Don't just hug a tree; play it!

You can sit in its shade. You can hug it. You can climb it. But did you ever think that you could play a tree?

My razor-tongued Stargazing Star colleague Malene Arpe sent me proof positive in a YouTube video a couple of days ago (see it below).

The musical fun reminded me that all things have what is called a "natural frequency." Tap it (literally, if you wish), and, voilà! Music. I found a neat, clearly written lesson on the physics of resonance and standing waves, if you want to know more (I promise you won't get a headache from reading it).

In musicians' terms, the lesson is this: You can't use not having a symphony orchestra in your backyard as an excuse for just listening to cicadas.

Here is Italian-born Burbank, Calif.-based sound designer/composer Diego Stocco's "Music From a Tree":

Cameron Carpenter: The pipes, the pipes are calling

 

One of my greatest professional pleasures is being able to meet square pegs, those people who don't neatly slide into the round holes of tradition or any of the other rules that carry us from cradle to grave.

In my experience, a lot of these square pegs are paricularly bright people who've spent time thinking for themselves, who keep asking the 4-year-old's annoying "why?" over and over again, and who discover that there are so many other potential ways of getting from point A to point B.

Some become inventors or scientists. Others, great artists. The unfortunate ones, unable to cope with the difference between their perceptions and thoughts and the world around them, tune out or turn to silly distractions.

No matter where their thinking is, and whether or not I agree with what they believe, these people invariably make me re-evaluate my own perceptions, ideas, principles and habits. I feel like I've learned something in the process.

Yesterday, I had a chance to spend 90 minutes with one of these inspirational people, 28-year-old American organist Cameron Carpenter. (Photo courtesy of khayman Photography.) The interview is scheduled for tomorrow's Star, but it can hardly do justice to someone who spent 10 to 15 minutes answering each of my questions.

If you can possibly make it to one of his three morning recitals for Stratford Summer Music, tomorrow through Saturday, do it. Love him or hate him, your musical world will be challenged, if not changed.

I get an intensely visceral reaction nearly every time I mention Carpenter's name to a fellow organist. The professional view is that he is gaudy and unmindful of the artistic traditions in the field.

But one question that keeps coming up in my head is, what's the point of having great traditions and mountains of fabulous repertoire if no one is interested in coming to hear it performed? Clearly, despite conventions, competitions, multimillion-dollar instruments and some truly astonishing performers both here and in Europe, organ music is not on the public radar. And I'm not just talking about popular culture; classical music listeners don't pay much heed to organ repertoire, either.

So, along comes look-at-me Cameron Carpenter, and the organ world blushes and looks sideways in shame at how one of its own could behave in such a way.

It's easy to dismiss him -- until you sit down to hear what he has to say. Like his technique, honed over hours and hours of practice, his artistic persona is the product of deliberate choices made after a lot of soul-searching. He is no lightweight.

Here is a short excerpt from yesterday's interview, pared to its essentials. It speaks directly to music education and our unreasonably reverent attitudes to so much classical music. It's not that we need to ignore artistic traditions. We have to make sure they speak to each new generation.

If we don't do that, there eventually won't be anyone left to pass the traditions down to.

I asked Carpenter about what happened to the boy chorister and organ scholar to turn him into this flamboyant performer.

Here's a portion of his response:

“I remember my high school teacher cultivating this affected pattern of articulation and phrase structure that I had no emotional relationship with, at all. Consequently, the transferance of that information from him to me was almost based on rote. It was, like, okay, now you do this, now you do that. It felt very alien, like a subjugation of the music to this other set of circumstances that I didn’t understand at all....

It seemed de rigueur for all the other organists, but it was difficult for me to do.

I went through three teachers at Juilliard and had a very similar experience. At that point, I began to realise that there was this set of strictures or dictates that was, in some way, designed for organists but not about giving the organist an ability to communicate the emotion of what they were experiencing to other listeners....

