Category Archives: Twin Cities performances

mid-winter musical life

February 28, 2009

Everything has ground to a halt. Heavy snow a couple of days ago and I have no ambition at all. The piano trio arrangements I am working on for a new version of “In Dreams…” are baffling me. The most straightforward of the pieces–which I thought I would whip off–seem impossible to put in any terms but piano. The more outside a piece is, the easier for me to reimagine it. Today I lack confidence. I will let it rest. It will come back.

schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

After going to a performance of two Schoenberg pieces, Verklärte Nacht followed by Pierrot Lunaire, I remarked to my companion that VN felt like an exploration of every possible conventional harmony. She said, “I’m pretty bored by Western harmony.” I’m not, but the harmonic cycling-through that happens in classical and romantic era music is starting to bother me. I’ll hear three Mozart symphonies in a row tomorrow afternoon. I wonder what effect that will have.

Played a hilariously varied variety show–Global Hotdish–at the History Center today with Jim Price and Ross Sutter. I don’t think I’ve seen lutefisk and West African drumming on the same program before. Desdamona and Carnage did some hip hop.

Carnage

Carnage

I got to thinking about how mainstream hip hop has become; from being an outsider art form in the seventies to now being uncontroversial, barring some sour people who say, “I don’t like that rap stuff.” And then I thought about the history of blues music, and Tony Glover’s famous 1980’s remark that Chicago blues is the Dixieland jazz of the eighties. If the pattern holds, we can expect that in a less than half a century hip hop will be performed in crummy little bars across the USA by old white people who have straight jobs as lawyers and stuff.

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Pinter in the Colonial

February 14, 2009

I went to the preview of the Minneapolis Pinter Studies project with a buddy Wednesday night. Four short pieces–each with its own director, dramaturge and cast–were presented “promenade” style throughout the old Colonial Warehouse. The outcome was mixed…as is to be expected. The torture play slayed me; the radio play baffled me. Scotty Reynolds has put this project together, and wants to explore other writers and genres in similar ways. I ended up thinking, a few days later, that it was wonderful for the directors to have an opportunity to do work that normally wouldn’t be staged outside academia. I admire Scotty’s passion and the nurturing role he played in building this project up.  I wonder what the next project will be.

Portrait of Pinter by Dick Scott-Stewart

Portrait of Pinter by Dick Scott-Stewart

From the conclusion of Pinter’s Nobel lecture:

When we look into a mirror we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimetre and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror - for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

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Songs of War…

January 19, 2009

Saturday night I attended a concert in the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s ongoing International Chamber Music Festival. This performance featured the members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the London Sinfonietta in Heiner Goebbels’ “Songs of War I Have Seen.” Goebbels first came on my radar through his amazing collaboration with the Ensemble Modern, “Eislermaterial.”

Like ” Eislermaterial,” “Songs of Wars I Have Seen” is a theatrical chamber music presentation which uses spoken word, in this case Gertrude Stein’s “Wars I Have Seen.”

Stein’s writing about her war–or at least the excerpts used by Goebbels–does not discuss politics, the fate of the Jews or other topics of controversy.  The poems in “Songs of Wars…” are about civilian life in a time of war: eating honey rather than sugar, the character of each nation’s radio sign-on, the paths of bombers, the progress of rumors, travel, loss, the way our thinking becomes distorted in a time of danger. The piece, beautifully written and staged, is profoundly moving. If you ever have a chance to see it, do so.

A memory of reading about Stein’s equivocal personal history tickled at my mind throughout the performance, and I verified it when I came home that night. She and Alice B. Toklas led a sheltered existence in eastern France during the Second World War, protected by the patronage of Bernard Faÿ , a closeted, right-wing, antisemitic Vichy official. Yes, Terry Castle wrote about it,  in a review of Janet Malcolm’s “Two Lives” in the London Review of Books.

So here we have it, a spoiled, apolitical genius writes an apolitical, sharply observed piece about a political, world-shaking event from the vantage of protection and safety. A Jew fails to note what is happening to her co-religionists in her time, under her nose, at the hands of her protector. Willed ignorance. And yet the truth of war will out. Goebbels realizes it beautifully.

From the OAE's blog--a blurry photo of the piece in performance at the Ordway Center, Saint Paul.

pic from OAE blog

This photo gives you some sense of what the performance looks like. The stage was lit by spotlights and lamps. Women instrumentalists were ranged in a rough semicircle in the front, men lined up in the back. The women spoke the text into microphones.

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