2:53 p.m. - 2007-03-05
I'm NOT an English Horn, DAMN YOU!
Hah!
Silly, whiny bassoon, or as the French say, faggot! It's time (almost) to play Le Sacre du Printemps! Of course that note is too high for you. Because, as all the timpani and various brass proclaim later in the piece, I-GOR-STRA-VIN-SKY-IS-A-SON-OF-A-BITCH. And yet we still play his music, perhaps with greater frequency than that with which we play the music of famous composers who weren't or aren't sons of bitches. Although off the top of my head I can't think of a single one. (The operative word being "famous", you understand.) (Although now that I think about it, I met Joan Tower once and she seemed pretty nice, not all full of herself like a lot of prominent people in the arts. Of course, this is based on a meeting that lasted for maybe a minute and a half so who knows. In any case, it's very well-documented that Stravinsky was an arrogant, cold-blooded prick. Just read anything that ever came out of his mouth. Really, the timpani don't lie.)
So, yeah, the Madison Symphony is doing Rite of Spring, maybe for the first time ever, in a couple weeks. I'm pretty excited, since I've never played it, but not as excited as I would have been around when I was in my early twenties and Kia and I and various friends cranked it up on the hi-fi several nights a week and flailed about drunkenly, occasionally moved by the varied and barbaric rhythm to start beating on one another in our sad, nerdy version of slam-dancing. Good times. But I've since grown older and now I like Petrouchka better. There's just something about all those adorable puppets gamboling about, pursuing one another romantically and then trying to murder each other. I still like Le Sacre, but maybe in a different way than when I was younger and responded more readily to pure, unadulterated musical viscera. Now I tend to be more interested in things like orchestral coloration and the integration of melodic elements without really a lot in the way of conventionally melodic themes. Stuff like that. Old people stuff.
It's interesting to me how one grows in and out of various artistic works and sets of aesthetic criterion and ideas about art in general. I'm reminded of all the lit classes I used to take and how the professors would always say, for instance, "You don't read The Brothers Karamazov. The Brothers Karamazov read YOU!" In addition to being a spooky idea (so are the books like, sentient? They sit patiently staring at you while you read, sizing you up, learning your weaknesses until it's time for them to make their move? Then what? In that one boring Merchant Ivory movie where the guy dies of being crushed by a shelf of books, was that an example of how the books act in concert after having "read" their human prey? How did they all know to collapse at the right time in such a coordinated way?), I think this is pretty much true, and can be applied to music as well. Hence my changing impressions of Le Sacre and my boring, boring self-examination.
Meanwhile, Yid Vicious is still kicking and just passed yet another Groundhog Day landmark, this having been the twelfth. MY, WHERE DOES ALL THE TIME GO, anyway? It was a good time, with a big jam during the second half. I got (graciously) kicked off the drums by Jon for the second set, then got kicked off the keyboard (rightfully) by Ariella. Later I got to "play" the accordian. There were plenty of people and it was a fun time. The next day, the guys in YV all assembled at our house for a visit from Veretsky Pass. Veretsky Pass is a klezmer trio that was in town to play a concert. For some complicated reason or other they had to teach a class while in town, and someone had the idea that they should teach Yid Vicious about the klezmer. And teach they did! We played a couple of tunes for them and they gave us lots of tips about balance and variety and not sounding too "arranged". It was very helpful and also they were very nice guys. One aspect of the whole thing that caused me some reflection and a laugh afterward was how they were getting us to not play too clean, too polished, too "music school". Later on, this struck me as being near the height of western decadence: almost every person in the room had spent years and years trying to play clean and now we had people, also the products of conventional music training, teaching us how NOT to play clean.
Clean or no, there's no artifice whatsoever in the music that Veretsky Pass plays. Cookie the violininst's parents were from Hungary (or maybe the Ukraine?), English was her second language and she grew up hearing Jewish songs from the old country. I'm not so clear on the bios of the other two guys, except that they've both been to the Eastern Europe/Ukraine region a bunch of times and also know the music really well. In short, the music they played, they were playing for real. I'll avoid the word "authentic" because it annoys me, but they had clearly lived the music for a long time, and it flowed out of them pretty naturally. It was a very good concert. Also, as mentioned above, they were pretty cool.
Not like that Stavinsky bastard.