What I ended up relating it to was a 'one-time pad,' which is the solution key to a given code, something the Germans used in the Enigma machine during World War II. It was an encoding device, and the one-time pad was a row of numbers that would set the rotors of the machine so that the incoming message was decodable. It’s a one-time pad because each of the codes is used only once.

It’s similar to this organ-world-wide one-time pad, where, if you understand the concepts that were taught, you can read the incoming information and know what they are doing. But, of course, only organists have that code.

Then, the question becomes, well, if only organists have the code, what about the rest of the people? What about decoding this music for others?

The inherent question that derives from that is, for whom do I want to play?

I like to liken it to accepted norms in how organ music is played because, for me, the organ community itself simplifies the question on both sides. On the organ-peer side, there’s the somewhat didactic, unquestioning transmission of this information. But, in a way, worse on the other side is the sensationalist school where it’s just a matter of ‘Do you want an audience or do you want to kowtow to these organ purists?’

The thing to me is that both sides are so simplistic, really. Both sides are so agenda-driven, or, at least the judgments that go into making the clearly perceptible sides in 21st century organ playing....

Whatever their origins and derivations, whenever we’re talking about these agendas, we’re not talking about music, even though we might be talking about the architecture of music or, more likely, the history of music....

It’s all about how you view how you want to communicate with people."

So there we have it: The musician needs to communicate in a way that makes sense to the here and now. What could make more sense than that?

It's one thing to play magnificently on a massive concert organ. It's another to take an ordinary, run-of-the-mill church organ and so something notable with it. Right?

So I asked Carpenter if he was in the mood to climb up to the organ loft at the church where I work as organist. The instrument is a mid-1970s two-manual Casavant organ that has nothing much to recommend it, aside from being a fine way to accompany a mass. 

Carpenter smiled when he sat down at the console, saying it reminded him of a church organ he would practise on as a teenager. It took him moments to figure the instrument out an begin playing some Bach -- far more colourfully that anything I (an, er, rank amateur, for all intents and purposes) could ever have imagined doing.

Just after the 6-minute mark, towards the end of the fugue, Carpenter goes off on his own, using Bach's subject in a jazz-like improvisation that progresses like an concerto cadenza. I think it's brilliant.

I apologise for the audio, which I captured on my mono voice recorder, then played back into my iPhone so that I could extract it in a file format that I could post here. The pictures are hastily cobbled together from Carpenter's past exploits.

K-korean t-t-t-take on P-Pachelb-b-bel's C-C-C-Canon

Thanks to a Korean boy band B-Boys, backed up by a women's university instrumental group, the world has yet another vclever ariation on Johann Pachelbel's immortal Canon to absorb.

This is not a new video, by the way. The zither-like instrument accompanying the B-Boys is the 12-string gayageum (kayagum in the old Latinisation).

I think the  beat interjections are pretty good.

For the sake of comparison, here is the original, performed by Voices of Music in period style.

Is one more or less worthy than the other?

Love of old chestnuts is in the performance

Several times a year, I go to a concert wondering why the main piece of the evening is so popular, so over-programmed, so over-recorded.

If I'm lucky, the performance will change my mind.

Last fall, I dragged myself to the Toronto Symphony to hear James Ehnes interpret Peter Ilytch Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D (written in a mad creative burst in 1878, premiered in 1881). It's not that I hate the concerto -- there's a world of beautiful music in it -- but sometimes everyone wants to play it.

Familiarity really can breed contempt (justified or not).

That evening, I exchanged greetings with my freelance colleague from the Globe and Mail, we bonded as we rolled our eyes at having to hear the concerto for the umpteeth time, and sat down.

Well, the experience changed both of us, so gorgeously nuanced was Ehnes's interpretation.

Last week, the Los Angeles Times included Ehnes in a roundtable discussion with several high-powered musicians (conductors Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and Bramwell Tovey, and violinists Ehnes, Vadim Repin, Gil Shaham and Leonidas Kavakos -- all recent guest soloists in Toronto) about what makes certain violin concertos such staples of the repertoire. The article was published to preview a series of concerts taking place this week at the Hollywood Bowl.

