After months of procrastination, I began composing String Quartet No.3. I’ve never had trouble starting works since my process relies on intuition, situation and subjectivity so intensely.

One’s third quartet has to be good and I’m freaking myself out just a little. Wolfgang Rihm, one of my great heros wrote his third quartet at the age of 27 and it is one of his finest works. Brahms, my childhood hero stopped at his third quartet. For the first time in my life I have let the blank page spook me. My solution: write String Quartet No.4 concurrently to simply remind myself that String Quartet No.3 isn’t the last word.

I played a similar trick on myself when writing Sibyl Tones, my first quartet – I said that it wasn’t really my “first quartet;” it was only a sketch. When writing my second quartet, I thought it would turn my Sibyl Tones into my first quartet by being a latter movement. By then (even months later), I realized that the situation (and thus my intuition) had changed significantly and that String Quartet No.2 (2005)  really stood on its own.

I believe they are my finest works and suddenly, surprisingly I find myself standing in their shadow as though they were written by someone else and I doubt if I can replicate the feat, let alone exceed it.

My good buddy, Daniel Johnson sent me a link to this fantastic blog. I now procrastinate writing this new piece for Alarm Will Sound by alternating between reading posts about bass flute drama and watching episodes of Mad Men, Season 2.

David Shea, clarinet; Daniel Sweaney, viola; Eli Kalman, piano premiere Tyger, Tyger (2010), a new trio at the Rocky Ridge Music Festival – the latest installment of the Other Tiger Cycle. Other works by Jacob Ter Veldhuis and the inevitable Robert Schumann. David Ludwig and Daniel Ihasz give a lecture-recital at 7 PM on the immortal Liederkreis, Op.39 More info…

John Adams enthralls me with his music and infuriates me with his prose. However, this essay on Leopold Stokowski is fantastic. J.A. isn’t a half bad writer when he stops whining about how “picked-on” minimalist composers are or the fanatical complaining about the long dead Schoenberg (1951, John! 1-9-5-1!).

I’ve blogged previously about my respect for artists like Jean Nouvel, Richter and Rihm and how I admire their adventurousness. Adams’ essay reminds me that Stokowski should be part of that club.  I also agree that Stokowski’s interpretations suit me more than Toscanini’s and Adams’ analysis as to why is engaging and convincing. Adams writes:

From my point of view, Stokowski is infinitely more interesting a musician and a cultural figure than Toscanini. I can deeply admire Toscanini for his standing up to Hitler and fascism. No argument there. And I guess he helped to make classical music popular. But his repertory was blinkered, and he stuck to the pieces he’d learned as a young man, doing them over and over and over, whereas Stokowski was endlessly curious, always up for risk or a crazy idea. And Stokowski, even more than Koussevitzky, did more to introduce serious new music to America than any other big time conductor. The list of composers he advocated is enormous. He gave US premieres of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder and the gnarly, twelve-tone Violin Concerto. He did the first US performances of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony and three of Shostakovich’s symphonies.

I agree. Adams points out that Stokowski (and I’d add, like Rihm, Nouvel and Richter and Schoenberg) was extremely inconsistent. “Anyone following his career will be driven mad trying to cull the pearls from the swill.” There are few composers as consistent as Adams. I wish he took more risks. His greatest works are those early ones where there was something vital at stake – when minimalists actually were persecuted. Aside from an irredeemable musical and an ultimately awesome five-stringed violin concerto, Adams doesn’t fail that often, he’s never on the wrong side of taste and musical institutions seem to prize knowing that when they commission John Adams they’re going to get “a John Adams.”

I am living at Aaron Copland’s Westchester County home as part of the Aaron Copland Prize and, as I’ve spent more time with his music, I’ve been struck by Copland’s breadth and diversity… and inconsistency. From the early acerbic modernist works to the pastoral Americana to the serial-haunted and choked late works, Copland’s oeuvre is the history of 20th-Century music from 1900-1971 (when he stopped composing.) Adams, in contrast, seems eternally youthful. It’s hard to believe that in two years he’ll be eligible to receive social security checks. I think that largely has to do with the Adams brand. I may be wrong. City Noir and Dr. Atomic seem to look back harmonically to modernism. But Adams, if anyone, seems most eligible to claim Copland’s title as “Dean of American Music.” Maybe Adams’ slow, steady rise, nearly unchanging brand and ultimate eclipse of his contemporaries tells us as much about the state of American music since 1971 as Copland’s varied oeuvre tells us about it before. I guess I wish he were more like Copland and Stokowski and less like Toscanini. I wish it were possible as a young composer in America to aspire to be less like the branded Toscanini and more like the madcap Stokowski.

