The Standing Room

13 Ways of Looking at a Music Festival: Ojai 2009, Part I: Friday

I must agree with the old fogeys that tweeting during performances is completely unacceptable. However, I thought I'd try tweeting in between performances during my recent trip to the 63rd Ojai Music Festival, a West Coast new music mainstay. Herewith, an annotated compilation of tweets from the weekend, or, if you prefer, a Twit's View of Ojai.

thestandingroom is driving down to Ojai. http://bit.ly/RBdc8 #fb 9:35 AM Jun 12th from TweetDeck

I picked up my car from Enterprise Friday morning. @linernotesdanny later said, "you DROVE, are you INSANE?", but really, I'm not sure there was any better option. I explored taking the train, but this NY Times article, coincidentally published on the same weekend, explains why that would have been folly. And Ojai is an inland community, nestled among mountains, an hour up a winding road from Santa Barbara.  So I loaded up the iPod with plenty of driving music, geared up for the long ride and set out on my solo road trip down 101. 

Twenty minutes out of SF, the stereo stopped working. 

thestandingroom is sure there are other nonwhite folks around. #fb 8:03 PM Jun 12th from Tweetie

I pulled into this small town, full of horses and spas, and walked over to the Libbey Bowl, an outdoor shell where most of the concerts were to take place. For various reasons I've never been free on this weekend in June, so this was my first experience in Ojai. And my initial, honest, immediate reaction was, well, that the Ojai Music Festival might well deserve slot #127 on the list of Stuff White People Like. Now, this is not meant to trigger a round of hand-wringing about diversity or a bout of white guilt or anything; I'm merely observing that normally the only other times I'm so aware of my own non-whiteness, living in California, is when I get hired to sing in churches where people say things like, "It is meet and right so to do." (It didn't help matters when I was the only person in my vicinity asked, by an usher, to confirm that I wasn't a plebeian interloper from the lawn, trying to snag an unclaimed seat.)

Official Ojai Festival photo

thestandingroom Tin Hat just finished a set where every piece led some women to say "mmmmm..." quietly to themselves in the silence before the applause. 8:42 PM Jun 12th from Tweetie

So with that I settled into 48 hours of concert-going, during which I heard seven and a half exceptional concerts. There's an unmistakeable romantic charm about hearing music outdoors in the dark, amid the sounds of nighttime insects and wind blowing through leaves, and Tin Hat, the 4-member composer/improvisor collective, were well suited to the environment with their quiet, Satie-inspired music, created from an assemblage of instruments ranging from violin and guitar to harmonium and the dark-hued contra alto clarinet.

Official Ojai Festival photo

thestandingroom sat through an entire performance with contacts reversed left/right. Luckily it was a theater piece about images that are out of focus. #fb 10:40 PM Jun 12th from Tweetie

The concert closed with eighth blackbird (the music directors of this year's festival), Rinde Eckert, and Steven Mackey performing the world premiere of Slide, a multimedia staged work structured around a narrative about a psychologist doing a test about human perception: if we look at an image out of focus and are asked to make a decision about what it is, how long after it comes into focus does it take us to recognize the truth, if we were wrong? And since, as it turns out, those who make an early guess take longer to see reality after it emerges than those who have not made a premature decision, what does this reveal about our preconceptions and prejudices generally?

I had somehow confused my two contacts when I put them in before the concert, so appropriately enough the whole thing was a little fuzzy throughout. But I could see enough to know (or did I make guesses based on preconceptions? hmmm...) that Rinde sang, acted, and danced his dance; Steve played electric guitar and narrated the tale; a projected slide, slide of, slide of a dog, slide of a dog running, dog running, running (with Steve's slide guitar underlay) was impossible to ignore; and eighth blackbird acted, moved props, gave a serious go at rocking out while singing and playing an electric bass, turned lights on and off... oh, and played their instruments like fiends, as they always do. But the most memorable part of the piece was not when the extroverted theatrical machine was in motion; rather, it was at the end, when it moved into the quiet, introspective place where Tin Hat had started, with Rinde softly intoning in his falsetto "and I sleep here like a baby...", permuting the phrase over and over, lulling us into the night.

thestandingroom Ventura women scream wooooooo! in the streets at 2am. 2:06 AM Jun 13th from Tweetie

P.S. I do not recommend staying in downtown Ventura.