Ehnes, whose thinking is as elegantly straightforward and unaffected as his playing, contributed this to the discussion: "Really great music wears extremely well. Don't blame the music. Maybe blame the performer for not giving an inspiring performance."

Touché!

Here's a video the London Philharmonia made ahead of Ehnes performing the concerto in England earlier this year. Ehnes shares several more insights along the way, directly addressing my thoughts today. I allowed YouTube to include a bunch of related videos, in case you have the time and inclination to watch more by this remarkable Canadian.

Salon des oubliés: English composer George Dyson

There are two classes of architect: those who design landmarks, and those who produce our houses, condo towers and strip malls. To add insult to being disdained by tastemakers in their lifetime comes the injury of being forgotten long before their buildings come tumbling down.

It's not much different for composers. There are those who create Works of Art. Then there are those who fill our everyday lives with music. The 20th century saw the ultimate split, between tonal and atonal composers. The atonalists, inspired by such influential cliques as Arnold Schönberg and his Viennese followers, steamrollered much of the rest of Europe's music after World War I into the dust. But that doesn't mean that there aren't dozens of worthy names and works that deserve our attention once in a while -- people who built our musical houses and strip malls: film and television scores, radio scores, advertising scores and, as it's easy to forget in our secular times, the organist-composers who work to provide fresh music for church services.

There's a branch of these historially challenged composers that extends to Toronto via England. Healey Willan (1880-1968), the longtime organist-composer at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene, was one. Derek Holman, retired University of Toronto faculty of Music professor and another onetime organist-composer is another example.

At the end of the season, we heard a new song cycle Holman wrote in memory of Richard Bradshaw. The music was gorgeous (and gorgeously interpreted by tenor Lawrence Williford and pianist Liz Upchurch), but hardly groundbreaking. Both Upchurch and Williford have mentioned to me, in recent conversations, that they are hoping to perform these songs again -- they engage the performer as well as the audience.

Holman and Willan both come from a mindset that seeks to combine an individual creative touch with a sense of musical adventure.

Sometimes the adventure is no more than an unexpected harmonic progression, or a rhytmic hiccup. Does that make the music less worthy?

I hope I'm not being unfair in placing English composer George Dyson in this group. His entry in my old Oxford Companion to Music is painfully short. It tells us he was born in Yorkshire in 1883 and died in Winchester in 1964. He wrote three books on music, as well as the Manual of Grenade Fighting, adopted by the British War Office during World War I. He taught at, and was later director of, the Royal College of Music, until 1952.

Oxford continues: "His compositions, skilful, sometime deeply felt, but never forward-looking in idiom, include several large-scale choral works, such as The Canterbury Pilgrims (1932), Nebuchadnezzar (1935), and Quo Vadis? (1949), and also a symphony (1937) and a violin concerto (1943).

If it weren't for a decade-old rediscovery of his music, there would be next to nothing on the Internet about him apart from a site maintained by the George Dyson Trust.

I have kept the 1997 two-CD set from Chandos that includes The Canterbury Pilgrims (sounding full and rich with the London Symphony, Chorus, excellent soloists that include soprano Yvonne Kenny, all under Richard Hickox). I wish The Mendelssohn Choir and the Toronto Symphony would give it a go (especially knowing that music director Peter Oundjian is more of a fan of the old choral society performance tradition than he lets on in his programming).

I'm a big fan of Dyson's church music -- both organ and choral.

Have a listen, and judge for yourself. Here are two works, settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in D Major (to be sung at Evensong in Church of England liturgy), as well as the Wife of Bath's aria from The Canterbury Pilgrims:

First, the "Mag and Nunc," sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge. No date is given, but I would say these clips were recorded about 25 years ago:

Now we have the great Scottish soprano Isobel Baillie (1895-1983) -- the U.K.'s unofficial Messiah soprano for most of her glorious career -- singing with from The Canterbury Pilgrims with the London Philharmonia and Sir Malcolm Sargent in 1947:

Enough music to fill a summer Saturday

Slowly, but surely, we're on our way to becoming true armchair musical travellers as a growing list of music presenters figure out how to fund live music streaming on the Internet.

