#pekka kuusisto

[idontknowreallywhy]

Am loving the folk interspersed with Vivaldi Four Seasons. Some fun improv bits!

And the whole violin soloist conductor excites me also! He’s a charismatic chap.

Well worth catching if classical floats your boat… or even if not - the folky stuff makes it very accessible to a newbie (according to my other half).

(BBC Proms 16/07/2023)

[arcimboldisworld]

Joana Mallwitz: Dessner/Mahler - Tonhalle Zürich 05.07.2024

Joana Mallwitz: Dessner/Mahler - Tonhalle Zürich 05.07.2024 #pekkakuusisto #joanamallwitz #gustavmahler #brycedessner #saisonfinale #konzertjahr2024 #tonhalleorchester #zürich #review #rezension #endofseason #musicwasmyfirstloveanditwillbemylast

Was für ein grossartiges Finale dieser Saison in der Tonhalle Zürich. Selten habe ich so einen tollen und differenzierten Mahler gehört und schon lange nicht mehr ein derartig begeistertes Publikum erlebt: JOANA MALLWITZ – endlich in Zürich zu hören mit der Schweizer Erstaufführung von Bryce Dessners Violinkonzert (von 2021) mit dem grossartigen PEKKA KUUSISTO und Mahlers 1. Sinfonie – was für…

[a-silent-symphony]

Here are all the songs Nightwish have never played live (by Metal Hammer)

Symphonic metal giants Nightwish have recorded around 117 songs, with only 34 never seeing the light of day

If you’ve ever seen the Finnish symphonic metal giants Nightwish at one of their 951 gigs (at the time of penning this list), there’s a good chance you’ll have heard them play Nemo, Wish I Had an Angel and Dark Chest of Wonders. The band’s top three most-played songs all come from the 2005 album Once, but what are they not playing?

With the help of tour Bible and gig reviewer’s best friend, Setlist.fm, we found 34 tracks from the band that have never been played live. For context, there are around 117 recorded songs in their discography; “around”, because their later albums have frequently been accompanied by a second disc of purely orchestral versions, and because Tuomas Holopainen has a penchant for composing songs that go over the 25-minute mark and consist of multiple movements.

Some of these, like the Lappi (Lapland) quadrilogy, are treated as four separate tracks here per the album’s tracklisting, whereas songs like The Greatest Show On Earth are treated as one long song. Cover songs that are B-sides such as Where Were You Last Night, and the instrumental Imaginaerum soundtrack album, haven’t been included, nor has the second disc of Human. :||: Nature.

Now that we’ve explained our highly sophisticated scientific methodology, below are the songs that have never seen the stage lights. Is your favourite Nightwish song on here? Get ready to strap in, and nerd out…

Angels Fall First (1997)

Besides the recently released Human. :||: Nature, the band’s debut album is the one they’ve delved into the least when it comes to live shows: the aforementioned Lappi (Lapland) and the largely acoustic Nightwish demo have all been skipped over, as have the mellow Return to the Sea and the folky Nymphomaniac Fantasia.

Oceanborn (1998)

The release of Oceanborn saw the band start to tour outside of Finland, and with the 1998 record full of tracks like Sacrament of Wilderness and Passion & The Opera, you could forgive them for overlooking The Riddler and Nightquest. Though if you ask us, we might swap Walking In The Air for either.

Wishmaster (2000)

From the band’s second-most played record, there are just two songs they’ve consistently skipped over: the mournful ballad Two for Tragedy, and the histrionic Bare Grace Misery, a song with a delightfully melodramatic chorus that frankly deserves at least one live outing.

Century Child (2002)

2002’s Century Child and the addition of Marko Hietala’s powerful voice ushered in a new era for Nightwish and brought what would become a new setlist staple in the form of the stunning Ever Dream. It’s not surprising they favoured other songs over the slow, plodding Forever Yours and Ocean Soul, but we reckon that the sultry Feel For You should have its day in the sun at least once. Speaking of which…

Once (2004)

Once is big for many reasons: their most played album, their last with Tarja Turunen, and the one that gained them a significant new following outside of Europe; of all its songs, only one has never been played, and it’s the guitar-driven Dead Gardens.

