About the Composer

This is what I found on the counter when I went in for lunch today. I swear I didn’t set this up:

Otherwise, nothing to report.

Last year I posted a little item about my discovery of this wonderful instrument. Since then, that post has become increasingly popular, and so it seems appropriate to offer some updated information. The site of the people in Switzerland who make the hang is currently down, as is the site of the Canadian distributor whom I’d linked to in my previous post.

The long and the short of it is that hang drums will not be available again until next April, and then it can only be purchased in person, which means a trip to Bern, Switzerland. More details can be found among the more recent comments to this blog post. There is a comment at the bottom, dated today, from the creators of the Hang:

After a busy summer, with lots of visitors from all over the world, we are closing our doors for our yearly spell of Research and Development. During this time we will be looking at new ways of working with the metal and its music.

Hanghaus will remain closed to the public throughout the winter. During this period we will not be receiving visitors or selling instruments.

Please contact us in April of 2007, at which time we hope to be in a position to show you the results of our winter�s work.

Felix Rohner and Sabina Sch�rer

Hangbuilders

Also, I’ve been advised of a Yahoo group dedicated to the hang, and there is now an entry in Wikipedia. (Many thanks to Saggio for writing me with this updated information.)

Dozing while my son watched Curious George early this morning, the following caused me to open one eye.

I wonder what the great scientists would have done if they were monkeys — without canolli.

So here’s StudyScores.com.

The idea is that, while Amazon.com and SheetMusicPlus may each have a pretty good selection, it’s pretty hard to find anything at either site unless you already know what you want. You have to sift through all the easy piano stuff and ColdPlay anthologies, etc.

StudyScores.com is organized around finding scores by composer, genre or time period. It’s basically Amazon’s catalog, so it’s somewhat limited, and there’s crazy stuff like putting the Mozart Requiem in the “Opera” bucket, and Sondheim’s Into the Woods under “Orchestra“, but it’s the cleanest I’ve seen so far as far as browsing scores online.

There are also sections for other books on music as well as accessories, like metronomes, etc. Pretty handy, actually. On Amazon, if I wanted, say, books on the Kodály Method, I’d have to sift through a lot of CDs and other search results. Here, you just search Kodály under “Books on Music” et voilà.

Lots of dirt-cheap Dover scores. Check it out.

San Francisco was deserted this weekend. We took advantage of the empty streets and spend a few hours around Union Square today. (Remind me to do this every Labor Day.) We did something very touristy that we never would have done otherwise: sit at the outdoor caf� whose tables take up the middle of Maiden Lane.

There’s an amazing jazz trio there consisting only of trumpet, bass and drums.

Now, as I’ve mentioned before, I don’t much like jazz. I don’t actively dislike it either, but it’s just not something I’m very interested in. I have to say that more often than not, I find it self-indulgent and/or competitive, and not much fun to listen to, but when it’s good it’s good. Occasionally I stumble into live jazz, and today I was really glad I did. These guys played with impeccable taste and sensitivity.

The bass player also sang (without amplification), and the trumpet player (without a mute) managed to accompany without ever overpowering him. In classical music we’re trained to avoid having the brass do much when there’s a soloist in the spotlight, but this player knew how to make it work. I always admire restraint. The drummer’s playing was also impressively delicate, tending more toward color as opposed to just keeping the pulse going.

Look for this trio next time your around Union Square on an afternoon. Apparently they play there a lot.

P.S. - Getting back to the deserted streets, in a tribute to M. C-, I just have to mention (not gloat) that within a second or two of thinking “Hey, I should look for street parking!”, I found a magnificent spot at Post and Taylor. Sometimes life is good.

How’s this for a sentence:

From Floyd Collins, where Southern string band music, contemporary folk song, and Feldman-esque introspection seamlessly blend with a dramatic sensibility totally informed by the tradition of the musical, to the quasi-operatic and completely infectious The Light in the Piazza, Guettel has shown himself to be a musical omnivore for whom the whole world is a stage.

Ahem.

Anyway, now on NewMusicBox.org there’s an interesting interview with theater composer Adam Guettel, whose latest musical The Light in the Piazza was recently televised on PBS, and is now making the rounds in a national tour.

I’ve been Guettel-curious for many years, but didn’t really start paying attention until a few months ago when I saw Piazza on television. Years ago I bought the cast album of Floyd Collins and listened to it exactly once. It wasn’t that it was bad, just that the style it was in (sort of a country, bluegrass thing) made it hard for me to appreciate. Also, it’s a total downer. I intend to listen to it again with fresh ears.

Piazza on the other hand is captivating from the opening harp glisses in the Overture to the final double bar. To me it sounds a lot like Sondheim, so I’m immediately attracted to it, for sentimental reasons alone.

Much has been made of how this piece resembles opera, and a variety of reasons have been offered for making this assertion, including the style of singing and the difficulty of the score. For me, it all comes down to one key component: a lot of the storytelling is coming out of the orchestra pit, which I’d say is the most important difference between what we call “musicals” and what we call “operas”. The accompaniments are contrapuntal, and by that I don’t mean they’re necessarily “busy”, but that the composer is thinking horizontally instead of vertically. In other words, the harmonic language is driven by inner and outer voices moving independently, whereas in a typical pop-oriented musical, it’s just a lot of block chords, really, and some filigree; a limited toolkit for storytelling.

As a disillusioned theater composer myself, I’m encouraged by some of the things Guettel has to say about this era, which I can only think of as “post-Broadway”. For starters, I hadn’t known this, but it’s mentioned that Guettel has relocated from New York to Seattle, which may signal a loosening of New York’s grip on the field.

Guettel:

I want to have an opportunity to develop things that are safer both in terms of the critics and economically, where the risks aren’t as high, which will allow me to stay fluid and take risks. There’s a guerilla spontaneity that you get from that. And theatre used to be produced like that.

So, now the future for “non-commercial” musicals seems to be in regional theaters, which is all right with me, and Guettel’s remarks seem to help legitimize that notion. This is good news for those of us composers for whom Broadway is no longer a “thing”.

Read the interview conducted by the American Music Center’s always-astute Frank Oteri.