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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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A couple years ago, I wandered into a small gallery in SoHo and saw a piece of art that I liked and surprisingly could afford, so I bought it. Since then, whenever I’m in the neighborhood, I stop by the Ward-Nasse gallery in hopes of another find. It turns out that the gallery is a non-profit artist-administered gallery, so artists donate their time and work to the gallery to keep it running. I think this is a worthy goal so I try to support them in their efforts.
This afternoon, I stopped by and they were having another sale of their artists’ work. I saw this photograph by Jack Shurtliff that I really liked, so I bought it. As usual, apologies for the terrible photography on my part - it looks much better in person. It’s a black-and-white photograph, and I initially thought it was an X-ray of a human ribcage. Looking closer revealed that it was actually a plant backlit in some way. The ambiguity appealed to me - the initial impression that I was looking at one thing which then resolves to another seems very apropos to this blog. Shurtliff is apparently a member artist of Ward-Nasse so I look forward to seeing more of his work in the future.
The artists’ sale continues throughout the month of April, so I recommend stopping by if you’re looking for affordable art in New York.
While I was down in Soho, I stopped by the Housing Works Used Book Cafe, which I’ve mentioned before. It was extraordinarily crowded, which I ascribed to it being a Saturday afternoon. But when I checked out (I saw the novel Con Ed, recommended by Seth Godin), it turned out that the first weekend of each month, everything is marked a further 30% off. Such a deal. I’ll have to remember that for the future (and am putting it up here so that others know as well).
This evening I went to go see So Percussion perform Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich. Long-time readers will remember that I’m a complete nut for Reich’s work, so I was looking forward to seeing it again, especially since the other So Percussion concert I’d been to was enjoyable. Alas, I was incredibly disappointed.
My expectations were clearly too high going in. I’d only seen 18 performed by Steve Reich’s ensemble, a group that has been performing the piece for 30 years, and has it polished to an incredible level of perfection. Their total mastery of the piece and comfort with its rhythms allowed them to move beyond the performance into this whole other space of art and meaning.
Given my recent posts, it’s probably not surprising that my thoughts during the performance tied this back into management. It’s another illustration that no matter how great the plan is, the team must execute for the plan to work. In this case, I know this is a great piece, and I love the ways in which the chords build on themselves and the interplay between the different instruments. And when it’s performed as intended, it’s a spiritual experience for me. But when the same piece is performed short of perfection, it falls apart into a disjointed set of bangings. Execution matters. Experience matters. Deliberate practice matters.
So why did the performance not work for me? A few things I noticed:
Nothing major. No one thing that leaped out at me and ruined the performance. It was a combination of little things that didn’t quite fit.
This relates to one of the points I made in my last post, where I stated that a team can be greater than the sum of its parts. And when everything locks into place, the results are amazing. The musical analogy I came up with is the overtone series. When a chord is perfectly in tune, you can actually hear the higher order harmonics audibly. If any element of the chord is just slightly out of tune, the chord will still sound okay, but you lose the spine-tingling harmonics. Listening to a chorus like the Tallis Scholars is great because they nail their chords and all of the overtones just pop out of the texture. There are more notes being heard than are actually being sung.
Something similar happens in a well-functioning team. When everybody is pulling together and perfectly aligned, extra output just appears from the synergistic effects of the team. One plus one plus one somehow equals four. But here’s the downside - like the overtone series, if anything is even slightly out of alignment, you lose all of that bonus.
It’s interesting to me as a student of management because it demonstrates that getting 90% of the way there means nothing. It’s only when all aspects of an organization are aligned 100% does it really take off. This reminds me of Built to Last, where the authors point out that the successful companies have built the core values of the company into every aspect of the company. Doing 90% doesn’t cut it because it raises the expectations and then doesn’t fulfill them. To take a made-up example, a company could put all the elements of an employee empowerment program in place, but if one manager micromanages their employees, it may be even more demotivating than if the company had done nothing.
I think that’s what happened at the performance tonight. It was a solid performance, and most of the audience enjoyed it. But having seen two perfect performances, where I’d seen the synergistic effect of the performers and the piece feeding on each other, this was far short of that experience. And because it was almost good enough, it was almost more frustrating than if it had been just terrible. I wanted to like it. I almost liked it. But I ended up being disappointed.
The take home lesson is contained in the post title. Notice the discordant elements in your company. If something doesn’t align with the company goals, remove it. It might seem minor, but it could be preventing synergistic organization overtones from forming. It’s like Peopleware’s description of how to build a team - first avoid all the ways in which you can prevent a team from forming, avoiding teamicide. It’s also similar to the Broken Windows theory, where fixing the little things makes it easier to fix the big things because all elements of the system are then in alignment.