Dark Passion Play (2007)

The Dark Passion Play tour was, and still is, Nightwish’s biggest tour to date, which is why it comes as little surprise that they’ve played nearly every song on the record with the exception of the sweet mid-tempo For The Heart I Once Had and the vitriolic Master Passion Greed.

With the latter widely understood to be a thinly-veiled jab at Tarja’s husband, perhaps the band felt that playing the song live would be taking things a bit too far, or that those bitter feelings are best left in the past.

Imaginaerum (2011)

With a feature film to promote and another massive world tour, only the instrumental Arabesque and the gentle folky ballad Turn Loose The Mermaids were missed off the setlist for the Imaginaerum shows. The latter, featuring a gorgeous violin solo by Pekka Kuusisto, definitely deserves to be heard in a live setting.

Endless Forms Most Beautiful (2015)

Enter Floor Jansen to take Nightwish into their Attenborough-metal era. Nothing says “I’ve got a National Geographic subscription” like writing an instrumental track called The Eyes of Sharbat Gula as tribute to the publication’s most iconic cover photograph, featuring the piercing green-eyed stare of a young Afghan woman. Of course, instrumentals are tricky to do justice live, so we’ll let them off for not giving this one an airing.

Human. :||: Nature (2020)

They band are only now touring their most recent record two-and-a-bit years after its release, thanks to a little something we’d probably rather not think about anymore, but so far they haven’t shown any love to the album opener Music (except as an intro played over the PA), Procession or closing track Endlessness. Watch this space.

Deeper Cuts

Like any band with as many albums and singles as Nightwish have, they bring out the odd B-side from time to time. Personally, we’d love to hear Floor have a stab at the ludicrous The Heart Asks Pleasure First, a sweeping, cinematic waltz from with some eye-wateringly high notes and beautiful violin outro.

They’ve also never played Away, Lagoon, Live to Tell The Tale, Once Upon a Troubadour, Sagan, Sleepwalker, The Wayfarer or White Night Fantasy. While there’s probably little chance of them playing Erämaan Viimeinen unless Floor really knuckles down in her language studies, perhaps Tuomas’ wife, Finnish singer Johanna Kurkela, could join in for the Dark Passion Play-era jig.

[nonesuchrecords]

"American composer, singer, songwriter, and sonic storyteller Gabriel Kahane uses a vast tapestry of musical styles to craft captivating works that illustrate and elevate the human experience," David Krauss, MET Opera Principal Trumpet and host of the Speaking Soundly podcast, says of his guest. They discuss Kahane's life and music, including his latest album, 2022's Magnificent Bird. You can hear their conversation here.

Gabriel Kahane kicks off a US tour with Council, his new duo with Pekka Kuusisto, in San Francisco on Friday, with stops in Oregon, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York City; they head to Australia in August.

[because-its-eurovision]

Do you have a favourite gig/concert/eurovision you've been to?

Hi!! 🖤 These three are the ones I can think of right off the bat:

Favourite Eurovision: Stockholm 2016

Of all the live shows I've been to so far (2015, 2016, 2018, 2022), Stockholm takes the prize by a large margin. Everything was neat, well organized, punctual and the staff of Globen was funny, friendly and knew what they were doing (cannot be said about every country😶) . The songs were great, postcards were cute and sketches funny, Måns & Petra were fantastic hosts, Love Love Peace Peace is my favorite interval act of all time (we saw Lordi!), Globen had a lovely athmosphere and audience, flag parade in the grand final still gives me chills and 1944 is my favorite winner of the last 15 years or so. Not to mention we met some very lovely people from Finland & Germany & Iceland in the front row every single night 😭💗 and ended up on the front page of Dagens Nyheter and accidentally gave an interview to some German radio show 😂

