The annual You Are Hear festival at San Francisco International Airport presented us with an opportunity to play this out. Today members of San Francisco’s Magik*Magik Orchestra performed beautiful quartets by Alexis Alrich, Dan Becker, Belinda Reynolds and Clark Suprynowicz and myself in a little enclave overlooking the security line in Terminal One.  Right between some busy escalators and a busy elevator.

You would think that as a composer I would find this setting intolerable for a performance of my music, but I loved it.   I loved the informality of it, and I loved the look on the face of the harried-looking woman clutching her People Magazine while she figured out what was going on after getting off the elevator.  I even loved the security announcements that repeatedly upstaged my very nuanced and contemplative piece.

The ambient noise and the bell on the elevator and the calls for Kim Anderson to pick up the white courtesy phone all became part of the music.  And, there was the added element of theater as I watched passers-by react in different ways to the incongruity of a string quartet playing next to the escalator leading to TGI Friday’s.  Most people were in a hurry and didn’t react at all.  Many paused and smiled briefly, and some stopped, transfixed, and sat on the floor.

I wonder how many of these folks would ever take time out of their life and buy tickets for a chamber music concert.

Here is part of my string quartet City Walks as performed by members of the Magik*Magik Orchestra today at San Francisco International Airport’s You Are Hear festival.

As previously mentioned here, Joseph Castaldo was my undergraduate composition teacher for four years. He and Seán Deibler were both tremendous personal and musical influences on me. As I also mentioned here in the past, Seán passed away last year, and this Choral Arts concert is being presented in his memory.

If you can spare 7 minutes, please watch the video below, where you can hear some excerpts of the work, and find out something about the two special musicians who brought it about in 1990.

The concerts are on March 13, 2010 at 8 pm (Paoli, PA) and March 14 at 6 pm (Philadelphia Cathedral). Visit www.ChoralArts.com for details.

I admire Minna’s restraint as an arranger here. Note the use of a sole bass drum as the entire percussion battery. The singers add color and depth without ever pulling focus from the front man. Enjoy!

I’m particulary fond of this passage in Scott’s article:

Conrad Susa’s music is of a fashion some writers may call accessible, a reprehensible term deserving a lifetime Sour Grapes Award on behalf of twitchy academic composers everywhere. Forget the term, and forget everything some well-intentioned sap has told you about contemporary music.

One is not required to understand the music, or appreciate it. It’s perfectly OK simply to enjoy it, let it be what it is and refrain from labels, -isms, -ibles, cubbyholes and pigeonholes. Susa offers the notion of “a transfiguration of an ordinary moment. And it puts a halo around a time of day and makes it blessed, something is conferred on it, or it confers something.”

Last week pianist Julie Nishimura, who participated in that 1994 performance, gave me the honor of including the piece in a concert celebrating her 20 years as faculty accompanist at the university.  This time she was joined by the wonderful clarinetist Marianne Gythfeldt, also of the U. Delaware music faculty.

Here’s a high-definition video of the performance.

American Standard is included on the British label Clarinet Classics’ CD Time Pieces – 60 Years of American Music for Clarinet and Piano

Check it out…

Here’s the segment containing my favorite part, known to people familiar with the piece as “The Seventh Door”. It’s basically the denouement, where we find out what Bluebeard’s been trying to prevent Judit from discovering. Below is the corresponding excerpt from my own translation of the libretto, mentioned in the previous post.

		BLUEBEARD
See them.
There are all of my late wives.
See my former wives.
See whom I loved.

		JUDIT
They’re alive.  They’re alive in here!

	(The three former wives enter through the seventh door,
	glorious and laden with crowns and jewels. One after
	the other, their faces pale, they proudly take their
	places opposite Bluebeard, who dips to his knees.)

		BLUEBEARD
	(With his arms outstretched as if he were dreaming.)
They’re beautiful. Beautiful.
Beautiful flowers.
They always were, and they still live.
It was they who collected my many treasures.
It was they who tended my garden.
It was they who made my empire grow.
All of it belongs to them.
All of it. All of it.

		JUDIT
	(Standing among the former wives as the fourth,
	doubled over and afraid.)
How beautiful they are. How magnificent.
I am bedraggled and worn.

