Forests and ICE

ICE, photo taken from the group's website

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performs “How Forests Think,” 7:30 p.m. Monday, August 14 at Merkin Concert Hall, Lincoln Center. 

The program – part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart summer festival – takes it’s name from a work for 10 musicians by composer Liza Lim. (Perhaps coincidentally, this is also the title of an interesting book about interconnected rhythms of life experienced by Amazon forest natives.) In addition to Lim’s music, the program includes Pauline Oliveros’s “Earth Ears,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Aequilibria.” The ensemble will be conducted by Baldur Brönnimann and musician Wu Wei will perform on the sheng, a Chinese mouth-blown reed organ.

The thread of the program, obviously, is the connection between music and nature, something that is very much on my mind as I prepare for the course, Music and the Natural World, that I teach each Fall for freshman at The College of New Jersey. The topic runs deep and crosses all lines of human investigation, including biological and physical sciences, philosophy, religion, politics, the visual arts, dance, psychology and sociology. 

The reason for this blurring of lines is the root of music is deep in prehistory – it prefigures and shapes many aspects of human activity that reason would typically try to parse into separate channels for analysis. Music doesn't parse. Any part of it interconnects to any other part. (Try defining harmony, for instance, without talking about pitch, time and esthetic impressions.) Music organizes  people like . On the one hand it lifts individuality and makes us conscious of time; on the other, it submerges our individual identities into the pool of the communal response, which holds all of the past, present and future in one bowl.

Those realizations are apparent with very little investigation – just an open set of ears and a heart tuned to an old song. Lim's composition uses for its model the life of the forest itself, the activity, growth and structures that define it. We hear forest sounds as music – is that because an ancestral association of good emotions with the sound of the forest? Or are we anthropomorphizing those sounds, turning them into human-style communication, reflecting our humanness back onto the non-human forest? Or is it because our understanding of music emanates from there, so we are ourselves manifestations of the forest? (Answer: yes. Mark this spot on the map in your brain: this is the approximate place where words stop, while the landscape of music keeps right on going.)

ICE is one of the best new music groups around, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a memorable and probably definitive performance. You can read and watch clips from my 2013 interview with founder and former artistic director Claire Chase on TheStreet’s website [The video link in the article isn't working. Use this one to watch the video.] Tickets to "How Forests Think" are $30 and are available through the Mostly Mozart website (www.lincolncenter.org/mostlymozart) or by calling CenterCharge at 212-721-6500.

--C.
August 8, 2017
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'Music and the Natural World'

Tomorrow my Fall semester class at The College of New Jersey begins. I'm teaching a Freshman Seminar titled "Music and the Natural World."

The idea for this course came out of a discussion on the Society of Music Theory email list about five years ago. Some on the list were interested in whether a music theory course could somehow work in ideas related to sustainability -- a hot topic at the time, as the academic world was reacting to mounting pressures to address climate change and environmental issues. The thought was that sustainability was one of the most important issues of our age and we had a responsibility as educators to reflect that concern to our students.

I was among those theory teachers who said, No, it can't be done. The theory curriculum is already demanding for the students and time allowed for that curriculum is far too brief. Moreover, the link between theory and sustainability is flimsy at best. We can recycle paper. But that's about it. In one way or another, most of theorists agreed with that assessment.

Out of that discussion, however, the idea arose that a separate course could be designed that focus on repertoire and environment. Composers throughout history have been inspired in many ways by the beauty of the natural landscape and composers today are examining that relationship in everything from traditional "musical landscape" scores to computer models of natural systems and chaos theory.

My thought was that, in a framework like that, students would be naturally sensitized to issues of sustainability and human responsibility for our changing environment. Putting it in a freshman seminar seemed perfect, as it allowed for a more broad-ranging discussion.

