#i wrote three repetitions of the motif that counts as a sequence even if there's only a couple of measures. c'mon.

[supercantaloupe]

getting real tired of turning in hw for counterpoint class where i have to compose something that sounds nice and follows proper voice leading, only to be told that what i wrote is wrong and bad because of some arbitrary rule that was never mentioned until now.

[goodbyenothanks-blog]

Week 2: ANGRY!

I’m mad! You’re mad! These composers are mad!!

...maybe?

I mean, there definitely is fire in each of these compositions, but it’s hard to really prescribe and attach an emotion onto a piece of music. Unless a composer tells us “Yeah, I’m UPSET” in relation to one of their pieces, we, as listeners, don’t really have the authority to say a composer was definitively “mad,” or a composition is “angry.”

We can, however, describe how a composition makes us feel. These compositions make me feel like the composers are angry. Sometimes, I think they’re absolutely livid. But were they really actually mad?

...maybe?

Shostakovich composing his 10th Symphony, 1953 (colorized)

Who knows? Maybe you don’t feel incensed at all upon listening to these songs. Maybe you think I just picked loud percussive dissonant songs and none of them made you feel like the composers wanted to punch a hole in a wall in the middle of composition. Well, that’s truly the beauty of music, especially classical music; we all can make our own interpretations of music, and we can all get emotional feelings from music, but no interpretation is actually wrong. Everybody is right. Especially me. I’m super right on this one.

I THINK THESE COMPOSERS ARE ANGRY!

1. Planets Suite (I. Mars, the Bringer of War) by Gustav Holst (Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra)

Ok, so I started the playlist with a really cliched piece. Sue me. But I think this movement exemplifies, in my mind, what angry music should sound like. It’s brutal, it’s dark, and sometimes it’s angry even in a quiet intensity. I think there’s a good reason this movement is as ubiquitous as it is; it’s just really really angry.

2. Symphonic Metamorphosis after Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (Mov. 1, Allegro) by Paul Hindemith (Performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra)

One of the harder things about developing this playlist was setting a barometer for what I felt qualified a piece or movement as being “angry” or “mad.” This movement was close to being replaced by either the second (”Turandot”) or the fourth (”March”) movement of the same piece, but I really love the dark and stormy beginning and ending to this particular movement. If you ever get the chance to listen to this Turandot and Weber’s Turandot, do so; the changes Hindemith made are pretty nifty. Also, the UMD Wind Ensemble is performing this piece on Friday, October 13 (!).

3. String Quartet No. 3 in F Major (Mov. 3, Allegro Non Troppo: Forces of War Unleashed) by Dmitri Shostakovich (Performed by the Taneyev Quartet)

And so, we have arrived in the Shostakovich block of this playlist. As you’ll come to learn (I guess right now), Shostakovich is my favorite composer. I’m not going to give away Shostakovich’s life story (that might be for another week!), but at the very least I can tell you the man went through quite a lot in his life, and he seemed to express the hardships and troubles he faced daily in his music. Shostakovich wrote this quartet in the midst of the constant repression of his works by the Soviet government, and this movement seems to reflect some of the anger he must have felt in having his art censored and repressed by his own government. Side note: there’s a really funky viola part in this movement!

Among the first results when you search Google Images for “funky viola.” I can’t say I’m surprised. What I can say is that I wish I could have this much funk.

4. String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor (Mov. 2, Allegro) by Dmitri Shostakovich (Performed by the Brodsky Quartet)

Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet is one of my two favorite pieces of music, period. Every single note, to me, speaks to Shostakovich’s personal tumult and his own conception of immortality through music.

The most common musical motif in this piece is the DSCH motif, or the notes D natural, E flat (”Es” in German musical notation), C natural, and B natural (”H”) in sequence. The quartet starts with this motif, and many of the movement’s themes are based around this motif. Shostakovich used this specific sequence of notes because it spelled out his name: Dmitri Schostakowitsch.

It is largely unclear the actual specific mindset Shostakovich was in when writing this quartet, but we do know that he wrote it shortly after facing severe muscle weakness and very reluctantly joining the Communist Party. Some argue that he was suicidal writing this piece; that much like Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, Shostakovich’s Eighth String Quartet was a suicide note. In this line of thinking, the quartet is autobiographical, and the constant repetition of DSCH is representative of Shostakovich screaming his name into eternity, hoping he will be remembered after he passes (this claim is somewhat contentious; our source on the matter is at times unreliable, and in this instance, refuted by Maxim, Dmitri’s son). Other analyses point to this quartet being anti-fascist, while still others see the quartet as a reaction to the destruction of Dresden, the city in which he wrote this quartet.

