This is the second post in this month’s edition of

Today, Judd talks about two of Witold Lutoslawski’s seminal works, and why they’re so uniquely able to engage us as listeners even without adhering to standard rules of Western tonality. Here’s Judd…

In his most avant-garde period, Lutosławski’s works are often very challenging and can feel a bit “cold”. They often explore structural and formal concerns, working out the different possibilities of this new technique of “controlled aleatory“. There are some fantastic pieces from this period, but it was only in the 1970s and 1980s that his harmonic brilliance, evident in his early works, was brought into dialogue with the formal and textural language that he had by then perfected.

This marriage led to the absolutely brilliant pieces from his late-middle period. The music is not at all “tonal” in a traditional sense, but his control of voice-leading, counterpoint, and harmonic motion come through in a personal and extremely emotionally resonant language that’s all his own. From this point on, Lutosławski uses only extremely simple, clear, and memorable musical motifs as his building blocks; if you’re listening carefully, you can follow the “story” of these motifs as they move forward through each piece, gathering meaning as they go.

The Symphony No. 3 is the high-water mark of this style. It is patient, clear, and beautiful on its own terms. I consider it perhaps the greatest Symphony since Beethoven (and yes, I’m aware that there were quite a few great symphonists writing music between the 1820s and the 1980s.) You have to check your expectations at the door in listening to this music. It’s not going to be as immediately approachable as was Steve Reich’s music, nor as lush as Messiaen will be when we get to that in a later installment of The Listening Room. Its often sparse and the harmonic language will be challenging — but the ideas are so clear, and the sounds so beautiful, that you really can follow the story and will enjoy the “characters” you meet along the way.

This exceptional recording, produced magnificently and conducted by a great orchestra with a conductor (Esa-Pekka Salonen) who is not only a Lutosławski champion but a very good composer in his own right, captures the drama of the work and has some of the best “sounds” that I’ve heard in a Lutosławski recording. As with Reich’s Tehillim, the end of the Symphony No. 3 is one of the best in the literature; suddenly, a new harmonic world emerges around a suddenly-lush texture, unlike anything we’ve heard before in the piece, recontextualizing everything that’s come before. It almost demands that you listen to the entire work again, right away, to hear how the work unfolds when you know what’s coming.

The Symphony No. 4 is one of the last works that Lutosławski wrote, and represents the final period of his creative life, where he largely moved away from aleatory and wrote with an incredible efficiency — not quite late Brahms, but in that direction. This Symphony is a humbler piece of music, though more directly passionate; there’s less space between the notes, and more big melodies and dramatic flourishes, all in a shorter timespan. This is one of the late Lutosławski works that I always suggest to conductors that they program, and if there’s a Lutosławski resurgence in this country, it might well start with this fantastic piece of music.

You can join the discussion at any point in the comments, and feel free to bring up points that Judd and I haven’t touched on – if some good side discussions develop, we’ll include them in future posts. You can get this month’s recording from Amazon by clicking the image at the top of this post, or on iTunes by clicking here. (Yes, we’re asking you to pay for the recordings we feature, but seriously? This one is $2.99 – you can probably afford that.)

Since Lutoslawski isn’t as familiar a name to many American listeners as he probably should be, I asked Judd to kick things off with a little background on who this composer was, why his music is important (or at least worth listening to,) and how he came to the particular compositional style that defines both him and his era. Here’s Judd:

Witold Lutosławski is the greatest symphonic composer you’ve never heard of. He is a towering giant of the late 20th century, a “composers’ composer” whose music exists on an island unto itself, truly original and deserving of more imitators than it has received. His more-famous Polish countrymen, Penderecki and Górecki, each have established their place in the symphonic repertoire, Penderecki as a lingering legacy of his confrontational early works, with their radical approach to texture and color (as well as, it must be said, their controversial titles), and Górecki for his spiritual, almost mystical scores that manage to be directly beautiful without dipping back in the well of Romanticism. Of those two, Górecki is the better composer, and has a number of excellent works, but even he doesn’t hold a candle to Lutosławski.

