Faux Musings

The Allure of Music

Applications to music schools are up across the nation Howard Reich writes in a front-page story in today’s Chicago Tribune. Up over 50% at Indiana University and DePaul University from 2000 to 2008, and at Columbia College Chicago music applications and enrollment have soared 37% from a year ago. The situation here at Cornish is no different: applications to the music program are up 26% over last year. The obvious question is: why?

Maybe this is evidence of a growing acceptance of musical pursuits among a wider population, a recognition that in this mediated information age creative expression must be valued just as highly as the hard sciences, and for both individuals and society to flourish we must continue to develop what Richard Florida has called “the creative class.” Or maybe it’s just the manifestation of a millennial generation showered with praise and coming of age in a time of relative peace and stability, whose supportive baby boomer parents, and ever-widening horizons, ever-more-interconnected global world encompasses the view that the mediated experiences of music, film, and video games are just the most tangible expression of an era. Maybe music has become the “safe” degree.

Betty Freeman

Word filtered out today that Betty Freeman, America’s most ardent supporter of new music, passed away this weekend. I fear that her likes won’t be seen in America again anytime soon, the impact she left upon new music truly immeasurable.

My association with Betty was only minimal; my dear friend and mentor Lou Harrison had introduced me to Betty at the Cabrillo Music Festival in the late 1970s, half-seriously, half-jokingly remarking that, “every young composer needs a patron”. Constantly snapping photographs in those days, I naturally assumed that Betty was merely an avid fan of new music, or a professional photographer on assignment. Only later upon visiting Betty at her home in Beverly Hills with music critic Alan Rich and coming face to face with the extent of her art collection did I fully realize that Betty was more than a fan, but someone with the means as well as the passion to avidly support the music and artists who excited her. To receive a note of encouragement or support from Betty after a premiere was always a pleasant and welcome surprise.

I was lucky enough to attend a series of soirees at Betty’s home while living in Los Angeles and teaching at CalArts in 1990-91. The youngest composer in attendance, Betty assigned me the duties of ensuring that regular attendee and nonagenarian composer Nicolas Slonimsky could navigate the house without fear of falling by relying upon a non-monetary type of support, my shoulder. Betty’s salons provided me with a wonderful introduction to the Los Angeles classical music scene including then Los Angeles Philharmonic administrators Ernest Fleischmann and Ara Guzelimian—the former long retired and the latter now Dean at the Juilliard School—as well as a young conductor my age that Betty was keen on introducing me to, a “local boy” named David Robertson.

Betty’s sheer enthusiasm for new music buttressed with her flair for throwing a good party—part matchmaker, part avid fan—will be sorely missed, but not soon forgotten.

Music, Community, and Competition

Reading my good friend Paul Hoffman's new book on the world of competitive chess got me to thinking: about music, community, competition, and what music says about who we are as a society.

I came to music through rock and jazz searching for community. I doubt that’s unique in any way; whether its the shared community of a gospel choir, a jazz band, the civic orchestra, or the Sunday afternoon concerts of John Philip Sousa music performed in the park by the veterans of foreign wars band I vaguely remember from my childhood, we all come together to break metaphorical bread at a shared musical table. We may speak different languages but if we share the language of music we can communicate.

Some languages are easy to learn, some difficult and nuanced, but all inherently embody that duality between initiate and outcast. We form our tribes and construct our musical languages out of shared values—about community, complexity, and competition. The language of rock and roll sublimated complexity to community—a language fashioned out of three-chord jams and eight-bar blues allowed the counter-culture of the 1960s and ‘70s to turn the established social and political structures of western music on its head. “Let a thousand garage bands bloom,” Mao was heard to say.

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I came to gamelan music through sound but found community. I was captivated the first time I heard recordings of gamelan, and hooked after attending my first performance. One did not need to understand the musical language to become enthralled by that enrapturing sound captured on Bob Brown’s seminal Nonesuch Explorer recordings released in the late ‘60s—like someone hearing the sound of a foreign tongue and becoming so intrigued that they decide at once to learn the language, I simply had to know more.

