1 - In Paris – May 30 to June 30, 2003

Two screamers:

An old woman painfully marking the passage of time and a younger woman ecstatically declaring the present resonate together in a shared space, the donuthole between apartments whose resonance is impermeable to the street.  Both women share too much of their lives with their neighbors.

Such is life at 16 Rue Cafarelli.  The septic tank takes an hour to fill-up after each flush.  One becomes more aware of the rate of one’s bodily functions. 

Everyday, it is overcast in the morning, threatening to rain.  But then it clears up and the sun comes out.  By the end of the day, there’s a layer of Paris you have to wash off.  I’ve also noticed that I accumulate a lot more snot here. 

I am living a fifteen-minute walk from the Pompidou Center.  That’s where Ircam is.  The premiere center for electronic music research in the world.  I am jealous of their governmental support of the arts.  It’s interesting that many of the programmers are American.  Last week, I fulfilled one of my lesser ambitions in life: I experienced an anechoic chamber.

About a year ago, I bought an edition of the complete works of Cioran in French to look for a quote used by Calvino.  Calvino did not give a citation for the quote, so I have been reading all of Cioran to try to find it. 

New music, modern contemporary music, is alive and (mostly) well in Paris -

 

Festival Agora:

 

June 11: Ictus Pop @ Ircam

 

This concert was held in the Grande Salle at the Centre Pompidou.  The crack Belgium-based ensemble, Ictus, performed a selection of contemporary European works, which were amplified and involved electronics.  Three-out-of-four were pathetic Franco-Italian attempts to “Rock Out!”  A Mexican composer, Javier Alvarez (one-out-of-four), had performed a concerto for steel drums.  The percussionist was Miquel Bernat, who, impressively, memorized his part. The electronics not getting too much in the way of the enjoyment of the unusual timbres.  Very nice.

The streets are narrower, even compared to Cambridge, MA.  And the cars are much smaller.  Hardly any SUVs.  No wonder they wanted no part of the Gulf War, part deux. 

Meat and dairy products are vastly superior here.  And a typical menu for lunch is a drink, entree (appetizer), and a main course for about twelve dollars.  In NYC, twelve dollars will get you one uptown Martini. 

So, I have agreed to write a travelogue for www.greathoboes.com.  I still haven’t finished all I had planned to write from my stay in Belgium four years ago.  These new Parisian episodes, might they be new chapters in that unfinished project, or should they be an isolated parentheses in life? 

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime. - Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad.

Reading Calvino turned me onto Cioran.  He writes in short sentences.  Cioran is a philosopher who writes like a Haiku master.  I think his syntax is closer to how I think.  Does anyone really think in whole sentences anyway? 

June 14: Bruits et souffles

 

Trombone: Benny Sluchin

Percussion: Steven Schick

 

A short concert featuring three solo pieces – two for trombone + electronics, one for percussion.  The solo trombone and tape piece, Solo, by Stockhausen I had never heard before – it surprised me since I thought I was at least aware of most of his pieces (uncle Karlheinz always continues to astound me).  The headliner was Ferneyhough’s Bone Alphabet.  I think I paid more attention to Schick’s histrionics than to the music.  He played it from memory.  There was a weird ambiguity between fluency and detachment, perhaps the result of performing something overly familiar.  The venue for this concert was the Chapiteau in the Jardins des Tuileries, a circus tent in the park which extends from the Louvre.  Modern music in a tent, in the afternoon.

 

Counter Phrases:

 

Film and Music, Ictus

 

Music by:

Stefan Van Eycken

Robin de Raaff

Thierry de Mey

Georges Aperghis

Steve Reich

Jonathan Harvey

Magnus Lindberg

Tom Pauwels !r Toshio Hosokawa

Fausto Romitelli

Luca Francesconi

 

Afternoon in a tent, the evening in the Cite de la Musique.  An evening-long collection of short films by the Belgian filmmaker/composer Thierry de Mey of danses choreographed by Anne Theresa De Keersmaeker.  Very well done.  Beautiful colors and movements set to an impressive variety of contemporary music specially commissioned for the project – and what an all-star list of composers!

I am a composer.  An American composer.  Every year I apply for the Rome Prize.  I keep rewriting my proposal each time, but I keep the Twain quote as an epilogue.  I think it’s more appropriate than “Et ignotas animum, dimmitt in artes,” even though the Ovid-via-Joyce has been a more fundamentally influential koan than the Twain.  I have not really thought of Twain since high school.  Went to Shakespeare and Co. last night.  I’m a composer, a Japanese-American composer.  At times I feel like an exile at home.  Certain resonances linger, immune to geographical distance.  Much more like a name - something one can recall at any moment, like one’s name, than a memory. 

