Music in Miami
I finally managed to get out to a cultural event here in Miami back on Friday, namely, a concert at Lincoln Theatre in South Beach given by the New World Symphony, dedicated to new American symphonic music. The concert was also included as part of a larger South Beach festival centered on the clocks falling back early Saturday morning - there were music and various events planned for an entire 25-hour span beginning Friday afternoon and extending into Saturday. I went to college with one of the current horn players (he graduated a year behind me from CMU), so was able to get a couple of free tickets, which mainly served the purpose of making it possible to convince a friend to go with me (i.e. drive me there). And, as it turned out, another of my colleagues was attending this concert as well with his girlfriend, since he has been writing a sequence of poems about Morton Feldman, who was featured on the program. If I had to guess though, I would think that the NWS concert was planned before it was included in the larger festival. The program was as follows:
Morton Feldman's Piano and Orchestra: This was actually the first live performance of any of Feldman's music that I've ever heard. Piano and Orchestra seemed to me to be a very successful piece. Tilson Thomas gave a lively introduction to the piece, where he related some anecdotes about interacting with Feldman, including an impersonation of Feldman's notorious Brooklyn accent and flippant attitude. MTT also had the pianist and orchestra introduce several of the motives of the piece, inviting the audience to try and determine for themselves, as they picked these motives out of the larger canvas of Feldman's work (the usual references to Rothko et al. were also made), what they meant. Given the unusually broad audience for a concert performance of music of this sort, the introduction was probably quite important, although I would imagine that MTT would have given a similar spiel regardless of the context - that seems to be pretty standard fare for new music these days. The performance itself went pretty well - Tilson Thomas also had pleaded with the audience to be as quiet as possible, and they mostly seemed to buy into that. Talking to my friend after the concert, he revealed that the performance really barely got through itself, but I suppose that's also a pretty typical attitude for a performer to have. Tilson Thomas conducted in a style that seemed to be his best impersonation of Pierre Boulez, which was definitely a different look than what I'm used to seeing from him (and in the other two pieces on the concert he went back to looking like himself). Feldman's music being Feldman's music, there were quite a few walkouts in the audience - which (and please, forgive my elitism) was awesome. Good for them. That music is boring as shit, you know?
The second half of the concert shifted to the 21st Century, starting with
Stephen Mackey's Turn the Key: Because of Dreamhouse, I will always give Mackey an extra large helping of benefit-of-the-doubt, but at the same time I thought this piece was rather good. Mackey was present in the concert hall, and gave a rambling, egotistic introduction to the piece (yes, it really is his past experience as a freestyle skier that makes his music so different from Feldman's, I agree). Mackey described the piece as a "rhythmic fantasy" and thats an accurate description. It uses some of his usual smatterings of pop-oriented musical material (most apparent in the writing for percussion), but maintained enough of a sense of heightened musical awareness to not be so accessible as to lose my interest (I'm, in my mind, making a comparison to a specific other American composer whose music I think is rather terrible, but I guess I won't name names at this juncture). And, at risk of sounding too condescending to be able to qualify that condescension with my own awareness of it, I really think that Mackey is the kind of composer that we, as Americans that enjoy new music, should get behind. Even if not all of his pieces work as well as this one did, it seems to me that he's got the right idea, and his right ideas can appeal to a larger, orchestra-sustaining public.
The last piece on the concert, which cemented its status, in my mind, as being conceived and planned well before being included in a larger cultural festival was
Charles Wuorinen's Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra. This piece was in five movements. The first two were pretty cool, but after that, this thing pretty well just lost me. And I don't really blame myself. Wuorinen was also at this concert, and introduced the piece. It's good to have the composers introducing their own music, I think. Since these intros are so par for the course now, its good to have the persons themselves doing it. The cello was amplified, so far as I could tell (and this was backed up by Wuorinen's own commentary) to make it loud. And it did. The piece was initially conceived as a ballet, so the equalizing of volumes makes more sense in that setting, but as a concert piece, the lack of commentary towards the loudness of the cello within the piece itself was for me distracting, especially as I struggled to find places to enter the piece at all.
