Last month at a concert by the Pilgrim Chamber Players in which my string quartet was performed, I met a delightful couple at the reception and they were very complimentary of my piece, which naturally I always enjoy.  As it turns out they were not just your average appreciators of rocking good string quartets, they are art collectors and focus particularly on the Chicago Imagists who I had never heard of but am now convinced are to play an interesting role in my artistic life.

I’m a big believer in fate and there are several things about these artists and how I came to hear about them that has me convinced that this meeting was fated to happen.  For one thing I am a composer is frequently inspired by visual art and who has written many pieces inspired by paintings and prints.

For another, the name of this movement, Hairy Who, came as a reaction to critic Harry Bouras who said that Chicago didn’t have any important artists.  Bouras was the critic for WFMT where I am a radio host.

And thirdly the art is my kind of art: visceral, uncensored, absolutely real.  These artists weren’t thinking about fame, they were simply making what they wanted to make and not being obsessed with fame meant they had the freedom to do whatever they want.

Now, after watching the Hairy Who movie, which I highly recommend, I am racking my brains to think of a project that involves musical pairings with some of this art in a way that is respectful to the art and that makes sense musically.  I know it will come to me, I expect this to be my next big project.  More on that as soon as the right idea comes my way!

I wrote a couple of months ago bemoaning the fact that the powers that be in Chicago are slashing support for the arts amid an unprecedented budget shortfall and just wanted to write a quick update as I, among many other artists in the state, just received a disheartening email from Shirley Madigan, the chairwoman of the IAC and wife of the most powerful man in Illinois, Mike Madigan.

First of all it looks like the IAC will remain operational but, according to the email, “due to circumstances beyond our control, we are unable to make any funding decisions regarding applications (current, pending, and future) at this time.”  The thing that really gets me down about this is that the cuts are not entirely owing to the budget mess.

In 2007 then-Governor Rod Blagojevich slashed the budget 35% simply because Mike Madigan was his political rival and, being unable to hurt him, he decided to hurt his wife instead.  From that point on the cuts have nearly always been politically motivated including the latest round from Bruce Rauner, who also doesn’t like Mike Madigan.

Look, I don’t like Mike Madigan either, in fact I’m pretty sure that no one in the state likes Mike Madigan except possibly his family, and even that is in doubt, so I can certainly understand the impulse but you can’t create cuts that affect millions of people simply because you want to spite the wife of a guy you don’t like.  That’s no way to use power. Although this is also the guy who literally hid in a closet when his budget director came looking for him so…

Since 2007 the IAC has been cut nearly every year until it’s now a shadow of itself.  They apparently still have staff and an office and they’re reviewing grants but as far as I can tell they will not be able to award grant money as of this year and, most likely, going forward.  Truly a shame that support for the arts are one more casualty of the never-ending partisan wars of our idiot politicians.  Fire them all!

This video, by Asaf Blasberg, is from my concert at Spectrum in New York City on May 29. The piece is called Ageless Animals and it’s from a film score I did for Chris Marker’s phenomenal La Jeteé originally for the Sound of Silent Film Festival in 2009.

For this piece I used still photographs from a scene in the movie in which the protagonist, who has traveled backwards in time to try and prevent a nuclear holocaust, meets with a girl he remembers from before the war and they enter a beautifully creepy museum where they have a quiet moment before everything goes to shit.

It’s one of the great moments of the film and I tried to write beautiful, and yet somewhat creepy, love music for it.

Musicians are:

Hristina Blagoeva – flute
Seth Boustead – piano
Melody Giron – cello
Matthew Lau – percussion
Medina – clarinet
Elena Moon Park – violin

Meatloaf: the crown prince of bad art hell

When you think about it, it’s truly astounding how much bad art must exist in the world.  Every artist that has ever existed has had to wade through some lesser iterations before getting to the handful of masterpieces that often define their career, and if the best artists made some bad art well then the rest of us must be making a lot of bad art. Times that by the bajillions of people making art that have existed since the beginning of art and that’s a lot of bad art.

Let’s just focus on music though.  What happens to all of the bad music? Does there exist somewhere a form of hell in which the penitent is forced to listen to the millions of bad pieces that have been written over the years?  In what form will these bad pieces exist?  Will they be badly played by a bad ensemble or expertly played by a fine ensemble who suffered the misfortune to wind up in this hell and is now forced to play bad music nightly? A kind of double punishment.

Does every masterpiece always require dozens or more failed attempts?  What about a one-hit wonder in the rock world like My Sharona?  Did the Knack write a dozen lesser versions before hitting upon the right one?  Is there a parallel universe in which the lesser ones are good art?  Is My Sharona good art?

Perhaps there’s a double universe structure where one is the repository for bad art, art that only exists as a trial run for the later masterpiece that then exists in the second universe.  Of course both versions exist in our universe but in the bad art universe Picasso would presumably be ridiculed.  Unless of course the bad art universe contains no sentient beings and is only a repository for bad art, a kind of transcendental storage house.  Also, perhaps the art that exists in our universe, both bad and good, exist merely as imperfect Platonian copies of the art in the other universes.