Of course, the first step to figuring out which elements are discordant is figuring out what the goals are. Until you know where you want to go, you can’t align everything else. But if you know what you want to accomplish, and you remove all the obstacles, even seemingly minor ones, then great things can happen. You’ll hear those overtones pop into existence and the company will achieve greater things than you thought possible.
I’d heard of local string quartet Ethel at some other event earlier in the year, but never followed up until seeing they were giving a free concert at the World Financial Center last week.
They’re fantastic. They played a variety of new music which suited their talents, from neoclassical works (I really liked the pieces by Marcelos Zarvos, including a premiere of Double Quartet - Rounds) to more avant garde stuff.
The performance itself was in the Winter Garden, a large atrium with palm trees. The quartet started at one end of the hall, played a few pieces, and then started moving around. Their instruments were wirelessly miked, so they could move around at will, and they played from several configurations, including one set with each player on a different atrium side, and another with two of them playing from the balconies. It was a neat effect, and I was impressed with how well coordinated they remained despite the physical distance between them; even though they had earphones, it’s still difficult to stay in sync without visual contact.
After the performance, I bought
their most recent album Light and have been listening to it about once a day, and enjoying it a lot. Amazon calls it the third best classical album of 2006. If you’re a classical fan, I encourage you to check them out.
A month ago or so, somebody wrote me. They had been looking for information on El Nino by John Adams, came across my account of it, noticed that I was now living in New York, and suggested that I check out the New Amsterdam Singers, where a friend of theirs sang. Intrigued, I checked out the website, noticed they had a concert of Renaissance music coming up, and went to go see it last night.
It was lovely. I was very impressed with the chorus. It was bigger than I expected for an a cappella classical chorus, at about 70 singers, but very good. I’d gone to see another chorus earlier this spring and was very disappointed because I’m a snob, so it was great to see a chorus that was unified in tone, with great diction, who actually looked up from their music, etc. It’s definitely a group I would consider singing with if I had time to join a chorus.
I was also impressed with the repertoire choices. I sang in various a cappella chamber choruses for something like ten years of my life, so I’ve done a lot of the standard repertoire, yet I had only sung one piece on the program. Coming in, I had been most excited to see the Victoria Salve Regina, as Victoria is one of my favorite composers, but that piece didn’t work as well as I’d hoped. Fortunately, there was a lot of other great music on the program, including a couple Handl motets, Senfl’s Ave Maria, gratia plena, Tomkins’s When David Heard, and the concluding Buxtehude Missa Brevis. So definite props to Clara Longstreth, the conductor, for finding interesting music in a space I thought I knew well.
P.S. I was sitting in the concert last night, and realized that the past ten months is the longest I have gone without singing in a chorus since my junior year of high school, when I first joined a chorus. I definitely missed it last night. Getting to do something right-brained regularly was good for me.
Last night I opened up my copy of Time Out New York for the first time in a couple months. I have a subscription, but I’ve been so busy with classes, that I was basically tossing it in the recycling as soon as I got it. But I’m done with classes (yay!), so I flipped it open to see what was happening this weekend.
One of the first things I saw was that Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) were performing Duke Ellington’s version of the Nutcracker Suite at Lincoln Center this weekend with the New York Philharmonic. Um, wow. I’ve been a fan of Marsalis for a while, and my respect for him and his orchestra skyrocketed after performing his piece All Rise. But the concert was at Lincoln Center and the tickets were kind of expensive.
I was hemming and hawing, and decided to go check out the web page this morning to learn more about the show. Then I saw the magic words: “Student Rush Tickets”. $12 for day-of seats, available online, and I’ve got my Columbia ID now! That made it a no brainer.
The first half of the concert was kind of eh. El Salon Mexico, by Aaron Copland (which was pretty identifiably Copland from the first two bars), and Symphony No. 2, by Christopher Rouse, who was in the audience.
The second half was awesome, though. The way they did it was that the New York Philharmonic played the original piece, as Tchaikovsky wrote it. Then the JLCO played it Ellington’s way. It made for a tremendously satisfying musical experience. I know the Nutcracker Suite really well, of course, and it was fun to hear the old standard again, even if it is kind of precious.
But then hearing how Ellington riffed on the themes was awesome. One of the things that I knew intellectually about jazz was that it’s about riffing off standard tunes and taking them in new and unexpected directions. But because everybody is riffing, you often only get a couple snippets of the tune, and if you’re somebody like me that’s not familiar with the original , you don’t appreciate the artistry of what they’re constructing. So hearing the original tune straight-up and then the expanded jazz version really made me appreciate what Ellington had done, and how he’d taken the themes of the Nutcracker and done interesting things with them. It was very cool, and of course the JLCO are excellent excellent musicians.