O HAI!!

NORA SEZ, IM ON UR PEEYANO KEYZ, PREMIERING UR KITTEH CONCERTO. I CAN HAZ PERFORMANCE AT OJAI?

(Here's the BBC report, in English.)

I'm driving 360 miles down the coast to the Ojai Music Festival today, which this year is under the artistic direction of eighth blackbird. Appropriately, there's already plenty of Tweeting going on there, where last night's concertgoers heard Thierry de Mey's awesome Musique de Tables and George Crumb's Music for a Summer Evening. A nameless entity known only as @OjaiFestivals seems to be particularly excited about tonight's premiere of a music/theater work called Slide by Steve Mackey, performed by the 'birds, Mackey and Rinde Eckert. Click here for the full weekend-long festival program.

And if Ojai doesn't hold interest for you, check out #newmusicanagrams, a charge led by @HurdAudio (Devin Hurd -> V.D.?!? Run! Hide!) and @briansacawa (Brian Sacawa -> Cabana Is Raw).

Time to get on the road. You can expect occasional communiqués @thestandingroom KTHXBAI!!!

The Sweeping Insensitivity of This

O Lord, forgive me for simultaneously laughing and thinking of the Ligeti Requiem when I listen to this.

BONUS TRACK: Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima as the soundtrack to an episode of the Care Bears. (You have to click the words "Threnody and the Care Bears"; h/t Chris Foley)

Previously on TSR's Inappropriate WWII References through Contemporary Music: I CAN HAZ WATER?

The Chairmen Dance

Alternately titled Five Organs.

I don't profess to understand this. Happy Memorial Day.

In Conclusion:Terry Riley's In C at Carnegie Hall

When I walked off the stage, I honestly had no idea how long we had been out there. The whole experience felt completely apart from time. If I had had to guess, I would have said, what, maybe 35, 45 minutes? I glanced at the clock and it said 9:55. The last time I had looked was more than two hours prior.

Wonderful things have been written already about last week's performance of In C at Carnegie; some links are included below, and video from the rehearsal is posted above. (I'm in it for about a nanosecond.) From my vantage point on stage, it was an utterly extraordinary evening, spent in an energy field of unblemished joy. (From the ten-minute standing ovation that capped the event, it seems there were at least a few in the audience who shared the feeling.) A full day later, I was still feeling the afterglow from that evening in a visceral way.

For my own benefit I need to jot down some of the special moments, before they slip from my memory ...

Feeling the pulse emerge from Evan Ziporyn's bass clarinet before consciously hearing it ...

The first time Ustad Mashkoor Ali Khan went up to the high G in his invocation, launching the ship ...

Stuart & Loren Dempster and Mark Stewart rising up out of their seats in figure 6 to didjeridu Stern Auditorium! ...

The crazy, pounding, primal unison at figure 11, and the recorders and kotos at the eye of the storm immediately following ...

Terry's vocal glides and gentle ornaments in something so simple as four whole notes in figure 14 ...

Looking upstage and seeing Adam Sliwinski from So Percussion clapping the pulse, and realizing that the clapping I was hearing wasn't from the monitors but from the audience ...

The almost shocking sense of portent in figure 21 ...

The instrumental ensemble receding in figure 22 to reveal the canon already underway between the adult singers stage right and the children's choir stage left (and then feeling Trevor Dunn come in under that!) ...

The bass frequency leviathans surfacing in figure 29 ...

The moment when the pulse was taken over by the accordion ...

The look on GVSU undergrad Katie Chapman's face when Terry said during soundcheck, let's start the whole evening with contrabassoon on the C drone ...

Suddenly remembering my 24-year-old self listening to big arcs of breath coming from Evan's clarinet in a recording session for Music for 18 Musicians (with Judy Sherman at the board) and now hearing those same arcs coming out of myself at 37 ...

