Faux Musings

La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

 
I appreciate Francesca Caccini's remarkable opera La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina (1625) even more each time I hear it, the deceptively simple 80-minute work revealing more upon repeated listenings.

Choreographer Anna Mannsbridge and music director Stephen Stubbs have shaped a beautiful interpretation of this 400 year old work in this excellent new production at Cornish this weekend. Moreover, several of our Artist Diploma in Early Music students shine in convincing performances–Christine Knackstedt as Alcina and José Luis Muñoz as Melissa in particular–as well as Cornish faculty member Ross Hauck as Ruggiero.

Likewise, the design team of Montana Tippett (sets), Connie Yun (lights), and Cristine Meyers (costumes) succeed in fashioning a whimsical setting for the drama to unfold, all complemented by the wonderful supporting performances of a number of our undergraduate classical vocal students and the superb accompaniment of our early music faculty comprising the period instrument continuo ensemble propelling the action along. A most successful first outing for our early music program that contributes immeasurably to the 30+ year tradition of producing seldom-staged operas at Cornish.   

Ross Hauck, tenor, as Ruggiero and Christine Knacksetedt, mezzo soprano, as Alcina (top). José Luis Muñoz, countertenor, as Melissa (bottom) in La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'Isola d'Alcina.

Photos courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts, Michelle Smith-Lewis, photographer.

Cabrillo Festival

Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Santa Cruz, California

If this perennial summer festival lacks the quirkiness and bold risks that characterized it in earlier years, it's made up for it in recent years through consistent execution and a sustained commitment to expanding the contemporary orchestral repertoire under conductor Marin Alsop. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Alsop's steady artistic leadership, and to celebrate the occasion the Festival played host to fifteen composers and at least equal that many west coast, U.S., or world premieres. Composers in residence this year ranged from American composers Mason Bates, Anna Clyne, Michael Daugherty, Tina Davidson, Margaret Brouwer, and Christopher Rouse to the Australian composer Elena Kats-Chernin, Dutch composer Robin De Raaf, and young Canadian composer Zosha di Castri.

Friday night's program entitled Mysteries of Light featured five works, all west coast premieres, and one world premiere—a brief, characteristic study constructed of expanding ostinato figures in parallel and contrasting motion by Philip Glass entitled "Black and White in Scherzo." Margaret Brouwer's "Pulse" (2003), a short, pleasant, if otherwise unremarkable work with a strong tonal center opened the concert. Mason Bates' recent work "Desert Transport" (2011), a brilliantly orchestrated programmatic meditation inspired by a helicopter flight over the Southwestern desert landscape and structured in four connected movements further confirmed his gift for composing tonally lush and alluring works for orchestra. One wonders how well Bates' work might fare on repeated listenings—in short whether substance might lie beneath the shimmering textures, or vanish mirage-like into the thin desert air. Nevertheless, Alsop coaxed a wonderfully well-balanced performance out of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, the quality of which continues to improve with each passing year.

Christopher Rouse's "Odna Zhizn" (2009) was a fifteen-minute work of both substance and depth, constructed out of its own logic evident aurally but not programmatically to the audience—rich sustained textures for strings punctuated with passages for low woodwinds, bursts of brass, and a battery of percussion. The Scottish composer James MacMillan's Piano Concert No. 3, "The Mysteries of Light" (2007-08) with piano soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet concluded the program. Easily the most satisfying work of the evening, "Light" combines contrasting themes and textures for different sections of the orchestra with a piano part comprised of equal part traditional concerto bravado and evocative, Messiaen-like harmonies and shimmering textures played in the extreme upper registers of the piano, while the left hand doubles plaintive interior melodic lines with various members of the orchestra to superb effect.

An audience of one

In his classic book Envisioning Information Edward Tufte demonstrated dramatically the power of visual representations to "make sense" of an otherwise incoherent sea of data. Swimming waist deep—no make that neck deep—in the ever-expanding ocean of market statistics and demographic data I sometimes feel as if I'm losing sight of landfall.

However, I quickly found my land legs when I came across this chart in Nick Rabkin's and E. C. Hedberg's recent study "Arts Education in America: what the declines mean for arts participation" published earlier this year by the National Endowment for the Arts. As vividly as Charle Joseph Minard's famous diagram illustrates the advance and retreat of Napoleon's army from Russia in 1812 and 1813, Rabkin's and Hedberg's data paints a sobering picture of the decline of arts education in America and what it most likely portends for future arts participation:

Even more concerning still is the break-down by race: Americans may like to envision themselves as a beacon of multiculturalism in an otherwise Balkanized and sectarian world, but if the trends visible in this following illustration persist we may soon live in a society where access to arts education will no longer be an expectation of all Americans, just those born "white."    

I'm not sure what this portends, but it is not good. An audience of one? Left unchecked this trend threatens to erode the gains made by the civil rights movement in prior years. We're experiencing a grand dismantling of what some conservative pundits might disparagingly refer to as the "welfare state" but which I prefer to think of as the guarantee of access to a shared commons, a commons that defines us as a people, and provides us with the opportunity to build bridges of understanding across disparate social groups, a quality that seems so sorely lacking in our political and social discourse today.