Then afterwards, of course they got a standing ovation, so we got an encore. Yay! And because the conductor had mentioned earlier in the performance that today was the 164th birthday of the New York Philharmonic, the JLCO played Happy Birthday jazz-style. And, again, because the original tune is so familiar, I was better able to catch all the references to it, the riffs off of it, etc. Wynton threw a tremendous trumpet solo in the middle too. Man, he’s amazing.
We kept clapping after that, so we got a second encore. This one they did what they did in San Francisco, where they got a couple of the orchestra members involved, with one of the basses playing the bass line, a trombone player doing a solo, and then the bass player facing off with the JLCO bass in a bass solo contest. Fun fun stuff - I’d seen it before, but it’s still entertaining.
Very cool evening - I would have been happy to pay full price for these tickets, so to have gotten them for $12 is truly ridiculous. Plus, they didn’t check my student ID when I picked them up! Such a deal!
P.S. In other news, I am a total snob. I was really disappointed by the quality of the New York Philharmonic. I know this is a holiday concert, so it’s not the best players, but the playing was downright sloppy in places. Some of that can be blamed on the conductor, who wasn’t very clear, but there were lots of bits where the section wasn’t even together with itself. I’m a bit biased because I performed with them, but I think the San Francisco Symphony is definitely better - better unity, better tone quality, better musicality. Plus MTT rocks, of course.
It’s interesting to me how having gotten the chance to experience some really great stuff like the French Laundry or the chorus has really spoiled my ability to enjoy merely good stuff. When you’ve had the best, the good doesn’t quite satisfy any more. Alas. I know, I know, tough life.
P.P.S. I think I have some sort of event or outing planned every night for the next five days. Think I was ready to be done with classes?
So that plan of mine to post every day during November? Somehow that stopped.
Class is almost done. I had a big presentation due this week in one class, and next week I have to turn in a take-home final, and the final version of master’s project proposal, and then I’ll be done with my first semester as a Columbia student. Yay! Then I have one month of “vacation” where all I have to do is work full-time, so I’m looking for fun things to do with my “time off”.
The “vacation” unexpectedly started early. On Monday afternoon, my friend Dylan called me up and said that he was in town from Milwaukee and we should hang out. I said I’d love to see him, but I had this big presentation due, and I was meeting my study group Monday evening, and had class Tuesday evening, and the presentation on Wednesday evening, and he left Thursday morning, so I didn’t see how it was possible. We agreed to hang out next time.
Also on Monday afternoon, my friends N and C from the San Francisco Symphony Chorus called me and said “Hey, we’re in Central Park! Want to hang out in the next couple days?”, and I had to give them the same spiel. It turned out N was leaving on Wednesday morning, but C was staying through Saturday morning, so I told him I would call him Thursday to arrange time to hang out.
Wednesday evening, the presentation went really well. My group had fun with it - we decided to go for the sales Sales SALES approach of Glengarry Glen Ross, and I think it turned out nicely. During class, I got a voice mail from Dylan. When I checked it later, his message was that now that the presentation was over, I should come out and have a drink with him. After stressing about the presentation for several days, that sounded good. So I headed out and met up with him and some other folks at about 11pm at the Pegu Club (warning: Flash page). Really really nice place - expensive but the cocktails were amazing. We ended up hanging out until 2am when I managed to summon the willpower to head home so that I had some chance of making it to work by 9am the next morning.
While at the Pegu Club, though, Beth mentioned that she had an extra ticket to a show Thursday night at the Bowery Ballroom. The headline act was Rhett Miller and the Believers, of whom Beth is a big fan. So after work on Thursday, I headed out again. Dinner in the East Village, and then to the Bowery Ballroom. Great space - chill bar downstairs, nice stage upstairs. It totally felt like the kind of space where real rock’n'roll happens, especially as we got there early enough to be 5 feet from the stage.
We ended up catching the opening band, Tom Clark and the High Action Boys, who were excellent. Way fun. Songs like “Caught Blondehanded”, “New Toothbrush on the Sink”, and “First Girl After You” (all high energy breakup songs, of course) were really entertaining, and I bought the CD for them (RealAudio available on their website). They also had a couple songs which I’m looking forward to on the next CD with lyrics of “You’re not hot, you’re just good looking, and there are a lot of good looking girls in this town”, and in another song, “If that’s country, I want to know what country it’s from”. I ended up listening to the CD all day today at work, and it’s nice light music to work to.
