1.9.07: Carnegie Snowball

Already I can sense I am being sucked into the prep for the four Carnegie Hall shows coming up in the first week of February. This week I’ve made the leap and have decided to add a small orchestra to the last 5 tunes of the Here Lies Love show. It’ll make a pretty spectacular last 20 minutes for that show, I think. Been thinking about adding these players for a while, but I needed to run the numbers and see if it was financially possible. Tony Finno is wrapping up some arrangements (some were already done for the German Century of Song dates in the fall.) We’re securing musicians, and my band is preparing for rehearsals beginning in about 10 days. I’m pretty excited about the show, as I am proud of the songs. They are also fun to play and sing — even though I’ll only be singing a third of them — Ganda and Joan will sing the 2 leads, which will be appropriate. I have already begun practicing the songs at home; some of the chords changes are tricky and I need to get comfortable with those. It’s a thrill to be able to do a whole concert of new material. Most of my life in concerts and tours I have gingerly mixed in new stuff with songs that are more familiar to an audience, which is what most bands and singers do. Occasionally we get overly enthusiastic and we play a whole new record, or most of it, on tour — our enthusiasm for the new material sometimes overwhelms practical concerns for the desires of our audiences. It’s a balancing act — we don’t want to give them only what they already know (and to be honest they’d get bored with that after a while, as would all of us) but one can only introduce new and surprising elements a little at a time so it becomes a mixing act. But in this case, as the material is all thematic, and it tells a story — of Imelda Marcos and Estrella, the woman who raised her — I might be excused for not playing the familiar favorites. Plus, if this ever gets produced theatrically there is no place for me performing in it, so this is a rare opportunity for me, too.

The drummer for The Knee Plays brass band playing on February 1st has just changed, so I’ll need to be sure he is up to speed. I’m going to begin speaking the texts for that piece around the house as well, as I haven’t performed the whole thing in many years.

Many of the acts for the February 2nd "Welcome To Dreamland" extravaganza happen to be touring together in the UK at the moment, so I will e-mail them and request that they think in advance how they might make an evening that will flow smoothly — ideally there won’t be any band or set changes, and each act will flow into the next with changing singers and rotating accompaniment. We’ll see. Good that a bunch of them are already traveling together.

I explained the concept of the final February 4th concert “One Note” to S&S last night over dinner. For non-musicians maybe it’s more confusing than I realize. I explained that an extremely wide variety of music has as its center a single tone or note. It could be an A or a Bb, but in many kinds of music — from Mississippi blues to contemporary classical — there is a constant tone, either played or implied, and all the other textures and melodies revolve around this tone. I used the example of Indian classical music, saying, “You know the guy that sits and plays the drone note and its harmonics on the tamboura? He never does anything else. He’s just there to provide the center point. It seems simple, but it’s not, and it’s critical that it be there. That’s the central tone and the soloist is free to improvise within the raga around that.” It apparently wasn’t a good example; maybe non-musicians — and S&S have seen and heard Indian classical music, I’m sure — maybe they don’t analyze what music’s made of when they listen the way musicians tend to do. Well, maybe this show will make that a little clearer. There are 3 acts in this high concept evening. Haale, a singer coming out of an Iranian tradition mixed with avant-post-rock stuff, has a central tone in many of her pieces, as does Camille, the French singer whose hit record Le Fil has a Bb going through the whole record, though you can usually only hear it in between songs, when it quietly connects them. Alarm Will Sound, an amazing local kind of chamber orchestra/band will round out that evening with instrumental pieces by G. Scelsi (Pranam II), electronica composer Aphex Twin (Cliff's) and a short drone-based early music work such as the Erart. So they’ll make a bit of a point with their contributions all by themselves. I’m hoping they can find a way to overlap with Camille and Haale, but we’ll see.

The late Italian composer Scelsi whose piece Alarm is playing is maybe the epitome of this one-note concept . He is most known for writing pieces in the 60s for orchestras and various ensembles that feel like giant single tones, cosmic emanations undulating and varying texturally. It’s far from static or boring — he does bend notes, add harmonics, and there are lots of dynamics. I’ve collected a few notes on this “outsider” classicist — thanks Alex Ross, Thomas B and LN. (LINK)

This has been an incredible opportunity to program this series of shows and be offered this kind of programming freedom. I sure hope I can pull it off. In the UK (Meltdown and All Tomorrows Parties festivals) and elsewhere in Europe these kinds of programming opportunities are not so unusual — but here, sadly, it is rare. This kind of risk-taking on this scale is exceptional. Ara Guzelimian is leaving Carnegie Hall soon, and he initiated some of the innovative programming changes there and at Zankel. I hope the creative initiative is carried on by his replacement.