In Javanese gamelan music I also found a social text that could only have emerged from a society that valued obtuse and artful articulation, studied restraint, and sublimation of the idea of individual expression in service of communal cohesion. If rock and jazz were all about expression, gamelan was about understated nuance, a “cultured” expression of baroque excesses favored by a mystical, idiosyncratic court—the hierarchal power relationships of Javanese language manifested in music.

Jazz exerted an altogether different allure. Whereas western classical music seemed too constrained by its own social and musical conventions, and rock too lost in narcissistic expression, jazz held out the promise of a music that married both Eros and Logos, community and complexity, spontaneous expression and studied artistry... and theatricality (cf., Art Ensemble of Chicago).

Jazz had another side to it though, a competitive side. One could find its roots in the playful challenges and musical repartee that two gifted soloists might partake in on the bandstand, or the gentle boasting one might hear after a gig, a gendered language that shared more vocabulary with boxing than letters: Sonny Rollins delivered a “knock-out” solo, Miles a “stinging” rebuke, a pull-out-all-the-punches artistry. Jazz is a music that could have only emerged out of the struggles of a people caught in the vortex of market capitalism American-style in the first half of the 20th Century.

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I came to opera later in life. My only problem with opera was that damn singing. I've learned that I'm not alone in my reaction: the fastest way I know to empty a room is the sound of a wobbly mezzo. Opera is an acquired taste. Like fine wine, perhaps more so, since the search for that "perfect" performance, that rare alignment of singer to a role, a composer, and a director sublimely suited for each other is the most ephemeral.

Opera aficionados pride themselves on their exclusivity, and a sense of competition. They cultivate it. Nonetheless, opera, perhaps more than any other genre, save jazz, thrives because of community. A community of celebrated feats and shared memories—that Meistersinger at Bayreuth in 1952 or that La Fille du Regiment at the Met in ‘72.

The opera community is altogether different from the shared community I found with gamelan. It is a community of spectators, a community that says we celebrate these performers because they are different from you and me. They are endowed with abilities we will never possess; we marvel at them; we place them on a proscenium stage not a pendopo, and we hang on every breath, fascinated with that fear of failure as they reach for the high notes, aerialists performing without a net.

When I first became interested in opera, I asked a friend why he went. He said because for every thirty-five mediocre performances he had attended there was one that changed his life. I thought that for life-changing experiences those were pretty good odds.

Fabricating Realities in San Francisco

The transformation from the physical constraints of wood, paint, and stucco to the almost limitless possibilities of a digital world play out in less than 100 years and a little more than 100 meters strolling from the Palace of Fine Arts to the new Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco.

Jan and I met our good friends Gail and Dan for lunch at George Lucas' new Letterman Digital Arts Center campus located on the grounds of the former Presidio millitary base. Gail oversaw production at Industrial Light & Magic for Lucas for a number of years; now she's currently on point for developing the next major Lucas venture into animation located in Singapore, not due to any labor cost advantage but access to talent: with animators from over three dozen different countries, the hassles involved in securing the necessary work pemits and visas from the U.S. government made it prohibitive to set up shop in the States.

Jan and I walked around the campus, a complex of new construction designed in a style reminiscent of the  military buildings that they replaced. We skipped the statues of Yoda and Darth Vader but Jan couldn't pass up a photo of me with her idol Eadweard Muybridge. Gail reminded us that Muybridge may have been the first in a long line of film celebrities who beat the rap when he was acquitted in a San Francisco court of murdering his wife's lover.

I found it somehow fitting that Lucas chose to locate his new complex only a stone's throw away from the Exploratorium and the Palace of Fine Arts: the former devoted to a mission of educating children in the wonders of science and exploration, the latter, one of the few structures remaining from the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition, a fabricated reality that, like the 1893 Columbian Exposition before it, was in many ways a precursor to the fabricated cinematic realities of DeMille, Disney, Speilberg, and Lucas.