No matter the interpretation of the context, it seems clear to me that each movement encapsulates a different emotion; the second movement is the pure essence of anger towards a hopeless situation.

5. Symphony No. 10 in E Minor (Mov. 2, Allegro) by Dmitri Shostakovich (Performed by the Orchestra of the Moscow Philharmonic Society)

Otherwise known as the “Stalin” movement by our favorite somewhat disreputable source, Volkov. It’s easy to imagine that this movement represents Stalin, with its harsh brass lines, intense string melodies, and powerful percussive rhythms, so it’s not a surprise that a link between this movement and the Soviet leader has formed in the common conscience. Whatever the topic actually is, Shostakovich is absolutely livid about it. Get out of his way.

6. Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 (Mov. 4: In the Hall of the Mountain King) by Edvard Grieg (Performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra)

Alright, alright. This one is pretty cliched, too. You could even argue that the first half of the piece is more spooky and creepy than angry, and thus makes this movement ineligible for this playlist. But I think the second half is fierce and and angry enough, and plus this is a really convenient way for me to plug the UMD Repertoire Orchestra concert on the 18th (featuring this suite, Liberty Fanfare, and Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony!). It’s stretching the limits of “angry,” I guess, but it’s worth it for a little bit of advertising. (Plus I think it’s pretty angry.) I’ll make up for it with the rest of the playlist, I promise.

But as long as I like it, that’s what counts, right? Right?

7. Concerto Grosso No. 1 (Movs. 4 and 5: Cadenza and Rondo) by Alfred Schnittke (Performed by the New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra)

This piece took a while to grow on me, but it’s become on of my favorites in the string orchestra (plus harpsichord /prepared piano) canon. At times, the piece feels like a parody of baroque music, and other times it feels like an homage to it. The Rondo movement in particular is one of my favorites because it has the “Grandma Schnittke” character (attested to by the composer himself) playing a tango on the harpsichord. And it sounds just like you would imagine a tango being played on a harpsichord would sound: amazing.

8. Romeo and Juliet Suite: Montagues and Capulets by Sergei Prokofiev (Performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra)

Much of this movement of the suite is from the section of the ballet called The Dance of the Knights, but I prefer the suite version because of its unique opening. I’ve always felt like this piece feels like a march to the gulag or some other sinister or otherwise life-ending excursion. The theme of this movement in my mind does not match up well with my (very basic) conception of ballet, but I saw a recording of a performance and it actually looked pretty cool. Hey, did you know that the UMD Symphony Orchestra is (maybe? probably?) playing this movement and others from the various Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Suites on Friday, October 20th???

9. Alexander Nevsky (Mov. 5: Battle on the Ice) by Sergei Prokofiev (Performed by the Russian State Symphony Orchestra)

To close out this playlist, we have an adaptation of Prokofiev’s score for Sergei Eisenstein’s first movie with sound, Alexander Nevsky. Nevsky was a Grand Prince of Kiev in medieval Rus, and this particular scene in this “biography” details the battle between Nevsky’s forces and the Teutonic Knights of Livonia on a frozen lake on the border of modern Estonia and Russia. It’s an interesting watch, and the music written by Prokofiev could not better express the danger of battle, but also the calm uncertainty of the battle’s aftermath. Hopefully, the ending of this piece was able to resolve any pent-up anger from the rest of the playlist.

Whew! What a long post! I always tend to ramble when Shostakovich is on the mind. Thanks for sticking with me this far, and thanks for listening to The ƒ-hole on WMUC Digital. Check out the three performances I mentioned in this post, and don’t forget to tune in next week when I will play John Williams’ March from 1941!