TCNJ's freshman seminars are intended give students an introduction to scholarship by presenting them with a subject of study, much like a graduate seminar, and then guide them through the process of research and scholarly discussion. The first two years in college are generally spent on required courses, with little other opportunity for this kind of personal scholarship.

By now, I've taught this particular course three semesters and I grow from the experience each time. We gambol around music history and the musicological spectrum, touching on other disciplines like philosophy, physics, sociology and biology. Since the course is open to students of any major, there are a jungle of approaches popping up in each classroom. Each voice adds to bigger picture.

We will start with an nature-themed trip through the classical repertoire, introducing some writings of Goethe and others along the way, and then head off into ethnomusicology and topics in semiotics before getting into soundscapes, musique concrete and John Cage. And we wind up with a look into the not-so-distant future of virtual environments -- what of nature, or of ourselves, do we take with us into the wholly digital city?

It's a mash-up dance, a rough-and-tumble idea playground.

So here we go. I'm excited. It's going to be a great semester.

--C.
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Music and Human Identity

I just listened to this radio broadcast via a link on the KUT website.

The recording is a fascinating article on the success of a guitar class in a juvenile correctional facility. Music, it seems, has the power to heighten an individual's sense of self-control and self-worth. One of the interviewees even says, playing the guitar allows these kids to discover something about who they are.

This fits in with the findings the students in my class, Music and the Natural World, keep stumbling onto: music acts as bonding agent and, in helping define us within a group, also reinforces and strengthens our identity as individuals. This appears to be a trait of humanity, not just classical music, not just our culture, not just the Western world.

I just touched on this same subject in a column I wrote yesterday for the Asbury Park Press, appearing this Sunday. By way of acknowledging Christmas, Hannukah and the New Years holidays, I point out this role of music in expressing the spiritual and physical bonds we share as humans.

--C.
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The Island of Dr. Bjork

Bjork’s album Biolphilia is one of the most interesting recordings I’ve heard in a long, long time. I presented it to my Music and the Natural World class at The College of New Jersey today, emphasizing its theme, repeated at every level of structure, of viewing the natural world on its own terms -- a poet’s view through the lens of science.

Like most people, I’ve been casually aware of Bjork and her music since Debut, released in 1993. Her last album, Volta, was one that I bought, largely on the strength of its single, “Earth Intruders.” On that album, she was reaching for a unified artistic vision, connecting the sound world of the various tunes with similar instrumentation, including horns of various types: boat recorded on the water and chorused French horns. The theme of the album is sociological, a musical and poetic study of humans.

But though ambitious, Volta didn’t reach me. Some of the effects, including the boat horns, seemed a little clumsy. Likewise a few of the songs, notably the duet with Antony Hegarty, “Dull Flame of Desire”. It all sounded somewhat cobbled together, directed but uneven.

Biophilia is equally ambitiuous. I’ve listened to it probably a dozen times now and have grown more enamored with each pass. Using inventive choirs, organs, harps and invented instruments, Bjork sustains a consistent musical texture, a clean line from beginning to end. The songs all share a dark, moody quality, with a main improvisatory vocal melody. The rest of the music is structured around that, in highly complex, transparent arrangements that are always surprising. Standard song formulas emerge, but the surface textures float free of the ground, like sacred chant. There are a few awkward musical moments, as in the arbitrary addition of a “drum and bass” style coda in “Crystalline.” But more often the juxtapositions grow organically into a cultivated flow, a single garden, lush and lovely.

Each song takes an element of nature imagery as its starting point, interpreting it poetically with connections that are highly personal and sometimes difficult to follow: “Thunderbolt” somehow inspires her to think of “arpeggios”; “Virus” veers into a verse on gunpowder.

>.View her video of "Moon" on her YouTube channel:




But despite that (or because of it) the poetry is gripping. In “Virus,” she compares the invasive role of a bug or a parasite to an obsessed lover, turning it over and examining it as a scientist, for its beauty, without denying its horror. “Thunderbolt” sets fear and a yearning for enlightenment in opposition as she questions the motivation for “craving miracles.” “Moon” startles as a prayerful ceremony of rebirth, as she celebrates her psyche washed, clean and reawakened.