I wasn’t as impressed with Rhett Miller, although that may be because I’m a straight guy. The women in the audience were certainly swooning :). I ended up leaving a bit before midnight, even though the concert wasn’t over, because I was just dead on my feet. Plus, my socializing for the week was not yet done.
I can’t remember where I saw the link any more, but I heard about likemind a few weeks ago, and was really psyched about it. “an opportunity to enjoy coffee and conversation.” Since I love conversation, I was in. I’d been planning to go for weeks. Except it was at 8am on Friday, after having been out late the previous two nights. But I set my alarm and made it down there.
It was excellent. I met some interesting people, including Noah, one of the two guys who started it. Apparently, he and Piers had never met in person, but knew each other through their blogs, so they decided to get coffee a few months ago. Being bloggers, they posted about their plan, and about 15 people showed up. Today’s likemind was likemind #5, and about 30 people or so were there. I observed that it was enjoyable to just sit and talk to people without having an agenda. Noah pointed out that having it in the morning helped with that - after work, people are coming out of work mode and thinking about networking and stuff. At 8am, though, people are still waking up, having their first coffee of the day, and it’s much more relaxed.
So that was a good time, and I’ll definitely be going to more in the future. But I had to bail at around 9:30 to go to work. Then at work, I got back in touch with my friend C (from the beginning of the post) who relayed the plan to go hit the free Friday from 4-8pm at MOMA. So I bailed from work early to go meet up with him and catch up. We wandered through the museum for a few hours along with his friends, and then grabbed a quick dinner before he went to a recital at Carnegie Hall.
My friend Jocelyn had text messaged me earlier in the day about catching a comedy show Friday evening, but I was just too exhausted. I came home instead, wrote this post to talk about my insane week, and will now turn my brain off and watch some TV. I had also discussed doing Guggenheim First Friday this evening with another friend, but that was out too. Too many things to do in New York!
P.S. Other stuff since my last post. Friday the 17th, the day after my last post, was a housewarming party/game night, where we played Settlers and then Apples to Apples until late. Saturday the 18th I had a total body shutdown, where I woke up at 9am, took a 3 hour nap in the afternoon, and was asleep again by 9pm. Sunday the 19th involved running many errands prepping for Thanksgiving weekend, watching the Bears shut out the Jets, then doing some revisions on my master’s project proposals. Monday the 20th was more revisions, Tuesday the 21st was class.
I took the Greyhound up to Boston on the afternoon of Wednesday the 22nd; even with them running busses basically continuously, I was in line for over an hour at Port Authority, and then it took an hour for the bus to get off of Manhattan. But I eventually arrived in Hopkinton, MA, and spent a wonderfully relaxing three days doing nothing, intentionally bringing no computer and no homework. I read a couple silly mysteries, went on a walk, and reaffirmed that Brezhnev’s has the best scallion pancakes ever. And then I was back on Sunday to work on the presentation.
P.P.S. Maybe more brain-ful posts after I’m done with classes.
In September, I was walking through Greenwich Village with a friend. We were chatting away as we passed by the IFC movie theater. Suddenly he noticed that I was no longer talking, and that, in fact, I had stopped several paces behind him. I had been dumbstruck by the theater marquee which said “Buffy singalong”.
Those of you that know me are probably aware of my once-overwhelming obsession with Buffy. So the idea that a theater was doing a singalong to the musical episode of Buffy was really just too awesome for words. I went over and asked about it, and they were doing a midnight showing. I called a few friends, and managed to convince a couple people to come with me to it. We got there at 11:45. There was a line of a couple hundred people on the sidewalk. We went to get tickets. It was sold out. I was denied!
However, they said they would be doing it again in November and that tickets would go on sale the following week. I stopped by the following week and bought six tickets, and then even managed to scare up five people to go with me.
Last night was the long-awaited (by me, at least) second Buffy singalong in New York. We already had tickets (fortunately, as it had sold out earlier in the week), but showed up at 11:20 or so to get in line for seats; there were about sixty people already there by that point. I was not even close to being the biggest Buffy geek in line. I don’t own the musical episode DVD (I recorded it off the air) or the soundtrack CD. I’d probably watched it fewer than ten times (although I did watch it on Friday night to remind myself, and then printed out the lyrics). After hanging out in line, we finally got to go in at midnight.
The show itself was a blast. In light of it being November, they showed Pangs, the Thanksgiving episode from season 4, as the warmup act. Much funnier than I remember it being, or maybe that was an effect of watching it with a crowd of other psyched people. They also had a Spike trivia quiz, which I did embarrassingly poorly on - I only got something like 4 out of 10 right. I’ll have to study up if I go again.
