sounds like now

With the 2004-2005 concert season coming to a close (there are a few concerts sprinkled throughout the summer) I’m finally able to spend some time getting back to the basics with my playing. As the season wears on and I get busier and busier and have to learn five new works to premiere on a single concert in only one week because the scores only arrived a week before the concert that had been scheduled nearly nine months in advance resulting in a situation that one could never have seen coming since it seemed to have been planned out so well so far in advance despite the best of intentions from both composer (I’m not naming names) and performer (can you tell I’ve been reading David Foster Wallace?), it becomes increasingly difficult to spend time on the things that I really should be spending time on with the horn. So it goes.

As I’ve realized that the situation described above is destined to happen more times that I’d like to believe it will, I’ve developed a more efficient and just as effective warm-up routine. But a 45-60 minute warm-up, no matter how efficient or effective, can never come close to spending a good quality 2 hours (or more) working on basic technique and other fundamental issues. But that’s what the summer’s for.

So if you happen to walk by my practice room and I’m not playing Theofanidis, Wuorinen, Bresnick, Hyla, or Hurst, you’ll probably hear me playing long tones, scales, thirds, and fourths very very slowly, an articulation exercise I adopted from a well-known clarinet study, arpeggios, palm key and low register exercises, palm-to-front exercises to help bridge the gap to the altissimo register, altissimo scales, and any number of simple melodic patterns in twelve keys (major and minor), that if you didn’t look in the window to see who was playing, you might mistake me for someone trying to get into college.

It’s all part of the process and I enjoy and even look forward to the summers because of it. My summers for saxophone playing are like my winters for cycling. As a cyclist, in the winter I build up my aerobic base so that I’ve got a big strong engine once the weather gets warmer (which seems to not be happening yet). And as a saxophonist, I re-establish (or reëstablish, in New Yorker-ese) my base/foundation for the long season ahead.

So besides getting back to the basics, what’s on the docket for this summer? A few projects to finish up:

Anyone who’s been to Japan and seen a hip-looking girl wearing a t-shirt that said something like “Open All Night”–clearly not understanding what it might be interpreted as–will appreciate www.engrish.com, a website that highlights “the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design.”

Anne Midgette’s got a great profile of composer James Tenney, whom she refers to as the “Zeilg” of American contemporary music, in today’s New York Times. Tenney will be honored with concerts celebrating his 70th birthday today at The Project Room and May 11 at the Whitney Museum of Art at Altria. Also check out the preview over at Sequenza21.

I’m off to Tucson, AZ for a little business. Back on Wednesday.

Is money tight? Are you on a budget? Are you a classical music lover who can’t seem to afford to attend as many concerts as you’d like to simply because of the cost? Well, never fear. See Anthony Tommasini’s “Critic’s Notebook” in today’s New York Times for the scoop on where to find free concerts in NYC.

Around the web: Are you a music snob? And the Yankees v. Red Sox rivalry plays out in the blogosphere.

There was a great topic on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today, which every college music teacher should download, listen to, and share with their students. The show was titled, Playing Jazz, and Making a Living, but could be applied to any artistic discipline–especially classical music. It dealt with the business side of music making and its importance in today’s music world–a topic that’s not addressed nearly enough in higher education. (Jazz composer and arranger Maria Schneider echoed this sentiment during an interview on the show.) The classical music world is changing. Witness how I’m communicating to you right now. Re-read Terry Teachout’s post on this issue. How will you prepare your students to be competitive and successful in today’s cultural marketplace?

Alex Ross amends his recent review of Harry Partch’s Oedipus and directs us to some great Partch resources, including Danlee Mitchell’s Harry Partch Foundation and Innova Recordings’ series of recordings. Another wonderful resource is available from American Mavericks, where you can learn more about Partch’s instruments, listen to Partch talk about the instruments, read some of his essays, and even have a go at performing on the instruments themselves.

Galen Brown over at Sequenza21 comments on my last post and informs me that Radiohead samples Paul Lansky’s first computer piece, mild und leise, on “Idioteque” from their Kid A album. Here’s the story, as told by Lansky himself. Actually, I knew this (that Radiohead sampled Lansky). My friend, who teaches middle school music (very progressively, I might add) does a unit on sampling for his kids. He plays “Idioteque” by Radiohead followed by the Lansky work, asking his students to try and identify the portion of the work that Radiohead samples.

Yes. I saw it last Thursday when I ventured out to Joe’s Pub in the East Village to catch the pianist Christopher O’Riley playing Radiohead. I have to confess with slight embarrassment that I am completely unfamiliar with Radiohead’s music, but know they’re popular among many classical musicians. At any rate, I was a bit skeptical about the concert from the beginning. Rock music transcribed for piano? (Well, Matt Haimovitz made a version of Jimi Hendrix’s rendering of the “Star Spangled Banner,” so maybe it’ll work.) As I sat and waited for the show to start, I began wondering why people were here. Were they Radiohead fans? Christopher O’Riley fans? Or classical music fans interested in how a fellow artist is reaching out to new audiences? I belonged to the latter category, while the rest of the crowd seemed to be in the first.

When O’Riley began his set–the second of two for the night–I retained my initial skepticism. After the third tune he began to talk to the audience about the music, about transcribing it for the piano, about esoteric Radiohead knowledge (he asked for hands in the crowd for who was the biggest Radiohead nerd, which O’Riley himself ended up being proudly), and his love for the music. O’Riley simply loves Radiohead. So much so that he transcribes all their music for piano. And his love for the music comes out in his playing of it. The next few tunes, actually, the rest of the set, sounded a lot different to me than the first few tunes. Maybe he wasn’t warmed up. Or maybe I began to understand what he was doing. My friend Evan told me that timbre is a big part of Radiohead’s music and that he was curious about how this would translate to the piano. There’s color in O’Riley’s playing. I didn’t once miss the drums on any tune (well, since I didn’t know them, how could I miss them?). There were moments when I was completely transfixed by the music and by O’Riley’s delivery of it.

I think I was a bit cold to O’Riley’s idea at first because I had already made some assumptions before the show. O’Riley is a concert pianist so he’d probably make the arrangements piano-y, like with lots of arpeggiations, virtuosic flourishes, and so on, right? Wrong. There’s no fancy piano stuff in these arrangements–just the music. And honestly, I was relieved when I realized that this wasn’t going to be a show-off-my-piano-chops kind of event. The truth is that this kind of playing requires its own kind of virtuosity and intamacy with the music that not every artist could pull off. (Kind of like a classical musician who thinks jazz is easy trying to swing.) But Christopher O’Riley pullls it off convincingly.

While you won’t catch me playing the complete The Clash at CBGB anytime soon, I think O’Riley is on to something in terms of bringing his art to a larger audience in a pretty cool venue. Gone were the traditional concert conventions and I think people might have been a little happier because of it. In this setting, people were free to chat if they felt like it, sneeze and not be glared at, eat tiramisu out of a martini glass, and go to the bathroom in the middle of a piece. That’s cool and this kind of looseness in no way implies that the artist on stage is compromising his artistic integrity. I don’t know if a crowd like this would be hip to a Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, or Iannis Xenakis joint, but I wouldn’t put it past them. It could work. I can think of one or two ways. (Coming soon . . . Hybrid Groove Project.)

P.S. Listen to O’Riley on NPR’s Performance Today.