Cinema transported the vision of the "other worldy" to people everywhere and made the idea of a "world's fair" obsolete; Lucas, John Lasseter, and others took it one step further and made the act of "physical" construction a thing of the past.

John Cage

Last week I traveled to Seattle to attend a performance by my good friends Jarrad Powell and Molly Scott and their dance company as part of the Pacific Northwest Ballet spring festival of dance.

I also took the opportunity while I was in town to visit my alma mater Cornish College of the Arts and establish an annual scholarship: the John Cage Scholarship.

Jarrad and I met at Cornish twenty-seven years ago when we were both undergraduates studying music composition. I was from California where I had studied composition and electronic music with David Cope and Gordon Mumma at the University of California at Santa Cruz prior to transferring; I had first heard of Cornish through my teacher and mentor Lou Harrison. Jarrad was a classical guitarist from Billings, Montana who already had a degree in religious studies but had decided to return to college to study music. In the years since, Jarrad has become a professor teaching composition on the music faculty at Cornish.

Both of us had "arrived" at contemporary music through John Cage, and I imagine it was partly Cage's influence that had brought us both to Cornish. After all this was the place where Cage had first invented the prepared piano in 1938, and where he had met his life-long partner Merce Cunningham, then still a skinny kid from Centralia, Washington, in dance classes.

So, it only seemed fitting that, when I could, I establish an annual scholarship at Cornish in John Cage's name, a scholarship to be awarded annually to a student who, "irrespective of artistic discipline or financial need, displays exceptional artistic potential and, in the spirit of John Cage, demonstrates an ability to stretch the currently accepted definitions of music, theater, dance, or the visual arts in innovative ways."

After I told Jarrad I had established a John Cage scholarship, he sent along this link. If you want to see for yourself what I mean by stretching "the currently accepted definitions of music," just watch this clip.

It's like Cage winking at us from the beyond. 

The Museum & Esplanade

The performance of Sulistyo Titokusomo's, Goenawan Mohamad's, Tony Prabowo's and Teguh Ostenrik's Panji Sepuh came about as part of the opening festival of the new National Museum of Singapore, a massive $132 million transformation of the old colonial era national library into a new national museum. "Is it really worth $132 million?" my cab driver asked when I mentioned that I had attended the opening reception the night before and met the President of Singapore. "Not as nice as the Asian Civilizations Museum," I replied, an otherwise average collection made outstanding by superb presentation and design. "That's because they had more to work with," my cabbie countered. "They had all of Asia 's cultures to pull from, not just Singapore. Singapore always invests in the hardware first, never the software," he added, "Always the buildings, never the art inside."

All I could think of was the new Esplanade Theatre, a stunning pair of dome-shaped theaters dubbed the big durians after the distinctive looking but foul smelling fruit indigenous to this region. The Esplanade was supposed to put Singapore on the cultural map, Southeast Asia's Lincoln Center. However, an extended run of My Fair Lady seems to be the only major attraction there this month. Ben Puah, an affable, if risk averse, individual originally from Surabaya, Java, oversees the Esplanade. He’s consciously steered clear of any controversy or artistic innovation in his programming choices. I can only wonder if the Esplanade will cater more in future years to tourists descending upon Singapore for gambling junkets rather than Singapore’s emerging cultural class.

Art or no art, Singapore now possesses a lovely 225-seat jewel of a black box theater as part of the new National Museum. So, it’s up to Goenawan, Tony, and Teguh to provide the software.

Singapore

William Gibson once described Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty," and indeed the immigration form proclaims in bold red letters: DEATH FOR DRUG TRAFFICKERS UNDER SINGAPORE LAW. However, the news here now, as in Macau, is more of opening new casinos, not prohibitions against gum chewing, jaywalking, caning or the death penalty. Gone are the days of getting reprimanded for not standing in single file at the bus stop. As a jaywalker and a gambler I'd take the odds in Singapore over Seattle these days.