As far as the musical episode itself, they’re trying to jump-start a Rocky Horror-like cult movement, so they had people acting out the various parts on stage, and passed out goodie bags to use as props. They prompted people to yell things at the screen (”Shut up, Dawn!”), throw things at appropriate times, use their cellphones as lighters during Giles’s power ballad, etc. I had been worried that people wouldn’t actually sing along but they did, so I got to sing out and enjoy myself.
Fun stuff. I might go again in December - they’re planning to do it monthly now. Check it out at Buffy Sings.
P.S. Probably more fluffy posts for the next few days as I catch up on homework. As usual, read the comments on my last post for some well-thought-out alternative viewpoints.
Short post today (and technically it’s after midnight), but I’m going to try keeping up daily posting for most of this month in sympathy with my friends who are doing NaNoWriMo. Christy’s going for NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), and even though I missed a couple days to start, I’m vaguely going to try to keep going.
Yesterday, I finally visited Staten Island, the only borough of New York City that I had not yet visited since moving here. I live in Manhattan, I’ve been to Brooklyn to Williamsburg and Prospect Park, I’ve gone to Astoria in Queens, and been to a couple Yankees games plus the Chihuly exhibition in the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx. But not Staten Island.
So yesterday, I biked down to Battery Park, and hopped on the Staten Island Ferry. Which is free. Such a deal. The ferry is a great ride. Great views of the downtown skyline as we left,the port and close-up views of the Statue of Liberty as we went past. Plus, I just like ferries. I really enjoyed taking the San Francisco-Oakland ferry when I used to take it in the Bay Area. This ferry ride reminded me of that experience, as I had a big goofy grin as we were cruising along. Watching the tourists all try to snap photos of the Statue of Liberty was pretty entertaining as well.
Staten Island itself wasn’t that exciting. Most of what I saw made it look like a typical suburb, with McDonald’s and Subway restaurants near the ferry. I had a bike map, so I headed down the east coast of the island, under the Verrazano Narrows bridge, and then along the south shore of Staten Island. There’s a nice little boardwalk along the beach there with a bike lane, so I cruised along for a while, looking out at the water and enjoying the view. But it was getting cold (45 degrees) and I was getting tired, so I turned back after 7 miles or so.
Back to the ferry, where I huddled inside for warmth, back to Manhattan, back to the apartment for a hot shower. I need to figure out the right layered approach to cold-weather exercising if I keep this up. Or possibly break down and join a gym. But I hate that.
Last month’s initial meeting of the New York chapter of the Social Media Club went well enough that they had a second meeting last night. As previously noted, Social Media Club is one of the things that BrainJams is doing now. It’s still in the formative stages, and it’s unclear what it’s for and what it’s meant to achieve, and the founders Chris Heuer and Howard Greenstein are looking for input. Yes, that’s right, Social Media Club is itself an experiment in social media.
So, what is social media? That was the first question asked, and there were a whole variety of answers. One person asked “What media is not social?” A good question. Media is all about communication and connecting people. For instance, somebody asked whether if he and his friend both read the New York Times, and then they have a conversation about what they read in the paper, does that make the NYT social media? One of the other attendees, David Berkowitz, apparently disagrees.
I tossed out the idea that social media may have to do with community building. Somebody had pointed out the importance of building relationships - that social media involves identity and reputation, even if it is pseudonymous. I picked up on that and commented about the importance of relationships and reputation in building a community. You can’t have a community with truly anonymous members because there is no accountability and it will degenerate into the tragedy of the commons.
It also relates back to the first example - if there is a community of New York Times readers, then I might argue that while the NYT may not reflect that community, it is a necessary element of the community’s construction. And I think there is a surprising amount that can be done with media even without the direct acknowledgment of the media creators. Henry Jenkins’s book on Convergence Culture (which I’m still only halfway through) is all about re-appropriating media through tropes like fan fiction and fan boards.
My one journey into uber-fan-hood illustrates the power of such communities. When I was a grad student, Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit the airwaves. This was the first TV show I watched religiously. I only knew a couple other people that watched it, but fortunately the Internet was there to save the day. I quickly became an active member of the alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer community, where I co-wrote the original FAQ. We fleshed out theories about the show’s mythology, kept better track of the show’s continuity than the writers, etc. There’s definitely an element of “social media” in there, but I’m at somewhat of a loss as to where it is. Is it contained only on the newsgroup? Well, the newsgroup wouldn’t exist without the show. Which part is the social media? It gets messy.