Then if good and bad art exist in parallel universes, are artists creating the art that is in them or do the artists have different attunements and are merely pulling pre-existing art from one or the other of the universes?  Some are attuned primarily to the  bad art universe like Meatloaf or Wagner’s illegitimate son Gerhardt  and others are primarily attuned to the good art universe like Radiohead or Wagner’s great great grandson Erich.

Obviously the human race can never know the answer to such deep questions but perhaps there will one day exist an app that allows us to only tune into the good art universe.  Until that day though we’ll just have to muddle through.

We’ve had a lot of great challenges in this country, not least of which was the civil war which as we all know was fought over whether or not to sweeten iced tea.  Ever since losing the war, the south has fervently promised to rise again and of course we northerners have always considered this to be complete drivel.  But all of a sudden I’m not feeling so smug.

As an avid consumer of iced tea, (I would say 2-4 cups a day on average including a disturbing tendency to keep my cups from Panera and Chipotle so that I can refill at different locations later in the same day or sometimes on a completely different day,) I have noticed a troubling trend of late: more and more restaurants are defaulting to serving iced tea pre-sweetened or favoring teas that are sweeter than a nice, comfortingly bitter black tea.

This can only be the nefarious work of the southern states who invented the idea of sweet tea in the first place.  New York, Chicago and Boston are no place to drink sweet tea.  Plus it just doesn’t make any sense. Why pre-sweeten the tea?  You can’t take sugar out of the tea but you can always put it in.  It’s totally crazy and I for one will not have it!

Mark my words and look around you.  Sweet tea is only the beginning.

I moved to Chicago almost exactly twenty years ago and have seldom done any of the normal tourist things. I haven’t been to the top of the Sears Tower for example, I haven’t taken the architecture cruise (I know, I know!) and I had never been to the top of the Hancock building to have a drink at the Signature Room until yesterday but I can scratch that one off the list now. Well, I can make a list and presumably include that and then scratch it off.

Once again I find myself incredibly happy to be part of ACM’s anual Composer Alive project because every year it takes me out of my normal routine and often makes me a tourist in my own city as I play host to composers from around the world.

That photo was taken as the sun was going down so it’s hard to see but the city is spread below us and watching the sun go down was a magical moment that I was very happy to share with our visiting composer from Warsaw Agnieszka Stulginska.  Thanks Agnieszka for showing me how beautiful my city is.

Why do directors still make silent movies in the modern era? This is of course a rhetorical question that I don’t have the answer to but I suspect that for many directors the idea of telling a story without dialogue, or even sound effects, is an intriguing challenge and so, though the days of Rudolph Valentino are long gone, there are still an incredible number of filmmakers today working in silence.

In 2005 I had the idea to start an event that would pair images with newly composed music in an interesting and innovative way and I decided that the thing to do would be to focus on modern silent films, which I wasn’t even sure existed.  But I wasn’t going to let a little thing like that deter me!  My way of doing things is to write a press release and send it to everyone and then I have no choice but to make it happen.

I found the best film from the first year in an almost laughable coincidence.  I went to see Ferris Bueller’s Day Off at a neighborhood park with my wife and I ran into someone who asked what I was up to lately.  Upon answering that I was searching high and low for modern silent films he said, “that’s funny, the guy across the hall from me is making a modern silent film.”

The guy across the hall turned out to be Dave Less and I scored his film Manos de la Muerte for the first year.  Another film from the first year came from Sergio Assad’s son Rodrigo who had eschewed the family trade of music and focused on film instead.

Over the years we did some crazy ambitious things like rescore Chris Marker’s classic film La Jetee with narrator and a small orchestra, hire singers to perform a deeply satirical version of the opera Carmen by Alexander Payne, ask four composers to write a seamless score for Hiroshi Teshigahara’s 74 minute masterpiece Gaudi, and perform music for a film to be projected in four directions simultaneously.

But the last couple of years have been the best.  The addition of conductor Francesco Milioto and a regular body of performing musicians have meant extraordinarily high musical quality, all of the movies are now submitted to us by world class directors which has vastly increased the quality of the films we’re showing and the audience is growing too.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since I sent that first press release. It’s been a wild ride but I wouldn’t change a thing.  Here’s hoping for ten more years!

I recently had the opportunity to fly to New York to cover a preview concert of Jennifer Higdon’s new opera Cold Mountain at the Guggenheim museum, put on by Santa Fe Opera.  I was having a drink in the bar the night before the concert with two of the publicity folks for Santa Fe and one, who had gone to school in New York, was talking about how amazed she was that her friends wanted to do completely different things while in the city than she did.

I agreed and said it’s always interesting how so many people have different ideas of fun, that your New York is not their New York.  I was reminded of this today when I got an email from a musician friend of mine who’s playing with “the best musicians in Chicago” and I didn’t recognize a single name. I don’t doubt that they’re great musicians, I was just surprised that, after so many years living here, there’s still so much more to the city than I’ll ever know.  His Chicago is not my Chicago.

