Last night Ronnie and I went to Disney Hall to the 2nd concert of the Green Umbrella series.
The concert opened with a piece I dreaded hearing but I became a convert afterwards: the Berio trombone sequenza. Trombonist James Miller, in clown costume, sold it to the respectable crowd.
Joanne Pierce Martin made me fall in love with John Cage. She played excerpts from his Sonatas and Interludes. Some of the most heavenly music I’ve ever heard. Bravo to John and brava to Joanne. The piano preparation sounded flawless.
I was looking forward to hearing Stockhausen’s Kontra-punkte, but ultimately found the piece BORING. No, I don’t ever need to hear it again, nor do I care how it was constructed. But, I’m very happy they programmed the piece. Beautifully played.
The final pieces were Ligeti’s Aventure and Nouvelle Aventure. I had known the pieces from LPs in the 70s and was thrilled to hear them. Pockets of the audience giggled and laughed all the way through. People seemed uncomfortable thinking there might be humor in these pieces, which I do. Come on gang, music CAN be funny. Brilliantly performed.
Part of my job as Chair of the UCLA Music Department is to know about all of our large and small performing ensembles. One group that is probably what most of the world thinks when it thinks music and UCLA is our marching band.
Yesterday Daniel and I spent from dawn to dark at the Rose Bowl as guests of the UCLA Marching Band. The main attraction for everyone else was UCLA versus USC, a long standing city rivalry that I personally never cared about but was amazed to see in full force. The mere fact the we both had UCLA blue jackets made us involved in the town rivalry. And when we walked through areas of only USC colors (red and gold), we felt a bit uncomfortable. How silly.
We arrived before 9 am and there were already miles of RVs with rugs in front, full bars and lots of chairs with people already drinking and barbequeing. We were misdirected and nearly had to be locked in the purgatory known as stacked parking, but we kept saying “NO! We have to be in the M lot.” They’d shake their heads and tell us to go to the opposite side of the stadium. Some police then gave us another set of bad directions and we started getting a bit cranky. We stopped again and a motorcycle policeman got out. He looked at our pass and said, “OH! You’re really going to M, eh? Ok, I’ll take you there.” We then got a police escort to Lot M.
After parking, we went to watch the UCLA Marching Band rehearse in a large parking lot, this was now 9 am. The Director, my Vice Chair in the department, looked professional, was cool, calm, and in control. He runs a tight ship. Controlling over 200 undergraduates while playing their memorized music and stepping through complex steps all over the football field is an amazing ability. Wow!
When Gordon realized that I was there, he announced to the amassed players that I was there and that it was the first time in 20 years that a Chair had come to a rehearsal and game with the band. I waved, they whistled and shouted.
After an hour and a half of rehearsal we wandered over to the Chancellor’s tent. This was a huge tent with terrific food catered by Bristol Farms, with a free open bar, a coffee bar, and lots of tables. This is a perk of being a donor. And if I heard it right, each of these people contributed at LEAST $10,000. And the place was packed. That’s when I realized how powerful school/team spirit is, or can be.
We sat down with a retired couple and had a lovely chat. Members of the band came in and entertained us for a while. I got to visit with the Chancellor’s wife, Carol Block who is a marvelous and bubbly person.
After the reception we went into the stadium, and since we were apparently on the A list, we had access to everything. We went down on the field during the pre-game show, wandering up and down the sideline until we were told to go back to our seats. We sat in front of the band near the 30 yard line, and with good earplugs, it was tolerable. The audience was deafening when the cheerleaders would call for NOISE. An incredible phenomenon–an audience of 40.000 (?) all screaming some loud sound that, together, adds up to an amazing cluster of terror, done to distract the USC offense.
Just before the end of the 2nd quarter, Jennifer Judkins, perhaps sensing I was in melt down mode from the sheer volume of everything, grabbed us, and walked us down on the field. It was a bit surreal. The game was still going on, and we tip toed around the edge of the field, cops saw our badges and waved us through, walking in front of a huge section of USC fans. Would they boo us? Would they throw something at us? Two little blue spots moving along a sea of red and gold. THey didn’t. We then stopped at the corner of the UCLA end zone and just watched the game from the field. It was marvelously QUIET. The view from the field is vast and quite beautiful. The sun was starting to go down as well, so everything looked beautiful.