The words could be completely satisfying and engaging read as poetry. Sung -- with odd offbeat accents that underscore their nonhuman content -- they gain emotional power. But no matter what, they remain anchored in the “biophilia” theme. Bending all to that end, on “Dark Matter,” she abandons words altogether, using her voice and her choir of closely harmonized womens’ voices to sing nonsense syllables, echoing the mystery to physicists of the dark matter presence in our physical world.

The invented instruments – a combination of celeste and gamelan, called a gameleste, on “Virus”; a Tesla coil rigged to sound a bass line on “Thunderbolt” – add to the sense of intimate human exploration of the mysteries of the world. Each offers a new perspective on the well-established laws of the acoustic physical universe.

All this says nothing of the marketing galaxy that accompanies Biophilia. In addition to the customary tour, CD and promotional videos, there are apps associated with the songs for the iPod, iPad and iPhone.

While extending the artistic ambition outlined on Volta, Biophilia is everything Volta is not: a deep artistic achievement, completely satisfying.

--C.
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Koyaanisqatsi

Spent a good part of today screening and discussing aspects of “Koyaanisqatsi” with the two sections of my freshman seminar, “Music and the Natural World.” This unit of the course is dealing with the rise and influence of environmentalism and “Koyaanisqatsi,” a 1983 film without dialog and with music by Philip Glass, is the perfect foil for class discussion. In fact, it invites a good deal more intelligent conversation than a great many other environmentally inspired works – composers like John Luther Adams (who I love) have made careers of linking music and nature in beautiful, intelligent ways. But with its inherently conflicted intent – part radical engagement and part Buddhist detachment – “Koyaanisqatsi” is tense, mesmerizing and philosophically resonant.


With much of the footage dating from the 1970s, it is surprising how contemporary the movie still feels. We note the old look of Times Square, the leisure suits and the clunky-looking cars (why don’t they come in those colors anymore?) only tangentially. In the main, neither the images nor the music have lost any of their force. The film is no more dated than is “The Rite of Spring.”

On the surface is a glib comment on the destructive nature of technology and human society. But the film’s director, Godfrey Reggio, finds himself embracing the machines and the humans who built them in all their ugliness and majesty. A witty transition into the human traffic sequences pauses on the façade of the corporate headquarters of a company called Microdata: The next scenes show humans themselves as microdata, streaming over the planet along paths of their own creation, like termites. Earlier scenes of a Twinkie factory are answered later by a shot from a camera on the conveyor belt, from the perspective of one of the Twinkies, as we head into a section dominated by lightspeed images of people in machines: We, the creators, have become the products.

Glass’ music is rarely dramatic in the Romantic sense of the word, instead accompanying the breakneck scenes with a cool-headed transparency, even as the tempo ratchets to match the superhuman pace of the visuals. Exciting because the images are exciting -- because we find them exciting -- the music drapes and does not flatter or judge.

What Reggio sees, and what Glass’ music perfectly captures, is the serene indifference of the universe, the gorgeous, unmoved natural world that serves as a backdrop and contrast for our descent into technological madness, our exotic, ongoing, unthinking metamorphosis into some future, unrecognizable machine. The haggard, contorted and notably self-satisfied human faces, shown in painfully long portraits that break up the high-speed action, tell a story more complex than can be told in words – a story of grasping at love, of devotion to emotional amputation, of the rationalization of our living death, our imprisonment in society’s high-priced, hurtling, hot rod hearse.

Should be required viewing in any media class.

--C.
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Sustainability

Heading out this morning to a meeting with the Rider Sustainability Across Curriculum group at the Lawrenceville campus. Last fall I started teaching a Freshman Seminar at The College of New Jersey then titled Music and Environment (now Music and the Natural World). The idea was to increase sensitivity to environmental concerns by showing the intricate relationship of this aspect of human culture to our natural surroundings.