Moving on, we started talking about disclosure and how that applies to social media. A San Francisco get-together had proposed three T’s of social media: Truth, Transparency and Trust. One of the proposals of the SF chapter was that people could self-select to hold themselves to such standards by affixing a badge created by Social Media Club to their sites. Somebody asked why bloggers should even aspire to such qualities and how that could be policed. Bloggers aren’t journalists, and therefore should not try to hold themselves to the same standards.
I think I picked up on that later by suggesting my idealistic world where people actually have some level of media literacy. In other words, if we can’t fix the source (and I don’t think we can or should), then we should try to fix the receiver. We need to teach people that they can not uncritically accept everything that they see or read. In some ways, the plethora of viewpoints out there being made apparent in the blogosphere may drive us into media literacy whether we like it or not. If the same facts are getting twisted one way on one website, and another elsewhere, choosing which to believe may force people to think about what other issues are involved, whether the writers may have hidden interests, etc. Or they could just retreat into their own personal blogosphere, but I hope not.
One other thought I had during the discussion was that we may start treating media sources like we treat other people. In the real world, there are people I trust, people I’ll listen to skeptically, and people who I will just ignore. Why shouldn’t the same thing be true of my media sources? We’ll find media sources that we like, either because they are trustworthy, or possibly because they have a consistent bias (one of the reasons I like The Economist is that their bias is obvious and consistent). Other media sources we’ll check in on occasionally to see what’s going on, but treat the information we get from there as being gossip-level at best. I’m not quite sure how to relate this idea back to social media yet (a Friendster for media sources perhaps?) but I like the direction.
Those are all the thoughts I can remember off the top of my head. Afterwards, several of us went out to dinner and continued a lovely conversation for a couple more hours. It turned out many of us were Bay Area ex-pats, and the get-together reminded us of similar get-togethers back in the Bay. One of my goals is to find more such communities here in New York; fortunately, Social Media Club may turn out to be one of them.
Technorati tags: socialmediaclub socialmediaclubnyc
This past weekend was the Carnegie Hall part of the Steve Reich 70th birthday celebrations. I’m a big fan of Reich, and so I’d bought tickets to all three concerts a couple months ago. There was a Young Artists concert on Thursday evening, where Reich and his musicians worked with a bunch of young musicians on his music for a week and a half before the performance. Saturday night was Pat Metheny performing Electric Counterpoint, the Kronos Quartet performing Different Trains, and Steve Reich and Musicians performing Music for 18 Musicians. Sunday night was Cello Counterpoint, Piano/Video Phase, the American premiere of Daniel Variations, and then Drumming, the piece that introduced me to Reich ten years ago.
It was an awesome weekend.
I have so much I want to share that this post is going to be ludicrously sized. But since it’s for my own memory, I’m going to write it all, and you can pick and choose as you see fit. If you read all the way to the bottom, there’s even a treat!
So here’s a list of all the different pieces I’m going to talk about.
One thing I’d like to comment on before getting into the specifics of individual pieces is how much I enjoy Reich’s music. I’ve talked a bit about how modern art is often conceptually interesting but aesthetically unappealing. Reich is a great counterexample. I find his work to have an interesting theoretical basis, but also to be pleasurable on a purely aesthetic level. I can appreciate the music in a variety of different ways: by trying to follow and understand the different ways in which he builds up his dense musical textures, or by just sitting back with my eyes closed and letting the music wash over me, or by enjoying the visual spectacle of his music being performed. This weekend was a true joy to see his music being performed and get a better sense of how it all fits together. Now on to specific commentary…
Music for Pieces of Wood, performed by young artists
This was the first piece performed during the weekend, and it was a great piece to start with as it illustrated the quality of Reich that I find so compelling: that he can take simple elements and create such interesting combinations. This piece is for claves, which are basically two sticks, one held in each hand, that you hit together. Five percussionists, with five differently tuned claves. One starts by setting up a steady beat. The next jumps in with a pattern on top of the beat. The next starts a very common Reich technique of building up their pattern one note at a time. So playing one note per pattern block of the second clave. Then two notes. Then three, until the whole pattern is built up. Then he fades, and the fourth clave jumps in, building up their pattern in a different way. Then the fifth in a different way, until he hits his final pattern, and all of the claves suddenly are in unison banging out their pattern, and then they fade out and start building up the next pattern, one player at a time. Such a simple idea. So interesting in practice.
The percussionists were great. All of the young artists were. The other pieces in the Young Artists concert were:
Electric Counterpoint, performed by Pat Metheny
This piece was commissioned for Pat Metheny, so this was the definitive version of the piece. It’s scored for “guitar soloist and guitar ensemble of 12 guitars and 2 electric bass guitars”, but Reich being who he is, the guitar ensemble is actually Pat Metheny, taped playing each part to be his own guitar ensemble. It’s a bit hard to follow all the lines happening on the tape as they are not visually apparent (more on this later), but Metheny did a great job with it. Plus, again, the conception is really interesting.