We then watched the half time show. After hearing the two bands, it is clear to me the great job Gordon does arranging and running the band. UCLA did, appropriately, a suite from West Side Story– perfect for town rivalry. After the show, Jennifer fetched us again as the players came back on the field and took us up to the press boxes hovering above the stadium. We went into the media room and watched the announcer, and everything involved in keeping the score board up to date, and the various video feeds.
Next to it was the Chancellor’s room where donors were allowed to watch the game from a privileged room and schmooze with the Chancellor. I greeted him and chatted with Carol again, had a hot dog with Sheila, Jennifer and Daniel and then got into our cars, leaving a bit early to avoid the rush.
USC beat UCLA 28 – 7. I’m over it. I had a great time and suspect everyone else did as well. I’m not ready to up my quotient of “Bruin Spirit” but I’m glad to have learned that many take it very, very seriously. We were exhausted when we got home. It is a lot of exercise: walking all over the place, standing most of the game, clapping with the cheerleaders, cheering, watching, shouting at each other. I had no energy to sit through the Beethoven 9 at Royce. We came home and collapsed, pooped, but exhilarated.
Go Bruins!
[Photo by Daniel Shiplacoff: RB watching UCLA Marching Band rehearse]
Some time ago, probably late 80s, I was sitting in Hugos in West Hollywood, with my partner having dinner. I looked across from me and there was David Crosby with his wife Jan. I couldn’t resist telling him that he changed my life and my music was very much influenced by his music. He was amused — amused enough to agree to come to UCLA to talk to our students about stuff (don’t take drugs — he was freshly sober), and his most recent music.
Before that, he came to my apartment in West Hollywood. He played me a cassette of the Bulgarian Women’s Chorus (their first Nonesuch recording), and I played him my Dickinson Madrigals, Book I where there was harmony that I felt was very Crosby influenced. He said he didn’t hear it, but he liked it.
I then pulled out my guitar, showed him that I knew the tuning for “Guinnevere”, he was impressed, and then I started playing it. We sang it together for a verse and bridge and stopped. “Yeah, that’s not exactly how I play it but those are definitely the notes.” I was sanctified.
The sound of “Guinnevere” pervaded my late-60s high school days. To be with this guy, WOW.
Here is a video of another version that was made at the same time with some very interesting variants from the one they released on Crosby Stills and Nash’s first album.
Americans celebrate Thanksgiving once a year. It’s a warm and fuzzy time often associated with being with one’s family — biological and not — and for being thankful. Like many other holidays, the origins are fuzzy, but we get the gist.
Being raised a Protestant American, “We Gather Together” meant Thanksgiving. It’s a great hymn. Lovely dissonances that resolve in a kind of Americana way. It was written in mid-17th century and is described as a Netherlands folk song. The harmonization we all know and love was done by an early 20th century chap. It always reminded me of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” from around the same time.
This Thanksgiving I brought out a book of folk songs. I sat at the piano and crashed through them. David, Daniel’s father, sang with with me. Great fun. We realized that young people just don’t know all the folk songs we older types do. We had a blast singing songs we haven’t sung since childhood. Daniel and Josie knew them all and sang along.
Some of these songs are like 20 seconds long. For that reason, there was never a hit single for young people to learn or hear. They would only know the songs if they were to have been sung by their parents, friends, or siblings. Think: “Skip to my Lou” or “Billy Boy” or “Clementine” or “Down in the Valley” … there are skads of them and I know them all! The storage capacity of knowing songs in remarkable, and not just a PhD from Harvard, everyone has their own bank of music memories.
I bring all this up because it seems a nice tradition: to sing these old songs at Thanksgiving. They are easy to sing, people like them, you can harmonize them, play simple guitar or piano or whatever instrument is lying around, and it makes people feel good, especially those singing. (If you really want to know, it increases the amount of oxytocin in your system, a hormone that spikes during orgasm.) Music does that. Clapping together does, as does singing together. Singing is a better high because there are more variants than plain old clapping.
I advocate a return to group singing, group music making: a new 21st century chamber music or parlor music tradition. Add your favorite Beatles, or Kurt Cobain, or Beyonce. Singing does a body good.
Tonight, after our Thanksgiving dinner, David and I sang old American folk songs out of a fake book around the piano instead of the traditional hymns. Not perfect but good spirited.
Today for some strange reason, I got the impulse to work out a treatment for piano for “Four Strong Winds.” This is a song made famous by the Brothers Four (see below) by Ian Tyson from the early 60s. It’s a good song and could stand a remake. kd? Rufus? Joni? Anyone? (I know Neil Young did it but there is more in that song than what he did.)
When I try to define the word “jaded” to a young person, I am more successful in explaining what it is not. The Brothers Four are NOT jaded. Was the the first boy band?
I just watched a life-changing video (for me, not necessarily for you): THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT. Just as scientists posit the existence of celestial bodies, or elements, or forces in nature by their INFLUENCE on things around them, I have realized the amazing influence of Jack Elliott on both the musical world and upon me.
As I listened to his songs I kept thinking “early Dylan.” And, no, it’s that early Dylan was under the influence of Jack Elliott. One of Dylan’s earliest concerts was advertised as “Jack Elliott’s Son” which Jack took as a compliment. But later, when people accused him of sounding like Dylan, he was hurt. When his old close friend Woody Guthrie died, he was not invited to the Carnegie Hall all-star tribute to his old friend. He resolved to play outside as people arrived to the concert. Ultimately he joined the group and his contribution was a highlight of the evening.
Jack Elliott’s picking style of playing the guitar is the style I sought out as a guitarist. It wasn’t Dylan, or McGuinn, or Doc Watson, or Chris Hillman, or Donovan, or Stephen Stills, or John Lennon, or David Bromberg, it was Jack Elliott. I have sought out the “Jack Elliott-ness” in American folk traditions, not knowing that it was Jack Elliott who introduced this technique. He went to London and was heard by all the early British rock band guitarists. They all imitated his technique, and it morphed into many electric guitar playing styles over the following decades.
Jack’s problem is that he was a wanderer. A space case. Interested in more than just being a famous folk musician, he was a rodeo aficionado, a sailor, and a traveler. He did not have the focus necessary to become a famous artist in the public eyes. The young Robert Hilburn wrote that Elliott was a folk musician’s folk musician. I feel the same way about Alexander Scriabin — he is a composer’s composer, but not terribly popular with the masses. Through using them as his manager and reality interface coordinator, Jack “used up” [his words] three wives and is now happily married to his fourth.
The video clip below shows Jack singing the 1944 Woody Guthrie song “TALKING SAILOR.” In it you hear Woody, AND early Dylan. Like Bono, he knows how to look into a camera and touch the audience through the lens.
Now listen to Dylan’s “Talkin’ New York” from his first album. You hear the clear lineage of Woody Guthrie to Jack Elliott and then to Dylan.
For enthusiasts of American folk music from the 40s to the early 70s, THE BALLAD OF RAMBLIN’ JACK ELLIOTT is a must see video. It is filmed by his daughter, and those seams, defects, or qualities show throughout. I enjoyed the personal hand-held unfinished business that she brought to the project.
Jack Elliott is a living legend.
Thank you Jack. You have touched and changed the world.
And to close, here is a video that has (in a reverse influential description) a strong John Sebastian delivery, the spirit of The Band (Robbie Robertson et al), a skosh of Dillard and Clark, the dionysian part of Gram Parsons, a more up tempo Rolling Stones metabolism, the spirit of Texas rock, and a different direction that country rock didn’t quite embrace.
For composers who choose to go the university route, I advocate studying with a variety of composers, and not just sticking with one. In a meeting today, we realized that between our two departments, we have four traditional white American composers, one Japanese American, one from Turkey, another from Lebanon, one from Mexico, and two black composers with feet in jazz and classical music. It occurred to us that if a student got to work with everyone of these people, what an amazing opportunity it would be. Break down the wall of “I only study with new music composition professors” and let students gravitate stylistically where they are most happy. If it’s one, great, if it’s all or none of them, bravo!
I studied with lots of composers, but I don’t sound like a single one of them. I sound like me.
[Illustration: Frontispiece for Charles Dickens's "The Haunted Man" by John Tenniel (1848)]
This is an audio only YouTube clip but is a joy to hear Anton Webern conduct Franz Schubert’s “German Dances.”
German Dances. Arranged by Anton Webern in 1931. Schubert wrote most of them in 1824, for the piano.
One of the very few documents of one of music’s greatest innovators actually conducting. People said that his modus of conducting was rather like Wilhelm Furtwängler’s.
It is the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra; it was recorded December 29, 1932, at the Frankfurter Funkhaus.
(Notes by Leibo07 on YouTube.)
rss feed