You notice the reason for the change once you board the sleek subway system, the MRT, at night. Nearly 90 percent of the riders are under 30, maybe three fourths under 25. Singapore is a young city that has become more obsessed with shopping and entertainment than business and finance: Las Vegas without slot machines, old ladies, and plastic cups filled with quarters. I'm sure somewhere in a warehouse in Montreal, Cirque du Soleil is already at work on the new show, busy tying up every talented circus performer and acrobat between here and Shanghai.

The outdoor riverfront restaurant walks at Clark or Robertson Quays do remind one of Epcot or Vegas, however, when you get away into Chinatown or Litttle India, or even further a field, the city becomes a wondrous mix of architectural styles and cultures and food: everything in Singapore is about food.

Orchard Street remains a dead ringer for Michigan Avenue in Chicago complete with no less than five Starbucks, a Borders, and countless Hermes, Marks & Spencer, Tiffany's and Gucci's along this mag mile. It even comes complete with Peruvian pan pipe musicians dressed in Mexican panchos and Sioux Indian feather headdresses. I guess it's all from the Americas so that's close enough.

And, of course, it's Christmas time in Singapore so what could remind one of Christmas more than purple reindeer, artificial snow, aluminum Christmas trees and carols sung in Chinese? I must admit though I have taken a liking to Santa Claus portrayed by a twenty-something Singapore model in red stocking cap and mini skirt. Somehow, I think something was lost in translation. As the sign over the entrance to one of the shopping malls reads: "Happy Mardi Gras and Christmas."

Batavia

I spent the day walking around the old city of Jakarta, or Batavia. I wanted to see what our friend Budi Lim had been up to lately. I met Budi and his wife in the old city later in the evening for dinner and then drinks at Cafe Batavia, a beautifully restored old restaurant and bar, owned by an expat Australian who made his fortune here by founding an English language school in Jakarta years ago, just when a new generation of young Indonesians saw learning English as synonymous with getting ahead in society.

Budi is a Chinese-Indonesian architect who Jan and I became friends with when we lived here in '93. It had been so long since I saw him last I was worried I wouldn't recognize him, but with his distinctive I.M. Pei-like glasses he stood out from across the hotel lobby.

Budi had moved his family, his wife and three children, two girls and one boy, to Singapore during the anti-Chinese riots in Jakarta in '97 and '98. His eldest is now attending the University of Oregon at Eugene, and he's re-established his practice here in Jakarta. He divides his time now between his offices in Jakarta, Singapore, and Bangkok.

The old city, or Kota Tua, where we met consists of about 15-20 blocks of decaying and mostly dilapidated Dutch colonial buildings dating from the early 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. The area contains an intriguing mix of colonial era Dutch architecture, early Chinese and Portuguese influences, and faded art deco designs. For good and for bad, that's the way the entire area has remained for the last forty years: good in that the tasteless commercial development that characterizes most of Jakarta has largely bypassed Kota Tua, bad in that the buildings have fallen into such disrepair many would be candidates for demolition if not for their historical significance. Most are crumbling on the outside, a few open to the sky, small trees and shrubs taking root within the former shops and warehouses.

This neighborhood has become Budi's passion. Budi's vision is to transform the area, about the same size as the French quarter in New Orleans, or South beach in Miami, into an arts district that would be a driver for economic development and growth in Jakarta while providing an incentive for property owners and the city to restore many of the historic buildings. "Ten art galleries within a ten minute walk. That's my idea." So far Budi has convinced the central government and several banks that own architecturally significant buildings within this neighborhood to invest in repairing and restoring them. More importantly, he's succeeded in getting the city to recognize that architectural preservation has a place alongside modernization.