I remember moving here in 1995 and being overwhelmed at first, but humans have a curious ability to break down overwhelming things and make them manageable.  First I moved to the north side of the city which cut it in half, then I settled in one neighborhood which, like so many Chicagoans, I rarely leave, and the city became manageable.  But it also became a reflection of me to a certain degree.

I cut myself off from the parts of the city that are not like me and then assume that Chicago is like me, that it’s my city.  But of course there are millions of people living only a few miles away who experience the city in a completely different way.  One of the advantages of city life should be that we seek out new parts of the city, new lifestyles and points of view, that we explore other people’s experiences of our city and don’t stay stuck within our own metaphorical city which is really a metaphor for our self-imposed ignorance.

Not saying I’ll get around to doing this of course, not during Game of Thrones season anyway. It’s just been on my mind.  Of course, your Game of Thrones is not my Game of Thrones either.

It doesn’t even feel like spring but I’ve already completed the Relevant Tones listings for summer.  I think it’s a great line-up and am looking forward to getting into the studio to tape!

RT 15-27: CD Grab Bag
We’re having a ball trying to keep up with our ever-expanding musical collection as composers and performers around the world joyously overwhelm us with their creations.  We’re consistently amazed by their level of talent and artistry, and are thrilled this week to share their music with our listeners.
(release 7/1)

RT 15-28: Pianist Jenny Lin
Stunningly versatile pianist Jenny Lin has recorded with jazz musicians, rockers, contemporary composers and everyone in between.  Equally comfortable playing Shostakovich on the same concert as giving a world premiere, Lin is a vital talent that is taking concert halls by storm.
(releases 7/8)

RT 15-29:  Above and Beyond
In recent years composers have become interested in the fact that the performers can do things on stage other than just play their instrument: stomp their feet, clap, play simple percussion, and even sing.  We’ll feature a variety of pieces from composers who ask musicians (who are not trained singers) to vocalize and supplement their playing.
(release 7/15)

RT 15-30: Composer Champions
Where would Gustav Mahler be without the incredible support of Leonard Bernstein?  Bach without the support of Mendelssohn?  Being championed by a famous performer or conductor is an incredible leg up to the career of many composers.  Who are the modern day composer champions, and whose work are they promoting?
(release 7/22)


RT 15-31:Composer Spotlight: Alvin Singleton
Critic Kyle Gann says “Singleton’s music is soulful, with an understated simplicity that I particularly prize. Despite the studied economy of his means and the set character of his images, the music is never cold … nor abstract. It glows with warmth.”  We’ll feature Singleton’s music on our next Composer Spotlight.
(release 7/29)

RT 15-32: Cityscapes
We all know the Pastoral Symphony of Beethoven, Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture inspired by Fingal’s Cave, and the music by Vaughan Williams inspired by the English countryside.  But in the modern era, the urban environment is inspiring many composers to capture its sounds in music.
(release 8/5)

RT 15-33: A Change of Opinion
Throughout history, composers who have been known for championing a particular musical style have shocked their fans by radically and suddenly changing their aesthetic.  Why does this happen, and who’s changing their style in the modern era?
(release 8/12)

RT 15-34: The Modern Symphony
Much like the novel, people are always pronouncing the symphony to be a dead form.  And yet, composers continue to write symphonies at an incredible pace.  We’ll feature music by composers around the world who are adding to the symphonic canon.
(release 8/19)

RT 15-35: The Laptop Ensemble
This week we’re exploring a newer musical medium: the laptop.  We wanted to find out what exactly groups named PLOrk, CLOrk, and Benoit and the Mandelbrots could possibly have to offer. The answer surprised us.  We discovered improvisation, live coding, and even orchestral collaboration.
(releases 8/26)

RT 15-36:  Composer Collectives
The twentieth century saw an interesting movement as composers banded together in collectives to help promote each other’s work. The movement has only gotten stronger in the twenty-first century with the rise of entrepreneurialism in classical music. We’ll feature the music of several composer collectives and take a close look at their inner workings.
(releases 9/2)

RT 15-37: SIRGA Festival  
A relatively new festival in a remote part of Catalonia featuring music by electro-acoustic composers, SIRGA has recently grown into an international event that brings musicians from all over the world.  Relevant Tones visits the SIRGA festival to feature audio from their concerts.
(releases 9/9)

RT 15-38: Composers Among Us: Michael Colgrass
Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Colgrass has had a varied career as jazz drummer, freelance percussionist and composer of a dizzying array of works in every conceivable genre.
(releases 9/16)

RT 15-39: Kronos Quartet
Ground breakers, virtuousos, and commissioners of many of the world’s twentieth and twenty-first century string quartet masterpieces, the influence of the Kronos Quartet cannot be underestimated.  We’ll talk with the musicians and feature a sampling of their luminous output over the years.
(releases 9/23)