Favorite concert: Nightwish at Hartwall Arena in 2009

The final show of Dark Passion Play world tour. We got to the second or third row on Tuomas's side. The arena was packed and the audience started making waves all by themselves and cheering when we were waiting for the show to start :') Anette was at top of her vocal game that night, they played Dead Boy's Poem and Meadows of Heaven and Walking in the Air and Ghost Love Score and The Siren which was accompanied by violinist Pekka Kuusisto who is of course mind-blowingly talented, and Troy Donockley was there with his bagpipes, and they had of course large screens and pyros and fireworks and dress changes, and rainfall and snow and confetti and it was perhaps the best show I have EVER seen in my life and I miss that Nightwish so much 😭😭🖤

Favorite gig: Kotiteollisuus at Tavastia 2011

First of all, it's Tavastia. Made it to first row very easily. I used to be a big Kotiteollisuus fan around 2006-2011, not least because Tuomas Holopainen used to tour with them in 2005-2006 when Nightwish was on hiatus after breaking up with Tarja and before finding Anette. In any case I remember this gig because I had seen Kotiteollisuus in Helsinki at Virgin Oil Co. maybe six months earlier, and that was the worst show I had ever been to - they had returned from a short break, hadn't really practised the songs, were a bit too drunk and on top of that there were so many technical problems that they actually cut the evening short. They did later apologise and said how ashamed and sorry they were for underperforming at Virgin Oil. And since I did still like their music and knew how great performes they could be on a good day, I decided to give them one more chance because everybody has mishaps. I'm glad I did, because the show at Tavastia was full of energy and practically perfect, and they played Satu peikoista which nobody was expecting and I just love that song so much. I also managed to get the setlist. It is the only one I have that was written by hand backstage right before the show and not just printed out. It is one of my greatest treasures.

[tuulikannel]

People say what an achievement it's from Käärijä to get English speaking audience to sing in Finnish. Sure, not denying that, but I got to point out that Pekka Kuusisto got the audience of 5000 people or so in Royal Albert Hall to sing in Finnish too. XD

[kivikunnas]

Finnish Folk Music - Pekka Kuusisto Home Video - December 2017

[beardedmrbean]

The farmers' and forest-owners' union paper, Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, reports that some of the candidates in the race for the presidency are shifting their campaign focus to the capital region, as Sunday's voting approaches.

It notes that in particular, Jussi Halla-aho, the candidate of the Finns Party, and the Centre Party's Olli Rehn are popular in provinces and in rural areas where they have run high-profile campaigns.

However, during this final week before this first round of the election, both Halla-aho and Rehn are campaigning in the southern Uusimaa region and the capital, Helsinki.

The same paper notes that a record number of Finns have already cast advance votes in the first round, almost 1.9 million. That is about 44.2% of all eligible voters.

Kimmo Grönlund, professor of political science at Åbo Akademi, estimates that 1.2-1.4 million more votes will be cast on election day.

Grönlund believes that the final turnout will be somewhere between 73 and 78%.

"It's impossible to say exactly, but I'd bet on 75 percent," he told MT.

According to Grönlund, high turnout is likely to benefit the Finns Party's candidate Halla-aho.

"And possibly also Pekka Haavisto (Green). A large number of Finns are also likely to consider voting for Olli Rehn (Centre) or Alexander Stubb (NCP)," said Grönlund.

During advance voting, pensioners were the most active group. Finns aged 35-44 were the least active voters, with just more than 35 percent of that group casting early votes.

Worrying migrant development

The Southeast Finland Border Guard reported Thursday it had detained 18 people who were found crossing the border with Russia through the forest on foot, north of the Imatra border station.

According to the Border Guard, the group included men, women and children.

Ville Kuusisto of the communications department Southeast Finland Border Guard told Ilta-Sanomat that the individuals were in need of care when detained but he did not comment further on their condition.

