7/4

now playing: Zia Mohiuddin Dagar · Rudra Vina · Live · Seattle 1981

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000XULO3O

The other night I dreamed that someone showed me a schedule of D's concert dates, which showed one in Michigan. Just clicked through to his website, and indeed there is - April 14th in Ann Arbor. When I was 17 I had a dream about Johnny Winter opening a show with Hideaway and then when I was at a show a few weeks later, that's exactly what he opened with. There's no way I could have known! If only we could harness our powers of foresight for the more pressing issues!

The other night I dreamed that someone showed me a schedule of D's concert dates, which showed one in Michigan. Just clicked through to his website, and indeed there is - April 14th in Ann Arbor. When I was 17 I had a dream about Johnny Winter opening a show with Hideaway and then when I was at a show a few weeks later, that's exactly what he opened with. There's no way I could have known!

The other night I dreamed that someone showed me a schedule of D's concert dates, which showed one in Michigan. Just clicked through to his website, and indeed there is - April 14th in Ann Arbor. Cool. I'd like to catch a full concert someday. I saw him with Bob Brotzman, they both did solo sets and then played together. This was at the Joe's Pub show I mentioned previously (about two blocks or so North of where you guys parked the van when you played NYC). I should go back to developing my steel guitar stylings, he was so inspiring when I first discovered him.

now playing: Pran, Raga for the Rainy Season Stuart Dempster and Greg Powers

Well, thank you! You are greatly encouraged to post in other threads while you're here..

Debashish Bhattacharya's slide guitar playing is amazing.

Africian music.

now playing: Call of the Valley Shiv Kumar Sharma , Brijbushan Kabra, Hariprasad Chaursia.

I know her, she recorded my string qt. I really like the label direction...all the focus on American composers.

I don't think I'd let him borrow my guitar.

I'm listening to this right now, sounds exactly like I expected, Hovaness with a sitar. Quite beautiful. It will be over momentarily so I'll just post the info here:

Viaduct?

That is him isn't it? He looks really healthy and good in this and younger than ever. It says Gatemouth Brown on the guitar.