Playing musical catch with Judy ...

David Harrington's limpid melody in figure 35, softly dancing above the pulsation, and all the raucous individual voices that followed his lead ...

So many overtones! ...

The sudden appearance of a banjo in the texture, and knowing that it's from Dan Zanes directly upstage ...

Seeing Francisco Núñez's whole body giving all of his energy to his young singers and having them amplify it and toss it right back ...

Twinkling everywhere and not knowing if they were from the toy piano or the celeste or the percussion or...? ...

The celebratory clangor of the carillon in figure 45 ...

Looking up and seeing the awesome Joan La Barbara across from me singing "ba da doop!" ...

Morton Subotnick playing a clarinet (instead of a Buchla Box) ...

Knowing the stylishly begloved Katrina Krimsky was still smiling around figure 40 CCCCCCCCCC &c ...

The stillness of figure 48, everyone recharging for the final push ...

Dave Douglas's augmentation of the rhythm in figure 52 or 53, soaring above a massive crescendo ...

Dennis Russell Davies's astonishing economy of gesture, suddenly pointing just one finger upward in the final crescendo, instantaneously giving everyone license to smash the ceiling ...

The gurgling of the contrabass recorder as the leviathan resubmerged into the night sea ...

The beautiful, resonant silence that followed, which was all the indication we needed to know that people had been with us the whole way.

Wall Street Journal "The sound was large. It enveloped me. It moved as it if were a living being, shifting, changing, falling away to let me hear (just for instance) the piping of four recorders... I got lost in this sound. I didn't want it to end, and it kept on delighting me for the full length of the piece, which on this festive anniversary was close to two hours. This was one of the happiest evenings of my long life in music, a celebration not only of In C and everything that stemmed from it ... but of life itself."

Theater of Found Sounds "If the European symphony evolved from concrete sound to abstract form, then the American symphony returns it to its etymological roots, a sounding-together. In C is an acknowledged masterpiece, but remains the great unacknowledged American symphony, a symphony in perpetual search of an orchestration, constantly new, constantly searching, constantly reinventing itself."

Village Voice "As all of the performers receded into silence—so that the air of Carnegie Hall itself seemed to thrum with the continuing pulsations of "C"—a nearly ten-minute standing ovation roared from the masses."

Eric Gamalinda "[You] found yourself traveling through the edge of the universe, where other worlds wafted and faded out of view. There were stretches of desolate, uninhabited spaces, exoplanets with their own tumults and surprises, and now and then a glimpse of some heavenly realm and strains of eerie, angelic voices."

Feast of Music "The biggest, most captivating performance of In C I've ever heard."

Michael Phelps's Bronze Medals "At the end of In C, there was nothing but the memory of sound in Stern Auditorium, and I could live in that moment for a long time."

Sequenza21 "In C is not so much about politics as about friendship."

New York Times "A view of music as a communal action and a key to transcendence."

disoriented "Riley is billed as a 'minimalist' composer, which suggests the idea of something spare and austere. In C was as rich and complex as you could ask for, the music not minutely pre-scripted but emerging naturally from the interactions of a stage-full of gifted musicians."

Decider "Terry Riley stood in the middle of the stage, hands clasped in prayer, smiling, and bowed. He walked away. People cheered again. He returned. More clapping. He walked away once more. Even more clapping and hollering. He returned. And it happened again and again—a moment no one was ready to leave."

M. C— On In C

Tomorrow I join Terry Riley, the Kronos Quartet, and around 5 dozen other musicians on stage at Carnegie Hall for a blow-out, 45th-anniversary celebration of the revolutionary piece In C. This will be the first time In C has ever been performed in the big hall at Carnegie, believe it or not! A number of the musicians involved have been writing down their reflections on In C for Kronos's Facebook page. Here are links to all of the posts, and more are being added regularly between now and the performance. My contribution is cross-posted below.