From the CD I’ve chosen for The Listening Room, I want to focus on the two Symphonies, Number 3 and Number 4. The four Symphonies of Lutosławski mirror his life’s progression as a composer, which roughly mirrors the arc of European modernism as it progressed through the Cold War, from the 1940s through the beginning of the 1990s (Lutosławski died in 1994). In the early part of his career, he wrote folk-influenced works for standard instrumentation, highly suggestive of late Bartok. Some of Lutoslawski’s great works of this period, particularly the Concerto for Orchestra and the Paganini Variations, are his most-performed pieces today, by far — even though he had three more periods ahead of him. This is typical for composers who had an early, “populist” period that preceded their move toward modernism, and usually is a tool for classical institutions to claim that they’re programming more “modern music”. (Yes, I’m calling you out, orchestras — we see what you’re doing!) [Guilty. I'm pretty sure the Concerto for Orchestra is the only Lutoslawski we've played since I've been in the orchestra, and Sarah conducted it. - Sam]

As the political climate shifted following Stalin’s death, Lutosławski was exposed to more radical styles; hearing John Cage’s Concerto for Piano was a big influence, as it suggested a way forward using “aleatoric” techniques — what we might call “chance” operations. For Lutosławski, unlike Cage (who embraced chance as a philosophical guidepost), aleatoric procedures were useful in very controlled circumstances, embedded in a highly structured, formal context. In his scores from the early ’60s onward, instruments would only sometimes be directly synced up with each other. Instead, they’d be cued at specific moments, but left to their own devices, playing exactly what was on the page, but not lining up directly (note-to-note) with the other players. This did two things:

1) It created textures which would otherwise be extremely difficult to notate, and which varied more from performance to performance than those in a completely-notated piece.

2) It gave each player a lot more freedom in their performance, since they didn’t have to line up directly with anyone else. Think about dancing by yourself versus dancing with a partner — neither is necessarily better or worse, but you have a lot more freedom in the former, right?

Tomorrow, Judd talks specifically about Lutoslawski’s 3rd and 4th symphonies, and the distinct periods of the composer’s working life. For now, if you’ve listened to the disc and have thoughts or questions, fire away in the comments…

One great piece of advice he gave me was to never tell the audience what a piece was “about”. He relayed a story in which a woman had come up to him after a performance, thanking him for writing a piece that so perfectly captured the sprit of mourning that she was in, having recently lost a loved one. He thanked her for the kind words, even though (as he told me), the piece had nothing to do with mourning, or death, or anything of the sort, at least not in his mind or in the narrative that he considered central to the piece. Sometimes, it makes sense to explain the origin of a work, especially if the work is written for a special occasion, and you want the audience to understand the connection between the abstract musical ideas in the composition and the concrete ideas concerning the occasion. But normally, music — even music with words, but especially music without — is highly abstract, open to many interpretations, conscious or otherwise.

The abstraction of music is both its strength and its weakness. We live in a culture where linear thought and concrete ideas are privileged over abstraction; art is defended as a means, not an end, useful in its ability to strengthen “real” skills, be they math scores or pattern recognition or the ability to communicate as a team. Nowhere in the defense of art is a defense of abstraction, of the need for non-linear thinking, and the beauty that comes when objects are neither “true” nor “false”. It’s not just art that suffers when we try to fit everything into a binary; many great texts, from the philosophy of Rousseau to the American constitution to the Bible, all contain inconsistencies to be resolved, not through choosing one way or another, but by learning to thrive in that underlying tension, to discover a truth that would never be known if one demanded a more facile “truth” that excluded the other position entirely. Abstract art is the purest form of non-binary thinking and creation, as there aren’t merely tensions between a binary, but different “truths” or even “ways of knowing” that work in many, many directions. When we bring ourselves and our histories into a work of art, the truth of the work is dependent on our own perspective as much as on the work itself. Therein lies the strength of abstract art, and the key to how it communicates so directly: by demanding that the viewer/listener build his or her own pathways of meaning, there’s an avenue already in place between the content of the work and the areas of emotional need that the viewer/listener brings to the table.

With all that in mind, there’s a lot (relatively speaking) at stake as I try to explain the title of my new work for the Orchestra, Acadia. There’s no linear narrative, except perhaps a very, very simple one that you’ll hopefully be able to follow without my explaining it. I don’t want to tell you too much, because I think it’s a work that can have many different meanings for different people. I don’t even know what it’s going to mean to me when I hear it — the process of writing and the process of listening are totally different creatures. I’ve been in dialogue with my imagined future-self, listening to the performance, and giving feedback from the perspective of the listener. But that’s hardly the same as the actual experience of hearing a piece live for the first time. If I’m not sure how I’m going to feel, or what I can take from the piece, why should I bring you down any specific road? Wouldn’t that be the most irresponsible thing I could do?

