Recently in Music Category

Alex Ross has this to say, in light of the spontaneous singing in Union Square the other night (see his original post if you want more links to follow):

A quick search of YouTube reveals that young crowds across the country broke into the national anthem in the early morning hours. You can find videos for the East Village, Times Square, Berkeley, Portland OR, Amherst, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Madison WI, and Harvard Yard (with band), among others. Two obvious conclusions: 1) contra Palin, the entire country is "pro America"; 2) increased support for music education would be nice.

One more musical angle: Bob Dylan announced the outcome of the election by playing "Blowin' in the Wind."

If you're like me at all, you've been thanking your favorite deities (or Barack Obama, whichever you prefer) that you haven't heard Sarah Palin's voice in the last several days. If you can handle it, though, check out this final note, so to speak, on the Couric interviews, also courtesy of Alex:

Have  you voted yet? Well, what are you waiting for?

If you're searching for thematically appropriate music to listen to while you read political blogs all day, you won't do better than WFMU's Electile Dysfunction stream. If you don't know WFMU, it's Jersey City's freeform radio station, now celebrating its 50th year serving the NYC area (and now the globe, thanks to the intertubes). No one does better or more eclectic themed playlists.

At the moment, DJ Hatch -- formerly of WNYU -- is finishing up a set. Click here for the stream; you can also check here for the entire day's schedule, which will be archived and available to listen to whenever you get a hankering to remember this historic freaking day! (Did I already remind you to get out the vote??)

And, as an update to yesterday's post: Hey, Lurkers! That was supposed to be a lurker amnesty post. Thanks to the folks who piped up with suggestions. Keep them coming! We also want to know who else is out there, how you found us (was it the recent feature in the Manhattan User's Guide? one of our classes?), and what we can do to make this a place you want to peek in on more regularly.

So let us know who you are. Yes, you can!

The popular 33 1/3 series from Continuum has a new call for proposals posted on its blog.

We've mentioned before our affection for the series, especially those volumes that move beyond memoir or criticism to offer something like a cultural history of the time and place a particularly seminal record was created. We even asked our students in Writing New York last year to buy Joe Harvard's volume on The Velvet Underground and Nico, one of the albums (along with Patti Smith's Horses) we include on the course's syllabus. We conceptualize that unit as "From the Beats to the Punks."

I've long had in mind a couple titles I'd propose to 33 1/3 if given the chance -- and now that it's here I'd like to put the question to friends, former students, and whomever else may be reading this (we know have more readers than people who comment). That's right! Consider this a lurker amnesty post: we want to know what albums you think should be recognized as cornerstones or records of important moments or movements in the city's cultural history.

Tip: the series has until now enforced a policy of publishing only one book per band, but given that they're dropping this rule (!), feel free to suggest albums for bands already in the series. The full list of published and planned volumes is here.

Can't think of key NYC albums? Maybe New York Magazine's recent feature on the New New York Canon will prompt you.

John McCain and Sarah Palin, in the latest installment of their occasionally uncomfortable joint interview with Brian Williams, offer their definitions of "elites":

WILLIAMS: Who is a member of the elite?

PALIN: Oh, I guess just people who think that they're better than anyone else. And-- John McCain and I are so committed to serving every American. Hard-working, middle-class Americans who are so desiring of this economy getting put back on the right track. And winning these wars. And America's starting to reach her potential. And that is opportunity and hope provided everyone equally. So anyone who thinks that they are-- I guess-- better than anyone else, that's-- that's my definition of elitism.

WILLIAMS: So it's not education? It's not income-based? It's--

PALIN: Anyone who thinks that they're better than someone else.

WILLIAMS: --a state of mind? It's not geography?

PALIN: 'Course not.

WILLIAMS: Senator?

MCCAIN: I-- I know where a lot of 'em live. (LAUGH)

WILLIAMS: Where's that?