I see Jean Nouvel’s gorgeous Chelsea building every time I walk along Highline Park but I didn’t realize it was officially finished. It stands opposite Frank Gehry’s in a rare corner of complete architectural splendor. I’ve written previously, albeit briefly, about my admiration for Nouvel, his adventurousness and risk-taking. It seems appropriate that it should face Frank Gehry’s who, in an excellent New York Times Magazine profile, explained Nouvel’s genius:

As his close friend the architect Frank Gehry told me last month, Nouvel was “long overdue” to win it, but the inconsistency of his work got in the way. “He’s precarious,” explained Gehry, who was on the awards jury until last year. “He tries things, and not everything works. There’s a mixture of things that are extraordinary, things that are experiments, things that don’t come off aesthetically. But Jean is willing to jump in and take on things and try. That’s a great quality.”

(I remember reading this profile in 2008 sitting in the Starbucks at the corner of Chapel Street and High Street in New Haven. It’s another of those corners of complete architectural splendor. Sitting against the window I faced one of the most beautiful parts of Yale’s historically inaccurate Gothic campus, to my left were Louis Kahn’s British Art Center and University Art Center with Paul Rudolph’s controversial monolith peering over. On my right was probably Robert A.M Stern, the aesthetically conservative, but pedagogically open-minded dean of the School of Architecture, who, with his brightly colored socks, shared my morning ritual of Starbucks + New York Times. This is why Yale is so magical. )

I think Gehry gets Nouvel or at least distills what I admire about him. “There’s a mixture of things that are extraordinary, things that are experiments, things that don’t come off aesthetically. But Jean is willing to jump in and take on things and try. That’s a great quality.” It’s almost like Gehry, who seems condemned to endlessly repeat himself is just a bit jealous of Nouvel’s erratic genius.

I like this quote too:

I never imagined I could do a building like Branly,” he replied. “But with a question like Branly, you have to have a building like Branly.”

Increasingly, I’m convinced that what bores me with American music in general, and the contemporary music scene in New York, specifically is that far too many people seem to be providing the same answers to same questions, namely, “How do “we” save classical music” or “How do we create a broader audience for classical music and thereby make it relevant?” If these aren’t the exact questions asked, they undergird a great many other ones. Nouvel, in contrast, seems willing to entertain a new question for each work. That is radical.

And this, about my new “hometown”

“I will keep the idea that Vegas has to talk about Vegas, and not about Brazil, Egypt, Paris,” Nouvel said. Instead of arbitrarily replicating some tourist mecca, he wanted his simulacrum to be of Las Vegas itself — or at least of Las Vegas before it became “Vegas.” The arid landscape appealed to him. He was also intrigued by the programmatic inclusion of an aquarium. “For me there is something paradoxical about the aquarium and the desert,” he told his team. “It could be poetic. I want to play with that.” He emphasized that the hotel complex must “exist in a universe of ‘wow’ objects but create a difference, a strong difference.” He envisioned a wall of towers and lower buildings that stretched for four-tenths of a mile and resembled a canyon.

And this:

“I like to play with the story of the city,” Nouvel told me. Having carefully studied the text, he is ready to write his own chapter.

A profile like this makes my heart sing; it’s just so inspiring.

Nicolai Ouroussoff began his review of the new Chelsea building with this:

During the past few years Chelsea became a one-stop-shopping destination for high-style contemporary architecture as well as high-end art, and the results can be depressing. For every significant building that went up, the neighborhood seemed to produce a half-dozen or so inferior knockoffs. The feeling on the streets now is the same as it is in most of the galleries: the sheer amount of work, and the mediocrity of most of it, can make the effort of sorting out the good from the bad too painful to contemplate.

Man! Why can’t we have NYT coverage of the contemporary music scene like that? Can you imagine anyone beginning a review like that? Tony, Alan, Steve and Vivian, meet Nicolai. Nicolai, meet Tony, Alan, Steve and Vivian! My friend Timo suggests that the NYT’s current type of criticism might be a misadventure in advocacy. I tend to agree but would extend it to his buddy at the New Yorker who tends to set precedents in this town. Oh for the days of Ada Louis Huxtable!

