Archive for September, 2009

Louder Voices

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

by Cathy Barbash

In a lovely coincidence of timing, just as Carnegie’s “Mostly Huaqiao” Ancient Paths Modern Voices festival celebrating Chinese culture is nearing its climax this fall in Manhattan, a Chinese horse of a much different color gallops into Brooklyn. What may be the first major tour of China underground rock arrives on the U.S. college/indie/alternative circuit in November. Chinese headliners P.K. 14, Carsick Cars, Xiao He, and White begin their three-week national tour on November 5 as part of the monthly Dumbo Art Walk, and head mostly south and west from there. 

The tour is the brainchild of Beijing-based business partners Charles Saliba and Nevin Domer, to promote bands they present at their hot Beijing club, D-22, and record on their Maybe Mars label. Savvy at cross-promotion, Saliba has also placed the bands on college radio specials, book launches, university panels, and the like. No surprise that presenters confirmed tend to the more independent-spirited, including Hampshire and Bard Colleges, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Saliba’s alma mater Columbia University. The great irony is that this low-budget scrappy tour will likely prove more effective in exposing impressionable young American future leaders to the creative ferment and volcanic energy of today’s China than any more conventional China festival, be it presented by the Ministry of Culture of the People’s Republic of China or a pillar of the American cultural establishment.

For more details on the tour, see http://www.maybemars.com/index.php/usa-tour-2009/               

Louder Voices P.S. 9/25/09

Club D-22 Owner Michael Pettis, who in his other life is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a finance professor at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, adds his two cents to my last post:

“The cultural change taking place in China is so rapid that it is sometimes hard for outsiders to grasp it.  There is a huge generation gap dividing young urban Chinese from the stereotypes most of us have of China.  For Beijing artists New York is the center of the world and these aggressive young musicians are as familiar with what their friends and contemporaries are doing in New York as they are with traditional Chinese notions of melodic structure and musical texture.  In this tour, the first time Beijing’s leading young musicians have come as a group to the US, we wanted to show that Beijing has suddenly emerged as one of the most important international centers for new music.”

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OLD WORKS VS. THE NEW

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

By Sedgwick Clark

When was the last time you heard a world premiere on “Live from Lincoln Center?” The typical fare is last season’s New York Philharmonic opener, at which Yo-Yo Ma played Dvořák’s Cello Concerto and Lorin Maazel led Tchaikovsky’s Fifth for the umpteenth time in his seven-year tenure.

Alan Gilbert’s first official concert as music director of the New York Philharmonic tomorrow evening (9/16) will begin with an overture by the Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg called EXPO.  He’s a fine composer—yet another in his generation of superb home-grown musicians benefitting from an enlightened national music-education program—but the important thing is that the Phil, under its new leader’s inspiration, finds it important to acknowledge that music (“classical,” “serious,” or whatever we’re supposed to call it these days) is still being written.

I was prompted to take time from my deadline on the 2010 Musical America Directory to key these august thoughts by Vivien Schweitzer’s review of the San Francisco Opera’s production of Il Trovatore in this morning’s Times.  She points out that the company has curtailed newer works this season to fill seats.  She quotes General Director David Gockley, who has a strong record of innovative leadership, as saying: “The research that I have access to says that it’s the core works, the great central works of the operatic tradition, that attract and inspire the new audience.  You might have heard, ‘Well, new works or edgy productions are what get the young people in.’  Well, it’s not true.”

I have argued this point for years with my good friend and colleague, Musicalamerica.com editor Susan Elliott.  The chief music critic of the Times, Anthony Tomassini, also believes in new music as the answer to attracting young audiences. Sorry guys, I have no doubt that Gockley is correct. There’s a reason these works have stayed in the repertory for centuries—audiences like them—and the kids are hearing them for the first time. Tony’s a fervent opera lover, and I can’t imagine that he would bet the house on Doctor Atomic (which was premiered at San Francisco Opera, by the way) over, say, Otello, as a young-audience pleaser.

Nevertheless—NEVERTHELESS!—a full-evening opera production has higher stakes than a single concert, and I think that Gilbert and the NY Phil deserve full support. A national television broadcast of a ten-minute overture by a successful composer who works in the tonal idiom isn’t that scary. It’s not Aaron Copland’s ear-rending 12-tone Connotations, which Leonard Bernstein conducted on the first concert in Philharmonic (now Avery Fisher) Hall in 1962, or the 80-year-old Stravinsky’s serial The Flood, commissioned by CBS and broadcast in prime time the same year, which effectively ended any further thoughts of classical music on network TV.

A not-so-minor musical point: Gilbert has programmed Lindberg’s EXPO on subscription concerts two weeks from now, a vote of pride in his new composer-in-residence (judging from his Violin Concerto played at Mostly Mozart last year, an excellent choice). Many—probably most—music directors drop new works like hot potatoes after their premieres. 

It’s a good sign.  I look forward to hearing it again.  Carry on, Alan!

WELCOME BACK, ALAN!

Alan Rich, that is. He’s been out of commission for the summer. In his first blog entry since June, it’s clear his sense of humor hasn’t deserted him (“A series of small strokes had disarranged the components of my skull for most of the summer.”) Nor has his love of music and music makers. Click on So I’ve Heard in the Web site’s roster of blogs.

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