MCCAIN: Well, in our nation's capital and New York City. I've seen it. I've lived there. I know the town. I know-- I know what a lot of these elitists are. The ones that she never went to a cocktail party with in Georgetown. I'll be very frank with you. Who think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

I suppose we could have seen that coming. Too bad no one lives in that Pennsylvania cornfield where Flight 93 went down, or they just might be targets too. Oh, wait ...

So I find their answers interesting, in part because I've heard myself saying more than once this season: "What's wrong with arugula anyway?"  But of course that must mean I'm an elitist too. Real, men, apparently, only eat iceburg lettuce purchased at a Super Walmart. Oh, wait ... apparently even Walmart stocks the funny green stuff these days. Elitists!

Sure there are some folks in NYC who take their food snobbery out on the rest of the country. My friend A White Bear has great anecdotes in this vein from her shifts at the Park Slope Food Co-op, involving annoying co-workers who poo-poo middle-Americans for their poor taste in cheese -- as if every rural Kansan has a world-class fromogier within a couple minutes' drive. (The fact that they don't must be what's really the matter with Kansas.) And certainly there are a lot of people who live here who talk loudly, sometimes when tourists are close enough to overhear, that they can't imagine living anywhere else. (By the same token, tourists are often overheard saying loudly that they might be having a good time on their visit, but they can't imagine living here.)

And I'll admit it: I've identified emotionally at times--in spite of the fact that my ability to live in Manhattan has nothing to do with money and everything to do with a million happy accidents I couldn't have coordinated if I'd wanted to--with the old Talking Heads song "The Big Country," from their second album, More Songs about Buildings and Food (1978). The speaker is in a plane, flying over the mid-West (which apparently includes everything west of the Hudson). Looking down at all the ballfields and driveways he launches into the chorus:

I wouldn't live there if you paid me.
I couldn't live like that, no siree!
I couldn't do the things the way those people do.
I couldn't live there if you paid me to.

Guilty as charged? Maybe. But I've had my moments of nostalgia for the sort of Sam Shepard world I grew up in, too. I only wish the bulk of the people there didn't think Obama is literally the anti-Christ, foretold by Scripture to wage war on Israel and usher in a one-world state. Don't they know how to read? To sift information? Can't they ask their fromagier for political advice? Oh, wait ...

All this waffling (Am I an elitist? Am I above that? Does thinking I'm above it make me an elitist anyway?) and referencing old Talking Heads songs is merely a set-up, though, for an excuse to plug David Byrne's recent entries in his online journal. He's on tour at the moment, all across that Big Country, on the ground this time. And, as he's proven many times before, he's an exceptionally gifted blogger. I would pay good money for a "David Byrne's Guide to Weird Americana," and even more to be a stowaway on his buses and planes and other modes of transport. From hot-air ballooning in Albuquerque to visiting Satin Doll's Lounge in Milwaukee, his entries celebrate the joys and idiosyncratic oddities of this great land of ours. It's a nice corrective to the dismissive (if sometimes understandable) chorus of his old song "Big Country," and yet this Byrne persona clearly retains an insidery-outsider's edge. It's not an elitist edge so much as one that brings a more generous kind of moral clarity.



As for McCain and Palin's less generous kind of moral clarity: doesn't that last line smack a little of hypocrisy?

"[Elitists are those] [w]ho think that they can dictate what they believe to America rather than let Americans decide for themselves.

I'd rather not have them legislating morality for my family, thank you. Damn evangelitists.

Byrne tour dates here, though there's no hometown show listed. Photo by Lily Baldwin, snagged from Byrne's journal. Doesn't it look a lot like an Amy Bennett painting?

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY



One hundred-twenty-five years ago today, the Metropolitan Opera House opened at 1411 Broadway, between 40th and 39th Streets. It had been built by a number of newly rich families -- including the Vanderbilts, the Morgans and the Rockefellers -- who felt shut out at the fashionable Academy of Music on 14th Street.