So I’ll just tell you a few things, and leave it at that. The word “Acadia” refers to the French colonies of the 17th and 18th centuries in northeastern North America, today comprised of mostly the Maritime Provinces of Canada, with small pieces of Québec and Maine. The “Acadians” migrated down to French territories in Florida and then the Louisiana Territories, where they mingled with other inhabitants and gradually came to be known as “Cajuns”. I first heard the term “Acadia” in the context of Acadia National Park, where I spent a few incredible days camping with a good friend, a long weekend that turned out to be a pivotal time — literally, in the sense of a pivot — in my life. If I were to break my life into two sections, the first part would end in that Acadian weekend, hiking in hills on the edge of open ocean, exploring the southern tip of that land that stretches along the coast, upward to the Arctic. Acadia no longer exists, as a territory, but lives on as a place, marked by a distinct topography and climate (for a little while longer, at least), a gateway between the Atlantic ocean and the Northern Forest of Canada and New England, sparsely populated with people who are distantly French or Wabanaki, identities receding into history like the name itself. Few words are as magical to me or feel more central to my life. And so, for a commission that means as much to me as any I’ve ever received, I wrote this piece with that word in mind, a pivotal word for a composition that may mark the end of something, or the beginning. It is written for the Minnesota Orchestra, of course, and for the Inside the Classics community, with special thanks to Sam and Sarah for making it possible, but also bears a dedication to my friends Matt Wessler and Sharon Wong, and their daughter Harriet, who are tied up in the weekend that this piece remembers, and commemorates, and buries, perhaps in the woods of New England or perhaps at sea, allowing the future to come as it comes, beholden to no ghost or memory.

So without further ado, here’s this month’s featured disc:

This is a Los Angeles Philharmonic recording of works by the legendary Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski. I say “legendary,” but what I really mean is “legendary within the world of professional musicians,” because sadly, Lutoslawski is one of those composers who just doesn’t seem to show up on the radar screens of the average concertgoer, despite the fact that his music is a) at least as accessible as your average Stravinsky ballet score, b) incredibly evocative and distinctive in style, and c) just a blast to perform live. I don’t know why his music isn’t performed more by big American orchestras, ours included, but since it isn’t, this may be your first time hearing Lutoslawski, and if that’s the case, you’re in for a treat.

There are two symphonies and a work for baritone and orchestra on this 1994 disc, and the MP3 version is going for $2.99 on Amazon and iTunes, so joining the Listening Room conversation this month probably costs less than your daily Caribou Coffee fix. Jump on board, send your initial thoughts to me by e-mail (sbergman[at]mnorch.org) if you want, and Judd and I will kick off the conversation on Monday the 23rd…

Folksongs by Hannah Lash

After the FutureClassics concert wraps up on Friday night, we’ll dive into a furious two-week charge through seemingly most of the notes Brahms ever put down on paper with a couple of dazzling soloists,and then we’ll wrap up the month with our next round of Inside the Classics concerts, which I’m even now scrambling to finish scripting. It’s a daunting month, especially coming right after a two-week layoff and a solid month of Christmas programs, so we’ll need to kick ourselves into gear as an ensemble incredibly quickly.

In other news, I got just about the best Christmas present imaginable a week or so ago, when the final and complete score for Judd’s world premiere dropped into my inbox! (I know, I kind of buried the lead on this post – sorry about that.) I’ve commissioned music before, but the feeling of getting your first look at a new piece written especially for you just never gets old. Paging through Judd’s 187-page magnum opus, doing my dead level best to not just look at the viola line (we string players have terrible tunnel vision when it comes to orchestral scores,) I got almost giddy. Not just because it looks like a fantastic piece, which it does, but because this, finally, was the tangible evidence of what we (meaning all of you who donated to the MicroCom Project) just accomplished. It’s an incredible thing to have banded together to do, and I can’t wait for you all to hear the results in March.

Speaking of March, this is looking quite a ways out (and I’ll be sure to post reminders closer to the date,) but I’m also very excited to announce that the awesome Kate Nordstrum (the presenter responsible for bringing so many fantastic musicians to the Southern Theater over the past several years) has put together a showcase concert of New Amsterdam Records musicians at Bryant Lake Bowl the night before our MicroCommission premiere – Judd’s music will be featured along with pieces by Nico Muhly, Bill Brittelle, and Composer Institute alum Missy Mazzoli. (Also, my pal Nadia Sirota will be performing, and she’s worth the price of admission all by herself!) BLB’s a small venue, so you’ll want to get your tickets fast once they go on sale in February.

And speaking of Judd, there’s going to be plenty of him this month, as well! As with our first set of ItC concerts in November, Judd will be here for the Adams concerts at the end of January: we’ll be talking to him during the first half, he’ll meet up with MicroCom donors at intermission of both shows (those of you who donated will be getting an e-mail about that soon,) and four of my favorite colleagues in the orchestra will be putting a bow on the evenings’ festivities with a performance of At the End of a Really Great Day, a transcendently beautiful work for flute, clarinet, violin, and cello.

We’ll also be getting started shortly here on the blog with the next installment of The Listening Room, which this month will be focusing on a recording of two symphonies by the great Polish composer, Witold Lutoslawski. Details coming soon, as well as a tweaked format that we hope will make the conversation more accessible and easier to participate in.