Some more Nouvel:

UPDATE: It seems Timo’s prays have been heard. Vivian Schweitzer can’t take it anymore, reviewing Scelsi thusly:

Scelsi (an Italian count who died in 1988) suffered a mental breakdown, after which he would play the same note on the piano repeatedly throughout the day. Much of his music uses only one pitch, and his abrasively tedious Fifth Quartet centers on F.

Berio occupies a central position in my musical pantheon. Sequenza VII influenced my Violin Sonata No.1 (2008); in 2003, I attempted to fuse John Adams’ Shaker Loops and Berio’s Corale in my Berio-esquely/Adam-ish titled work, Light Upon Curves (2003); and the whole concept that Berio proposed in his Chemins series probably influenced me more profoundly than any other musical idea, not only compositionally, but as a student of intertextuality in music.

I thank Brad Lubman who invited me to play viola in Eastman’s Berio Festival in 2003 with both Musica Nova and the Eastman Philharmonia. And while Berio could not attend, (he passed away shortly after the festival), it was a mind-blowing, life-changing experience where I was privileged to play Sinfonia, Chemins IV and Corale. Playing this marvelous music prompted me to radically rethink my relationship to European Modernism and skeptically question the dominant narrative perpetuated by American baby-boomers that European Modernism was expressively limited and ideologically stifling.

“Music gazes at its listener with empty eyes, and the more deeply one immerses oneself in it, the more incomprehensible its ultimate purpose becomes, until one learns that the answer, if such is possible, does not lie in contemplation, but in interpretation. In other words, the only person who can solve the riddle of music is the one who plays it correctly, as something whole. Its enigma apes the listener by seducing him into hypostasizing, as being, what is in itself an at, a becoming, and, as human becoming, behavior.”

“In music, what is at stake is not meaning, but gestures. To the extent that music is language, it is, like notation in music history, a lunguage sedimented from gestures. It is not possible to ask music what it conveys as its meaning; rather, music has as its theme the question, How can gestures be made eternal? In contrast, the search for the meaning of music itself, as something to be disclosed in the rational justification of its raison d’être, is revealed as a delusion, a pseudomorphosis into the realm of intensions, to which music, by virtue of its resemblance to language, misleads us… It is the paradox of all music that, as an effort toward that intentionless thing for which the inadequate word “name” was chosen, it unfolds precisely only by dint of its participation in rationality in the broadest sense. Sphinx-like, it fools the listener by constantly promising meanings, and even intermittently- meanings that for music, however, are in the truest sense means to the death of meaning. Nor is music ever exhausted in these means. As long as music was played within a more or less closed context of tradition, such as that of the last 350 years, this irresolvable quality that it has, the fact that everything suggests meaning and nothing actually wants meaning, could be concealed. Within the tradition, the meaning of music was accepted, and it asserted astonishment, as self-evident. Today, however, when tradition no longer prescribes anything for music, its enigmatic character emerges, weak and needy, like a question mark — one that, admittedly, becomes blurred the moment anyone asks it to confess what it actually wants to communicate. For the name is no communication of an object.”

“The emergence of music’s enigmatic character tempts one to pose the question of its being, while at the same time the precess that brought it to this point forbids the question. Music, after all, does not possess its object, is not in command of the name; rather, it longs for it, and, in doing so, aims at its own demise. If music, for an instant, were to accomplish the thing around which the tones revolve, this would be its fulfillment and its end. Its relation to the thing that it cannot represent but would like to invoke is therefore endlessly mediated. The name itself is n more present for music than for human languages, and the theodicies that are so much in vogue just now and present music as a manifestation of the divine are blasphemies. They afford music the dignity of revelation, although music, as an art, is nothing but the secularly preserved form of prayer, which, in order to survive, forswears its object and surrenders it to thoughts. In such efforts to reach what is at once blocked and unattainable for it, music is, of necessity, endlessly mediated in itself. It has no being to which the person is who seduced by the enigma could refer. Rather, ti draws the name closer, through the unfolded totality, the constellation of all its moments. Music’s simple being, which would be accessible to a primal question is a fata morgana –no different from the Being from which philosophy, bored with its tedious investigations, hopes to suck gratification… Immediately before the conclusion of the first movement of Beethoven’s Les Adieux, when in a fleeting, vanishing association over the course of three measures the galloping of horses becomes audible as “meaning,” this passage, which is more sublime than words can tell, says that this most transient of things, the ineffable sounds of disappearance, holds more hope of return than could ever be disclosed to any reflection on the origin and essence of the form-seeking sound.”