The idea for the course came out directly out of a discussion on sustainability and music theory curriculum on a Society of Music Theory list. The very beginnings of this discussion on SMT raised the hackles of many theorists and I certainly don't blame them.

As all music majors know, music theory courses are routinely jammed with information. They are notorious for shoe-horning in every possible technique of historical Western music theory plus a handful of ethnomusicological bric-a-brac. On top of that they also usually entail some ear-training, sight-singing and often a piano keyboard mechanics component. While they may have become more condensed, music theory has been taught more or less the same way for hundreds of years.

So the very thought that you could rejigger the music theory curriculum to fit into an all-of-a-sudden academic trend like sustainability just seemed a bit outrageous. Further, the topic itself seems pretty removed from any direct connection with sustainability--what is there to be sustained in music? How does music theory affect the physical environment and how can recycling or solar energy improve it?

I point all this out because the discussion actually did become useful, once we began to brainstorm and talk about intersections of environmentalism and music that interested us. And the course, so far, has turned out to be one of the most exciting that I've taught.

--C.
http://www.theandofone.blogspot.com

"Music and Human Experience"

Teaching a Fall semester Freshman Seminar at The College of New Jersey on the topic of "Music & Environment." I've noticed, of course, that there's relatively very little scholarly writing on this topic, despite the fact that every writer on music at some time or another points out the love of Nature (with a capital N) exhibited by musicians of all cultures through the ages and to a lesser extent the relationship of a composers' environments to the work they create.

The only actual textbook I've found specifically on this subject is called Music and Human Experience, by Arthur Komar, and was published in 1980. The book attempts a standard survey-of-music curriculum from the perspective of music's functions within society. It's a fascinating approach and handy to have. But it is also hopelessly out of date from a teaching perspective, pointing out just how much our culture has changed in the last few decades.

Given the book's raison d'etre as a substitute for standard intro to music literature texts, its emphasis on Western musical canon and standard repertoire is somewhat understandable. Within that scope, Komar strikes a nice balance of informative and entertaining, perfect for the lay reader. But it's been a long time now since educators have allowed themselves to talk exclusively about the music of Europe in such a course. In that respect, the book simply represents the dead end of an era.

Funniest of all in light of contemporary standards is the unit "The Music of Lands and Peoples" which deals exclusively with nationalist-inspired composers, from Mussorgsky to Copland. Just passing remarks on Bartok and little discussion of the growing ethnomusicology research, let alone its ethical quandaries. No mention of world music influences. No mention at all of African American music or its influences on European repertoire apart from Milhaud's use of jazz and one or two other such. No mention at all of women composers. No mention of environmentalism or soundscapes. No acknowledgement of the power of popular music (barely even a reference to the Beatles).

Even by the standards of the day, the absence of any discussion on minimalism is glaring. The style was still evolving and at the time amounted to an open sore on the body of traditional classical music scholarship. Funny, that so often what we can't see or can't tolerate in the present becomes the central element in our recounting of history.

I would say the '80s were the cutoff point for this particular group of offenses. By the mid-'90s, every music department was at least encouraging scholarship in these overlooked areas--perhaps "overlooked" is too soft. "Ignored" would might be the more correct word. A 1983 article on the absence of women composers in contemporary textbooks uses the diplomatic phrase "benign neglect."

No matter how you look at it, it's hard to believe that such a complete shift in scholarly expectation and emphasis, one that is now so widely accepted, could have occurred so recently.

I've got Komar's book on reserve for my students (that is, they can read it but do not have to buy it). Along with the valid scholarship it presents and its attempt to tie together music with other aspects of life, it offers a time-capsule glimpse of the wildly shifting sands of cultural definition and the simple, yet glaring mistakes that await us in our research.

--C.