For Boulez debut, exacting practice By David Patrick Stearns Inquirer Music Critic Orchestra 2001 is mobilized - and on this occasion, it so has to be. http://www.philly.com/inquirer/columnists/...s/14175311.html The Philadelphia premiere of the Pierre Boulez masterwork Le Marteau sans Maitre - a nine-movement suite for voice, guitar, flute and percussion that changed the classical music world in 1955 - is looming, and with it the responsibility of dispelling misconceptions among audiences who know the piece more by name than by sound. "I lost you a while ago," says guitarist Jason Vieaux, peering up at Orchestra 2001 conductor and artistic director James Freeman. Others at Tuesday's rehearsal at Swarthmore College talk of requested tempos "within reason" while pondering enigmatic notes affectionately named "the little squiggly guys." That's why the concerts, at 8 p.m. Saturday at Independence Seaport Museum and 7:30 p.m. Sunday at Lang Concert Hall at Swarthmore, are getting 10 rehearsals in a world where half as many would be generous. That probably will be just enough, said Boulez, 82, who is now in New York conducting a series of concerts. News of the Philadelphia premiere - hatched because Orchestra 2001's Freeman simply decided it was about time - left Boulez visibly pleased: Often cities have to wait for the composer himself to arrive and assemble and conduct a performance of this piece. And as someone who also has an international career, with ongoing relationships in London, Chicago and Cleveland, and who just finished recording all the Mahler symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon, Boulez can't take it upon himself to conduct Le Marteau everywhere. "I'm surprised [the piece hasn't been done in Philadelphia] but I'm also surprised for the good," he said last week. "I write what I think is for me necessary to write. And I try to give performances that justify what I've written. After that, what can you do?" The single biggest reason for the piece's neglect - even though it's the first great work by Europe's most lionized living composer - are the reasons it opened a new world of music: its instrumentation. Part chamber piece, part song cycle with vocal settings of surrealistic René Char poems, Le Marteau has a unique scoring that includes alto flute, viola, vibraphone, guitar, bongos, and any number of other percussion instruments. Few preexisting ensembles, aside from the Paris-based Ensemble Intercontemporain that Boulez himself founded, have that kind of lineup, which means a Marteau ensemble must be assembled for each performance. That's feasible for Orchestra 2001 because it's more a loose collective - one used to accommodating the innovative demands of George Crumb - than a permanent ensemble. Coming from a generation whose composers felt duty-bound to reinvent as many aspects of music as possible, Boulez refused to accept the standard 19th-century instrumentation under the argument that no great painter would use the same colors time and again. Once the group is assembled, hardly a note passes without directions for volume or articulation in a score that asks for details so minute - and details that interlock so intricately with others - that some of the Orchestra 2001 players are dumbfounded. Guitarist Vieaux spent a month play-conducting the piece at home to a recording to get a feeling for the whole. Even now, he wonders, "Does this guy really hear this stuff when he demands something so specific?" The surprise of Le Marteau sans Maitre (variously translated The Master Without a Hammer and The Hammer Unmastered) is how often both performers and listeners find the music to be "sexy." Freeman goes further: "Incredibly sexy." "I hear raindrops," says flutist Christa Jennings. "With the alto flute, there are flutter tonguing [effects] along with the percussion." "Red caravan on the edge of the nail" and "executioners of solitude" are images in the piece's poems, ones that mezzo-soprano Freda Herseth can't interpret as the typical 19th-century German doorways to emotion, but as more modern portals into dreamlike landscapes. "You can't read the poetry and say that it's about this or that," she says. "I experience it moment by moment. I hear even as it occurs." That's the spirit. Boulez admits he was often inspired not by the words' meanings but by their sonority. Some vocal lines, he says, are treated like another instrument; others are like operatic recitatives. The paradox many of the players are experiencing - most of them are modern-music specialists imported from Cleveland, Ann Arbor, Mich., and Colorado for the occasion - is that the more they follow the composer's micromanaging directions, the more liberated they feel. "It's a pleasant shock when you hear how the piece all goes together," said violist Matthew Dane. Echoes of jazz can be heard here and there - or so it seems. In fact, Boulez was an early student of what's now called world music. At times, the guitar sounds like a Japanese koto, and rhythms are straight out of Africa. "I knew an anthropologist who was a specialist in African music," he said. "There were some ceremonies that were very interesting, I must say." Though Le Marteau has sometimes been viewed as a manifesto for serialism (the strict, cerebral method of composition often credited with driving away audiences), the piece more reflects the increasing globalization that followed World War II. And, in fact, the piece isn't serial; Boulez had gone beyond that years before. In a way, he is assumed to be the leader of a movement that wasn't his. "I know," he said with a sigh. "I can't write a denial each time" the piece is performed. Even the most learned audiences approaching Le Marteau, then, should leave all preconceived notions at the door, and, as Igor Stravinsky once said, enjoy the music's exotic succession of sound. "Then you invent your own trajectory," Boulez said. "You know, it's not the writer who makes the novel. It's the reader that makes the novel . . . and his own story with it. I find that's just fine."