Different Trains, performed by Kronos Quartet
This piece was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet, so another definitive performance. Like Electric Counterpoint, the live performers are accompanied by a pre-recorded tape that includes two versions of themselves as well as other sound effects like sirens and speech samples. Steve Reich’s notes explain the conception of the piece:
“The idea for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated, with my mother going to Los Angeles and my father staying in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, as a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period I would have had to ride very different trains.”
He went and interviewed his governess and a retired Pullman porter to get speech snippets describing the experience of American trains before the war, and then interviewed Holocaust survivors to get speech snippets describing the experience of European trains during the war. Then there’s a final section of After the War. The speech snippets have pitch, and he gets the various instruments to accompany and imitate the snippets. This grows particularly effective in the European section of the piece, where the snippet is only played once, but the notes continue to play, as if the words can only be uttered once because they are so painful, but we can not forget their echo. It’s a tremendously affecting piece, and Kronos Quartet does a phenomenal job with it.
Music for 18 Musicians, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
This was the highlight I was looking forward to after seeing this six years ago. It was just as amazing the second time. The visual spectacle of watching three people play the marimba together. The sheer wall of sound.
But there were things I picked up this time that I had missed last time, and that I hadn’t gotten from listening to the CD dozens of times. I noticed how a couple different sections had the xylophones building up their patterns as they do in Music for Pieces of Wood or Drumming. It makes sense, as that is such a Reich technique, but I hadn’t noticed before until I saw it happening in front of me.
The other thing I really liked this time was how human the piece was. We often think of minimalist pieces as being dehumanizing in how they conform to mechanical variations of a theme. But Music for 18 Musicians has the fundamentally human element of the singers and clarinets taking breaths together (and I read in the notes how they repeat their chords for two breaths each so the whole piece is timed to the human breath). I also liked how they coordinated the movement and different parts. When a section was about to move on to a new section or configuration, people would move to their new locations, get ready, and then make eye contact or nod to the vibraphonist, who would step up, and play the sequence of notes indicating the move to the next section. It was wonderfully choreographed and a pleasure to watch. I need to find out how to contact Steve Reich to tell him that I’d pay for a DVD of his ensemble performing this piece. No commentary, no fancy camera angles. Just a single overhead camera and good sound mixing, letting the music speak for itself.
The performance was excellent, and earned a well-deserved instant standing ovation that went electric when Reich was forced by his group to take a solo bow.
Cello Counterpoint, performed by Maya Beiser
After the thrills of Saturday night. it was hard to see how Sunday night would stand up, but I think it may have even exceeded Saturday. It started out with Cello Counterpoint, performed by Maya Beiser, for whom the piece was commissioned. Like Electric Counterpoint, this piece has the performer playing against taped versions of themselves. The bit they added was that they had actually videotaped Maya recording each of the other tracks, and then spliced together a video of seven slices of her sitting side-by-side, each performing a different track. They displayed that on a big screen behind her as she performed the eighth live track. Normally I find video art to be self-indulgent tripe, but this was _wonderful_. It added so much to the performance to be able to see her do each part, especially in the second movement, where she plays a seven-part canon against herself; watching the melody ripple across the screen through each of the different Mayas just enhanced the auditory experience.
And Maya Beiser did a great job. I’m putting her in my personal category of wonderfully energetic women soloists like Lauren Flanigan and Leila Josefowicz, who throw their entire bodies into the music (I’m not sure why I can’t think of any similarly energetic male soloists. Me, getting a crush on attractive, energetic, talented women? Can’t imagine why you’d think that). She also toured as the featured soloist in Naqoyqatsi with the Philip Glass Ensemble. Definitely a name I’m going to keep an eye out for.
Piano/Video Phase, performed by David Cossin
Piano Phase was an early piece written by Steve Reich, experimenting with phasing in and out of rhythm, a technique he took to the extreme in Drumming. It’s for two pianos, playing the same bit more and more out of phase with each other.
David Cossin took that idea and ran with it. He’s actually a percussionist, so he sampled the piano tune, and broke it up into pieces that could be activated by hitting a MIDI pad. So by playing the right sequence of MIDI pads, he could generate the piano tune. Then he videotaped himself playing the straight line of the piano tune. During the concert, that video is projected onto a screen in front of where he is sitting. So when he starts playing live, he’s playing in sync with the video. As his part phases behind, you can see him get slowly behind his video counterpart. And then phase another beat back. And eventually they sync up again, and start a new section. It was excellent. This was another example of video art that actually added something to the experience; if I had just heard the pianos playing, I might have been able to follow the phasing, but it would have been difficult. But by seeing it visually, with him hitting pads just a split second behind his video counterpart, and then a little bit further behind the next iteration, and a bit further behind, until it’s a full beat behind. So cool. I’d pay for a DVD of that too.
