the Pulitzer Prize for Music

[7/4]

The 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winners

By The Associated Press

MUSIC: "The Little Match Girl Passion," by David Lang

Lang, 51, is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York's Bang on a Can, an arts group dedicated to commissioning, performing and presenting new and experimental music. In recent projects Lang has collaborated with filmmakers and other visual artists in the creation of monumental musical environments. Lang has said he believed it was necessary to thwart musical rules to "regain the mystery of hearing music for the first time." He said he might base a piece on "the life span of a potato" or the "rhythms of a blacksmith's hammer in the Middle Ages."

Edited April 24, 2008 by 7/4

[7/4]

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[7/4]

I can't find our discussion about it, but check this out:

FEATURE WRITING: Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post

Weingarten's "Pearls before Breakfast," according to the Post, "began as an audacious experiment in social science: What would happen if one of the greatest musicians in the world appeared incognito outside a Washington D.C. Metro station at rush hour and played some of the most beautiful music ever composed on one of the most valuable violins ever made?"

When readers learned that violinist Joshua Bell had played his Stradivarius "to an indifferent, unheeding audience," some said they were inspired to make fundamental changes in their lives. More than 40 clergy members crafted a sermon around the message they found in the story.

[Larry Kart]

I can't find our discussion about it, but check this out:

FEATURE WRITING: Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post

Weingarten's "Pearls before Breakfast," according to the Post, "began as an audacious experiment in social science: What would happen if one of the greatest musicians in the world appeared incognito outside a Washington D.C. Metro station at rush hour and played some of the most beautiful music ever composed on one of the most valuable violins ever made?"

When readers learned that violinist Joshua Bell had played his Stradivarius "to an indifferent, unheeding audience," some said they were inspired to make fundamental changes in their lives. More than 40 clergy members crafted a sermon around the message they found in the story.

Weingarten's inane (and IIRC journalistically unethical) piece of dung won the Pultizer? Guess that's all you need to know about any such award. If the jurors are a bunch of monkeys...

[7/4]

Weingarten's inane (and IIRC journalistically unethical) piece of dung won the Pultizer? Guess that's all you need to know about any such award. If the jurors are a bunch of monkeys...

Yeah, well...how about that.

[7/4]

April 7, 2008

David Lang Wins Music Pulitzer

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Filed at 6:43 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- David Lang had always loved Bach's ''St. Matthew's Passion.'' But as a Jewish composer, listening to one of classical music's greatest works always gave him pause.

''It's a strange thing as a Jewish artist to listen to this music, because we are the enemy in this, we are the bad guy, and yet the music is fantastic,'' he said of the orchestral and choral piece, written for Easter and considered to have some anti-Semitic text.

So when coming up with the concept for what on Monday became his Pulitzer Prize-winning work -- ''The Little Match Girl Passion'' -- he decided to use the revered ''St. Matthew's Passion'' as his base, but remove the Christian element of the piece.

''When I got this commission, I thought maybe there's a way to heal this wound, to fix this, so I imagined what it would be like to take some of the story of the 'St. Matthew's Passion' and take Jesus out of it and put in the story of this other person who also suffers and who also dies,'' he told The Associated Press on Monday after winning his prize.

So he used the story of the tragic child who was the focal point of Hans Christian Andersen's ''Little Match Girl'' and wrote text that was interspersed with the Book of Matthew in the Bible, Andersen's words and others. The 35-minute piece, which debuted at Carnegie Hall in October 2007, was performed by the vocal group Theatre of Voices.

''It's a very emotional piece. ... it's a very heartbreaking story,'' he said. ''It's an odd feeling as a composer to be happy to have had so many people in the audience miserable.''

Lang, who is co-founder and co-artistic director of the music collective Bang on a Can, admits he was feeling pretty miserable himself on Monday morning. He was having a bad day and was in the studio. His mood didn't brighten until he got a call from National Public Radio telling him had won the Pulitzer.

''I feel a little better, (but) I'm sure I'll be miserable tomorrow,'' he joked.

[WD45]

I have his "Passing Measures" disc, and enjoy it greatly. Pulitzer, though?

[7/4]

I have his "Passing Measures" disc, and enjoy it greatly. Pulitzer, though?

I'm surprised myself.

[7/4]

I can't find our discussion about it, but check this out:

FEATURE WRITING: Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post

Weingarten's "Pearls before Breakfast," according to the Post, "began as an audacious experiment in social science: What would happen if one of the greatest musicians in the world appeared incognito outside a Washington D.C. Metro station at rush hour and played some of the most beautiful music ever composed on one of the most valuable violins ever made?"

