I'm off with the Valkyries

I'm signing off until July 13, for some much needed head-clearing.

Before I go, don't forget to check out some of the concerts that are part of the Royal Canadian College of Organists' centennial convention, on right now.

Rather than disappearing in a cloud of smoke, I'll leave in a volley of notes: the infamous "Ride of the Valkyries" from Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle -- transcribed for solo organist (there's a more easily playable duet version out there), and played at one of my favourite North American spaces, the Cathedral Church of St. John-the-Divine in New York City. All the credits for this performance show up at the start of the video. And there are nice shots of the cathedral to keep your eyes busy, too.

Enjoy.

Hey Luminato, check out the music of the street

I've got a programming suggestion for the next Luminato festival: British artist/free-thinker Luke Jerram's Play Me, I'm Yours interactive art installation (click on the link and watch the wonderful, 10-minute video introduction to Jerram's fabulous creativity).

Most recently seen in England during the current Sing London festival, Jerram and organizers have placed 30 pianos around London -- in every conceivable type of location. The installation has been to several other cities, including Sidney, Australia, earlier this year, and Sao Paulo, Brazil, last year.

Each instrument is colourfully marked "Play Me, I'm Yours," begging passersby to sit down and do something, anything. It's a daily, unexpected challenge to switch from passive listening into active transformation of our aural environment.

In a city as rich musically as Toronto, I'm sure the results would be fantastic.

Here's a brief clip, caught by a Londoner at the start of the festival:

Jerram, who lives in Bristol, is also the creator of the Sky Orchestra, a flotilla of hot-air balloons, each carrying speakers playing a part of a larger musical work. It was supposed to be the highlight of the 2007 Stratford Summer Music Festival here in Canada but, If memory serves, was buffeted by bad weather.

Here's a younger enthusiast, perched near the Millennium Bridge last week. Judging from the pile of music on the piano, it looks like he's settling in for the day:

The couple that plays together...

Nearly 4 million people have already watched this couple at play, so, clearly, I've arrived late. But, in case you haven't seen it, here's a beautiful example of sharing -- Fran & Marlo Cowan doing a four-hand party piece. When it was posted, the information on the video said they had been married 62 years. I guess that gave them plenty of time for practice:

Alas, poor corpse

If you're looking for an unorthodox way to mark the passing of Michael Jackson (best wait for the Pride Parade for your Farrah Fawcett moment, darlings), here are two very different suggestions for off-the-beaten-path new-music outings tonight: Hamlet -- the opera, and a game of Exquisite Corpse.

Hamlet

Toronto composer (and U of T graduate student in Music Theory) Mark Richards was given an opportunity for an intensive workshop of his adaptation of Shakespeare's Hamlet last year by Stratford Summer Music.

The most recent, slightly abridged, version of this difficult-to-adapt work gets staged, piano-accompanied performances tonight and tomorrow at the hands of local musical theatre presenters TripTych Vocal Arts.

Catch it either evening at 7:30 p.m., at Trinity Presbyterian Church, 2737 Bayview Ave, (just south of the 401). Tickets are $20 or $25, depending on your age, at 416-763-5066 x. 1

Exquisite Corpse

Le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau.

Nonsense has never resonated as well as this sentence randomly created by a bunch of silly Surrealists led by André Breton shortly after World War I.

The first two nouns of the sentence stuck to what is essentially a party game where one writer, or visual artist, or composer-musician adds a small piece to a slowly growing linear, creative progression. The words become a sentence, the musical figures a piece.

In recent years, there have been hundreds of digital Exquisite Corpse projects, easily accessed on the Net.

The unpredictability of outcomes adds fun, mystery and anticipation to the process -- three ingredients so often in short supply in high culture.

Toronto composers Tania Gill, Martin Arnold, Doug Tielli and John Sherlock will create a new Exquisite Corpse tonight with members of Contact Contemporary Music. Also on the program is Sonorous and Exquisite Corposes, a 60-year-old collaboration between John Cage, Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison and Virgil Thompson.

There are companion efforts being presented in New York City and Vancouver tonight, as well. The performances are supposed to happen in the dark, so you can't see who is playing.

It starts at 9 p.m. (not dark enough, so close to the summer solstice, guys), at the Music Gallery, 197 John St. Admission ranges from $5 to $20, depending on your age. Box office: 416-204-1080.

Here's an Exquisite Corpse video put together at last year's ComicCon in San Diego:

A dose of summertime inspiration

Toiling away at St. James Cathedral, right downtown but just beyond the mainstream of classical music in the city, Andrew Ager (left, in a Star file photo) is a remarkable man -- a fine organist and a gifted composer of music that is, at once, accessible yet not glib.

In the grand, old (and rapidly fading) tradition of English cathedral organists, setting sacred texts to music is part of the day-to-day job.

Ager also organises concerts that run practically year-round in the gorgeous Victorian-Gothic space. 

