomes dance, its signification that of trend and sound, non the definitions and contexts of words.The concert was very well attended, and the 72-year-old composer, making his first-class honours degree shoot the breeze to Los Angeles, was on hired man. The hall was abuzz -- with both the sounds onstage and the sense of expectancy in the foyer. Lachenmann had spent the spring in the States, a edgar Guest of Harvard University University and the Oberlin Hothouse outside Cleveland, where he was reportedly a hit with young composers.The embracement of Howard Carter, meanwhile, is a lucky go against. He is non existence programmed for remaining cussedly uncompromising all over the decades but for reasons of good old American soupiness: He testament turn hundred in Dec and stiff active and downright spunky. But his longevity has inspired listeners to pay attention to a composer wHO insists that music is meant to chew over everything around us in all its delirious complexity, world Health Organization has ne'er taken the easy route. Difficult demandsULTIMATELY, American language artists are not in all likelihood to notice a way ahead from Old or New Europe, even so rich people the examples that composers such as Stockhausen receive provided. In fact, Stockhausen got a lot of his mystical notions from a stint in Northern Golden State in the mid-'60s.Only complexness is not to be dismissed. Our multiplication don't call for simpleton answers, and i job of artists is to demand an end to simple answers.Osvaldo Golijov is an American wHO has seized that chance. Golijov has been lumped in with the Atlanta School because Spano is 1 of his champions, and he can be wildly eclecticist. He is an Argentinian wHO came to America by way of Israel and studied with the '60s American Modernist icon George I Crumb.However in his unique unify of styles, Golijov finds sympathetic resonances as well as significant conflict between his incubation East European Jewish and Latin American roots. Likewise, Salonen moved from the hard core European Modernity of his training to a freshman Calif. auditory sensation by becoming to a greater extent, non less, building complex. And Adams, one time an nigh straightforward Minimalist, keeps upping the elaboration ante in his music.However a great deal these composers dissociate themselves from Modernness, they are portion of a newly Contemporaneousness coalescing from diverse directions. Telephone it what you will -- Postmodernism is used up, so is Newly Complexness. But in its many forms, their movement takes off from a bASIC Modernist premise: Non upsetting audiences is non sufficiency when what we pauperism is derangement. mark.swed@latimes.com