Pia Lindfors, executive director of the Finnish Refugee Advice Centre NGO, told the paper that she finds the news very worrying.

"I hope this does not become more common, because crossing the land border is always dangerous, and in these weather conditions definitely very dangerous," she said. "You only have to imagine going into unknown terrain in a climate that is not really suitable."

The journey is also dangerous for men, she points out. However, Lindfors is most concerned that children, who are always particularly vulnerable, are now involved in these irregular border crossings.

Munitions plant expanding

Friday's Iltalehti carries an article about the Nammo Lapua Sastamala factory, Finland's only facility that produces artillery shells.

Nammo is half-owned by the Finnish company Patria and the Norwegian state. Nammo's main customer in Finland is the Finnish Defence Forces.

None of its output, the paper notes, goes directly to Ukraine. However, demand for the 155 mm artillery shells it manufactures has exploded since the start of Russia's attack on Ukraine. The EU's target is to supply Ukraine with a total of one million artillery shells by the spring.

IL says Sastamala needs new factory space and more workers, with plans to increase production by a factor of five this year.

The company is now in the process of investing 10 million euros in its plant, with the possibility of more funds from the EU in the spring.

Poor puffin

Over the past week, there have been several sightings in Finland of Atlantic puffins, a bird very rarely seen in this country.

The North Karelian newspaper Karjalainen reported on Thursday afternoon that a woman in Joensuu who saw one in her yard called the police to rescue it, but to her shock and dismay, they shot it instead.

The incident led to outpourings of rage on Finnish social media.

Police defended their decision by saying that they made an assessment of the bird's condition, determined that it couldn't fly, and decided it should be put down to avoid suffering.

In a follow-up, Aki Arkiomaa, executive director of Bird Life Finland, the national umbrella organisation for birdwatchers, told Helsingin Sanomat that more information would be needed before judging whether or not the police acted correctly.

According to Arkiomaa, one possibility is that the police misinterpreted the bird's behaviour. Puffins are sea bird that cannot take off from the ground after landing on snow – a fact that may have given the mistaken impression that it was injured.

Phone care in the cold

It's happened to most of us.

Your phone is fully charged when you go outside. You are tapping away in freezing weather and suddenly you realise that the battery indicator is showing a single digit, or the phone even just turns off.

The simple explanation for this common winter problem is that the battery simply doesn't like the cold, writes Aamulehti.

"The battery has to work harder to produce the power your phone needs as more energy is wasted. If the battery can't produce that power, the phone shuts down," explains Pekka Peljo, Professor of Materials Engineering at the University of Turku.

Temperatures even just a few degrees below freezing can slow down your phone, but there are differences between phone brands and battery types.

The battery charge percentage of some phones can drop to nearly zero when you're outdoors, but bounce back up in no time after you plug it in.

"It depends on how the battery charge status of the phone is determined. It probably tracks how much power is coming out of it and correlates with its state of charge. If the power output is suddenly much lower when the battery is cold and isn't working as well, then it's basically a measuring error," says Peljo.

He recommends letting your phone warm up inside for a while before plugging it into the charger.

You can also have some influence on the phone's performance in sub-zero temperatures.

"You should try to minimise power consumption and keep the battery warm by keeping it close to your body," Peljo advises, and further suggests switching on the power-saving mode when outdoors.

[theplushiefox]

Bringing back this jam from almost 4 years ago (wow), I've been using it as my wake-up alarm since it's conception lol

It's just nice to wake up to qwq

Total credit to Pekka Kuusisto and Samuli Kosminen for composing the beautiful soundtrack of Moominvalley!

So I took Snufkin’s tune from the beginning of the episode November from season 2 (it shows up some other time too I guess)

and uh

composed

something.