Tonight comes the third installment of his "Midsummer's Ease" chamber-music series. It gathers up an interesting combination of treats:

-George Meanwell performing J.S. Bach's Cello Suite No. 4 (reason enough for popping into the cathedral this evening) and the famous Méditation from Jules Massenet's opera Thaïs, accompanied by Ager at the piano;

-The premiere of a new work by Ager, Une nouvelle voix, to be sung by soprano Jennifer Griffith and tenor Rob Kinar.

The concert begins early, at 7 p.m. Freewill offering.

In honour of the Royal Canadian College of Organists centennial convention, which begins in Toronto on Saturday, here is a video I made for the Star last year, where Ager explains how the pipe organ works, from the console of his instrument:

Does this sound like anything to you?

Perenially cranky music critic Norman Lebrecht once quoted this reply by Sir Thomas Beecham when asked if he had listened to any music by avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen: "No, but I believe I have trodden in some."

Stockhausen, who died 18 months ago, aged 79, spent his entire working life not only picking apart every musical convention, but also as much as he could of any form of organized sound.

Like painters who separated colour, medium and technique and architects who divorced structure from form, Stockhausen and his post-World War II contemporaries were looking for novel ways of expression in what, in this instance, we have to loosely define as music.

In his wonderful look at new music in the 20th century, The Rest is Noise, American music critic Alex Ross describes Stockhausen thus:

"No composer was more tireless in inventing or appropriating new ideas, more ambitious in articulating the avant-garde's historical and spiritual mission, more adept at assembling the latest sounds into jaw-dropping spectacles. Stockhausen has the dash of a great colonial adventurer, proceeding through jungles of sound."

I'm sure you've played the game at some point in your life where you pick apart a word so intensely that it loses its meaning. That's how far Stockhausen went. Posterity may (or may not) ultimately relegate his efforts to an asterisk in the history of music, but there's a lot to be said for picking music and sound apart so that you can listen to Bach, Beethoven or Lady Gaga in a fresh way afterwards.

It's funny and strange how, a half-century after the beginning of intense experimentation in new music, today's audiences know, understand and appreciate the thinking behind these experiments little more than the audiences of the day.

I guess it's because we want music to soothe our savage breast more than we want music to prick our somnolent brain. (The cartoons are courtesy of Stockhausen's official website, linked above.)

Here  is Stockhausen speaking in 1972 on his evolving relationship with sound:

Music 1; Philosopher 0

Thinkers accuse doers of shallowness. Doers accuse thinkers of procrastination.

It's a rivalry that can appear particularly acute in music, as there is nothing until a finger strikes a key or a bow slides across a string.

Not that there isn't a lot to think about. Starting in the 19th century, composers left increasingly detailed instructions about how their music should be performed. But even so, a page of music is nothing but a jumble of black ink on paper until an artist comes along to make some sense of it.

That process combines a personal vision of what the work should sound like with history and performance tradition. Some musicians make a show of rejecting history and tradition. Others are slaves to it.

Meanwhile, the critic and musicologist try to put all this in context for audiences, musicians and educators.

For the last three years, I've been waiting for the right moment to dive into a collection of notes on musical interpretation by German-born philosopher and social critic Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (Polity, 2006) is 278 pages of notes Adorno made over several decades that grapple with the objective and subjective issues of musical interpretation. He never got around to turning these ideas and observations into a book, but the blurb on the back cover and a quick perusal of the contents made the notes alone sound promising.

Adorno became best known for his theories concerning culture and capitalism -- and how the latter distorts the former. It's dangerous to condense complex arguments into short sentences, but, at the risk of distorting a lifetime of thinking, Adorno essentially said that most of what passes as culture in the 20th century is mere distraction, foisted un an unsuspecting population in order to increase consumption of goods and services.

It's hard to argue with that. Knowing that Adorno originally had aspired to be a composer, I had high expectations for the Musical Reproduction notes.

The first roadblock I ran into was Adorno's language. It's been a long time since university, and I'd forgotten how opaque academic writing can be.

Persisting, I finally realised that Adorno could no better explain the magic that is a great concert than can a casual audience member stepping out onto a sidewalk with a smile. At least that smile is eloquent and concise in its verdict. Unlike Adorno.

For example, how slow or quickly should a given passage be played?

Adorno: "The fundamental insolubility of the tempo problem -- the fact that there is not really a correct tempo for any piece -- is an expression of compositional antagonism, of the irreconcilability of the whole or its parts in thematic music."

I won't belabor the point. I think the reason Adorno never got beyond his random notes was that there cannot be a systematic theory on why a piece of music needs to sound this way or that. Adorno makes many valid points, namely that the composer and tradition suggest a certain shape and the performer's technical ability and artistic imagination give detail to that shape.

But there's no revelation in that.

We either enjoy a concert, or not. Thinkers, doers and good-old listeners will argue about who was right, and why, until the end of time. The words on newspaper or website pages, or over a post-performance drink, will always be colourful.

It's part of the experience.

On a more practical note, here are two of six Studies for String Quartet by a 17-year-old Theodor Adorno, performed by the Leipzig String Quartet, from a 1997 disc:

In praise of the summer music camp

That's what kids having a good time sounds like. Really.

