yes, more beauty!
bathing in musical delights against a backdrop of misery
Days before the inauguration, I suggested that, faced with an ascendant autocracy, we could still strive to fill our broken world with love, kindness, and beauty. Three weeks and a bloodless coup later, I stand by that argument. This isn’t to say that artists oughtn’t devote energy to civic or political activity, but merely to underline the claim that art has value, both in and of itself, and as an essential component of any society’s ecology.
A few weeks ago, I oversaw the 10th annual PIVOT Festival, a three-night affair held at Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances. Like many of you, I imagine, I’ve spent a good deal of the last month in a state of high anxiety. Many of our worst fears about this administration are coming to pass: the cruelty, the pettiness, the impunity. The regime’s aim is not only to cause pain and exact retribution, but to paralyze the populace. But for those of us who are not physically imperiled by the administration’s actions, it is possible to resist that paralysis. For me, music has played a central role in maintaining a sense of motion.
The festival opened with Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths, a response to Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, whose morbid heuristic finds twenty-six children— each named for a letter of the alphabet—meeting their demise in vividly concise couplets. Rather than setting Gorey’s text, Carla took it upon herself to dream her way into the psyches of these children. As she put it in aside during the concert, the piece is less about death than it is about the curiosity of children whose knowledge of the world is provisional. These kids’ hunger to better understand their surroundings, and the pulsing life Kihlstedt brings to that search, makes for a deeply moving piece of music. But it’s also a powerful antidote to the real world, in which willful lack of curiosity—about each other, about difference, about what it is that animates our political opponents—is partly to blame for the sorry state in which we find ourselves.
This was my first time conducting a substantial work other than my own, and I relished the dozens of hours I spent with Kihlstedt’s detailed score, a window into her endlessly fertile imagination. A singer, violinist, and composer with a keen ear for orchestral color, Carla speaks entirely in her own voice—but that doesn’t mean she lacks antecedents. In her music, I hear traces of Bartók, Bjork, Fiona Apple, Shostakovich, even Sondheim, and yet whatever has nourished her musically over the years comes out the other end sounding like no one else.
In the fourth movement, a response to “D is for Desmond, thrown out of a sleigh,” raucous, rapid-fire double-stops on the violin are accompanied by sleigh bells, punctuated by pointillistic accents from the ensemble, each plucked string or staccato piano note like a twig clipping Desmond’s ear during his fatal, breakneck ride; this is Prokofiev on Adderall by way of Joy Division. The next movement, “Death by Peach,” finds half of the ensemble swinging whirly tubes over their heads, generating a seasick drone over which Carla improvises a searching, lonesome tune on the violin, before piano and bass enter with a slow, pulsing chord progression full of sly chromatic moves, around which she sings:
There’s never too much of a good thing Oh there’s never too much for me
Indeed, there’s never too much of Carla’s music for me, but we must move on.
The following night, I was a lay audience member for Haley Heynderickx, the estimable Portland-grown singer-songwriter, who over the last several years has developed an ongoing collaboration with the beguiling brass quartet, The Westerlies. Heynderickx writes songs that are as witty as they are psychologically astute, and often achingly vulnerable as well. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a product of the Pacific Northwest, she is attuned to God’s presence in nature, and nature’s ineluctable presence in our lives. She writes with equal reverence about trees, birds, and insects, or a lover who make her “hands feel covered in moss.”
But what struck me most in Thursday’s set was Heynderickx’s guitar playing. She’s a rock-steady fingerpicker whose unconventional tunings and slippery harmonic language place her music just outside standard singer-songwriter fare. Backed by The Westerlies, a quartet of two trumpets and two trombones, the idiosyncrasy of her chord progressions was brought to the fore. At times, the brass mimicked her fingerpicking note for note, the guitar’s sharp attack offset by the Westerlies’ unusual warmth. The evening’s high point, for me, was an almost unbearably beautiful account of the Connie Converse tune “One by One,” which is rapidly becoming a standard after having been all but lost for decades. In Heynderickx’ pleading delivery, the song became an anthem for the essential loneliness of the human condition; as tears slid down my cheek, I wished that everyone in the world could hear it.
Finally, on Friday, Sandbox Percussion came to town to play Andy Akiho’s instant classic, 7 Pillars. As a percussionist in the Oregon Symphony said to me once: “there’s percussion music before Steve Reich; there’s percussion music after Steve Reich; there’s percussion music before Andy Akiho; and there’s percussion music after Andy Akiho.” Indeed, hearing Andy’s 80-minute masterwork performed live for a second time in a jaw-dropping performance by the Brooklyn-based quartet, I was left with the feeling that Akiho is indeed operating in his own realm. This is a piece on the order of Music for 18 Musicians, at once earthbound, tectonic, and interplanetary in its ambitions.