When readers learned that violinist Joshua Bell had played his Stradivarius "to an indifferent, unheeding audience," some said they were inspired to make fundamental changes in their lives. More than 40 clergy members crafted a sermon around the message they found in the story.

Weingarten's inane (and IIRC journalistically unethical) piece of dung won the Pultizer? Guess that's all you need to know about any such award. If the jurors are a bunch of monkeys...

I saw this comment over at Sequenza21:

Got to give Weingarten credit for pulling a PT Barnum and getting a world class musician to trot himself out as a side show geek for one of the all time half-witted experiments. Certainly caused a minor stir for a week or two…

[Larry Kart]

Interesting comment I wouldn't have thought of made at the time of the Post article by a woman who successfully plays the musical saw in NYC subway stations and who also has this blog:

http://sawlady.com/blog/

The Washington Post published an article about an experiment they did: they got Joshua Bell, one of the best violinists in the world, to play incognito in a subway station. They wanted to see if without the PR he usually gets for his stage performances anybody would stop to listen.

The result was - hardly anybody stopped to listen.

The Washington Post analyzed it as if it were the fault of the audience, the passers by, for not recognizing such a great musician. I say - it wasn’t the fault of the passers by at all.

The thing is Joshua Bell is a great violinist but he doesn’t know how to busk. There are violinists who are not even close to being as good as he is (such as Jim Grasec or Lorenzo LaRock), yet they get crowds to stop and listen to them. It’s because when you play on the street you can’t approach it as if you are playing on a stage. Busking is an art form of its own. You need to be as good a musician as to audition for any stage gig (the competition over permits is fierce) but in addition to that you have to relate to the audience and be a real people’s person. You can’t hide behind your instrument and just play, with an invisible wall between you and the audience, the way a stage performance is conducted. In busking you use the passers by as if they were paint and your music is the paint brush - your goal is to create a collective work of art with the people, in the space, in the moment with you and the music.

A busker is someone who can turn any place into a stage. Obviously, Joshua Bell needs an actual stage. As a busker one needs to interact with those around, break walls of personal space, and lure people into a collective and spontaneous group experience on the street, in the moment, with you. A bad busking act is when the performer doesn’t make an effort to connect with the audience. Like musicians who play for themselves, not acknowledging the audience, just burying their heads in their instruments.

IMHO that is why Joshua Bell didn’t get lots of people to stop and listen.

[medjuck]

Wow! I went to a dance performance last night that had music by David Lang. I liked the music but the program didn't disclose which pieces were by him. I do have and like the Bang on a Drum performance of Eno's Music for Airports but obviously that's not by Lang.

[7/4]

Wow! I went to a dance performance last night that had music by David Lang. I liked the music but the program didn't disclose which pieces were by him. I do have and like the Bang on a Drum performance of Eno's Music for Airports but obviously that's not by Lang.

Bang on a Can.

I think he arranged one of the transcriptions.

I think it's nice that one of the post-modern NYC minimalists won, but now I expect Phil Kline to win it next year.

[7/4]

Pulitzer Prizes, 2008 (III)

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[7/4]

Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Cutting Room Floor: Validation & Legacy

Some musical works that we think of as masterpieces today were given a

decidedly rocky reception on their first performance. (As we

demonstrated in dramatic fashion at our January Inside the Classics concerts, Tchaikovsky's violin concerto was one such piece.) But Copland's Appalachian Spring

was not only an instant hit on the concert stage, it was awarded the

Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1945. Which got me wondering what else had

won the Pulitzer during the musically tumultuous 20th century.

The music Pulitzer was awarded for the first time only two years before

Copland won it, and William Schumann was the first recipient.

(Schumann's music is not frequently performed these days, but he was

extremely popular with orchestral audiences in the mid-20th century.)

In 1944, it was Howard Hanson (another too frequently forgotten

composer) taking the prize for his fourth symphony. (Hanson's best

known symphony was his second, which the Minnesota Orchestra

will coincidentally be performing next season.)

Other familiar names capturing honors in the Pulitzer's first decade

included Charles Ives, Gian Carlo Menotti, and Walter Piston.

If the initial ten or fifteen winners have anything in common, it's that

the majority of them fell outside the musical avant garde that was fast

overtaking concert music at the time. Germany's Arnold Schoenberg, whom

we'll be discussing at next week's Inside the Classics concerts, had thrown down the atonal gantlet

with his system of 12-tone composition decades before, and by the

1950s, composers had well and truly splintered into multiple movements,

some of which clung to traditional models of tonality even as others

disdained anything that average audience members might actually enjoy

listening to.