Theodore Adorno, The Relationship of Philosophy and Music

(Trans. Susan H. Gillespie)

Beethoven, Sonata No. 26 in E-flat Major, Op.81a Les Adieux, I.

Arthur Rubenstein, piano

(My favorite recording)

David Soyer, longtime cellist of the Guarneri Quartet, died last week.

I remember hearing them play at Tanglewood in 1996, when I was 16 years old, sitting under a canopy of stars (Sternenzelt) while the quartet played a breathtaking account of Beethoven’s Op.132. The Heiligedankgesang was unforgettable. As an encore: Op.59, No.3, IV.

Two Beethoven performances in memoriam:

String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, V. Cavatina

String Quartet No.9 in C major, IV. Finale

…I love New York City and here is one reason why:

I really love Gerhard Richter. Go and see the exhibit before January 9, 2009 (and take me with you.)

I visited the Richter exhibit at the Marion Goodman Gallery at 57th and 5th Avenue on Tuesday with my friend, Matt Reeg and enjoyed it so much that afterwards my mouth was sore from smiling. I had always been impressed by books and photographs of paintings by Richter and a few months ago I even saw (a tiny) one at the Met. But I had never seen a Richter in the flesh until a few weeks ago when I visited the Chicago Art Institute where there is a whole room devoted to really big Richter paintings.

Richter’s use of color, textures and layers excites me on a purely visceral level, but also intellectually: he’s rethinking abstract expressionism is such bold, effective and revolutionary ways. He paints these gorgeous abstracts, turns around and then paints the photographic-blurry motion paintings is such painstaking detail. I love the tension between violence and calm in both texture and timbre, and not always in the same proportions or same places: sometimes he paints pastel washes with incredible, violent textures. Other times, he paints brilliant, bright colors so placidly. I love that the abstracts seem so haphazard and violent and that the photo-motion paintings are, in contrast, so meticulously and cooly crafted.

Richter inspires me in a way that most living composers don’t.

Richter is:

• Prolific. We saw paintings from 2008-09: there must have been 50+
• Stylistically diverse: one might mistake the show for three different artists if you didn’t know his varied themes
• Prolific + stylistically diverse = many painting in different aesthetic categories.

This differs from the career of most composers (and especially successful American composers) who:

• Write comparatively little, maybe 1 or 2 works a year, totaling maybe 40-70 in a lifetime.
• Stylistically unified, often writing long stretches of either very similar pieces or embrace a general eclecticism that allows a number of different style that relate similarly over a number of works.
• Few works + stylistically unified = a brand.

As a young composer, I feel great pressure to be more stylistically unified, to find “a voice.” Seeing Richter’s works is encouraging.  

Thus, I count Richter, the architect, Jean Nouvel and Wolfgang Rihm in my personal artistic pantheon: people whose careers I model my own after. While each has a definite voice or voices, each is prolific, stylistically all-over-the-map and, most importantly, is equally unafraid to either repeat themselves, change directions or produce bad work in transit. That’s artistic courage and to make a career of it is inspiring.

It’s days like this that make me reconsider my loveless marriage with New York. My friend, Matt Reeg organized a very nice “Welcome Home” day for me after I returned from the VCCA. We planned to go see the Gerhard Richter and he suggested we visit an exhibit of David Hockney’s, a painter I don’t know well, as well and he prepared and organized a terrific brunch as his apartment to kick the whole thing off.

Hockney’s latest works are gorgeous. Going to both exhibits reminds me that the uninitiated probably enjoy art with a more vivid, childlike wonder than those of us that practice it – or at least in a different way. I need to do that (and go to dance concerts, which do the same thing for me) more often.

After our Midtown gallery visits, we visited the Met’s Samuri exhibit thinking it was the “big show” reviewed in the New York Times. It wasn’t,  so we spent an hour looking at 40-50 different sword blades…

Caroline Shaw, my former roommate hosted a caroling party in Brooklyn that ended an exceptional day – one of those days that make me give NYC another, friendlier look.