More from composer/conductor Pierre Boulez David Patrick Stearns Inquirer Music Critic Posted on Wed, Jan. 23, 2008 Once the seemingly icy iconoclastic music director of the New York Philharmonic, composer/conductor Pierre Boulez is now, three decades later, a mellow 82-year-old who is embarking on guest-conducting engagements with the Chicago Symphony and Cleveland Orchestra. First, though, he began 2008 with a New York City stop-off to conduct his own music at Zankel Hall and to begin musical celebrations for the 100th birthday of fellow composer Elliott Carter. As David Patrick Stearns found out during a post-rehearsal conversation with Boulez in New York last week, he was always mellow and never actually icy - and maybe not even a real conductor. Question: Your conducting life has changed a great deal over the last 10 years. Most obviously, your repertoire is larger. Answer: I cannot really play the same repertoire a thousand times. I don't find that you learn anything anymore. You just repeat yourself. That's just marketing - good marketing but not good conducting. Q: You also had a reputation for being emotionally cool. But nobody can say that's the case with your new recording of the Mahler Symphony No. 8 on Deutsche Grammophon. A: I don't think I was cool. I was simply not completely in command of the technique of the orchestra, and until you're at a certain level, you're careful with what you're doing because you don't want to make mistakes. It was not at all coolness. It was caution. Q: I associate you with pieces that have a strong cerebral side. But that wouldn't be the Mahler 8th - especially the second movement, which sets long, rarefied sections of Goethe's Faust. What now attracts you to the piece? A: For a long time I had problems with this piece. Not the first movement; it's very compact, and in the old tradition of the Bach - like a late-Baroque flower. The second movement is much more difficult to organize, in my opinion. It's also a kind of abstract opera. You have scenes that are sometimes very short, sometimes longer, some very dramatic, some naive. It's difficult to create continuity in all of that. I conducted it a long time ago in New York and London. I wasn't at all satisfied by the result. I think I can manage it now. The motifs - there aren't very many and they're repetitive. How to you repeat that without being boring? And to give life to these motifs and their different aspects? I realize that better than I did several years ago. Also, I've conducted [Wagner's] Ring in between. And in the Ring you learn how to manage leitmotifs! That was a good lesson for me to approach this Mahler symphony. Q: Last year you conducted your first Janacek opera, From the House of the Dead, that comes out on DVD this spring directed by Patrice Chereau, your collaborator on the famous Bayreuth Ring cycle. I know you've done some Janacek concert works here and there. I also know that your visits to the opera house are increasingly infrequent and possibly now a thing of the past. What appealed to you about this bleak opera, based on the Dostoevsky novel set in a Siberian prison camp? A. I find that the most interesting of all his opera works. It's three operas in one, when the characters tell about their lives and experiences. Therefore, when the opportunity came [to conduct it], I took it. I don't regret it. It took a lot of time to establish the character of the music. It has a reputation for being a boring opera. But no! Q: You've often been a conductor who revises a piece's reputation. A: I'm not a conductor, as a matter of fact. I'm a kind of outside conductor. Composition is more interesting and composers are more interesting - when they have a lot to say. Q: Like C.P.E. Bach? I recently came across a very early recording, possibly from the 1950s, of you conducting that composer. A: Oh, my God, yes! With Jean-Pierre Rampal! That was like the horse ride in Faust because he was so quick. I tried to match him but it made no sense. I wasn't very proud of this effort. Q: In decades past, you've been caught making disparaging remarks about Verdi. Do you think you'll ever conduct his music? A: I'd like to conduct his Quattro Pezzi Sacri (Four Sacred Pieces), but it's too late now. I would've done them, maybe, but you cannot do everything. Q: I've observed you in rehearsal being extremely patient and relaxed with musicians, and never more so than while preparing the Elliott Carter festival at the Juilliard School of Music (titled "Focus 2008: All About Elliott," beginning Friday, Jan. 25, at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater in New York). A: When you put players in a situation where they become nervous and unsure, that's not good at all. You try to give them some security. You have to know the difference between mistakes that have to be corrected and mistakes that are just an error. You look at the musician. He knows, we know - simply. I'm not obsessive about precision, but precision brings sonority. The good sound of an orchestra, for me, is tied to precision. If an orchestra is imprecise, the sound is blurred. You are an artisan. You're making a sound and know that you have to spend time to reach the level that you want. Q: In past conversations I've had with you, I've contended that American audiences have become much more sophisticated about contemporary music compared with when you were New York Philharmonic music director more than 30 years ago. And I don't think you've agreed with me. To what extent do you still see a problem? A: Mostly, the performers are lazy. The performers want to impose authority and knowledge on a piece, and cannot do that with contemporary music. You can organize things. But you can't convince the audience if you aren't convinced yourself. Q: One person you've often supported is Elliott Carter. You've commissioned new pieces from him and made some fine Carter recordings. Why him? A: I like people who are not satisfied with themselves. And for me, his rhythmic world is very interesting and something from which I could benefit. I'm very egotistical. I like a composer from whom I can take something. And profit from that. Q: Take something? As a listener or a composer? A: As a composer!

well now...that was a quick experiment.

Dare ya. Double, triple dare ya.

Dream House.

Oh...change the subject eh?

Funny, that's what AAJ said about you. Moderators, where are you this guy is only here to insult us Where did I insult anyone? I simply reported some facts, and it was another party who slung the dirt. I've no beef with anyone here, but did feel the situation at AAJ, brought up by someone else, was misrepresented. It sure appears to me that the concept of open-mindedness here only applies if it's agreed with; otherwise it's an insult? So how do you feel about that new Pat Metheny trio album Dave?