what’s in my ears? (well, this is bulls— 2020)

nightafternight style playlist for the last month. bandcamp links where possible.

it’s been a while since i’ve done one of these. i’ve been perpetually self conscious about not listening to enough music of ______ genre or _______ provenance when i don’t need to for my classical-music-writing day job. now’s not the time for that, i think. support artists, buy their music.

 

DELANILA · The Philosopher

Fiona Apple : Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Robert Fripp: “Flood Suite” (Water Music I / Here Comes the Flood / Water Music II)

 

Grouper : “Headache”

Wang Wen : “Stone Scissors”

GIRL SKIN: “Forever and Always”

The Pack A.D. : “Give Up”

Nøkkenoc : “Bourrée à Plassard / Les triplex de Bonneville”

Kat McLevey : “Doorman”

Car Seat Headrest : “Hollywood”

Chicano Batman : “Blank Slate”

Mabe Fratti : Pies Sobre la Tierra

Ben Lukas Boysan : “Kenotaph”

Chris Wood and Andy Cutting : Knock John

Laura Cannell : “Someone Will Remember Us in Another Time”

Perfume Genius : Set My Heart On Fire Immediately

 

we have reached the stage of my covid-mandated solitude where i have slow danced with a ghost at 1 a.m. to this track

John Maus & Molly Nilsson : “Hey Moon”

 

 

Not Another Kendrick Lamar Pulitzer Hot Take

Yesterday, Kendrick Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize in Music, becoming the first artist working in a genre that isn’t classical or jazz to receive the coveted honor. He also may be the youngest winner of the prize, at 30; I don’t know when Caroline Shaw’s birthday is, but there’s a chance he’s some days or months younger than she was when she won for “Partita for 8 Voices.”

Dana Canedy, who with this awards cycle marks her first as Pulitzer administrator, said this about the selection:

I don’t know specifically what the piece was, but in this case they were considering a piece of music they felt had hip-hop influences and said, “Well if we’re considering a piece of music that has hip-hop influences, why aren’t we considering hip-hop?” And someone said, “That’s exactly what we should do.” And then someone said, “We should be considering Kendrick Lamar” and the group said “absolutely.” So then, right then, they decided to listen to the entire album and decided “This is it.”

For my first year at the Boston Globe, I only wrote about classical music. Now it’s about a sixty-forty balance of classical and non-classical. I’d never ask to review a Kendrick Lamar show or album because as a. a white woman and b. a very casual hip-hop listener, much of the commentary on black life in America would be lost on me, and I wouldn’t be comfortable critiquing it. But I do know this: If I had an hour, I’d probably rather listen to “DAMN.” than about 75% of the recordings I get sent as a classical music critic.

This win has quite unpredictably sent shockwaves through the conservatory-music corner of the internet. On the cliché side, there’s the old white men (why is it always all old white men?) lamenting the death of art, culture, music, etc. On a more nuanced note, some called attention to the fact that the Pulitzer Prize was one of the last remaining awards in the mainstream cultural consciousness that went to a work of new conservatory-music until yesterday. In 2004, then-administrator Sig Gissler announced that a score submission would no longer be necessary to win the prize, but the award kept going to operas, concertos, and in 2007 and 2016, jazz compositions.

In the world of such music, where success rides on reputation, commissions, and awards, this feels like hearing the gold medal for figure skating was just awarded to a snowboarder, and an amazing technical and artistic show of snowboarding will now and forever be eligible for the gold medal in figure skating.

But, as Dana Canedy pointed out, there’s no rule that says the Pulitzer must go to a work of classical or jazz music. The criteria for the award is: “For a distinguished musical composition of significant dimension by an American that has had its first performance in the United States during the year.” So “DAMN.” qualifies, and in my opinion, it deserves it and then some. It’s an astounding, touching, relevant work of art from a genre that has been disparaged as lowbrow, misogynistic, unworthy of serious consideration, and “not music” since its first stirrings. (When the classical music establishment calls ANYTHING misogynistic: pot, meet kettle.)

We’re living in a time of churn and change in music, and my overwhelming hope is that this shattered barrier will encourage young creators to create art that reflects their truth, academic constraints be damned.

 

“It’s in the blood.”