The company gave a performance of Charles Gounoud's Faust, sung not in French but in Italian, as was then the fashion. The opening night cast featured Italo Campanini as Faust and Christine Nilsson as Marguerite, with Sofia Scalchi, Mme. Lablache, Franco Novara, and Ernesto del Puente in supporting roles. The conductor was Auguste-Charles-Leonard-Francois-Vianese. (Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence [1920] opens with a scene set at the Academy of Music during the "early seventies": Nilsson is singing Faust, and Wharton's narrator wittily comments on the use of Italian: "She sang, of course, 'M'ama!' and not 'he loves me,' since an unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.")

The original building was designed by J. Cleveland Cady; it was nicknamed "The Yellow Brick Brewery" because of its seemingly industrial interior. A fire destroyed the building on August 27, 1892, forcing the cancellation of the 1892-93 season. Although the building was completely renovated and the opera re-opened for the following season, it soon became apparent that the building's facilities were too small for the growing company.

Various locations for a new building were proposed over the years, including Columbus Circle and the site of the present Rockefeller Center. Finally, in 1966, the company moved to its present location at Lincoln Center. The Old Met was not given landmark status, so it was torn down the following year. Its original rival, the Academy of Music, had met a similar fate forty years earlier in 1926.

THIS DAY IN NEW YORK HISTORY

On October 12 and 13, 1982, the Clash opened for The Who at Shea Stadium. The Clash were touring support of their album Combat Rock. "Right away when we heard we were going to play there we thought about the Beatles at Shea," guitarist Mick Jones told the Associated Press. "Everybody knew about it." The band played fourteen songs in the rain:

London Calling
Police On My Back
The Guns of Brixton
Tommy Gun
Magnificent 7
Armagideon Time
Rock The Casbah
Train In Vain
Career Opportunities
Spanish Bombs
Clampdown
English Civil War
Should I Stay Or Should I Go
I Fought The Law

I didn't see the Shea Stadium shows, but I did see the band about a month earlier at Pier 84. It was an amazing show, and when the rain began to fall -- hard -- at the end of the show, it seemed only to energize the band. There's an account of that gig online here, along with descriptions of existing bootlegs of the show.

Meanwhile, the second Shea Stadium show has just been released on CD.  According to Rolling Stone's review of the album, "the album captures a rousing, crystalline-sounding Clash show." You can find out more about The Clash Live at Shea Stadium via this YouTube video:

Watching the premiere of Life on Mars got me reminiscing about New York in the Seventies. And then today I gave a brief talk at a College of Arts and Science admissions open house, which I preceded with the opening slides from Bryan's and my Writing New York class. I substituted a version of "Sidewalks of New York" performed by Duke Ellington for Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five's "New York, New York," which we usually play over the slides, but I still played Ace Frehley's "New York Groove" at the conclusion of the slide show.

Do you remember that song? It was from Frehley's "solo" album, released in October 1978. Frehley was the lead guitarist for the band KISS, and each member of the quartet released a solo album that fall.

Here's a video of the song from the KISS tour that followed the release of the solo albums and the group album Dynasty in 1979:

This year I'm teaching a "Freshman Honors Seminar" on the subject of "Modernist New York." The class is held in the residence hall where we live, and it is linked to an "Explorations" community. The students live together, intermingled with another seminar/community called "New York's Writing Women," which deals with Greenwich Village Bohemia and the Harlem Renaissance. The Explorations program enables us to create programming related to the class: so, for example, we took students in both classes to visit the Tenement Museum last month. In-between our readings of Hart Crane's poem The Bridge (1930) and John Dos Passos' novel Manhattan Transfer (1925), I took my students on a walking tour of Brooklyn Bridge and City Hall Park.

Our "textbook" for the class is the very readable cultural history New York Modern: The Arts and the City by William B. Scott and Peter M. Rutkoff. The book works well for my purposes in part because it concentrates on arts other than literature and also because it makes an argument about  "New York modern" as a set of styles and perspectives that is both distinct from modernism (because it is rooted in the realism of such writers and artists as Whitman, Wharton, and Eakins) and outlasts it.