The “seven pillars” of the title refer to the work’s structure, a ring form comprising seven ensemble movements punctuated by four solos, one for each member of the quartet. The instrumentation—an array of traditional pitched and unpitched instruments, as well as metal pipes, glass bottles, and the like—is typical of Akiho’s work, which is informed by influences from around the globe. The piece is long, and there are moments that send this listener into a kind of meditative state. But I think that’s what Andy is after. And just when I find myself asking “can he sustain this?”, the piece somehow outdoes itself, a function of Akiho’s ample resources as a composer. One of his trademark moves is to establish a rhythmic motive that seems destined to settle into a groove, only to have it modulate before you can begin to tap your foot. At others times, you locate the underlying pulse, or the pulse locates you, and you find yourself bobbing along happily, the beat all the more satisfying for being hard won.
This was Sandbox’s thirty-ninth performance of the work, which they not only play from memory, but perform while executing choreography and lighting design. Cannily conceived by Michael McQuilken, the visual ambience derives from a series of battery-powered light bars, which can variously evoke the austerity of a church service or a throbbing warehouse rave. In an era of instant art and gratification, 7 Pillars, developed over a number of years in collaboration between Akiho and Sandbox Percussion, is a reminder of what can be achieved when artists take their time.
CODA
Between rehearsals and concerts for the PIVOT Festival, I was able to catch maestro Herbert Blomstedt on the podium, first in rehearsal, and then in performances of works by Schubert (the 5th Symphony) and Brahms (the 1st). Still energetic at ninety-seven, Blomstedt drew from the San Francisco Symphony a sound of unspeakable warmth and delicacy, eliciting long lines and architectural clarity. It’s something of a cliché to observe that younger conductors often struggle to pace large symphonic works: every forte is seen as an excuse for a terminal climax, rendering the meta-structure illegible. But the cliché persists for a reason. By contrast here—particularly in the Brahms—the nonagenarian brought a sense of ease to matters of pacing, which gave the sprawling symphony a sense of inevitability one encounters all too rarely.
The players obviously adore Blomstedt, who served as music director in San Francisco from 1985 to 1995. But it’s not just his laureate status that makes him beloved. Watching him work, his grace and generosity were impossible to miss. At the end of the concert, Blomstedt sat and faced the orchestra, applauding for several minutes and acknowledging individual players before turning to the audience and taking a modest bow himself. Here was a leader who understood that he was nothing without those who labor on his behalf. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they all labored together in search of a common goal, and Blomstedt, as much as any of the players, saw their collective efforts as inextricably linked.
Days later, the image of Blomstedt applauding his musicians returned to my mind’s eye. What a contrast, I thought, to this epochal moment in American history, in which the world’s richest man has effectively bought the U.S. government, and seeks to remake it (or strip it for parts), not to benefit those who toil on behalf of our society’s children, its elderly, its sick, or its institutions, but rather for his own personal gain, and for a small set of like-minded and obscenely wealthy men whose thirst for power cannot be slaked. In group music-making, a ruthless drive for power by a single individual seldom ends well. It begets mistrust, resentment, and tentative or fearful playing. It dampens morale. But the analogy carries only so far.
I don’t claim to have any special knowledge of how the Musk/Trump coup will play out, but any cogent observer can predict that it will not be good for workers. The culture war that has raged for the last several decades has been fought by opposing forces armed with competing strains of identity politics. But for all of their mutual contempt, what these movements have largely shared is a politics stripped of class consciousness. This has been to the benefit of those in power, whose unscrupulous hoarding of wealth has too often been obscured by a culture of scapegoating that finds working people pointing fingers at each other, even as inequality widens, and billionaires capture ever more wealth.
In Carla Kihlstedt’s 26 Little Deaths, curiosity provides the emotional engine. People of all political stripes, I believe, would do well to follow Carla’s lead, and to embrace curiosity—and a dose of Blomstedt’s grace—as a political tool: to ask themselves how we got here, and, rather than settling for easy answers that place the blame squarely on “the other,” to consider the ways in which we are all implicated in having set the table for this terrifying banquet of cruelty, grift, and impunity.
AHEAD
This Sunday, I’ll be playing Hegaxons with Caroline Shaw at the Laguna Beach Music Festival. The following weekend, I’ll be in Stamford, CT, for performances of my piano concerto, Heirloom, which will be played by my dad, alongside Orchestra Lumos, under the baton of Michael Stern. I’ll sing a handful of songs on the program, which also includes music by Mahler and Schubert.
As always, if you are a devoted reader of this newsletter, please consider opting for a paid subscription, which allows me to spend more time thinking and writing.
