Who's George Crumb?

It's not a question I have asked for a very long time.  Long enough that I can't remember how long since I didn't know the answer.  My musical coming of age in the happily spiky bubble of Oberlin College funneled me into a community where people like Crumb and John Cage were all-stars.

When Josh and I sat down to talk on WKCR at Columbia the other day before our Miller Theatre concert of Crumb, the first question was "why don't we hear more George Crumb?"  At first, I didn't understand the question, like the interviewer was speaking a foreign language.   From my perspective, his music was so widespread that its trademark gestures had become cliches in other composers' hands.  You couldn't use poetry, theater, or weird percussion sounds without encountering him.

But the question came from a very educated music lover, a neuroscience Ph.D. candidate from Columbia who wanted to talk for two hours on his own classical music show about Steve Reich, Charles Ives, and George Crumb.   So I had to re-evaluate my assumptions on the spot.  

I think those of us who love this music have to increasingly deal with the fact that we are in a niche fan club, sort of like The Society for Creative Anachronism or Kucinich supporters.   For our older colleagues, this can be hard to swallow.  Many of them either remember, or studied with those who remember when European and European-influenced composed music was a bulwark of American culture (socially stratified as it might have been).  Becoming just another option in a democratized marketplace wasn't easy.  

But it can actually be liberating.  Talking about an artist whose work you believe in is really fun when your advocacy is based on a personal love for his/her music, instead of what I read Alex Ross refer to as the "politics of style" (he was quoting somebody else, I don't remember who).  It frees you to consider artists from this tradition in the same breath as those you love from others, and to naively disregard their differences.  

So the interviewer (God bless him), let us talk for two hours about George Crumb, and why we care about his music.  As percussionists, bowed flexatones and wind machines are obviously part of the appeal.  But there's something else there, too, an identification.  I always thought his Lorca settings were beautiful, but "Unto the Hills" -- the Appalachian song cycle that we played with Daisy Press at this show --  touched a nerve somewhere.  I'm about as Appalachian as a bagel, but the stark, simple quality of these songs and their haunting accompaniments evoked a deeply moving melancholy.  It seemed a heart-rending undercurrent, something a perpetually happy society could never admit to having in common.

I'm hoping to post Jason's interview onstage with Crumb here soon...

-adam

Montana to New York - Adam

This past weekend, Jason and I talked in a session at the Chamber Music America conference about audience engagement.  "The Creative Audience," it was called, lead by Ed Noonan, the director of the Myrna Loy Center in Helena MT.  Ed brought us out to Montana in November for a residency sponsored by CMA.

We are accustomed to rooms full of people, but there definitely is a level of self-consciousness when talking to an audience about how to engage their audiences! It occurs to you mid-sentence that you'd better be demonstrating what you're talking about.   It's a difficult thing to analyze, since you hope that real engagement arises spontaneously as performers and audience feed back to each other, not as a cynical strategy.  

We spent much of the time talking about attitudes and pre-conceptions: giving people credit for what they bring, how they participate as an audience.  Jason mentioned how he used to feel when presented with a long dry list of prescriptions for understanding a piece before hearing it, only to believe that he must be stupid or uninitiated to not get it all. He called it feeling like you were "taking your medicine."

I have to admit that even after a few degrees in music, I still have an intuitive reaction to music before the analytical kicks in, full of imagery and associative memory.  I think we all do.  So why not give the audience (and the composer) more credit, let them believe that they have a way in through this intuition?  If they are curious to know later about structure and history, terrific!  Program notes and google take care of that handily.  

So it's about letting people inside the music on their own terms.  As a string player friend pointed out to me, percussion can be like cheating sometimes: everybody relates to objects out of their cupboard or backyard. Still, if somebody at your show has never heard of minimalism or post-modernism, but is geeked to realize that you can even make music with a car brake drum, are you going to want him to feel like he can't approach you and tell you all about it?  He's waiting to see if you think it's cool too, or if you believe you've inherited the mantle of Western Civilization by playing on freaking car parts.

The Myrna Loy Center is one of the most fascinating places we've ever played.  The building itself is a miracle of karmic reversal.  One of the most brutal prisons in Montana well into the 80's, it was converted with the NEA's help into a concert hall, movie theater, and community space.  Here's a sketch of the exterior:

Apparently when it was renovated they even conducted a Native American cleansing ritual because of all the people who had been killed there when it was a jail. 

Upon entering, the transformation the interior has undergone is striking. The lobby is filled with movie posters, and an entire gallery on the left is dedicated to the work of local artists and artisans.  

We were given the full tour, including the solitary confinement room, a dank, impossibly small block of stone in the basement.  As anybody who has been to a place like this knows, the walls don't forget what they've seen.  The idea of inhabiting the space with art and music was deeply moving and inspiring for us.  

After all of the educational activities and performances that week, Ed wrote this poem to commemorate the experience:

"Hey, Rhythm,"

said the child,

"Think you can't be found.

You underestimate my motion,

my surfaces of sound.

My ears will hear where you are hiding.

My hands will catch your beat.

Making that connection we'll be one

and in that moment, Rhythm,"

said the child,

"We'll have fun."

-Ed Noonan

A new Blog

The experiences that we have had traveling around the country (and around the world, a bit) have proved beyond interesting, and almost always surprising. The most exciting thing has been to see our preconceptions turned completely upside down. Although making a career like this is far from easy (actually, it's really, really hard), we are blown away every day by the people we come in contact with.

Most of all, we are delighted by how our experiences contradict all the lamentations about how everything is dying: music, records, audiences, etc. Maybe those things are reorganizing, but the impulse and the hunger is alive and well.

Anyway, there's no telling what will make it into this blog...probably some pontificating, maybe some thoughts about poker and really really long rides in mini-vans for weeks on end (poker poses unique trust issues in a group).