Oh, and have I mentioned that every seat to every classical or ItC concert is 50% off at our online box office right now? Truth. But I’m told it ends after tomorrow, so you’re gonna want to get on that.

Sam: The Desert Music is also scored for voices and small orchestra, but it couldn’t be more different from Tehillim. Talk a little bit about Reich’s use of “phasing,” a technique he devised in which the same rhythmic or melodic figure is played by multiple musicians ever so slightly out of sync with each other.

Judd: Phasing is simple — take two recordings, and start them at the same time. Then speed one up slightly so that it begins to sound weirdly chorused/distorted, then gradually becomes discernible as an echo of the other. That’s phasing. Where it gets particularly interesting is where you phase musical elements that are able to take on different meanings when they are shifted in terms of their rhythmic relationship. If you take two recordings of Row Row Row Your Boat, and phase them, stopping the speeding-up each time the rhythms line up again, you’ll get a nice effect because Row Row Row Your Boat is a round, meaning that the harmonies line up with each other at regular intervals in the song. If you do the same thing with The Rite of Spring it might be interesting, but it’ll be cacophonously so.

What Reich winds up doing is doing this live, with different players playing the same instrument (type), so that you get this crazy mental effect of not being sure what is producing the sound. Your brain can also parse the melodic fragments he’s using quite easily, and you get very familiar with them, so it’s a way of having things remain the same, and familiar, while also changing.

In The Desert Music he doesn’t do the kind of gradual phasing that you hear in earlier works, but the interlocking patterns will often change in relation to one another in ways that come out of the earlier phase works.

Sam: The texts for The Desert Music are from poems by William Carlos Williams, who seems to be a very popular muse for composers. What do you think it is about his poetry that speaks to composers of our era?

Judd: He’s just an incredible poet. And he writes in a way that preserves the cadence of speech, which, for a certain type of composer, is very useful. The centerpiece of The Desert Music is the section taken from “The Orchestra”, with this famous passage:

Say to them: Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them or perish.

That poem is really remarkable, and it’s equally remarkable that Reich, when commissioned by the Brooklyn Philharmonic to write a quasi-orchestral work, immediately went to a poem that seems to draw a parallel between the way an orchestra works together, and works with an audience, to the way that human society works together. (side note: I’ve never seen anyone mention this, but Williams was almost surely quoting Bertrand Russell there, from the end of an essay he wrote for the Guardian in 1952, two years before The Desert Music and Other Poems was published. It’s an incredible tribute, the Moses-like command to “say to them”, with Russell as the holy prophet. I don’t know if Reich was aware of that allusion when he set the poem but it makes everything even more interconnected.)

Sam: Reich gives very specific tempo instructions for each movement of The Desert Music, and I’ve even read that the different movements have tempo relationships, a specific number of beats per minute that line up in a 3:2 ratio. Obviously, rhythm and tempo are critical elements of Reich’s music, but honestly, would it really make any difference to the listener if a performance of this piece didn’t follow Reich’s exact tempos?

Judd: Music lives in the body. Would it make a difference if two notes were out of tune? The answer is yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. Sometimes things being out of tune, or of different timbres and with different overtones, can be a good thing. I think you can feel when tempo relationships exist across different spaces of music — you at least feel the relative shift, if not the strict relationships — but it could well be that things move better when certain sections are a little faster or slower than Reich intended. I have to make enough of these decisions in my own music; I’m not going to try to pick apart Reich’s masterworks that way.

Sam: Fair enough. Let’s shift gears a bit – we haven’t talked much about the singing on this album yet. The vocal lines in both pieces are performed entirely without vibrato, which is a very unique sound, and one we seem to be hearing more and more of today. Is this just a stylistic preference, is it related to the rise of amplified performance, or is there a deeper reason that many composers are moving away from traditional operatic styles of singing?

Judd: Actually, you know what’s really a unique sound? Western operatic singing! It’s totally crazy that this is the basis for what’s expected in contemporary music practice, but again, you only know where you’re coming from, not where things are going.

Straight-tone singing makes a lot of sense in this vocal writing, which isn’t about the small inflections that might happen in a typical operatic aria, but is either about quickly-moving repeated notes (at the beginning and the end of the piece), or about long tones, held over moving lines. The former would be impossible with vibrato and the latter would be tricky. Plus, the vocal lines would have a hard time blending with the clarinets, vibes, and harmonics. The vocals are themselves also usually blending into a big chord that is held for a while, and not only does that sound really outstandingly amazing in straight-tone singing, but it might sound strange with vibrato.

That said, I don’t know that it would necessarily be “bad” to sing with more vibrato here, it just would certainly be against Reich’s intent.