Here are three rich options to fill your summer Saturday with gorgeous music. (In the case of Toronto, this is a worthy antidote to yet another promise of rain -- an unfortunate pattern this year and last).

1. Music on CBC Radio 2

This is the oldest wireless technology of all, but, this morning offers Toronto-based baritone Prett Polegato as host on This is My Music. 

Later, on Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, we get a new creation that had its premiere in Toronto this past season: Inès, by composer James Rolfe and librettist Paul Bentley, nurtured and produced by Toronto's Queen of Puddings Music Theatre. Mixing Portuguese fado with new opera, the score is very accessible. I didn't much like the libretto, but was seduced by real Portuguese pop and fado singer Inès Santos, pictured left (her name and the title of the opera are coincidental).

2. The New York Philharmonic

The orchestra celebrates its new music director, Alan GIlbert, with a free performance of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 1, available until July 31.

The New York Phil has had a close association with the symphonies of Mahler ever since Leonard Bernstein championed them in the late 1950s, and recorded them a few years later.

Gilbert is no Bernstein, but he does have something interesting to say.

3. The Verbier International Festival

Martha Argerich's powerhouse event is being streamed on medici.tv, with a new offering every day. At last check, mezzo Susan Graham and piano Malcolm Martineau were paired up in a recital of French mélodies. I'm a big fan of both performers. Graham occasionally sounds a bit awkward as she tries to navigate the language, but otherwise offers up some fine singing. Martineau is more colourful than the average accompanist, but never distracting.

The musical mind of Gertrude Stein

Someone in Dallas, Tex. must've combed through the archives when Walter Cronkite, once a cub reporter at The Daily Texan, died last week.

They uncovered a gem of a short interview with Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), from March 22, 1935. It was published in Monday's Daily Texan, and sent out this morning on ArtsJournal.

I love how down-to-earth Stein is in her various assessments of the world around her.

What struck me in particular was her opinion about war, when asked by Cronkite if it looked likely to her that a large conflict might be brewing in Europe:

“Before I left, those who know in France didn’t believe that there would be a war,” she answered. “But then war is just like anything else. When people get tired of peace they will have war and when they get tired of war they will have peace. Don’t you, when you have been good for a long time, want to be bad?”

Besides this pithy snapshot of the human condition, I was reminded of the musical cadence of Stein's language (especially when she was writing).

For those of us who don't attend poetry slams or listen to rap, it's good to be reminded that speech can become music, if organized and modulated into an aural portrait -- in the same way we organize and modulate the sound waves we call notes into a story or picture.

Here is (a computer-animated) Gertrude Stein, reciting "Some Day," from her pre-World War I novel, The Making of Americans. (The YouTube video: copyright, Jim Clark, 2009). Besides being musical, Stein was strangely prophetic.

In case you need to read along with the words, they are: 

"Some time then there will be very kind of a history of every one who ever can or is or was or will be living. Some time then there will be a history of every one from their beginning to their ending. Sometime then there will be a history of all of them, of every kind of them, of every one, of every bit of living they ever have in them, of them when there is never more than a beginning to them, of every kind of them, of every one when there is very little beginning and then there is an ending, there will then sometime be a history of every one there will be a history of everything that ever was or is or will be them, of everything that was or is or will be all of any one or all of all of them. Sometime then there will be a history of every one, of everything or anything that is all them or any part of them and sometime then there will be a history of how anything or everything comes out from every one, comes out from every one or any one from the beginning to the ending of the being in them. Sometime then there must be a history of every one who ever was or is or will be living"

Live concert experience latest casualty of messaging madness

I walk as much as possible -- to concerts, to interviews, and, of course, to exercise the dog. So I've come to realise what a danger texting has become on the streets, from oblivious fellow pedestrians to drivers trying to check the latest communication at a stoplight.