The subject of tomorrow's class is music, and our reading comes not from New York Modern but from Alex Ross's history of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise (2007), in particular its fourth chapter, "Invisible Men," which treats U.S. composers during the ragtime and jazz eras. Our listening assignment is drawn from some of the composers whom Ross mentions:

Antonin Dvorak, Symphony "From the New World"
Scott Joplin, "Maple Leaf Rag"
Original Dixieland Jazz Band, "Livery Stable Blues"
Will Marion Cook, Overture to In Dahomey and "On Emancipation Day"
Jerome Kern, Show Boat (Act One, Scene One: "Niggers all work on de Mississippi"; Act Two, Scene One: "Dyunga doe! Dyunga doe!"
Charles Ives, Three Places in New England, "1. The 'St. Gaudens' in Boston Common"
Edgard Varèse, "Amériques"
George Gershwin, "Rhapsody in Blue" and Porgy and Bess, Introduction and "Summertime"
Duke Ellington, "Black" (First Movement of Black, Brown And Beige)

I've paired the students up and assigned a piece or set of pieces to each group. I'm looking forward to seeing what they make of the music, particularly the Ives, Varèse, and Ellington. And we're capping this week off with an outing to the New York Philharmonic on Friday, for a special program called "Inside the Music: Dvorak's New World Symphony," which features a performance of the symphony preceded by a multimedia presentation about its genesis, narrated by Alec Baldwin.

Here's how Alex Ross, in his fantastic book The Rest Is Noise, describes Steve Reich's 1976 minimalist masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians:

The premiere took place at New York's Town Hall on April 24, 1976. Here the fascination of rhythm is joined to a comparably sophisticated drama of harmony: at the core of this piece is a cycle of eleven chords, each of which underpins a section of two to seven minutes in length. Early on, bass instruments touch repeatedly on a low D, giving the feeling that this is the work's fundamental level. But in Section V, the midpoint of the structure, the bass clarinets and cello lower the floor from D to C-sharp -- a crucial alteration in the physical space of the music. The harmony sinks toward F-sharp or C-sharp minor, and rugged six-note figures burrow in. A similar change in the weather darkens Section IX, which is almost expressionistic in its stabbing intensity. Only at the end do bright D and A-majorish chords clear the air.

Ross's writing here differs from his treatment of most other works in the book, which aims to allow his readers to imagine the sounds he's describing. Here the description is almost clinical, and I don't think it's an accident. This is Ross at his most minimal, perhaps to emphasize Reich's precision. But the minimalism he's describing is also incredibly lush, and it's strange that he doesn't spend more time conveying the feelings Reich's piece conveys or even the ways in which it was received.

[You can, however, in the web supplement Ross provides, listen to bits and pieces of Reich's influential repertoire if you're not already familiar with it.]

Reich -- along with other downtown minimalists in the 1960s and 1970s: LaMonte Young, Phillip Glass, sometimes Terry Riley -- contributed to what was then a burgeoning neighborhood avant-garde art scene, one that blurred boundaries between media and forms and disciplines. A few paragraphs after Ross discusses Reich's piece, he quotes the critic John Rockwell describing a loft performance by Phillip Glass at the artist Donald Judd's loft, ending with a comparison of 70s SoHo with 50s Greenwich Village. "It was a good night to be in New York City," Rockwell remembered.

That's what I was thinking last night at Le Poisson Rouge, the new Village club in the space formerly inhabited by the Village Gate. LPR has mounted an incredibly ambitious and eclectic roster of live shows  for the coming season, including several installments of the "Wordless Music Series," which aims to bring together contemporary composers and indie rock audiences (and vice versa). Last weekend, the new music ensemble Signal played Reich's most canonical piece as the second half of an evening of pulsing orchestral sounds. Reich himself was on hand on Saturday, becapped and (unless I was imagining it) glowing under the adulation he received from a diverse audience: indie kids, NYU percussion students, older folks more likely to attend performances at Lincoln Center than in a downtown basement venue, Sufjan Stevens (who was behind me in line to get in and whose music -- especially the Michigan album -- owes an enormous debt to Reich's work). Most of the crowd sat on the floor or packed in several pockets assigned for standing room only. It was a vibe much more akin to a rock show than a classical performance, though when the music got underway the audience was rapt.

When the Times reported on Reich's first recording of this piece in 1978, the critic opined that the record was better than the live show, which, in the critic's view, tended toward the mechanical and cultish. Sitting on the floor of Le Poisson Rouge, close enough to the principal clarinet player to be able to read the score on his stand, I would have begged to differ, at least on the first point. There's an extraordinary joy to go along with the piece's trance-like mechanical qualities, a secular energy that pushes you, in the interactions between the ensemble as much as in the pulses they are producing, toward something like religious ecstasy.

Yesterday, David Byrne and Brian Eno released Everything That Happens Will Happen Today, their first full-length album together since 1981's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Unlike that album, this one actually features Byrne's vocals. It holds its own against recent Byrne albums and other late Eno collaborations, with the exception of last year's release from Robert Wyatt, Comicopera, which contains what I think are the finest Eno co-writes in years.

I'm almost more interested in the duo's demeanor and m.o. on this release than in the music itself, though I've enjoyed streaming it while puttering around the house catching up on work yesterday and this morning. I'm interested not just in the fact that the collaboration happened, this go around, via email (Eno writing tunes and hooks and laying down beats and Byrne composing songs and lyrics from these building blocks), but also in their decision to self-publish and -promote. "In the past, I might have undertaken all kinds of expensive marketing plans to prepare for a record release," Byrne wrote on his blog a couple weeks ago, announcing the early release of a free MP3 from the album. "[T]here would be a teaser, live shows, posters, magazine ads, interviews, and advance CDs sent to writers and reviewers. We've done a few interviews, but that's about it." For this record, though, the "Internet word-of-mouth" experiment seems to be part of the fun. According to the Times, the free download, "Strange Overtones," saw 40,000 downloads in the first three days it was posted. (If you've never read Byrne's online "journal," by the way, you should know that he's among the best contemporary NY bloggers.)

They've now made the entire album available for streaming, and even set up a nice little widget that allows you to stream from blogs like ours if you'd like:



Byrne and Eno met on May 14, 1977, the day Byrne's band, the seminal New York art-punks Talking Heads, headlined their first show in England, where they had traveled to support another New York punk band, the Ramones. Eno, an experimental musician who had played with the legendary glam outfit Roxy Music and was currently guiding David Bowie through one of his most fertile periods, was in the back of the club recording the gig illicitly; the band's management confiscated his recorder and sat him closer to the stage. In some versions of the story, former Velvet Underground member John Cale (who had worked with other downtown New York acts since) was at the same gig. David Bowman, in his biography of Talking Heads, says that Eno and others recall Cale saying something to Eno like "Get out of the way, Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, I want them, you bugger." Cale says he wasn't there.

Eno did wind up producing Talking Heads records; he spent more and more time in New York, which he thought of, according to Bowman, like a "medieval European city":

Eno liked shopping in Chinatown for weird odds and ends. The smell of burned meat was in the air from a shish kabob stand. He passed by windows hung full with dead red ducks. Windows full of water and huge fish with the faces of old men. An Asian dwarf writing calligraphy on the window of a bank.

Eno's 1978 pop album Before and After Science includes a Heads-style homage to the band called "King's Lead Hat," an anagram for the band's name. That same year, Eno also made downtown NYC music history by curating the album No New York, a compilation of four post-CBGB/post-punk minimalist bands: the Contortions, Mars, DNA, and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks (fronted by Lydia Lunch). In many ways, the No New York album is the bridge between the mid-70s downtown scene and 80s post-punk New York landmark bands like Sonic Youth and Yo La Tengo.

If Everything That Happens doesn't fully live up to expectations, recall just how much its creators have shaped the soundscape of our own contemporary NY scenes -- and how much better even their late efforts are than most of the crap rolled out and cut from corporate cookie-cutter music factories.