Very good program overall though, and well-programmed to boot. We didn't really stick around South Beach for any of the other festivities though. Just stayed down there long enough to have a couple of plastic cups of Dogfishhead 60 minute IPA outside a small beer bar on Lincoln Road.
Morton Feldman's Piano and Orchestra: This was actually the first live performance of any of Feldman's music that I've ever heard. Piano and Orchestra seemed to me to be a very successful piece. Tilson Thomas gave a lively introduction to the piece, where he related some anecdotes about interacting with Feldman, including an impersonation of Feldman's notorious Brooklyn accent and flippant attitude. MTT also had the pianist and orchestra introduce several of the motives of the piece, inviting the audience to try and determine for themselves, as they picked these motives out of the larger canvas of Feldman's work (the usual references to Rothko et al. were also made), what they meant. Given the unusually broad audience for a concert performance of music of this sort, the introduction was probably quite important, although I would imagine that MTT would have given a similar spiel regardless of the context - that seems to be pretty standard fare for new music these days. The performance itself went pretty well - Tilson Thomas also had pleaded with the audience to be as quiet as possible, and they mostly seemed to buy into that. Talking to my friend after the concert, he revealed that the performance really barely got through itself, but I suppose that's also a pretty typical attitude for a performer to have. Tilson Thomas conducted in a style that seemed to be his best impersonation of Pierre Boulez, which was definitely a different look than what I'm used to seeing from him (and in the other two pieces on the concert he went back to looking like himself). Feldman's music being Feldman's music, there were quite a few walkouts in the audience - which (and please, forgive my elitism) was awesome. Good for them. That music is boring as shit, you know?
The second half of the concert shifted to the 21st Century, starting with
Stephen Mackey's Turn the Key: Because of Dreamhouse, I will always give Mackey an extra large helping of benefit-of-the-doubt, but at the same time I thought this piece was rather good. Mackey was present in the concert hall, and gave a rambling, egotistic introduction to the piece (yes, it really is his past experience as a freestyle skier that makes his music so different from Feldman's, I agree). Mackey described the piece as a "rhythmic fantasy" and thats an accurate description. It uses some of his usual smatterings of pop-oriented musical material (most apparent in the writing for percussion), but maintained enough of a sense of heightened musical awareness to not be so accessible as to lose my interest (I'm, in my mind, making a comparison to a specific other American composer whose music I think is rather terrible, but I guess I won't name names at this juncture). And, at risk of sounding too condescending to be able to qualify that condescension with my own awareness of it, I really think that Mackey is the kind of composer that we, as Americans that enjoy new music, should get behind. Even if not all of his pieces work as well as this one did, it seems to me that he's got the right idea, and his right ideas can appeal to a larger, orchestra-sustaining public.
The last piece on the concert, which cemented its status, in my mind, as being conceived and planned well before being included in a larger cultural festival was
Charles Wuorinen's Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra. This piece was in five movements. The first two were pretty cool, but after that, this thing pretty well just lost me. And I don't really blame myself. Wuorinen was also at this concert, and introduced the piece. It's good to have the composers introducing their own music, I think. Since these intros are so par for the course now, its good to have the persons themselves doing it. The cello was amplified, so far as I could tell (and this was backed up by Wuorinen's own commentary) to make it loud. And it did. The piece was initially conceived as a ballet, so the equalizing of volumes makes more sense in that setting, but as a concert piece, the lack of commentary towards the loudness of the cello within the piece itself was for me distracting, especially as I struggled to find places to enter the piece at all.
Very good program overall though, and well-programmed to boot. We didn't really stick around South Beach for any of the other festivities though. Just stayed down there long enough to have a couple of plastic cups of Dogfishhead 60 minute IPA outside a small beer bar on Lincoln Road.
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