One really cool thing about this recording is how the instrumental players really attack the lines at times — it’s not meant to be this cold, neutral, austere presentation. Listen to the last movement of The Desert Music, it’s like this orgy of wild violin lines, big crescendi, and even these awesome vocal slides that are very “pop” and totally wonderful when they occasionally happen.

This would probably be a good time to note that this recording is really, really good. I have a close personal relationship with the premiere recordings of both these pieces (I still remember hearing the end of The Desert Music on WNYC one night when I was home from college, the precise moment that I became a Steve Reich fan), but this recording is so meticulous and really elevates the pieces to new heights.

Sam: One of the hardest things for listeners who shy away from “new music” tends to be the lack of traditional Germanic melodic forms, and I never know quite what to say when someone claims that a work by a living composer has “no melody.” I hear melodic fragments all over Reich’s work, but it’s true that it’s very different from listening to something written in sonata form. I enjoy Beethoven, and I enjoy Reich, but I almost feel like I have to enjoy them with different parts of my brain. Is that true for you as well?

Judd: I think part of what’s happening here is that, to a lot of people, “melody” means “diatonic melody”. [ALERT: THIS WILL BE NERDY AND MAY MAKE NO SENSE.] There’s a really big difference between even triadic, relatively “consonant” harmonic writing, such as Reich’s or mine, that never (Reich) or rarely (Greenstein) uses tonic-dominant relationships — which, without getting into it, is the backbone of Western harmony from around 1500 to 1910.

Reich and I both move around much more by seconds and thirds — necessary when you’re holding a bunch of common notes in a pattern — and this means that there are going to be different kinds of melodies that emerge. My melodic writing, to my own ear, feels derived almost from plainchant. But all modal music has something of that quality — look at, say, Mongo Santamaria’s Afro Blue, made famous by John Coltrane. You could convincingly use that as an isorhythm in a motet, right? Maybe? Am I stretching things? It’s close, in any case.

But none of this has much to do with the kind of melodic writing that you get when there’s a big V-I move articulating the harmonic change. (Ed. note: V-I is the notation for music moving from a dominant chord back to the main tonic chord. More simply, it’s what your average, uncomplicated ending sounds like in everything from Tchaikovsky symphonies to pop songs.) It’s not better or worse, it’s just a different feeling. But the chord changes that happen in Reich are some of my favorites ever, and I have stolen them completely and thoroughly in my own writing.

So there’s Judd’s take on this remarkable CD from Alarm Will Sound and Ossia. What’s yours? Chime in down in the comments, and join us in January for the next installment of The Listening Room…

The first album Judd chose to feature was this one, a Cantaloupe Records recording by Alarm Will Sound and the Ossia ensemble of Steve Reich’s Tehillim & The Desert Music. Tehillim is Reich’s 1981 setting of four Psalms. It’s considered one of Reich’s most important works, but also sounds quite distinct from much of his earlier work. The Desert Music is a choral setting from 1983 of several texts from the great American poet William Carlos Williams. For more background info on the album, check out my original Listening Room post, and you can click the album cover if you want to download the music and participate in the conversation.

I’m going to break our initial discussion of this album into two separate blog posts, for reasons of length and clarity. Today’s post covers Tehillim, and our discussion of The Desert Music will go up tomorrow morning. Enjoy, and don’t forget to offer your own opinions, reactions, and musical assessments in the comments!

Sam: Okay, so I think I know why you chose this album in particular. Tehillim is a setting of four Torah passages for women’s voices and an instrumental ensemble made up of some traditional classical instruments (clarinets, violins, etc.) and some distinctly 20^th century electronic instruments. This is the type of ensemble you’ve written a lot of music for, and just this year, you premiered Sh’lomo, your own setting of passages from the Song of Solomon.  Fair to say that Steve Reich has had a major influence on you as a composer?

Judd: This is like one of those “do you think America is a great country?” questions from Presidential debates. Yes, Sam, Steve Reich has indeed had a major influence on me as a composer. I’m glad you asked.

Actually, all the composers I’ve chosen for The Listening Room have had a huge influence. Reich, though, is the composer who’s far-and-away most often cited when people are drawing connections between my music and that which has come before. The Hebrew has something to do with it, but much more, it’s the interlocking rhythms and modal harmonies, with a great attention to big chord changes as well as small-scale harmonic and contrapuntal details, that connect my work to his. I do love all those elements of Reich’s music, and I carry them over into mine. Reich loves to establish a pattern and then move chords underneath it, with the pattern remaining entirely, or almost entirely, static. You’ll hear that maneuver a lot in my new piece for the Minnesota Orchestra — it’s actually one of the main “ideas” of the work. But when I think about that musical device, I think of it as coming, in part, from the hip hop that I listened to, and made, when I was growing up. How do you know when a hip hop beat is ready to go? When you want to leave it on loop, and never stop listening to it. Then it’s ready for things to move over it — in this case, the MC, rapping. I think of Reich’s repetitions in the same way. Even though there’s a certain pacing that’s optimal, in terms of when the harmonies or patterns shift, and even though the shifts themselves are usually the most magical moments of the pieces, there’s also a sense in which you don’t want the patterns to end, when they’re good. I strive for that in my music.

