Bari – Pianist Emanuele Arciuli, director of the “Embracing the Universe” festival that ended yesterday, likes to casually mention that America is currently producing the best music in the world – and he doesn’t mean pop or jazz. He means postclassical. I didn’t know the whole program when I first wrote about it last week, but here’s a list of all the pieces performed on two concerts and during the conference:
Bernadette Speach: Embrace the Universe and Viola
Michael Gordon: Romeo
Mary Jane Leach: Prospero’s Sigh and Bach’s Set
Eve Beglarian: Fireside and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Philip Glass: Etude No. 13
John Adams: American Beserk
Andrew Thomas: So Far Beyond the Faint Edge of the World
David Lang: Before Gravity, After Gravity
Julia Wolfe: Believing
Larry Polansky: Ensembles of Note
me: Serenity Meditation; “Faith” from Transcendental Sonnets; Earth-Preserving Chant; and Sang Plato’s Ghost
With one exception, they’re all friends of mine, all people I’ve written a lot about, and all postminimalists or totalists. (The exception, Andrew Thomas, was chosen by the performers, and his thoughtfully virtuosic percussion showpiece fit in well.) The concerts, well attended and well-received, consisted of the kind of repertoire that would be ubiquitous today had my plans for world domination worked out successfully. The conductors, Giovanni Pelliccia for the orchestra and Filippo Lattanzi for the chamber concert, are both dynamic visionaries. It is so common in the US for me to show up and find the performers not really understanding the piece, that I sometimes fear I don’t capture the idea in the notation well enough; but here, each conductor had a compelling vision for the piece that was obvious from the first notes, and I needed add only the tiniest cosmetic touches and check the occasional questionable note. It was the most thrilling week in my life as a composer.
One of the papers was on the important Italian jazz figure Giorgio Gaslini (1929-2014), who promoted a concept called “Musica Totale,” which involved a blending of classical and vernacular styles. I told Emanuele that if I could prove that totalism originated in Europe, America would start to take it seriously.
Below: the ancient city of Matera, kind of an urban Grand Canyon, and where we ate there:
And the Bari Conservatory Orchestra rehearsing my Transcendental Sonnets:
Congratulations!
“I told Emanuele that if I could prove that totalism originated in Europe, America would start to take it seriously.”
And it would have to be mainland Europe as the mainland Europeans think the British are mad, especially the ones that are influenced by rock music as well. However it is strange because most of my friends, particularly when we were at school, always looked to America.
As you probably know, Matera was the setting for Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli. It used to be a rabbit warren of shelters for the homeless, but when we were there it was in the process of being turned into a luxury resort. How has that progressed?
KG replies: Little tchotchke stores and nice small restaurants everywhere.
Nice to see this, and wow, what a beautiful setting, too.
Congratulations, Kyle! It sounds wonderful. I wish I could’ve been there to bask in your music, and to toast you with some fine Italian wine.
KG replies: Your name came up frequently in my lecture on totalism and my conversations with Emanuele. He’s putting you, me, Peter Garland and some others on a CD.
This is wonderful hearing how composers and musicians in Italy are interested in current American composers. It was an Italian-American composer, Salvatore Martirano, who first thrilled me to the potential expressive and purely sonic beauties of music made with new technologies. This was his SalMar Construction synthesizer, heard while I was an undergraduate, playing in an enormous open hall. Some years later, Marshall Bialovsky told me how Martirano drove his construction all the way from Illinois to Los Angeles to give a performance at Cal State Dominguez Hills. That’s dedication! Fortunately, I had a chance to meet Sal when he was in residence at CalArts, including playing him recordings of some recent compositions. His favorite was March Wind from my Fire Monkey album. To this day, the pristine sonorosity with a truly alive presence I experienced that night in Potsdam (New York) with Martirano’s musical medium remains embedded within my compositional body chemistry.
I recently completed one composition, tentatively named Nomad, for a new album, and hope to begin and finish another piece for that album having recently arrived in Lahaina where I had the sweetest tasting Pasta Bolognese ever.
Some music-related ramblings from Polynesia: I had brunch last Sunday in Pukalani with a gentleman who enlisted in the Navy during the Vietnam War in order to avoid being drafted into the army. It was discovered that he had supersonic hearing, and so he ended up in Naval Intelligence where his auditory prowess were combined with technology to detect enemy entities underwater. Not only that, his father was a conductor who regularly walked to work with Albert Einstein in Princeton. His Dad knew enough about science to challenge Einstein on one weakness in his relativity theory (!) and Albert enjoyed discussing music, of course. My newly made friend’s Dad also emulated Einstein by purchasing the same special bicycle for the price of a car. Regarding whales, my friend said they had the ability to communicate with each other all the way from Maui to Alaska, and that they could repeat a “song” lasting over thirty minutes on subsequent occasions in exact detail. Yesterday, I purchased some shirts on sale in Paia from a woman whose uncle turned out to be Fu-Yuan Soong. Earlier that morning in Lahaina, I met briefly a favorite singer whose abilities would appear to defy genres if so challenged: Michael McDonald.
Mars, Saturn and Jupiter are dominating the night sky here, much larger and brighter than expected. Mars has an unearthly ruby tone, and Saturn and Jupiter dazzle with their brilliance. Its easy to see how composers from Cheltenham and Dallas and a saxophonist from Hamlet would be inspired by such majesty no matter what degree was astrological.
Produce bogus citations to show neorhythmic music (AKA totalism) was an offshoot of atonal serialism. Also, find (or if necessary invent) examples of neorhythmc music that sound intolerably ugly and appallingly crude. Then they’ll fall down on their knees and worship you.
Nothing thrills American musical cognoscenti like ugliness and crudity. If you could find an example of a neorhythmic composition that involves beating a baby seal to death onstage, that would be ideal. Then neorhythmic music would become the Next Big Thing.