The NY Phil­har­monic, in their newfound quest to be “hip and with it”, contin­ues to hand out comps to anything resem­bling a blogger, so here I am, blogging. Chris and I had high hopes for last night’s CONTACT! show at Sympho­ny­Space; we were partic­u­larly excited to hear Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, a huge song cycle written just before his death in 1998. Grisey’s music isn’t played very often here in New York, I assume because of the daunting demands it places on musi­cians, audi­ences, and stage managers alike; his language incor­po­rates micro­tones (grada­tions of pitch outside the 12-note chro­matic scale) as well as about half an acre of differ­ently-sized gongs. 

I’ll take a para­graph now to address the NY Phil’s PR depart­ment directly: “live-tweeting” Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil is bathetic on the level of “photo-blogging” your meal at Alinea; it speaks only of the tweeter himself. Take a step back and think, now; what does one hope to achieve by contribut­ing 160 tren­chant char­ac­ters to the #nyphilcon­tact bucket? Nothing beyond “concert good” or “concert bad” means much to someone who wasn’t also present, expe­ri­enc­ing the same sounds and images. A composer I vaguely recog­nized was sitting alone across the aisle from me, face perpet­u­ally bathed in his iPhone’s glow; was his twitter feed a stand-in for an absent compan­ion? Here’s the other thing. Arts insti­tu­tions are all about intro­duc­ing tech­no­log­i­cal gimmicks in the name of “outreach” and “embrac­ing new audi­ences”, but what audience do we see contribut­ing to the afore­men­tioned bucket? Composers, PR people, hardcore new-music bloggers, the occa­sional “real critic”, i.e. the audience who would come to the concert anyway, and pay for it happily, too. 

But I’m being mean and negative, and the Grisey was truly, spec­tac­u­larly good. Chris and I agreed that the piece conforms to our rules for How to Not Be Boring. Namely: 

1. use sharply defined, instantly recog­niz­able musical materials;
2. struc­ture your mate­ri­als in a way that is audible;
3. don’t use too much, or extra­ne­ous material.

If you, too want to write a 50-minute micro­tonal rumi­na­tion on the tran­sience of life, civi­liza­tion, and the human race, then you should probably follow these rules. Inci­den­tally, Not Being Boring should be the absolute bare minimum, and beside its value as virtu­osic spec­ta­cle, I found Quatre chants quite moving; La Mort de la Civil­i­sa­tion was partic­u­larly beau­ti­ful, a glacial, methodic reading of partially destroyed inscrip­tions on Egyptian sarcophagi. 

Of course, it also helped that Alan Gilbert, the small group of NY Phil musi­cians, and most of all, Barbara Hannigan (a soprano/total fox) gave a commit­ted and riveting perfor­mance. It takes the charisma of a great stage actor to hold an audi­ence’s atten­tion for 50 minutes, espe­cially while remain­ing still and silent during, say, a five-minute drum inter­lude; anyone who saw Le Grand Macabre last spring (or, as I did, watched the videos on YouTube) knew that Hannigan would be up to the task: 

Seems likely she’ll become a regular at Gilbert’s Phil­har­monic, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks for the beers, Phil, and until next time.