The Crack in the Bell Redux
For the first time I've repeated a work on Postclassic Radio. It's Daniel Lentz's The Crack in the Bell, and I aired it last September, but I listened to it again last night, and it's just too beautiful, and not nearly enough well known. It's a setting of e. e. cummings's classic antiwar poem "next to of course god america i":
"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum
why talk of beauty what could be more beaut-
iful than these heroic happy dead
who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter
they did not stop to think they died instead....
Lentz matches cummings's irony with a deadpan but glitzy setting, with a driving pop energy breaking into passages of glorious Renaissance counterpoint on the word "beauty." The piece is hilariously tongue-in-cheek yet sumptuously written, and its use of synthesizers and delay units in a large-ensemble context is elegant and innovative. Some people don't like the voice and intonation of vocalist Jessica Lowe on this (the only) recording (originally on EMI, now rereleased on Lentz's Aeode label), but those people's expectations are too classical. I think she's perfect for the piece, with just the cheesy insouciance to undermine cummings's surface meaning. As far as I'm concerned, a society in which Le Marteau sans Maitre is famous and The Crack in the Bell isn't has its values upside down, and so you can check out that opinion, I'll also post the mp3 to my web page, here.
Categories:
Sites To See
American Mavericks - the Minnesota Public radio program about American music (scripted by Kyle Gann with Tom Voegeli)
Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar - a cornucopia of music, interviews, information by, with, and on hundreds of intriguing composers who are not the Usual Suspects
Iridian Radio - an intelligently mellow new-music station
New Music Box - the premiere site for keeping up with what American composers are doing and thinking
The Rest Is Noise - The fine blog of critic Alex Ross
William Duckworth's Cathedral - the first interactive web composition and home page of a great postminimalist composer
Mikel Rouse's Home Page - the greatest opera composer of my generation
Eve Beglarian's Home Page - great Downtown composer
Just Intonation Network - a meeting place for people interested in alternative tunings
Erling Wold's Web Site - a fine San Francisco composer of deceptively simple-seeming music, and a model web site
The Dane Rudhyar Archive - the complete site for the music, poetry, painting, and ideas of a greatly underrated composer who became America's greatest astrologer
Utopian Turtletop, John Shaw's thoughtful blog about new music and other issues
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