 

Future forward

I've got Walt Disney to thank. Some people are fascinated by the past, others the future. A child of the Gemini and Apollo space programs (I was too young to remember the Mercury program), I've been fascinated by the possibilities of the future since childhood. Not some Malthusian future, rather that shiny, new future with big "fins" and long sleek lines that Walt and his band of merry men (they were all men in those days, after all) depicted for us in animation. Reality always paled in comparison.   

My first childhood aspiration was to become an astronaut. So caught up in our national obsession to put a man on the moon, almost every child my age harbored similar hopes. How amazing now to think how science could displace sports in the pantheon of most popular childhood aspirations. What do six-year-olds aspire to today? Kennedy's genius was in understanding the power of grand, symbolic gestures. So too Reagan. And Obama. The poetry of grand gestures.

If my mother is to be believed I began writing NASA at age 4, although the corraborating evidence would seem to support a much more credible conclusion that it was closer to my seventh birthday when I dragged out my father's trusty old Underwood typewriter and began to peck out letters to NASA requesting photos of the last space mission with my slow, but reliable two-finger typing technique. I never did learn how to type properly. Instead, my typing gradually evolved into an idiosyncratic four-finger technique that I'm saddled with to this day. I can type 70 words per minute, but everyone in the coffeee shop inevitably glances over to see what all that clatter and racket is about, as my fingers dart across the computer keyboard.

What did arrive was a big official looking envelope. One of many that the postman would deliver to our home from NASA's public relations department over the years as I dutifully maintained a correspondence inquiring after the latest mission. Each envelope packed to the gills with big, glossy, 8 x 10 color photographs of the mission crews and gorgeous, high resolution images captured in space.

I learned that if you were curious to see the future, all you had to do was ask.

The Corigliano Quartet

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

We hosted the Corigliano Quartet this last week in a residency designed to allow our student composers to work all week with a top-notch string quartet. Reports from the students, the Quartet, and from audiences in attendance at both Friday night's open reading of the eight new student works and at Saturday evening's culminating concert was that the Quartet's residency was an unqualified success.

The quality and variety of the eight student compositions premiered on Friday night was staggering. If one of the attributes of a good teacher is their ability to allow each student to develop their own individual style, then instructor and composer Janice Giteck is a great teacher: each of the eight student compositions developed its own compositional language, each different, one from the next.

On Saturday night, the Corigliano Quartet played with passion and verve in a program that included works by Mozart, Corigliano, Silverman, and Maggio.

Photo of the Corigliano Quartet courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts, Michelle Smith-Lewis, photographer.

Rudresh Mahanthappa

Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle, Washington

Alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa and his Indo-Pak Coalition, with Rez Abbasi on guitar and Dan Weiss on tablas and percussion, paid a visit to Cornish this past week, part of a two-day swing through town that saw them conduct workshops at Cornish on Thursday and Friday and perform at Kirkland Performance Center on Friday night. Few workshops this year have generated as much excitement in their wake.

That’s partly due to Rudresh’s music—an exciting hybrid that combines the traditional rhythmic and melodic organizing principles of Hindustani and Carnatic music with the contemporary, idiomatic instrumentation of jazz—but equally his adeptness at articulating what he’s attempting to do, that resonated so well with our students. Rudresh’s “project” is a conscious effort to define a personal as well as a musical identity. A hybrid music for a “post-racial” America, an America where by 2042, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, for the first time in our history America’s “minority” populations will become a majority of our nation.

There was a point in Friday’s workshop when Pakistani-American Rez Abbasi inadvertently referred to himself as an Indian-American—a gaffe that elicited a smirk from Rudresh. It was telling, because in Rez’s story relating how he’d grown up in the U.S. listening to Eddie Van Halen and Allan Holdsworth, such a distinction really didn’t matter—in a geographically challenged America the average citizen would be hard put to locate either India or Pakistan on a map. Yet both nations, borne out of a shared cultural history stretching back over 3,000 years, have been at the brink of war for almost as long as Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. Hence, the implied irony in the group’s name: the Indo-Pak Coalition.

Jazz, of course, is a product of this collision of cultures, one borne out of a history of forced migration and subjugation. However, today’s musical miscegenation arises out of different circumstances, a world where the Internet, and the rise of global communications over the past two decades, makes geography irrelevant. Music, after all, defies national borders.

Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis courtesy of Cornish College of the Arts.

Heiner Goebbels

Songs of Wars I Have Seen

On the Boards, Seattle, Washington

Heiner Goebbels visited Cornish this week, in connection with the Seattle presentation of his work Songs of Wars I Have Seen, to share video excerpts of some of his past music-theater pieces and offer his thoughts on the future of theater.

Songs of Wars I Have Seen, presented in a double bill with Monteverdi’s Il Combattimento di Tancredi et Clorinda by On the Boards in collaboration with the Seattle Chamber Players and Pacific Musicworks, is one of Goebbels’ staged concert works. A music-theater sans actors, where the musicians embody the dramatis personae, delivering Gertrude Stein’s ironic text in a dry, uninflected tone, the “songs” spoken, not sung.