It's a sure bet that most of us remember the drudgery of weekly music lessons from when we were growing up. Some of that drudgery is necessary, some not. But the reality of having music lessons crammed in with all the other needs and wants and constraints of the regular school year means that a lot of the fun gets sacrificed on the altar of efficiency.

Summer music camps are the perfect antidote, combining the raw power of daily immersion in a setting that looks and feels like it's part of a summer vacation.

Once hooked, kids make swifter progress. Listen to the difference a decade makes (I apologise for not knowing more about the people in these videos):

.. and, then, you're set for life.

There are summer camps for adults, too.

Here is a two-part mini documentary from 2007 on a 10-day summer camp (well, they call it a seminar) that the St. Lawrence String Quartet hosts annually at its home base, Stanford University (this year's starts Friday). The most beautiful thing here is how it provides a place where advanced adult amateurs can perform with the world's finest professionals.

The 110th birthday of Czech composer Pavel Haas

It's the first day of summer, and I've been thinking about Czech composer Pavel Haas, whose 110th birthday falls on June 21.

The protégé of composer Leos Janacek didn't write a huge amount of music before dying in a gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp in October, 1944. But what he did compose deserves a listen.

There's a Toronto connection to all of this: One of his fellow Holocaust inmates at the camp in Terezin (Teresienstadt), where he and a group of other imprisoned artists forged a semblance of a musical life before most were sent to their death there and at places like Auschwitz, was conductor Karel Ancerl.

Ancerl conducted the premiere of Haas's Study for Strings at Terezin. (In the photo, taken from a Nazi propaganda film about the wonderful town built by Hitler for Jewish people north of Prague, the audience applauds the Study for Strings, with Ancerl on the podium, and Haas bowing awkwardly in front.)

Ancerl reconstructed the full piece from various parts that he had managed to salvage after World War II. Ancerl became the music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1968, staying on until his death at age 65 in 1973.

The Independent published an interesting article on Haas and Terezin in 1997, in connection with a series of concert performances of Haas's 1938 opera, The Charlatan.

Here is a performance of A Study for Strings, accompanied by a montage of period images of Haas, Prague and Terezin:

Still high from a belt of Pink Martini

It's a adult pop extravaganza at Roy Thomson Hall this weekend.

It'll be interesting to see how the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Finnish vocal group Rajaton compare, in their ABBA-themed program tonight and tomorrow, with Portland, Ore. lounge-pop masters Pink Martini, who captivated a near-capacity hall last night.

The TSO has a long history of pops concerts, but the few I've ventured to over the last few years have given off the unmistakable whiff of being duty calls for these musicians. I hope tonight will prove different.

Pink Martini, on the other hand, is a study in enthusiasm.

Although the 12-member band has been around for 15 years, their Toronto popularity is recent, the rise, practically meteoric.

Three years ago, they made their fist visit here, performing to a couple of hundred people at the Phoenix on Sherbourne St. At the time, their publicist was desperate to try and sell some tickets. She sent me their second disc, Hang on, Little Tomato, and I was hooked by the end of the first track.

I interviewed both bandleader-pianist-arranger Thomas Lauderdale and singer China Forbes -- friends since their student days at Harvard -- and discovered two fun, quirky, earnest performers who wanted little more than to share their good time with whoever was willing to listen.

On a cold winter's night, the audience at the Phoenix burst into spontaneous dancing as Pink Martini performed its mix of originals and arrangements of popular songs from old movies -- all flavoured with dance rhythms.

In 2008, following a successful third album, Hey, Eugene!, Pink Martini filled Massey Hall. By last night, they had graduated to the biggest pace that this town can reasonably offer a small ensemble.

Three discs in a 15-year career is not much, so some of the band's repertoire is getting old, by live-performance standards. But there were no wrinkles, as Forbes, Lauderdale and the other band members performed them with energy and zest.

We were also given a couple of tastes of a new album. Lauderdale announced that the band had finished recording it three weeks ago, and that it would be out in 2010.

One of these samples, typical of Pink Martini's old-is-new plundering of various musical worlds, was a fresh arrangement of "Uska Dara," a Turkish song originally recorded by Eartha Kitt on a 78-rpm disc in 1953. (Forbes, in fine, strong voice, skipped Kitt's English-narrative interludes, which include her sighing "Oh, those Turks").

Looking around at the audience at Roy Thomson Hall last night, I was struck by the demographics-defying mix: There were hip 20-somethings as well as smartly dressed seniors, downtowners and suburbanites.

How many other performers can cut across all our boundaries?

ABBA could, in its day. So let's see if the TSO can capture some of the same magic.

For those of you not familiar with the pleasures of Pink Martini, here are two sips. The first is a (very old) video of the title track from their first album, Sympathique, written by Forbes and Lauderdale:

Here is one of my Pink Martini favourites, "Kikuchiyo to mohshimasu," an arrangement of a 1960s Japanese pop song about a one-night stand with a woman named Kikuchiyo ("She vanished/ Leaving only her sweet scent lingering softly/ In the fog..."), from the second album: