New and Newer Music - The Usual Suspects and Others

 Among the music that I listened to recently were works for clarinet and small orchestra by Elliott Carter, his Clarinet Concerto and John Adams, his Gnarly Buttons. I am a long-time admirer of Elliott Carter's music, his string quartets, piano sonatas, Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello & Harpsichord, Double Concerto..... I do not admire John Adams' Shaker Loops or his Gnarly Buttons. Adams' music is too slick for me. I can understand why he has his devotees - the music is well-crafted, has catchy titles, flag waving American stuff. But it's not for me; it has surface meaning at best, virtuosity without a center, an M & M candy without the good stuff inside. The Adams' works that I know are too simple-sounding. I have the same problems with Philip Glass's music.
     Many years ago I heard the Philip Glass Ensemble perform at the Detroit Institute of Arts. It was a spellbinding event for me - soprano saxophones, electric pianos and organ, sound projection. Indian ragas and Coltrane elements. Wow! The surface of an M & M candy tastes fine; but after you're done with it, you wish there were more to the candy as a whole.
     I have a number of new and newer CDs to audition. What I propose to do over the coming weeks is listen to some of these CDs each day and blog about what I think I have heard. I'll listen to them and see if there's anything happening.
     The usual suspects. Among the 28 compact discs are multiple discs featuring the works of Mauricio Raúl Kagel (1931 - 2008) and Wolfgang Rihm (*1952) and single discs devoted to the compositions of George Crumb (*1929), Brian Ferneyhough (*1943), and Louis Andriessen (*1939). These are composers with whom I am most familiar.
     The others. There are included in the 28-CD set 29 composers with whom I've had no listening contact. I like surprises, in Whitney Balliett's phrase, I like "the sound of surprise". So I hope there are many sonic surprises encoded in these compact discs!
     Now must bounce to the listening. I'll report what I think I've heard tomorrow.
     Cheers.

     Addendum - 9/2/11

     Pierre Boulez, in a recent interview, remarks on the music of Philip Glass and John Adams as follows:

The minimalism of Philip Glass and Steve Reich is "interesting for five minutes", says Boulez contemptuously. "But it represents creative exhaustion. If you spend a whole piece repeating just one chord [as Glass tends to do] it's like being in a red room, and staying in it for your whole life.

Finally you want to say, could you please change something." The music of John Adams, whose terrorist opera The Death of Klinghoffer is currently being proudly trailed by the Coliseum, is "just movie-music". But isn't Adams's music a direct reaction to the music of Boulez? "If so, it's an infantile reaction. Music like that you can prepare in one rehearsal, put it in a concert, and everybody is satisfied. And two days later, nobody remembers it."

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/pierre-boulez-ray-of-light-or-lord-of-the-dark-side-discuss-2296306.html