“One can become an artist, but one must be born a griot.” – balafonist Fodé Lassana Diabaté

The members of Malian group Trio da Kali have known each other “like family” all their lives, but they hadn’t played together in a formal group until collaborating with Kronos Quartet for last year’s phenomenal album “Ladilikan.” The trio is currently touring the US, and making its Boston debut tonight in a solo show. I talked to Lassana Diabaté about griot families, religion and griots, and how Islamist extremist activity in Mali has impacted musical life.

Read over at the Globe!

My latest(s)

I’ve had two feature articles published this week in the Boston Globe. One is an interview with soprano Kelly Kaduce, who captured my attention after her performance as a remarkable down-to-earth Mimi in Boston Lyric Opera’s “La Bohème” two years ago. I caught her in a break between BLO “Threepenny Opera” rehearsals to chat with her about preparing for new roles, planning childcare when both parents are performing opera singers, and why it’s easier to play onstage lovers with a stranger than with her husband. Read it here!

The second has to be some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing a Globe article. I wrote a preview of Celebrity Series of Boston’s experimental new music series Stave Sessions, which runs for five night next week. I talked on the phone with Shara Nova of My Brightest Diamond, a personal favorite of mine. (I’ve admired her ever since she sang the role of the imperious, terrifying Queen of the Forest on the Decemberists’ 2009 album “The Hazards of Love,” which came out when I was 15, during the height of my Decemberists fandom.) I also got to spend an hour observing the jawdroppingly impressive musicians of Boston experimental art rock sextet Bent Knee, and talk to them and their percussion mentor Samuel Solomon afterwards. I now know from experience that if you ask the six a question, you’ll get seven answers. You’ll probably also laugh. A lot. Read it here!

No, playing classical music for your babies doesn’t make them smarter. But I’m pretty jealous of this baby.

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra music director and rapidly rising star conductor Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla announced today that she is expecting a baby at the end of August, and will be taking parental leave starting in July and ending in November.

The myth that playing Mozart for babies makes them smarter has been pretty much debunked. But babies can hear in utero, and mini-Mirga will be attending an enviable slate of concerts from a front-row berth on the podium. According to Bachtrack, MGT’s conducting engagements before her leave include dates with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra, the MET Orchestra, Italy’s Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen as well as the CBSO. The repertoire includes Mahler 1, Beethoven 5, the Shostakovich violin concerto, Rudolf Buchbinder performing Schumann’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde, a few Boulanger pieces paired with the Fauré Requiem, the Rite of Spring, and a plethora of Debussy including “La Mer” and “Pelleas et Mélisande.” And yes, Mozart as well.

What a lucky little nugget!

 

 

Sleeping On It

There’s an incredible power that comes from being able to name an experience. I felt tapped into that power when I discovered the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) community in freshman year of college, and found out that I wasn’t the only one who had shivery tingles ripple through their body when they heard a soothing voice or other specific sounds. And I felt it when my partner told me that the intense, half-lucid visions I had on the edge of sleep were called hypnagogic hallucinations.

A few weeks ago, I slept while listening to Robert Rich’s seven-hour piece “Somnium,” which is intended to provoke or intensify these hallucinations. In response, I was treated to one of the most labyrinthine dreams I can remember. Read more in VAN!

“I became the thorn in people’s side, and I’m proud of that. . . . I feel like I have a role to play here and I’m going to play it.”

I talked to composer Joan Tower for a profile in advance of her 80th birthday celebrations in Boston. This was one of those interviews that I thought was going to last 20 minutes and instead lasted over an hour. I probably could have written three articles with the material I had from her and Kati Agocs, a composer she mentored who also told stories about meeting Tower at a crazy dance party and benefiting from her “bullshit detector.”

Read Joan Tower’s thoughts on growing up in South America, writing for amateur orchestra, being the only woman in the room, and dancing, over at the Globe!

All Male Seasons™ and online outrage

With the turn of the new year, symphony orchestras across America have begun to announce concert lineups for the 2018-2019 season. And as classical listeners living in 2018 have come to expect, the work of female composers and composers of color is vastly underrepresented in most of the season prospectuses that have been released. At present, two of the historical “Big Five” orchestras (Chicago and Philadelphia) have announced seasons entirely comprised of pieces by men.