Of course, Steve Reich didn’t invent that idea. In fact, as he’d acknowledge, it was inspired by West African drumming that he played and studied. Go a step further and you can find specific texts that he studied, which contain transcriptions of drum patterns that form the basis for much of his work in the 1970s. Does this question remind anyone of anything? “Good composers borrow, great composers steal.” Given that nothing has ever really sounded like Steve Reich, it’s a great example of the good that comes when a brilliant composer blatantly steals from someone else, or in this case, another culture. I’m very, very glad that he had the guts to do that, because the “safe” version probably wouldn’t have created the opening for his own distinct voice to emerge.

For me, I don’t know if I point back to Reich as directly as people think, but I definitely count him as a huge influence, and he’s one of the composers that I listen to regularly. That’s a short list.

Sam: Tehillim, which was written in 1981, was actually quite a departure from what Reich had been doing in the 1970s. It’s far less radical than most of his work, and dare I say, a little more classical? But Reich also wrote in the liner notes for the original recording that “the overall sound of Tehillim, and in particular, the intricately interlocking percussion writing which, together with the text, marks this music as unique by introducing a basic musical element that one does not find in earlier Western musical practice including the music of this century. Tehillim may thus be heard as traditional and new at the same time.” I confess that I didn’t hear it that way on this recording – the percussion seemed to blend very naturally with the almost Renaissance sound of some of the vocal lines. When you listen to the piece, do you hear all the disparate elements Reich talked about, or do you hear it the way I do, as a consonant whole?

Judd: This idea of “radicalism” is something that I really detest, because it always means looking at music from this extremely linear, highly shortsighted perspective. Human beings have been around for a long time and will continue to be here for a while yet, and our view of art is confined to this tiny little period of music history where we evaluate everything basically in terms of whether it moves toward or away from Beethoven (think about it). Tehillim is “radical” in Reich’s output, which to me is more important than whether it (here we go) Breaks New Ground In Contemporary Composition. Plenty of pieces that do the latter have been totally forgotten, because the Ground that they Broke was really uninteresting, and turned out to be more about where people happened to be at that time, than about where they’d be in just a few years. What’s unique about a work comes entirely from its status as a reflection of an individual artist’s uniqueness as a person, with his or her particular influences and ways of looking at the world. It grosses me out to read Reich’s own words on the topic, which are so incredibly and obviously defensive. It’s like, “no no, look, here’s why this isn’t as square as you think it is!” and I’m like, hey, Steve Reich, you just wrote TEHILLIM, it’s a masterwork, you’ll be fine. I think when he’s talking about the percussion writing, he’s tying it to works like Drumming, which introduces the African rhythmic practice; that interlocking quality is certainly present, wouldn’t you agree, Sam?

Sam: Yeah, definitely. And what you said about the quality of the work being more important than whether or not it breaks new ground is one of my favorite discussion topics. Is Mendelssohn’s music any less exhilarating because he didn’t “change the game” the way Stravinsky or Haydn did? Not in my book. And you’re definitely right that Tehillim gets counted among Reich’s greatest works today.

Judd: For me, [the pieces on this album] are Reich’s two greatest works. What’s remarkable about them is precisely that, like others in this late-70s/early-80s period in his career, they blow open the rigidity of his earlier work, which were built on the idea that discernible “process” had to be paramount over other formal concerns. What this means is that the musical elements in a given work tend to remain static, and when they change, the changes happen in only one or two elements at a time, and the changes are highly discernible. You’ll hear a note added to a pattern, and then that new pattern will repeat a lot until you get to know it, and then something else will get faster, and you’ll hear that until you’re familiar with it, and so on. What’s amazing about Reich’s seminal work Music for 18 Musicians is that even with these constraints, of highly-discernible, extremely transparent “process-oriented” music, he creates a large-scale form that’s rich and complex and not as linear as most process pieces tend to be (for obvious reasons). Tehillim and especially The Desert Music take this to an entirely different level, where the process elements are subservient to the larger form — at least to my ears (I don’t know how he constructed the works). The musical form feels highly intentional, and built from the top down, not the bottom up.

One interesting thing to note here is that a number of “minimalist” composers made this shift, as they moved into the late 1970s and 1980s — Philip Glass, John Adams, and others all started writing bigger Symphonic works that placed less emphasis on transparency than the works of the early/mid-1970s, and certainly, then those of the 1960s. I’m not sure what was in the air, but that coming-together was a really wonderful time for music, and some of my favorite scores emerged from the period, including these two.