Idk, feel free to use it, but if you do, please reblog! Thanks! (you know, kindness spreads like wildfire, you just got to strike the match)

[pastdaily]

Pekka Kuusisto With Vassily Sinaisky And The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic In Concert - 2012 - Past Daily Mid-Week Concert

https://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Netherlands-Radio-Philharmonic-2012.mp3 Over to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw this week for a concert by the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, conducted by Vassily Sinaisky and featuring Pekka Kuusisto, violin – the concert was recorded at the Concertgebouw Summer series, June 29, 2012. The concert begins with Sir Edward Elgar’s In The South – and they…

[citylifeorg]

Pekka Kuusisto and Nico Muhly (27th) & The Knights with Pekka Kuusisto (28th) at Caramoor

Top: Pekka Kuusisto (photo, Maija Tammi) andNico Muhly (photo, Heidi Solander); bottom: The Knights (photo, Shervin Lainez) Caramoor presents two evenings in late July featuring Finnish violinist, conductor, and composer Pekka Kuusisto and celebrated American composer and pianist Nico Muhly. On July 27, Pekka Kuusisto, a “one-of-a-kind” (Globe and Mail) violinist, teams up with Nico Muhly on…

[euriosaparisi]

Pekka Kuusisto plays Tchikovsky Violin Concerto and encore BBC Proms 2016

Buenas noches

[gabrielkahane]

A Brief History of Magnificent Bird

In the aftermath of a year off the internet, I’ve become low-key obsessed with Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, in which he argues that the movement of a gift—or a work of art—from one individual to another helps to define the community in which the gift or artwork circulates.

Today, my fifth album, Magnificent Bird, is released into the world, and it is, for me, most fundamentally, an expression of my community. There are no hired guns: only musicians whom I cherish as much for their humanity and friendship as I do for their artistry. So I thought it would be appropriate to mark the unveiling of this project with a little history & chronology of a dozen-and-a-half musical relationships that have made this record possible.

1989 - At our respective homes in Rochester, New York, Ted Poor and I play boogie-woogie duets: me on piano, Ted on drums. We’re also on the same Little League team; he often plays first-base, I’m over at shortstop for a quick 6-3 on a ground ball to the left side of the infield. Twenty-five years later, he plays drums in The Ambassador, my first piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Ted was so incredibly generous on this project, recording 3,287 versions of “Hot Pink Raingear” before we arrived at the approach heard on the album. His sense of rhythm lights a room, and he is my oldest friend — not just on this LP, but in life.

2006 - The Nickel Creek bus drops Chris Thile (as well as Sean and Sara Watkins) at my parents’ house in Santa Rosa, California. We start playing music at around 1am. Fifteen years, hundreds of cups of coffee, and dozens of alcohol-fueled arguments about the “correct” approach to rhythm in the music of J.S. Bach later, Chris is one of my closest friends, and also a hero. We all know what a monster, once-in-a-generation talent he is. What is maybe less apparent is the insane work ethic that undergirds his seemingly effortless command of his instrument, an ethic I got to witness up close while opening some 60 shows for Punch Brothers. The only person whose approach to rhythm is as continually mind-boggling as Ted Poor’s is Chris’, hence the mando-drums on “To Be American.”

2007 - I meet Alex Sopp through her new music ensemble, yMusic. I will forever be spoiled by the fact that she’s the first flutist I work with: her tone singing, her sense of phrase totally intuitive and poetic. Over the course of fifteen years, we share with each other many, many, many photographs of our cats. Her collaborative spirit was evident in her work on this album: for “Hot Pink Raingear,” I asked if she could play a synth riff on some “messed up whistles and flutes,” and she sent back, thirty-six hours later, fourteen different tracks of various antique wind instruments. I wish I had kept all of it for you to hear, but sometimes less is more.

2008 (part one) - I hear Elizabeth Ziman sing at a tiny cafe in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I am instantly in love with her voice and songwriting. I would happily listen to her sing tax returns or technical manuals or the transcripts of municipal water supply hearings; she is magic. Somehow, after an almost fifteen year friendship, this is the first time we’ve worked together on record; her singing on “Sit Shiva” is, for me, what makes the song.