David Harrington, Kronos | Aaron Shaw (Uilleann pipes) | Bill Ryan, GVSU New Music Ensemble | Jon Gibson (saxophones) | Kathleen Supové (celeste) | Elena Moon Park (mandolin) | So Percussion - Eric, Jason, Adam, Josh | Wu Man (pipa) | Jacob Garchik (low brass) | Yang Yi (guzheng) | Joan La Barbara (voice) | Michael Hearst (claviola, theremin, &c) | Stuart Dempster (trombone, didjerdiu, &c) | Katrina Krimsky (piano pulse) | Jeanne Velonis (accordion) | Koto Vortex | Michael Harrison (voice) | Alfred Shabda Owens (voice) | Morton Subotnick (clarinet)

When was the first time you heard Terry Riley's In C? What was that experience like?

I have to be honest: I remember hearing a lot about In C before actually hearing it! And I think that because of the simplicity of the title and what I understood to be the simplicity of the structure, I remember having developed certain preconceptions going in.

So my main memory of being introduced to In C for real was surprise. I think I expected stasis, and instead found constant movement. I expected repetition, and heard constant change. I expected an hour of monolithic C major, and heard tonal shifts moving like clouds. I expected a precision machine, and heard a group of individual personalities working together.

And there was a sense of familiarity about it. I didn't know how a piece of music could feel welcoming, but somehow In C was. Now that I've met Terry, I understand quite clearly where that sense of warmth comes from. And looking back, I know now that the sense of familiarity came from all of the music that I had heard up to that point that had taken inspiration from In C. Last night I revisited the SUNY Buffalo recording, and at one point I suddenly, unexpectedly, had a strong flashback to when I was 13, hanging out in my friend's basement, jumping around to Baba O'Riley.

Have you played In C? When did you play it for the first time?

This will be my first time performing In C, and it should be a blast! It seems a lot of instrumentalists encounter In C at one point or another in school or whatever, but it seems to cross singers' paths less often. And since we have such a large group—encompassing brass instruments, woodwind instruments, strummed & plucked instruments, bowed instruments, and singers—one of the things I'm really looking forward to is hearing what happens within each of these subgroups, and how the subgroups interact with each other. What happens when adult singers get to toss around these patters with children singers? What changes when all these voices interact with a group of wind players? In a way, it will be like the First Time for everyone on stage, since this specific group of instruments has never been and will never be gathered together.

How has In C influenced you as a musician?

Since I'm also part of the staff of the Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association, I've been working on this event for around a year and a half now. And probably the most unexpected discovery as I've spent more and more time with In C was realizing that, hard-wired into the piece, is a whole philosophy of life. As we individually move through the patterns, we take responsibility for our individual selves, yet we have to constantly watch out for others. We have individual voices and diverse skills, but we are always in a social context, and ultimately we are equals. Sometimes someone leads the way, and then someone else begins to take us in a different direction. Community-building is at its core: the piece falls apart completely if that group sense is missing. And yet the individual musician cannot relinquish responsibility to a leader or conductor. We all have our roles to fill at different points in the journey, yet no one can predict what they will be, or when the moments will emerge when we will either need to step up and lead, or step back and follow. And Terry achieved this by writing 53 fragments of music—that's just jaw-droppingly amazing.

How has music changed since In C first premiered in 1964?

Last year I went to a book release event for The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. In C premiered in San Francisco at the Tape Music Center, and David W. Bernstein collected a number of writings about that time and conducted several in-depth interviews with a number of influential artists who worked there, including Terry. The release event was in the basement of a library in the Haight Ashbury district that held maybe 100 or seats. By the time the event began (with Stuart Dempster standing among us, playing the didjeridu), the room was so over-capacity—with people of all ages—that the fire marshal came in and threatened to close the whole place down if most of the people didn't leave the building. The result was that many people in their 20s and 30s went outside and sat on the ground, poking their heads through the windows to hear Morton Subotnick, Bill Maginnis, Ramon Sender, and Don Buchla recount how they and their colleagues did the work they did. Those folks sticking their heads through the windows are the testament to what's changed since 1964: they have been so influenced by In C and all the work that came out of the Tape Music Center that they demonstrated in the most concrete way their need to come out and give props.