Tomorrow: Judd and I tackle The Desert Music. Check back then, and don’t forget to join the conversation in the comments. The Listening Room stays open for as long as you guys feel like hanging around…

The narrative part is particularly tricky for this show, since the featured composer is a) alive, and b) not participating directly in the show or its preparation. When we initially chose to feature My Father Knew Charles Ives, I thought about getting in touch with Adams and asking for his guidance in where we might take the show. After all, he’s known for being a genuinely nice guy, he has long connections to the Minnesota Orchestra (primarily through our former concertmaster, Jorja Fleezanis, and her late husband, the musicologist Michael Steinberg,) and it never hurts to ask, right?

In the end, though, I decided against contacting him, for one simple reason. While our series has always been partly about allowing the composer’s voice to speak through his music, it’s also become very much about the narrative arc that we decide to craft around the music, and in this particular instance, that arc needs to go well beyond John Adams. It needs, in fact, to reach almost to Judd Greenstein.

When we (micro)commissioned Judd to write the piece that will close out our 2011-12 ItC season, we knew that one of the challenges of the year would be finding ways to draw our audience into the world of new music. After we announced the repertoire for this season, a few angry e-mailers complained that we were taking the series away from the direction of “classics,” and yes, there were even some canceled subscriptions. Which is frustrating, since Sarah and I are firm in our belief that there are a fair number of outstanding composers walking among us today, but also understandable, given all the challenges I outlined last spring.

So in coming up with this season’s non-Judd-intensive programs, we decided that we needed to build a bridge that could carry the average ItC concertgoer from music with which they are already comfortable to music with which they could easily become comfortable if it wasn’t just dropped on their heads suddenly and without warning. Starting with Shostakovich was an easy decision – he’s a familiar composer, very much of the 20th century. He had a distinct style of composition, and he used driving rhythmic patterns as a primary component of his work, which is a thing that became very important to later composers.

To get from Shostakovich to Judd, though – that’s a neat trick. Concert music went through so many twists and squeezes and arguments and reconciliations during the second half of the 20th century that it sometimes seems like the connections from 2011 to 1937 (when Shostakovich’s 5th symphony was premiered) are less a bridge than a sinewy mass of barely connected fibers. There really was no one composer who we could point to as a bright line between the comfort food that orchestral audiences crave and the molecular gastronomy (yes, another food metaphor) that many of today’s young composers are engaged in.

Still, John Adams gets awfully close to being that perfect connector. One of the original minimalists, he established a distinctive (and relatively accessible) style as a young composer, then gradually evolved that style over time. Many of his more revolutionary works came early in his career, but some of his recent efforts (My Father Knew… included) have a historic sweep to them that he probably couldn’t have pulled off back when he was writing Harmonielehre or Klinghoffer. His music challenges the listener when he wants it to, but he almost never loses his grasp on the audience’s need for a certain level of familiarity, too.

Of course, Adams’ music doesn’t sound in the least like Judd’s, but that’s not really the point. Listening to new music is about challenging your mind in a way that might be difficult at times, but still gives you some degree of emotional or intellectual pleasure. So we don’t actually need our Adams show to bring you all the way to Judd’s doorstep. We just have to get you close enough to make the next leap seem attainable and worth your while.

…and we have to do that by Tuesday. sigh.

We also were pleasantly surprised by how many hundreds of you chose to stick around after the concert to hear Judd’s string quartet, Four on the Floor. The crowds for those post-concert performances were easily 3-4 times larger than we’ve had for past post-concert Q&A sessions, and people flooded up to the stage afterwards to ask where they could get a recording of the piece. The answer to that is that it’s never been commercially recorded, but there’s a recording of the Israel Contemporary String Quartet playing it on Judd’s website, and earlier this year, I posted this version of the same group that played it this past weekend performing it at Sommerfest 2011 here’s a video of our Friday night performance, shot from the first tier by our wonderful web czar, Jennifer Rensenbrink.