With this, much of the music Twittersphere is bubbling up in predictable yearly outrage. Critics at major outlets – Joshua Kosman at the San Francisco Chronicle, Zachary Woolfe at the NYT, Alex Ross of the New Yorker, myself at the Boston Globe, et al – are Tweeting right on cue. Lisa (Iron Tongue) is keeping track of numbers on her blog in this consistently updated post, and she and I are in on a spreadsheet that will track the number of female composers, composers of color, and living composers in proportion to dead white men that each orchestra programs. Matt Marks, of Alarm Will Sound and New Music Gathering, is calling for a boycott. Threads and lists of female composers are up for unrolling and scrolling.

The question that pervades my mind is how much all of this online outrage will do. Unless something major changes, these All Male Seasons™  will continue to be profitable for orchestras, meaning they have no reason to deviate from status quo.

I highly recommend these two threads:

The above thread by Vanderbilt University musicologist Doug Shadle provides some valuable and easy to understand summary of why it’s so easy for individuals connected to orchestras (music directors, conductors, patrons, PR) to cast off responsibility for diversifying the lineup.

And here, composer and singer Patricia Wallinga takes her hometown orchestra to task, explaining how it feels for a kid in the gallery seats when none of the composers look like you.

The standard institutional answer for why there are no female composers featured is the same answer you might get if you ask a college admissions office or a hiring manager why there are so few black people in your school/workplace; “because we don’t consider gender/race when we program music/admit students/select applicants, we select based on how great the music is,” throwing the asker into an awkward situation that it’s very hard to talk out of. It implies that only the music the ensemble has programmed now or in the past is “great,” and any other is therefore not “great” enough. “Great” is marketable. “Great” is what leads to a single name becoming an icon. “Great” has never, to my memory, been used to describe a musician that’s not a dead white man. This view of “greatness” as a sublime, untouchable authority is what led to the adulation of conductors such as James Levine and Charles Dutoit, which silenced the voices of those speaking out against their sexual misconduct until the #MeToo avalanche last year buried their careers.

In a now-deleted tweet, the Rochester Philharmonic responded to criticism of their overwhelmingly male program with “Philharmonics series = classical series, back in ye olde times when that wasn’t as common…we try to expand rapidly while not discounting classic repertoire from which we’re based.” But would performing a few more works by composers that aren’t cisgender white men really be “discounting the classic repertoire?”

Glimmers of progress sometimes do appear. This afternoon, it was announced that Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim would replace the disgraced James Levine in conducting the Cincinnati Symphony and May Fest Chorus in Verdi’s Requiem at Cincinnati May Festival. She will be the first woman to conduct at the festival in its 145 years. But the fact that it took this long, and that Kim (or another woman conductor) was not booked until now, and it not even being a scheduled booking but a replacement: it says something.

The Boston Symphony has programmed one female composer in its Symphony Hall concert season for the past few years. The new season comes out in March. If the BSO holds the pattern of the token one female composer or rolls out with an All Male Season, hopefully more than just these voices will be loudly asking why. I know I will be.

 

In memoriam: Ursula K. Le Guin

“Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.” – Ursula K. Le Guin, in the Paris Review

My favorite author of my time died earlier this week, and her death was announced yesterday while I was on a bus. For her, daring to imagine a better world wasn’t an empty platitude. In her work, she showed us those messy better worlds. She gave us fantastical societies and civilizations that weren’t the countries we already knew wearing thin masks. She practically predicted the Internet with her ansible. And she consistently questioned what it was to be a hero. In her stories, actions had consequences. One couldn’t just jump in an X-Wing and blow something up, to quote General Organa.

Was blowing something up ever the right thing to do in a Le Guin book? I haven’t read all her work, so I can’t say definitively, but I know that during her lifetime, her country (mine as well) was at almost perpetual war. Accordingly, there’s no glory in war in her stories. She knew the addictive power of violence. Consider the ending of “The Word for World is Forest,” when the Athsheans have learned what violence and rape are, and may be beyond going back to singing to resolve conflict.

“What would that world be, a world without war? It would be the real world. Peace was the true life, the life of working and learning and bringing up children to work and learn. War, which devoured work, learning, and children, was the denial of reality.” – Four Ways to Forgiveness, “Betrayal”

And so she encouraged us to dream of better worlds, but also to learn how to make those worlds, and to do our part towards that long journey. To honor her memory, cherish your friends. Give gifts that didn’t cost money. Respect all genders. Journal. Give fascists hell. Beware of self-proclaimed utopians. Make sure she outlives those who don’t deserve to outlive her, because as long as her words live, she will too. For the love of all the hearthgods, don’t buy her books on Amazon.

And if you do one thing to remember her, imagine real grounds for hope.