Last night had Fondue AND Raclette for dinner.  Contemplated an assiette de fromages for dessert, but wisely refrained from it.  That would have been too much.  The dairy products are superior here.  Met an Iraqi street musician.  He played while I filled up on various exotic forms of melted Emmenthal.  He spoke better English than French.  Said his parents used to send him money, but because of the war, he had to now go out to the street to earn money.  He didn’t know any Radiohead or Dylan (my requests), but sang instead an Iraqi pop song.  The table next to me was a group of Mexican college girls from Puebla.  UDLA!  I gave a talk there three years ago.  They filled up on exotic forms of melted cheese too.  Melted cheese is the glue that ties us all together.

 

 

 June 16: Concert Percussions I, Iannis Xenakis

 

Roland Auzet, Steven Schick, solistes du Centre International de Percussion

Rebonds, Pleïades, Persephassa

 

Back at the tent.  Both halves of the concert opened with a movement from Rebonds.  First, it was an awesome, intense, reading of the first movement by Auzet.  The second movement was Schick.  Schick also lead a group of younger percussionists from the Centre International de Percussion in Persephassa and Pleïades.  The festival Agora got their money’s worth from Schick with this concert, although one got the sense that his solo rendering of Rebonds might have suffered a bit by the volume of music he was engaged to perform on this concert.  Then, again, one might not have sensed any qualitative loss had not been for Auzet’s stunning brilliance which set the standard for the rest of the concert.  The tent was the perfect venue for both ensemble pieces.  The first movement of Pleïades was like frozen time.  Six special microtonal metallophones hammered out resonances which swirled around the Chapiteau.  It was like being inside the world’s largest music box, but with infinite sustain. 

 

 

The Médiathéque (a kind of library of not only scores and recordings, but online resources) at Ircam is the only library to which I have ever been where the stacks contain only contemporary music and one has to specially request Classical music from the archives.  Recording!s, videos, articles, and some scores are online. 

There’s a concrete incline that leads to the entrance to the Pompidou Center.  I’ve seen kids Kamikaze down the incline with their rollerblades and scooters without helmets or kneepads.  They don’t have the same culture of litigation here. 

Most of Ircam is underground.  The address is the best for any place concerned with modern music: 1, place Igor Stravinsky.  The studios are under a Tanguely fountain.  Our classes are held in the Salle Luigi Nono. 

 

 

 

June 18: Philippe Manoury

Ensemble Intercontemporain

 

Neptune, Passacaille pour Tokyo, Frangemnts pour un portrait.

 

Three pieces by the French oenophile master of turgidity.  Musicologists will remember him for being one of the first to use “real-time” computer processing.  The scale and scope of what is possible in France by way of  temporal Roccoco is, indeed, astounding.  As impressive as the last two concerts were (Counter Phrases and the Xenakis percussion-fest), this concert was a downer and is most accountable for the “(mostly)” in the sub-heading above. 

 

 

June 19: Paysage sous surveillance - Georges Aperghis

 

Ictus.

 

Once again at the Grande Salle, Ictus seemed to give a stellar performance of a new multi-media (video projection + two actors) work by Aperghis.  Very dense.  Most black and white or gray.  I didn’t understand this work.

 

 

In the local Chinese restaurants, when ordering take-out, one has to ask for a quantity in grams.  Being a dumb American, grams mean nothing to me.  Must resort to trial and error.  100 grams is really not much.  For two people, you have to order at least 400 grams of rice.

 

 

June 20: Johnathan Harvey

 

Schoenberg – Serenade, Op. 24, Ensemble TM+

Harvey- Mythic Figures, Song Offerings

 

Arditti String Quartet

Oliveira – Labirinto

James Dillon – The Soadie Waste

Harvey – Fourth String Quartet.

 

The relatively new thirty-five minute string quartet (+ electronics) is the closest work I have ever heard to a work about pure duration, without materials.  Of course, there are sounds, light scratch tones, chords, melodies...but the sounds themselves, seemed secondary.  This piece transported the listener to a place beyond music.  A contemporary masterpiece. 

 

Calvino says that Cioran said that Socrates, when waiting for his dose of Hemlock, was lear!ning a new melody on the flute.  His disciples asked “but what good would knowing that melody do you when you are gone?” 

What good is having traveled?  What good is having created?  What good is having lived?  Why is it our tendency to try to hold onto the present as well as to the past when it is so fleeting? 

Tomorrow is the last day at Ircam.  Four weeks reduced to one day.  Tomorrow will be the last time I will make the walk from my apartment to Ircam.  Most likely, the morning will be overcast, and it will clear in the afternoon.