It'll take a series of accidental deaths to raise enough of a ruckus to get lawyers, doctors, concerned citizens and our generally spineless politicians to realise that mobile communications are, in fact, incompatible with mobility.

Texting is what it is, a form of instant communication that allows us to have conversations -- often crucial, interesting or both -- with people out of earshot. There's nothing wrong with that.

What is seriously wrong is that people are forgetting that it is incompatible with a wide range of tasks, from trying to unload a supermarket grocery basket (yes, I was behind someone who held up a long queue while the cashier waited for her to respond to a message) to the more obvious ones of walking or driving.

Some things need our full attention. Period.

I want to argue that listening to music in a way that truly engages the senses is the same. 

I challenge anyone, anywhere, anytime to tell me that they can be reading something (a score, programme notes, a novel) and take in a piece of music at the same time.

I've seen music teachers and even fellow critics sit through performances while following the printed score. Even that, I would like to argue, wedges in a sliver of distance between the brain and the music.

This applies to the performers themselves. Given equal preparation and practice, the soloist performing without a printed score in front of them will usually deliver a finer, deeper, more nuanced interpretation of a work than someone who is glued to the printed page.

What's got me going is an announcement by the National Symphony Orchestra in the United States that it is going to send out programme notes via Twitter during an outdoor performance of Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 at the Wolf Trap Festival outside Washington, D.C. on July 30. I was put on to this by my colleague Tim Smith, at the Baltimore Sun.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

"With this first ever in-time symphonic Twitter you can have the conductor as your personal guide through Beethoven's most colorful and atmospheric work,” explained NSO @ Wolf Trap Festival Conductor Emil de Cou. “I have designed the tweets to go perfectly with ideas I have about the piece as I conduct it but also some interesting commentary to go along with the sights and sounds of Beethoven's day in the countryside: an adult musical pop-up book written for first timers and concert veterans alike."

The idea of providing a sort of running Surtitle (a Toronto creation, by the way) with a concert, whatever form that commentary takes, reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between a performance and our enjoyment of it. We need to remove as many instances of mediation between us and the performance as possible, not add more.

It's not a new issue, and I won't belabour it. I just needed to vent.

Expressing my sentiments far more eloquently, in a way guaranteed to make you laugh, is veteran satirist, Prof. Peter Schickele, a.k.a. PDQ Bach, giving us running commentary on the Beethoven's Fifth (there are no visuals on this old audio recording):

Kids become instant composers with Youth Music Box

One of the countless benefits of increasingly sophisticated computer processors and software code has been an explosion of music-oriented games and learning tools. With every passing year, the dreaded old-cliché piano teacher ready to rap a reluctant young player's knuckles recedes further and further into the dark closet of history.

The latest kid-oriented music-creation gadgetry -- called Youth Music Box -- went on public trial on London's Southbank Centre on Friday. It's oh, so hip. In a culture that expects instant results, it helps users compose music and play it back right away.

I can see you shaking your head that this is not the basis for a proper musical education. But isn't it great that this might allow more kids to get hooked first, encouraging them to WANT to find out more, rather than have it pushed on them?

The company has set up a way to play online for free, as long as you register.

For a (slightly) more objective presentation, check out this recent news story from the BBC.

Juicy offerings from Verbier festival today

The medici.tv site is currently running yesterday's concert presentation of Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Verbier International Festival in Switzerland. Young Toronto bass Robert Gleadow (Masetto) counts among a particularly stellar group of male soloists that includes Bryn Terfel (in the title role), René Pape (Leporello) and Michael Schade (Don Ottavio). Even Thomas Quasthoff shows up as the Commendatore. Wow. Manfred Honeck conducts with plenty of fire.

The festival busts out this afternoon with a concert that centres around Lang Lang as a (gasp!) collaborative pianist. He'll be playing in a Tchaikovsky piano frio as well as accompanying Terfel and Pape in Broadway songs. Should be interesting.