by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
Continuing their European Tour, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra are traveling to Austria to mark Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday with an open air concert on Wednesday at the Pfarrkirche, Ansfelden, that includes Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, “Romantic.”
INTERESTING READS:
In a New York Times essay, opera director Yuval Sharon considers the idea of opera as a revolutionary force. “For every composer affirming authority in their work, opera’s history offers counterexamples: creators so committed to establishing a new world order in sound that they resisted all conventions and invented their own instruments, their own ensembles or their own theaters.” Read Opera Doesn’t Have to Be an Elite Art Form. Here’s Why here.
PsyPost reports that a study of classical music audiences reveals that Concert music moves audiences bodily. “Music reaches not just the minds (the cognition and experiences of people), but also their bodies such as heart rate, breathing, body movement. This is called ’embodied cognition.’” Read the article here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1987, American composer Morton Feldman died in Buffalo, NY, where he taught at the University after spending his first 47 years working in his family’s children’s coats business.
A friend of John Cage and other avant garde composers, Feldman began his compositional career writing “indeterminate music” transmitted in unconventional, sometimes graphic scores, and after 1977 turned to quiet works of extraordinary length.
CIM New Music Ensemble members Madeline Lucas, flute, Shuai Wang, celesta, and Brian Sweigart, percussion, played his more-than-four-hour work For Philip Guston in Cleveland on March 31, 2012, in conjunction with an exhibition of monumental wooden sculptures by Ursula von Rydingsvard, the last concert to take place in MOCA’s midtown location.
I stopped in to hear part of that performance after covering another event, and wrote in a review:
During the half hour I sat in the main space, the keyboardist would play a soft cluster of notes, answered by a soft note from the flute and a single stroke from the percussion, followed by a soft cluster from the keyboard, a soft note from the flute and a single stroke from the percussion, followed by… When this slow sequence was interrupted and the percussionist played many (slow) repetitions of the same marimba note, it seemed like a seismic musical shift, but then the original material came back again.
For a taste of that work, watch a video of a 55-minute excerpt from a performance on November 2, 2014 by flutist Claire Chase, keyboardist Sarah Rothenberg, and percussionist Steven Schick, in Houston’s Rothko Chapel on the Da Camera chamber music series. (Unfortunately, the chapel, which features 14 murals by the Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, sustained extensive damage in Hurricane Beryl on July 8, and is closed indefinitely).
And here’s a shorter Feldman work from 1970 — before he embarked on his extended duration pieces: his The Viola in My Life 2 performed by the CIM New Music Ensemble in Mixon Hall on April 2, 2017.