[nofomoartworld]

Hyperallergic: When Art Refuses to Let Go

Sol LeWitt, “13/3” (1981), painted balsa wood, 31 3/8 × 31 3/8 × 31 3/8 inches, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Madeline Mohr Gift and Rogers Fund, 1982 (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)

In Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, the new exhibition at the Met Breuer, a relatively small painted balsa wood sculpture by Sol LeWitt — “13/3” (1981) from the Met’s own collection — sits inside a Plexiglas display case atop a white pedestal. Its label reads in full:

Upon first glance, 13/3 would seem to have little relationship to delirium. It is an abstract sculpture composed of identical modules assembled according to the simple plan documented in the title: a thirteen-by-thirteen grid from which three towers rise. LeWitt, however, did not consider his otherwise systematic work rational. Indeed, he aimed to “break out of the whole idea of rationality.” “In a logical sequence,” LeWitt wrote, in which a predetermined algorithm, not the artist, dictates the work of art, “you don’t think about it. It is a way of not thinking. It is irrational.”

The work’s balsa wood legs cast shadows that multiply and disarrange the modules. In addition, the modules act as frames that fracture the surrounding space. Overall, 13/3 creates perceptual effects both vertiginous and disorderly.

In her generous review of the exhibition for The New York Times, Roberta Smith recalls that LeWitt’s “irrationality and obsessive repetition was first noted by the critic Rosalind Krauss in a 1978 essay on the artist,” a text that, she tells us, was the inspiration for Delirious’s curator, Kelly Baum.

Smith is referring to “LeWitt in Progress,” published in the Autumn 1978 issue of October magazine. One of the more notable (and intrinsically ‘70s) aspects of the essay is the inexplicable (and, unless you check the footnote, uncredited) interruption of the text by passages from Samuel Beckett’s 1951 novel Molloy, namely the famous — and maddening — account of the first-person narrator explaining his systemic rotation of “sucking-stones” among the pockets of his greatcoat.

If the passages from Molloy, with their demented methodology, and Krauss’s intrusive introduction of them into the text, had affected the curator’s selection and arrangement of the art in the show, it is an influence that is hard to detect. Instead, the exhibition seems to be taking its cue from classic LeWitt, with innumerable variations on the box and grid, especially in the opening rooms, whose staidness and regimentation might at first glance (if not a second or third) persuade you that you are stepping off the elevator into the wrong show.

And in effect you are. If you want to see something truly delirious, go one floor down, while you still can, to Ettore Sottsass: Design Radical, with its orange walls and profusions of clashing patterns, candy-colored Roman ruins, ebullient forms, and ancient artifacts, not to mention Sottsass’s quintessentially Surrealist “The Societies on This Planet Bed” (1992), with its mock-cinderblock headboard and wavily top-heavy, gravity-defying pearwood footboard.

As Deborah Solomon commented in her perspicacious discussion of the show on the public radio station WNYC, Delirious “sorely under-delivers. It offers, in essence, a tame, academic view of a small swath of modern art – the Conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As most everyone knows, Conceptual art emphasizes ideas and philosophy over visual pleasure. The mind matters more than the eye.” And what is remarkable about this show is how visually flat-footed it is, despite the unquestionable quality of much of the art. The selection process seems to have adhered to a dictum of LeWitt’s that Krauss quotes in her essay:”Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.”

Piero Manzoni, “Achrome” (1961-62), bread rolls and kaolin on canvas, Collection Gian Enzo Sperone, courtesy of Sperone Westwater, New York

The harsh but foregone conclusion is that, for the most part, the show’s overly intellectualized premise and procedures yield beautiful but comparatively polite works by such habitually transgressive artists as Piero Manzoni, Lee Lozano, Robert Smithson, Bruce Nauman, Eva Hesse, Hannah Wilke, Martha Wilson, Lynda Benglis, Bruce Conner, Nancy Grossman, Peter Saul, and Jim Nutt, to name an even dozen, while the offerings that match the supposed temperature of the show — by Yayoi Kusama, Howardena Pindell, Claes Oldenberg, Paul Thek, Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé, Carolee Schneemann, Ana Mendieta, León Ferrari, Mira Schendel, Stan VanDerBeek, Wallace Berman, and the designated social-issues tag team of Nancy Spero and Leon Golub (it really is okay to show one without the other), to pick a baker’s dozen — feel isolated and forlorn. There is no connective tissue, none of the visual/thematic magnetism so evident in, say, the Museum of Modern Art’s recently concluded foray into the world of Robert Rauschenberg — an exhibition covering roughly the same period of time — that would draw you from one piece to the next or spin you around the room.