Tell me about the instrument(s) you'll be playing.

I'll be singing, using lyrics that Terry wrote specially for this performance. Mostly they're just phonemes, not actual words, but Terry's essence still comes through loud and clear!

Is there anyone performing that you've worked with before? Anyone you're looking forward to meeting for the first time?

I've worked with many of the musicians on that stage in some capacity or another, some for around 15 years, but this will be the first opportunity to share a stage with them. I look forward to the whole thing!

Postcards:Switchboard Festival 2008

3.30.08 Switchboard Festival @ Dance Mission Theatre

The second annual, eight-hour Switchboard Festival starts at 2pm this Sunday, 3.29; schedule here. Come and go at your whim. Here are some snaps from last year's inaugural festival that have been languishing in iPhoto. (Last year's program, PDF)

Refreshing, in the dance studio


the always-fabulous Amy X Neuburg


Edmund Welles


Robin Estrada's theatrical, ritualistic Parangal,
the most memorable piece of the day


Switchboard directors Jonathan Russell, Jeff Anderle, Ryan Brown

The M6 at the Whitney

I'm afraid that after a 6.5-hour soundcheck at the Whitney, immediately followed by a performance of Death of Klinghoffer (seated in the audience, behind two of the rudest, most immature twits I've encountered in years), I'm too tired to be particularly articulate. But I feel remiss in not putting the word out that I'm performing with my group The M6 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York this Sunday afternoon (yes, we know it's Super Bowl Sunday) as part of:

MEREDITH MONK MUSIC @ THE WHITNEY
A one-day-only four-hour performance marathon

The Whitney Museum of American Art presents Meredith Monk Music @ the Whitney, featuring highlights from 43 years of work by the eminent composer, singer, and multi-disciplinary artist. 

Meredith Monk's long relationship with the Whitney began in 1970 when she gave the first full concert of her music as part of the Museum's legendary Composers' Showcase series. Now, in a historic return to the Whitney, Monk and her Vocal Ensemble perform early material like Vessel Suite (1971) and more recent work like her haunting and witty Songs of Ascension (2008). Other works in the concert will include Stringsongs (2004), Monk’s first string quartet (written for Kronos); music from ATLAS, a 1991 opera; and Gotham Lullaby (1974), Tablet (1976), Dolmen Music (1979), Lonely Spirit (1991), and Double Fiesta (1986). In addition, author Rick Moody will read his story Boys accompanied by four voices performing a piece originally composed for NPR’s The Next Big Thing.

With Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble, The M6, Todd Reynolds, Theo Bleckmann, John Hollenbeck, So Percussion, and more

Sunday, February 1, 2-6pm
Whitney Museum of American Art
Madison and 75th Street

Admission to the event is free with paid Museum admission. No reservations, no reserved seating, no special ticketing.

The museum opens at 11am and admission to the museum and the event are one and the same. Doors to the 3rd floor gallery, where the performances will take place, open at 1:30. Starting at 2, it'll basically be four hours of continuous performances and screenings in one huge room where audiences are free to come and go as you please.  Everyone's doing various things during the course of the afternoon, but the big M6 hour will be sometime between 3pm and 4:30pm.

If you're in New York, please come! It will be quite an event. And the show finishes right at 6, so it's not like you'll miss much of the game anyway.

Facebook | Whitney Live blog

Caturday Met Broadcast

Bert on the set of Doctor Atomic

Cuz you're the best mom I'll ever know

Precious Auntie, Amy Tan, Crazy Mom

We're your Daughters
Boys, off with your pee-pee

We're your Daughters
Boys, we fly through air

We're your Daughters
"Dragon breathe fog from nostril"

All you gotta wear's a wig, "Lootie"...

And Amy's there!

BONUS TRACKS
Inspired by the Tattler:

What would an Assmaster aria for Margaret Cho be like, set atop a Chinatown restaurant lazy susan? Mommy so curious!

Ancient Chinese Stuff, huh?