Nielsen Rating

I'm old enough to remember the tail-end of the Nielsen revival of the 1960s and 70s, so when Alex Ross recently opined that Nielsen was his choice for "most underrated composer of the twentieth century," I thought ... well, I won't say what I thought, except that I felt there might have been worthier candidates.

Thus you can imagine the jaundiced eye I gave Ross's recent New Yorker piece on Nielsen. But you know how it is with Ross: his brilliantly apt descriptions of the music get into your head, and you start hearing things differently. I just listened to a live performance of Nielsen's Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos and the Frankfurt Radio Orchestra conducted by Nielsenist Paavo Järvi, informed by Ross's portrayal of Nielsen's aesthetic. The abrupt shifts of mood and rhythm, the echoes of folk music, the "blazing individuality"--they were all there, but I must thank Ross for allowing me to actually hear them, whereas before Nielsen's music only sounded like a very good example of the usual neo-Romantic sumptuosity.

The New York Philharmonic's conductor designate, Alan Gilbert, is, according to Ross, a Nielsen booster, so perhaps we New Yorkers have some exciting performances to look forward to.

I Love Alex Ross, but ...

I'm not buying what he's selling on Messiaen. By rights, I should be a Messiaen fan: he's French, he's avant-garde, he's a teacher and inspirer of Boulez and Stockhausen. But I've never been a fan. So I'm glad everyone had a good time at the St. Louis concert the other night; but I'm also glad that I missed it.

Nico Muhly

The New Yorker's web site still feels there is something to be gained by withholding content, so Rebecca Mead's beautifully written profile of the young New York-based composer Nico Muhly can only be found in the print version. Seek it out; it's worth reading, not just for its introduction to the work of this prodigy, but for Mead's masterly (one is tempted to say Rossian) descriptions of just how his music sounds. (She speaks of one of the techniques employed in Muhly's concerto for orchestra and electrified violin as "bouncing the bow across the strings to create an aural ricochet.")

Muhly is part of that current--I don't think it's quite right to call it a movement, as its practitioners would no doubt object to such a term--that locates in the space otherwise known as "classical" an aesthetic that encompasses influences and associations from across a wide musical spectrum. (One could place Schlimé in that space as well.)

The New Yorker web site does at least post a generous selection of Muhly's works. The aforementioned violin concerto, complete with those "aural ricochets," is featured. It's a languid piece that always seems about to veer into sheer prettiness but manages not to. It is clear that Muhly truly is an inheritor of both minimalism and the American eclectic tradition, but those tendencies are so deeply assimilated that the music never sounds derivative or recherché.

Muhly also has a web site, where he muses in an engagingly overstimulated way. And there's a MySpace page, which I leave you to find for yourselves.

Astrid and Birgit and Martha

Intrigued by Alex Ross's post on the prank played by Astrid Varnay on Birgit Nilsson? Then check out this transcription of a televised discussion with Varnay, Birgit and the great Martha Modl. Here's one gem, Nilsson on her testy relationship with Karajan:

"Making music with him was marvelous. But doing theater with him wasn't so marvelous. He was a lighting technician. We walked around like blind pilgrims looking for some light, with our faces tilted up to catch some if we found it. If you liked his lighting everything was fine! Everyone was so reverent about him. I didn't see why you had to be more reverent about Karajan than about anyone else. I said what I thought. Once he said, 'Frau Nilsson, do that again, but this time with heart. You know your heart, it is there where your wallet is.' 'Then we have at least one thing in common, Herr von Karajan' I replied."

Ten Books, Two Women

The Times Book Review has announced its list of the ten best books of the year. Eight of them are by men, including all five of the novels (and Philip Roth was not among them).

Congrats to Alex Ross for making the list with The Rest is Noise. That book is a wonderful introduction to the music--classical music, I suppose one should say--of our time, written with the warmth and pluralistic outlook that grace his columns and blog. It's reassuring to know that the Times Book Review sees its worth. If anyone can bring this kind of music back into the cultural conversation, it's Ross.

The rest of the list looks equally worthy. Still, it's a surprise to see so few women on it.

Copland

This week's New Yorker features an excerpt from Alex Ross's upcoming book, The Art of Noise, that focuses on how Aaron Copland became something of a target in midcentury cold-war and musical politics. Many years ago, as a young editor at St. Martin's Press, I was asked to supervise the publication of Copland: Since 1943, the second volume of Copland's autobiography. That book owes its existence primarily to the heroic exertions of Vivian Perlis, whose long-standing devotion to new music is sincere and ardent. I never met the great man, who by that time was in declining physical and mental health, but the book's publication was the occasion of one of the most memorable evenings of my life: a New York Philharmonic all-Copland concert at Fisher Hall where in one fell swoop I met John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, and that evening's conductor, Leonard Bernstein--all thanks to the generosity of Vivian Perlis.

Clearly Ross relies on Copland: Since 1943 for some information, but he fills the story in beautifully, giving Copland's struggles during that era depth and context. It may just have been the way the piece was edited, but it omits a curious fact. Readers may be interested to know that, in a sign of the split personality that marked the cultural gyrations of that period, Life magazine, which had savagely attacked Copland as a Communist fellow traveler and dupe in 1949, published his late piano work, "Down a Country Lane," not 13 years later!