Now for two blocks in the heart of Kota Tua the constant din of motorcycles and buses gives way to a quiet right-of-way in the midst of a total transformation with new granite paving stones, street lighting, and buried utility lines that one might mistake for Tokyo or London, not Jakarta. A gentle curve in the main artery slows the traffic, the separation between sidewalk and street non-existent. Budi's idea, formulated during his time abroad studying at Oxford years ago, is that the dynamics of the street needs to be altered so cars, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians share equal footing, no one form taking precedence.

Now the city government has adopted Budi's plan as its own, and if all goes as planned the entire old city will be repaved with stone over the next year. Budi's even thinking of moving his office into the neighborhood. "You have to put your money where your mouth is."

Jakarta

The first impressions are the same. That blast of hot, humid air that hits you when you step off the plane, that familiar smell of mold and tropical mildew in the air.

The smells are what I notice most. We don't have smells in America: the smell of kretek cigarettes wafting through the evening air, the smell of kerosene burning in the stoves and lamps in the warungs lining the streets at night, the smell of open sewage, a smell that I will forever associate with Indonesia when unexpectedly confronted by it drifting up through an open manhole cover on a hot summer day in New York.

I am struck, and in a strange way comforted, by how little has changed. Yes, the numerous flyovers have all but eliminated that wonderful, cacophonous sea of cars and motorcycles, Bajaj and becak, students and entire families piled high on bicycles or bebeks jockeying for position, patiently navigating through a sea of humanity at a major intersection, no conception of passing lanes or turn signals, stop lights or right of ways. Now the automobile has brought to Indonesia what the old general never could. Indonesia has passing lanes.

These new toll roads have made it possible to get across town in twenty minutes instead of two hours, circling the city, passing scores of new high-rise apartment complexes and a bevy of cranes erecting the new Indonesia. Slender, hastily constructed, non-descript condos, office towers, and shopping malls ring the city just like those of Gurgaon south of New Delhi. The bamboo scaffolding is gone.

However, when you get off the toll road and into Jakarta very little has changed.  In fact, the past twelve years have brought less change to Jakarta than the last five to New Delhi. When one reads of the nine percent GDP growth rate in India, you wonder what forces could ever materialize to cause that same growth rate here. Indonesia seems stuck in the slow lane. However, at least now there are lanes.

Mediated Butterfly

The big news at our house this fall has been Jan and her director Tod Lending's latest film Omar and Pete getting nominated for a national Emmy for best documentary. Tod's previous film, Legacy, was nominated for an Oscar, but Jan had come in on the tail end of that project so her involvement was minimal. In contrast, Omar and Pete has consumed the better part of both their lives for the past three years.

The film aired nationally as part of the P.O.V. series on PBS last season; however, the Emmy awards ceremony didn't occur until this past weekend in New York. Tod and Jan attended, but in the end didn't win—this year's Oscar winner Born into Brothels garnered the top honors here as well as expected—but both Tod and Jan had a wonderful time hobnobbing with television execs and rubbing elbows with Walter Cronkite, Anderson Cooper, Bill Moyers, and Ted Koppel, et al at the awards presentation. Jan also talked with several other friends and fellow filmmakers about other future potential projects. 

While in New York, I skipped the Emmy awards, and instead elected to spend my evening with a thousand of my closest friends experiencing the surreal spectacle of Anthony Minghella's production of Madama Butterfly projected onto fifty-foot-high screens wrapped around Times Square. The event, the first Metropolitan Opera opening night under new general director Peter Gelb, was a marked contrasts from opening nights in recent years, and although I can't say that the sound of Puccini blasted across the din of Times Square traffic and a constant stream of tourists, opera fans, New York's finest, and the just plain curious made for a pleasant listening experience, it did make for an evening I won't soon forget. Only the absence of a blimp floating overhead would have been required to complete this total sensory transformation of Times Square into Blade Runner circa 1982 or Los Angeles 2019.

If Mr. Gelb's intent had been to create a marketing event that elicited some second looks and at least a glimmer of curiosity in what may lie behind that imposing Met facade at Lincoln Center, he just may have achieved success. It will be fun to see where he takes the Met next.