Interestingly, there are two works that succeed on distinctly different terms: the standard set by Rosalind Krauss in “LeWitt in Progress,” and the expectations aroused by the show’s title and even more pungent subtitle.

In her essay, Krauss states that LeWitt’s generational cohort viewed “a false and pious rationality [to be] the enemy of art,” and defines LeWitt’s “irrationality” in terms of his congenital inability to adhere to modes of logic in the formulation of his conceptual works:

His math is far too simple; his solutions are far too inelegant; the formal conditions of his work are far too scattered and obsessional […].

LeWitt’s offerings in this show don’t come close to “break[ing] out of the whole idea of rationality,” at least in terms of the visual evidence presented here. With all due respect to curatorial intent, I didn’t notice, as I studied “13/3,” the extent to which the shadows cast by the legs of the white balsa wood cubes “multipl[ied] and disarrange[d] the modules.” My attention was instead absorbed by the light glistening off the sculpture’s surface, the fierce repetition of the cubes, and the sublimity, even nobility, of their three-peaked structure.

Alfred Jensen, “Beginning Study for Changes and Communication” (1978), oil on canvas, The Baltimore Museum of Art, purchase with exchange funds from Bequest of Sadie A. May

The piece that is defined by a “far too simple” use of math, rife with inelegant solutions and scattered, obsessional formal conditions, is Alfred Jensen’s “Beginning Study for Changes and Communication” (1978). In this imposing, vertical oil painting, the words “Changes and Communication” are emblazoned at the very top of the canvas in black script on a white field, while the rest of the composition is taken up by multi-colored, zigzagging grids whose cells are jammed with numbers that increase by a count of two from the center out.

The wall label informs us that the painting’s concatenation of 16 grids “serves as a cosmic calculator of sorts, obsessively repeating a series of precise numerical progressions” in which an “underlying program based on odd and even numbers controls the reversal of color.” And yet Jensen’s rules need not be apparent to the viewer for the painting to pack a wallop. The numbering system evokes the runaway sequencing of a computer virus while the composition takes on the homeyness of a warm, quilted blanket, a disorienting sensation to say the least.

The painting’s odd numbering system may fall short of bumping up against the limits of reason, but it certainly lies outside the precincts of a “a false and pious rationality,” given that Jensen’s dazzling grid feels less like an ordering device and more like an instrument of aggression. If anything, it is the perfect encapsulation of the Greek-derived term “aporia,” or internal contradiction, which Krauss deploys to sum up LeWitt’s practice: “Aporia is a far more legitimate model for LeWitt’s art than Mind, if only because aporia is a dilemma rather than a thing.”

Anna Maria Maiolino, “In-Out Anthropophagy (In-Out antropofagia) from the series Photopoemaction (Fotopoemação)” (1973-74), film still from digital video, transferred from Super-8 film, color, sound, 8 min, 27 sec

A “dilemma rather than a thing” is also a perfect description of Anna Maria Maiolino’s Super-8 film (transferred to digital video), In-Out Anthropophagy (In-Out antropofagia) from the series Photopoemaction (Fotopoemação) (1973-74). Anthropophagy is a term for cannibalism adopted by the Brazilian Dadaist/Constructivist movement of the 1920s, Movimento Antropofagia, which the Met’s wall label fails to point out. Based on the hybridization of cultures, the cannibalistic metaphor is used to imply the ingestion of the Other.

Cordoned off in its own darkened room, so that it isn’t defused by the competing agendas of the other works in the show, In-Out Anthropophagy is a succession of shots centered on smiling, grimacing, jeering mouths — one adorned with black lipstick, another wreathed in cigarette smoke, and yet another sucking in and spewing out various lengths of string — while a musique concrete soundtrack quietly worms its way under your skin.

A photo of the string-stuffed mouth is the poster image of the show, positioning the film as the proper (if misleading) standard-bearer of the exhibition’s alleged deliriousness, and it is indeed the one work in which you can lose yourself, allow your mind to go blank as its absurdist images play over you. You may not know exactly what you feel when you reach the end (the repetitious motifs are as hypnotic as the variations in image and expression are disruptive) but you will undoubtedly feel as if you were taken somewhere you didn’t expect to go.

Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason continues at the Met Breuer (945 Madison Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through January 14, 2018.

The post When Art Refuses to Let Go appeared first on Hyperallergic.

from Hyperallergic http://ift.tt/2xBcQNs via IFTTT