There is so much to love in Holland Cotter’s review of Gerhard Richter in today’s NYT. So much of what Richter has achieved is what I aspire to in my own art and Cotter aptly distills some of this in a few great quotes:

Art-world types obsessed with painting’s supposed endangered status point to him as a keeper of the modernist art-for-art’s-sake flame, a true believer. Others take the distinctive coolness of his art as proof of his skepticism toward virtuosity, originality, expressivity, all the qualities that modernism holds dear.

One reality seems fairly clear. At present, the fashion for work that is ideologically overdetermined in meaning, political or otherwise, has passed. We are now in a phase of retreat from easily readable content. And Mr. Richter’s career offers a model for how to build art on ambiguity.

And this one:

Of course no art, abstract or otherwise, is devoid of content (which doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of hollow work around). All art has meaning, intended or not, and part of the meaning of Mr. Richter’s is precisely to keep meaning on the move, to hide it, change it, multiply it, undermine it, all the while couching these feints and thrusts in visually ingratiating forms.

This one too:

Mr. Richter, early in his career, viewed drawing — and its history as a vehicle for virtuosity — with suspicion, if not disdain. The only way he could approach it was indirectly, by taking its conventions apart, exposing its artifice.

Kindred spirits!

Anyone familiar with Mr. Richter’s painting knows that he uses similarly contrasting images and styles in that medium, as if telling us that he planned to keep his options open. This has allowed him to sample from a range of art histories without swearing allegiance to any, to make a sweeping formal investigation of painting without declaring his absolute faith in it.

And concluding:

Mr. Richter remains as enigmatic an artist as ever. Whatever questions you ask of his art still yield conflicting answers. But you won’t find a more intimate setting for asking those questions than this one.

Christoph Demantius (15 December 1567 – 20 April 1643) – not pictured

Threnodiae: Quis dabit oculis nostris fontem

Q: How do you get from Lassus to Schütz?
A: Demantius

Here’s the fantastic album that includes more marvelous German funerary music

Loquebantur variis linguis apostoli, alleluia

The apostles spoke in different tongues, alleluia

No, but really. Tallis is amazing

Thomas Tallis, Loquebantur variis linguis

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.

…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.

Rarely have I ever heard an ensemble and immediately bought everything they’ve released, but La Chapelle Rhénane, a French early-music group, makes some of the most spectacular music I have heard this year. I was looking for a comprehensive recording of any of the books of Heinrich Schütz’s Symphoniae Sacrae  (because I am a late 16th-Century/early 17th-Century, polyphonic church music fiend) and ran across their fantastic collection from the Second Book. This is some mighty fine playing and some might fine singing, my friends. Like many younger, European early-music groups, (I’d also include La Venexiana or Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano), La Chapelle Rhénane has abandoned the ideological dogmas of the previous generation with respect to vibrato, tempos and orchestration in favor of heightened virtuosity and expressivity that, in these recordings, reach toward the ecstatic.

Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672) is a hard nut to crack. While a generation later than Monteverdi, who may have been one of his teachers, Schütz’s brackish oeuvre seems less integrated than even the older Italian’s. His a cappella works, in many ways, look back further into the 16th-Century and have consequently been performed and recorded more generically, while his larger concerted works, like these sacred symphonies, reflect the influence of the Venetian polychoral style typical of Monteverdi and Gabrieli and employ an assortment of instruments and voices in various formations; issues of balance and timbre become paramount.

La Chapelle Rhénane overcomes this with full-throated, grain-of-the-voice, one-on-a-part  singing and sensitive, but fiery instrumental playing. The opening track, a virtuosic performance of “Es Steh Gott Auf,” is performed at break-neck speed, excellently navigated by violins that sound as though they might spend their nights-off playing hoedowns. While historically impossible, such a fantasy seems appropriate, since Schütz, in setting the words, “aber die Gerechten müßen sich freuen,” rips off a chaconne  straight out of Monteverdi’s Eighth Book of Madrigals. It’s as if the righteous cannot help themselves from dancing to the promised delights of Heaven.

The whole collection is excellent, but for me, the highlight is the final track, “Freuet Euch Des Herren.” Great performances of 17th-Century music not only convincingly relate fragmented sections but leverage the mania into religious ecstasy. Schütz sets the text, “Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied” to violins playing pulsating Baroque “tremelos” over which singers weave their new song. A second “Danket dem Herrn” explodes with more of that Orange Blossom Special-like “fiddling” and then concludes with blazing “Hallelujahs.”

The only regret I have is that they did not recorded the entire Second Book, a project that would have spanned three “discs.”

The other discs are great as well. I love the performance (on the disc, Magnificat D’Uppsala & Autres Ouevres Sacrées) of “Herr, Der Du Bist Vormals Genädig Gewest” which so sensitively displays Schütz’s setting, a parallel play on assonance , of “Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja” and “A-a-a-men” or the terrific performances of the Musikalische Exequien (Histoire de la Résurrection) – though sometimes the choral sections seem excessively ornamented by the second soprano – I quibble.

Here is a performance of the final section of the Story of the Resurrection (seriously,why do French people translate all German titles and names into French… Jean Sebastién Bach?)

Here is a live performance  of Psalm 150 from Psalmen Davids - I have to admit that part of the charm is that they are superbly recorded