Daniel Variations, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
This was commissioned by the Daniel Pearl Foundation in memory of Daniel Pearl, the journalist killed in Pakistan in 2002. Reich chose to approach it by juxtaposing verses from the book of Daniel in the Bible, where Daniel is asked to interpret the king of Babylon’s dream (Reich pointed out that Babylon was where Iraq is now), with words of Daniel Pearl. This piece received its world premiere earlier this month in London, and this performance was the American premiere.
I really liked it. It showed Reich’s growth as a composer. Unlike pieces like Music for 18 Musicians or Drumming, it had no artifice in its construction, no technique mechanically applied repeatedly. It was just flat-out good. The Bible sections were heavy on ponderous percussion, which makes sense, and the Daniel Pearl sections were led by the strings, as Pearl was an accomplished fiddle player. I liked the string writing especially, which surprised me because Reich’s strength has always been percussion. The incorporation of the voices was also well-done; instead of wordless humming, the singers got to sing actual phrases set in a variety of different ways. The piece reminded me a bit of some of John Adams’s work, which is interesting, as Reich and Adams are generally acknowledged to be the top two living American composers. In particular, the high interlocking vocal harmonies reminded me a bit of the three countertenor parts from El Nino.
Great stuff. I can’t wait for the CD.
Drumming, performed by Steve Reich and Musicians
And the conclusion to the weekend was Drumming, the piece that started it all for me ten years ago. I went to see the Talujon Percussion Quartet at Stanford, and they played the first movement from Drumming, and I was like “Whoa!” This time was particularly great for me, as I had never seen the entire piece performed - just the first movement.
For those that don’t know, Drumming is the ultimate in Steve Reich’s phasing and beat-adding techniques. He starts off on tuned bongo drums with two players playing a single note repeatedly. Then, like Music for Pieces of Wood, he adds notes, so it’s a two-note pattern for four repetitions. Then three notes, etc., until it’s built up into a 12-note pattern. Then the players slowly get out of phase, until one gets a full beat in front of the other. Then they do it again. Then other drummers come in and add some embellishment on top of the pattern. Then they phase back until they’re in unison, start dropping beats until it’s back to a single beat again, and then they build it up again in a different order. From there, it is passed onto the low range of the marimbas, building its way up through there in a variety of ways, before getting passed onto the glockenspiels, before the final movement brings all the instruments back together.
It’s hard to do it justice with an explanation in words. And even though the CD is amazing, it’s so much better live (another DVD I’d pay for). I had semi-accidentally gotten tickets high up and on the side of the auditorium (because I bought tickets too late to get in the main section of Zankel Hall), so I had a great overhead view to watch how the piece evolved. Watching from above, I could watch the two drummers get slowly out of phase, as one would hit the drum just an instant behind the other, and then further behind until they locked in a beat apart. It also made it totally apparent which parts of the sound were the result of the interlocking patterns, and which were embellishments on top of the patterns. Plus, it made it clear how they switch from the stick end of their sticks to the muffled soft end to get a different sound on the drums when they rebuild the pattern halfway through the first movement.
Once they moved on to the marimbas, we got to see all nine percussionists crowded around three marimbas. In fact, five were playing the same marimba at the same time at one point. And, again, being able to see the players on two marimbas phase away from each other made it clearer what was going on in the music. And I could also hear the overtones that sounded like voices that convinced Reich to add two female vocalists to accentuate those overtones. Neat effect. Later on, Reich whistles to add to the glockenspiel overtones. And as it gets even higher, he uses a piccolo player.
Anyway, it was a thrill to see the piece live in its entirety. I highly recommend seeing it if you ever get the chance. Like Music for 18 Musicians, it got a well-deserved instant standing ovation, and was a worthy conclusion to a fantastic weekend of concerts.
P.S. Thanks for the great comments on my customer service post - I want to pick up on that thread, but I haven’t had time; I was busy on Saturday afternoon prepping for my corporate finance class, concert Saturday evening, more work Sunday morning, Dale Chihuly at the Botanical Gardens Sunday afternoon, concert Sunday evening, then a conference call with my corporate finance group after the concert Sunday evening. Tonight was doing a few pages of writing for my Tuesday class, and another conference call finishing up corporate finance discussion. But I think I’m in good shape at the moment so hence the post.