Gina DiBello & Jonathan Magness, violins
Sam Bergman, viola; Katja Linfield, cello

My favorite part of that video is right around the 7:42 mark, when I go to turn my last set of pages, and have to spend nearly ten seconds fumbling with the music to prevent it all from flying off the stand. The irony was, that particular page turn has a note from the composer stating that, if the violist can’t make the page turn in time to play the first set of four sixteenth notes on the following page, s/he should skip it and jump in at the next set. As I began my fumbling, I caught sight of that note and thought to myself, Yeah. This is gonna take a little longer than four sixteenth notes…

And as long as we’re posting clips, many of you seemed interested in finding out more about Judd and his music in the months leading up to the premiere of the MicroCommission next March, and this video, recorded and mixed by the good folks at NewMusicBox, is a great place to start…

Lastly, for those who want it, here’s the complete playlist of everything we excerpted during the first half of this set of ItC concerts:

SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Opus 47
SHOSTAKOVICH String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Opus 110 (arr. for orchestra by Rudolf Barshai)
SHOSTAKOVICH Lady Macbeth of Mtsnsk District
SHOSTAKOVICH Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Opus 93
PROKOFIEV Romeo & Juliet Before Parting
BIZET L’amour est un oiseau rebelle (Habanera) from Carmen
SHOSTAKOVICH Sonata for viola and piano, Op. 147
KANCHELI Little Danielade

First off, Judd arrived in the Cities last night, and he’ll be a major part of all of our ItC shows this season – we’ll be making use of his compositional expertise during the first half of this weekend’s concerts, he’ll be hanging out with MicroCommission donors at intermission (if you’re a donor and didn’t get an invite to that, by the way, drop me a line and I’ll fill you in on the details,) and he’ll also be front and center for our post-concert activities, which will be much different than what we’ve done over the past four years.

We’re still planning to do our usual post-concert Q&A session next March, when Judd’s Still-Officially-Untitled-But-Apparently-Not-A-Symphony will be premiered, since we know you’ll all want a chance to talk to him after you hear it. But for our November and January shows, we wanted to give you a chance to get to know not just Judd the gregarious and eloquent composer, but his actual music. So we’ve selected two works of chamber music – one for this weekend’s concerts, and one for January’s – and we’ll be inviting anyone who wants to stick around after the main performance to stay and listen to members of the orchestra perform them on the big stage. These post-concert concerts will be very informal, and pretty quick – 12-15 minutes – but judging by how exhausted our string quartet was at the end of this afternoon’s rehearsal, they should be pretty high-energy affairs as well!

We also wanted to do something here on the blog that could include everyone who’s taken an interest in Judd and the MicroCommission Project, even if you won’t be able to attend the concerts. We’re calling this side project The Listening Room, and essentially, you can think of it as something of an online book club, only with music instead of books. We want it to be as broadly participatory as possible, and it starts now.

Here’s how The Listening Room will work: four times between now and March, we’ll announce here on the blog a specific recording that Judd has chosen to feature, and we’ll provide a link to where you can go to download it or buy the CD. (Yes, we are asking you to buy the music if you want to participate, but honestly, downloads are pretty much a steal, and we think these composers and performers will be well worth your pennies.) We’ll also give you a date a couple of weeks out when we plan to open up discussion of the music we’ve picked, and encourage you, prior to that date, to send us your initial impressions of the music, questions you have about it, and opinions as to what makes it engaging (or not!) to you.

Then, on the discussion date, I’ll post an e-mail conversation between Judd and myself which will incorporate as many of your submissions as possible, as well as Judd’s own thoughts on what makes this music important or engaging or just fun to listen to. With any luck, this post can spark a much broader discussion in the comments, and Judd and I will make a point of checking in regularly to respond to everything you all have to say.

(I know some of you may be wondering why we don’t just make this whole exercise a live chat. The answer is that we just couldn’t figure out a way to do it live without excluding a whole lot of people who might want to chime in but aren’t available at whatever time we’ve picked. This way might be a little clunkier, but should allow for the conversation to unfold more organically over time.)

So that’s the plan, and here, without further ado, is Judd’s first CD of the Month:

Click for a link to Amazon's download page.

This is a great Cantaloupe Records recording by Alarm Will Sound and the Ossia ensemble of Steve Reich’s Tehillim & The Desert Music. Tehillim is Reich’s 1981 setting of four Psalms. It couldn’t be more distinct from a lot of Reich’s other work, and there are more than a few elements to it that remind me of Judd’s own work. (We’ll definitely get into that in our discussion.) The Desert Music is a choral setting from 1983 of several texts from the great American poet William Carlos Williams, who has inspired more than a few composers of my acquaintance.

You can read more about Tehillim at the Boosey & Hawkes website, and if you’re the type who likes a lot of context to go with your music, you can find some great background on Steve Reich here and here.

By the way, it’s probably worth mentioning that, in selecting the music for this project, Judd restricted himself to a) music that at least some people would label as being in the “classical” realm, and b) music that he doesn’t have a personal stake in. (In other words, while he might know some of the composers or performers, there won’t be any recordings from Judd’s own New Amsterdam Records label.)

Like I said, the idea here is for you all to get the music, listen to it, and shoot us your first impressions and points of interest that you think we should hit in our discussion. You’ve got three weeks or so to do this – I’ll post our kickoff transcript on Monday, November 28, and then we can continue the conversation for as long as you all stay interested!