		BLUEBEARD
	(Stands. Whispering.)
The first one I found at dawn,
In the beautiful, red-smelling dawn.
Every dawn belongs to her now.
Hers is the fine, red robe.
Hers is the silver crown.
Every dawn belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The first wife goes back.)

		BLUEBEARD
The second one I found at noon.
Speechless, flaming, golden noon.
Every noon belongs to her now.
Hers is the heavy robe of fire.
Hers is the golden crown.
Every noon belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The second wife goes back.)

		BLUEBEARD
The third one I found at evening.
Peaceful, languid, dusky evening.
Every evening belongs to her now.
Hers is the brown robe of sorrow.
Every evening belongs to her now.

		JUDIT
Oh, she’s more beautiful than I.  More splendid than I.

	(The third wife goes back.  Bluebeard stops in front of
	Judit, and they face each other for a long time.  The
	fourth door slowly closes.)

		BLUEBEARD
The fourth I found at night.

		JUDIT
Bluebeard, stop! Stop!

		BLUEBEARD
Starlit, black night.

		JUDIT
Stop.  Stop. I’m here still!

More YouTube trolling has turned up this footage of Zoltán Kodály himself interviewed on Hungarian Television in 1953. It was around this time that the ideas about music education he had been putting out in his writings for decades were just starting to be put into practice officially in Hungary’s education system.

I’ve never seen footage of Kodály before, or heard his voice, so this is a real gem for me. Below, I’ve translated the essential part of Kodály’s comments in the interview.

Yes, on a trial basis, the Ministry of Education has allowed about ten schools to teach singing six hours a week. So, we don’t have a lot of experience yet, but we’re seeing a surprising result in these schools. The students are improving in all areas. Their speech has improved; their writing has improved; their reading has improved. They’re learning to read earlier.

All of this goes back to music. For example, writing music down requires such precision that, if the written note is too high up or low down, it means something completely different. So, that influences their penmanship. Math is also going a lot better for them. Music involves constant counting, so it becomes useful to arithmetic as well.

But the most important thing is the effect it has on discipline. We complain about how hard it is to teach children discipline. Generally, in these schools things go a lot more smoothly. Ensemble singing gets them used to discipline and a feeling of responsibility.

Some of this may seem a little forced, but the epilogue is that Kodály’s notions on singing in schools were put into practice in Hungary in the 50′s and 60′s with the well-documented results that Hungarian students excelled in a number of areas as compared with those of other countries.

Briefly, the song attempts to deal with a particular event that’s important to the piece, but not particularly dramatic. Sondheim even calls it a “song about nothing” (which is very interesting in these post-Seinfeld times). What’s interesting about the song is the reciter’s setup line: “No one knows what happened in the treaty house.” The solution is to tell the story from three points of view: 1) An old man who remembers watching from the top of a tree when he was a boy; 2) That same old man as a 10-year-old boy; and 3) A soldier hiding under the floorboards of the treaty house.

The old man and the boy report what they’ve seen. The soldier reports what he’s heard. It’s a brilliant use of time and space in a theatrical moment.

The first video below is a very young Frank Rich interviewing Sondheim and his collaborator John Weidman in Sondheim’s house, presumably during the (extremely brief) run of the original Broadway production. In this video discusses in depth how the song came about and why he loves it so much. He also talks about the repetitive accompaniment figure, and how it came about.

The second video is a continuation of the first, where Sondheim accompanies the four cast members involved in a reading of the song.

Now, here’s the song as it looked in it’s full production.

Just a personal note about all this. I’m literally kvelling that YouTube has made it possible to see all of this. I had once before seen the second video, with the actors in Sondheim’s house, at a Sondheim-kook event here in San Francisco many years ago, but I did not know of the existence of the first part. I used to think I’d seen every Sondheim interview that exists on video. I also have to say that it’s really fun to see what the inside of his house looks like (or at least what it looked like in 1976).

This is Kodály’s “Esti Dal” (Evening Song) performed by the King’s Singers. It is possibly my favorite piece of choral music. Here’s my own translation of the text:

As I lay down for the night by the edge of the woods,
I pull my blanket up to my chin.
I put my hands together,
Thus imploring you, my good Lord

My Lord, grant me a place to stay,
For I’ve grown tired of wandering,
Of hiding,
Of living in a foreign land

My Lord, grant me a good night
Send me your blessed angel
To give courage to the dreams in our hearts.
My Lord, grant me a good night