New audio is up for Home Stretch, this time the complete piece from the other night’s concert. Also: a page for my newest piece, Nightjar, which will be performed by LA Phil in May.

Courtesy of Paul Rand flickr group.

Simplic­ity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.
—Paul Rand

Fig. 1: Scarf styles.

Yale Phil­har­mo­nia played Messi­aen’s Turan­galîla-Symphonie here in New Haven last night. They’re repeat­ing it tomorrow night at Carnegie. If you’re in NYC and have the evening free I urge you to go hear it. I know every­one’s probably Messi­aen’ed out by now (and it’s not often one can say that) but to hear this piece live is really a special occasion. Even though the piece is really long— about 80 minutes— the concert feels short, thanks to Reinbert de Leeuw’s brisk, almost neoclas­si­cal reading; it reminds me of the way Boulez does Mahler— he doesn’t stop to look to the heavens (or look at himself in the mirror).

I’d been obsessed with Turan­galîla when I was about 16— probably the appro­pri­ate time to be obsessed with that kind of piece— but hadn’t listen to it much recently. Coming to it with fresh ears, I was surprised just how gamelan‑y the music is. Besides the seven or eight percus­sion­ists, there’s a central battery of celesta, keyboard glock­en­spiel (!), and solo piano, all of which seem to play almost constantly. (The sound of that little key-glock cuts through anything. I wonder if the player had any idea just how promi­nent her instru­ment was, even from Woolsey’s super-balcony). The sum effect was that kind of massed, jangly sound one hears with Balinese gamelan, smashed together with a loopy Wagner­ian orches­tra (someone tell Evan Ziporyn).

So appar­ently at CalTech, they have over 130 olive trees around campus and press their own olive oil. I could not possibly be any more jealous. Things like this make me feel even more dismal facing the long New Haven winter. 

I spent last week at my family’s ances­tral home in Wash­ing­ton, CT. I don’t remember what I did, exactly, but I think it involved many days of alter­nately cooking and eating.

I also got to play the piano badly and for fun, which is not some­thing I usually have the time or energy to do in New Haven, perhaps because I don’t have a piano in my apart­men­t’s living room. I took out all my volumes of Schubert sonatas and even pounded through the Hammerklavier. It was epic.

My brother Wells’s violin playing has blos­somed to the point where he can sight-read Brahms and Beethoven with aplomb. We were reading through Brahms’s third sonata, and I had a shocking real­iza­tion in the first movement devel­op­ment: it has a constant dominant pedal. I can’t think of any other examples of this in the clas­si­cal liter­a­ture. Can I even still call it a “devel­op­ment”? It’s really just an extended dominant pedal leading into the recap. Here, listen:

Robert Mann, violin; Stephen Hough, piano

I guess what aston­ished me was not the presence of the pedal, but how it threat­ens and ulti­mately subverts the feeling of sonata form in the movement. There is none of the bluster and bombast that Brahms usually brings into his devel­op­ments; all the tension is roiling just beneath the remark­ably calm surface. Instead, all of the outward drama gets post­poned until the recap’s tran­si­tion into the second theme, which swings wildly and at top volume between harmonic regions. In the normal trajec­tory of a sonata, one has a sense of “release” or “return” at this point; here, that sense has been completely under­mined by the relative stasis of the development.