Music! Including a review of Kraft (not the one your thinking of)

Ah, music … it’s about time I started blogging on it.  Now, I’m just as passionate about music as I am food.  Like cooking, I noodle around on one of my many guitars (or sometimes an autoharp), and sustain my dream of being in an indie band.    And in the same vein as eating out at restaurants, I frequently go to concerts (more often than plays—gasp!).  But unlike food, I tend to immerse myself in music as often as possible, anytime there’s silence—I try to fill it with music.  When writing or cleaning my room, when cooking or doing the dishes (there’s a cd player and box of cds in the kitchen just for this purpose), and of course the many hours spent riding the train.  But, did I mention concerts?  


Friday night, after a perfectly boring shift at the subscriber table (aside from the usual people watching), I treated myself to one of the perks of a job at the New York Philharmonic (aside from the fact that I sit on my ass and earn money): actually listening to a concert.  It was the first time I’d done this all season, and the second half of the program that night compelled me to sneak  through the doors (though not without the approval of the house manager, Omar.)  Walking into the hall, no one could fail to notice how radically the piece rearranged the concepts of an orchestra, or the traditional boundaries of the performance space.  A gong hung from the ceiling in the center of the seats.  Smaller gongs and metal objects occupied the rear corners—even directly behind my seat.  And a stage center, soloists manned a piano, cello, contra-bass clarinet, and an assembly of ordinary objects and junk placed far out of context.  This would not be a typical performance. 

Kraft, by the Finnish composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg, originated in the post-punk of the early Eighties.  It’s rarely performed due to Lindberg’s demands on the venue and orchestra—and the inclusion of objects gathered from local junkyards.  Essentially, Kraft is such a nontraditional take on orchestral music, that the Philharmonic prefaced it with soloist Joshua Bell (sure to sellout the house) in Sibelius’ Violin Concerto, and included Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun” as an appetizer to the main works. The publicity hype began early, presumably focused on keeping the audience in the hall after intermission.  You’d think a nearly thirty-year-old piece wouldn’t be controversial anymore, or on the frontier of artistic developments.  Stomp made music from ordinary objects, and the Kronos Quartet includes nontraditional materials and objects (aka. “junk”) in their music. The found object as art reaches back to the Dadaists of interwar Europe and surely beyond that.  And dissonant, seemingly cacophonous orchestral music hasn’t shocked since Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the premier of which incited a small riot among the Parisian audience in 1911.  And the cutting edge of music today is found in computers—music completely detached from objects that produce the very vibrations that travel through the air to strike the intricate mechanism of the inner ear.  (Well, perhaps not entirely; the human voice is a rather prominent feature of contemporary music.) We’re dealing more with WAVs than waves.

But in this modern context, the way Lindberg relies on twisting and distorting the orchestral instruments—and utilizing found objects salvaged from a Staten Island junk yard—actually makes the piece a revolutionary departure from both current orchestral music and that of the classical composers (although the distance from the latter seems more evident than the former.)  Musical director and conductor Alan Gilbert used one word repeatedly in his introduction to the piece (a necessary departure from the usual formality of a Philharmonic program—that, and the untucked lavender polo shirt he and the soloists wore): sound(s).  And that is the crux of the piece.  Was it music?  Not quite.  Was it noise?  Certainly not.  The Philharmonic does not peddle in noise.  Yes, sounds; sounds from unusual objects, sounds surrounding the audience, sounds from traditional sources derived in atypical ways. 

The piece does so much in just thirty minutes: it sounds intricately layered but perfectly random and chaotic all at once.  And thus it was beneficial to learn that Lindberg calculated and composed precisely, every note places deliberately with great consideration of the moment, the theme, the entire work, the performance space, and the audience experience.  Any attempt to convey how the piece sounded would be a disservice to the work; live is the only way to experience it, like jazz.  And this certainly distinguishes Kraft from most anything else that will be performed in Avery Fisher Hall the rest of this season.  However, some highlights I recall: 

-          the 72-note chord played in bar 4 using the full orchestra

-          the 5 gong ensemble

-          soloist running up and down the aisles

-          horn and woodwind sections disappearing from the stage only appear later in the balcony

-          the gaping silences and the stillness of the piece halfway through

-          Gilbert virtually beatboxing into a microphone

-          screeching strings replicating Lindberg’s piano torturing

-          the blown-bubble sounds

-          the piccolos sounding nearly like electronic music

-          and, of course, the audience members exiting in the first 5 minutes

But perhaps the most revolutionary or provocative thing about Kraft was demonstrating that a night at the Philharmonic could be exciting and (dare I say?) fun.

Don’t want to take my word?  The Times seemed to like it:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/09/arts/music/09kraft.html?scp=2&sq=kraft&st=cse

But one angry patron did not (an actual email received by the customer relations department):

“Magnus Lindberg’s piece is ideally designed to be listened to while trying to pass kidney stones or if the defense department wants to break down a high value detainee.  Needless to say it is hard to describe how much my wife and I disliked the evening.  Earlier in the week I went to a free concert at the Church of Heavenly Rest on fifth avenue, that involved the premiere of a piece, that was actually a pleasure to listen to.  Can you believe that? 

I have been going to the philharmonic for 20 years, never again will I go when Lindberg is involved. Please pass these sentiments along to Alan Gilbert and Zarin Mehata. 

Additionally, I paid $225 for two tickets including handling fees. I would like my money back.  If I could, I would ask for my time back.”