The avant garde may have been fighting their way

to the fore of the compositional profession as early as the 1940s (or

even earlier, if you count such luminaries as Schoenberg, Stravinsky,

and Berg as members,) but it took the Pulitzers a while to catch up.

The first significant work of seriously atonal music that I see on the

list is from 1960, when Elliott Carter won for his second string

quartet. (In general, I'm not a huge fan of a lot of the atonal music

that was written mid-century, but Carter's string quartets,

like Bartok's, are truly masterworks, and did a lot to advance both

composition and performance of chamber music.) Interestingly, the 1962

award went to Robert Ward, who rejected 12-tone and atonal music as

"boring," for his operatic version of The Crucible,

which is still regularly performed by companies the world over. And

while the Pulitzer committee toyed with the avant garde a bit in the

'60s (Leslie Barrett won in 1967, George Crumb in '68,) it stayed

largely away from the most "out there" compositions of the era.

But then, in 1970, the committee decided to jump headfirst into the new, and gave the award to Charles Wuorinen, for his synthesizer symphony, Time's Encomium.

There are those in the music business who will tell you that this was

the moment when concert music in America truly went off the rails and

lost popular audiences forever. (I may not disagree - I generally

despise Wuorinen's music, and most of what he stands for as a

composer.) There are others who would insist that it was only when

Wuorinen was legitimized in the eyes of the musical establishment that

those of us in the hidebound, old-fashioned orchestra world finally

began paying attention to the important changes underway in our

profession.

For most of the 1970s, the Pulitzer would go to an

avant garde composer; not a surprise, given what was going on in

America's larger culture during that decade of experimentation and

rebellion. (One of the exceptions to the rule was Minnesota's own

Dominick Argento, a staunch melodist who won in 1975 for From the Diary of Virginia Woolf,

a song cycle premiered at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis.) But in the

'80s, things throttled back a bit as composers began to emerge from

decades of intense pressure to reject any idea that reeked of the past.

By 1987, when John Harbison won the Pulitzer for The Flight Into Egypt, it seemed that tonality and atonality were on their way to a reconciliation.

The last couple of decades have firmed up that idea, at least as far as the

Pulitzers are concerned. A new generation of American composers, from

Aaron Jay Kernis to John Corigliano, won the award for compositions

that embraced traditional melody and harmony without sacrificing

intellectual content. Some composers who had never gone away during the

decades of experimentation (John Adams, for instance, who won in 2003

for a symphony inspired by the 9/11 attacks) experienced career resurgences. And in 2007, there was an even more positive sign: a jazz score, Ornette Coleman's Sound Grammar,

won the Pulitzer for the very first time. (Jazz legend Wynton Marsalis

had won the award in 1997, but it was for a classical composition.)

A lot gets made these days about the collapse of traditional barriers

between musical genres, and certainly, embracing jazz in 2007 doesn't

exactly make the Pulitzer committee a risk-taking bunch. But just as

orchestras (the biggest, costliest, and most unwieldy ensembles of the

music world) are generally an important bellwether of which trends are

truly here to stay in the classical world, the Pulitzers tell us a lot

about which composers may (and I stress may) stand the test of time. The full list of winners is here

if you want to peruse it yourself, and I'd love to hear about any

winners that leapt out at you, or any you find incomprehensible...

[Christiern]

What do you expect from an awards business that gave Wynton M. a Pulitzer for that truly mediocre piece, "Blood In the Fields."???

[Mark Stryker]

There was lots of debate here about the Joshua Bell plays-in-the-subway story that eventually won Gene Weingarten a Pulitzer Prize. I don't want to rehash the pros/cons, but thought people might be intrigued by this coda. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8062401153.html

[Larry Kart]

The fun part is that Bell for some time unknowingly played the same violin that had Gordon played. Even more fun (for snarky former-journalist me) was the sentence that Weingarten writes after he mentions this fact: "For 11 years, Bell's fingers held the same ancient wood." Truly, the conventions of corny feature writing don't change. But shouldn't Weingarten have written: "For 11 years, Bell's fingers caressed the same ancient wood"?

[Randy Twizzle]

There was lots of debate here about the Joshua Bell plays-in-the-subway story that eventually won Gene Weingarten a Pulitzer Prize. I don't want to rehash the pros/cons, but thought people might be intrigued by this coda. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...8062401153.html

Here's a story that appeared in the NY Times in 1930