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CONTENTSCONGRATULATIONS
TO . . ., 3 LIVE EVENTS I
Hear Museum Art (B.L.C./Greenfest) <> Mad Dreams and Brits
(Hickey), 6 DOTTED NOTES
INTERVIEW SPEAKING OUT!
THE PRINTED WORD RECORDINGSÀ outrance
à la Anderson (de Clef Piñeiro) <> RECENT RELEASES, 31 THE
PUZZLE CORNER: COMPOSER INDEX, 34 BULLETIN BOARD, 35 WEB SUPPLEMENTLive EventsEquinox
Chamber Players In Concert for Impact CD ReviewsHarrison
Birtwistle: Refrains and Choruses ObituariesArthur
Berger (1912-2003) |
I Hear Art at the Museum B.L.C. and
Mark Greenfest ©2003 Richard Festinger: The Coming of Age. Text by Denis Johnson. Amy Burton, soprano; The Group for Contemporary Music/ Bradley Lubman. Presented by Works in Process at the Guggenheim Musuem (Peter B. Lewis Theater). NY, NY May 18/19, 2003. No one can quarrel with the notion that our great museums must make a commitment to disciplines beyond the display of the world’s visual treasures, their main raison d’etre, of course. It is in fact the case that in many cities that is where you go for the best opportunities to hear the chamber music of the Classical and Romantic traditions played by the finest performers. But what about contemporary music? Only recently have our bastions of contemporary art begun to establish programs with living composers and their finest interpreters in mind so as to share the spotlight with De Kooning, Bacon, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Johns, Pollock and all the celebrated visual artists of the last 50 or 60 years, a movement that would seem natural enough. Works and Process at the Guggenheim is an outstanding example of such programming, thanks to the vision of Mary Sharp Cronson, who conceived the idea in 1984. That title has been carefully chosen to meet the full concept, i.e., an investigation of the creative process with lectures and discussions. This evening’s event hosted cellist Fred Sherry as moderator of a talk with the two artists. The segment, boldly placed during the intermission (technically, an interruption in the performance), gave the audience a brief glimpse of how the collaboration between Messrs. Festinger and Johnson took place.
To digress just
for a moment, it was interesting to note that the series planners had
scheduled for June a performance of Rameau’s opera Les Boréades
by William Christie and his Les Arts Florrisant. Mr. Christie’s
presentations, to us so impeccably transporting of time and place, serve
as a wonderful example of our social expansion so as to provide a theater
audience with a genuine taste of 17th century aristocratic entertainment
without the requirement of membership in the aristocracy nor of the
need to put on tight britches and powdered wigs. We raise this point
because (1) Mr. Christie should be appreciated by those who want tradition
to remain essential, and (2) witnessing his performances brings up the
question of whether Western art has changed all that much. Mr. Festinger
uses today’s chromatic scales quite delicately in Coming of
Age. France is a major historical focal point for the acceptance
of new musical scales, and Debussy, certainly, remains an important
chronological link between the ancient proclivities and today’s
musical fashions. Then too, if in several hundred years the sources of inspiration have shifted from mythologic to everyday, true aesthetic sensibilities have not. If Mr. Johnson in his poetry makes references to his typewriter, a suffering tango, his black Chevrolet and the sun at ninety miles an hour, he can also enmesh his ideas into lines like
Needless to say,
a composer of lesser sensibility than Mr. The group is comprised
of flutist Rachel Rudich, clarinetist
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