2008 (part two) - Outside a rural elementary school in Switzerland, I am approached by a young man, who, seeing my banjo case, announces that he “plays folk music, too.” It’s Paul Kowert, who that autumn would join Punch Brothers as its bassist. Years later, we travel around the country while I’m opening for his band, playing chess over coffee, getting lost on long walks in unfamiliar cities, talking endlessly about music. He is a one of the most supremely gifted bass players of our time.

2009 - Holcombe Waller and I are set up on a West Coast co-bill tour by a friend who warns me that Holcombe is extremely flamboyant. I write to Holcombe, and in a postscript, mention—sort of in jest, sort of not—that I’m 18% gay. He writes back, “I’ve worked with less.” A friendship is born. Need help understanding obscure financial instruments or fledgling cryptocurrencies? Ask Holcombe. Need a quick tutorial on the history of energy policy in the Northwest? Ask Holcombe. Need the most sublime falsetto (but also booming bass-baritone) you’ve ever heard? Ask Holcombe. Happily, we now live less than a mile from one another in Northeast Portland. Holcombe, can I borrow some sugar??

2010 (part one) - I’m playing a gig in upstate New York accompanied by a string quartet. At soundcheck, one of the violinists mentions that she “writes a little music, too.” Next thing I know, that kind and quiet musician—Caroline Shaw—has won the Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, we email with eccentric frequency about Lunchables (can’t remember how that one started), and have occasionally appeared together in concert. What I admire most about Caroline is the absolute honesty of her music. Many of us work for years building up artifice, then tearing it down. Not Caro: she knows, and seems always to have known, who she is. When I first heard her overdubs for the record, I cried.

2010 (part two) - Casey Foubert and I have known each other for a few years when he begins to mix my second album, Where are the Arms. Working on that record reveals to me the uncanny depth of Casey’s musical knowledge, spanning, as it does, obscure 60’s piano-driven folk-pop to free jazz. One of the most versatile and multivalent artists I’ve ever encountered, Casey is the only musician who has played on all of my records (with the exception of Book of Travelers, which is just me). He’s also a profoundly curious person, and a super generous spirit. He now lives with his family in rural Illinois, and I love that there’s a bit of that energy on this album.

2011 - It’s a dark and dreary evening in Peterborough, NH, when I find myself sitting at the piano in a little cabin, singing standards with a young woman named Amelia Meath. We keep in touch here and there, and then a few years later, I hear a band called Sylvan Esso and think, that voice sounds familiar! Over the last few years, Amelia and I have had long, deep phone calls about everything from literature to TikTok to systemic racism to the music biz. She encouraged me, while we were working on “Linda & Stuart,” to embrace the cognitive dissonance between the cheerful groove and the sense of grief that pervades the lyric.

2014 (part one) - Driving from the Denver Airport, Chris Morrissey tells me that he does a great BBC newscaster impression. I immediately try to one-up him. (Mine is better.) Every year on his birthday, to commemorate my small victory of superior British dialect, I leave Chris a three-minute voicemail in a preposterous BBC voice. Chris is a complete musician, and a complete human. One of the things that drew me to him when we first met was how emotionally available he was. So glad he’s on this joint.

2014 (part two) - A recording studio in New Jersey. yMusic has a new cellist on the session. We get through one take of my arrangement of Beck’s “Mutilation Rag,” for the Song Reader album, and Gabriel Cabezas, maybe 22 years old, says, without a trace of attitude or ostentation, “oh, this is a twelve-tone row, right?” What a punk! One memorable night years later ends drunkenly at my house, where we cook both carbonara and cacio e pepe after a long conversation about how the best pasta sauces are emulsified using the cooking water.

2014 (part three) - I’m not sure that the classroom at the fancy private school in Laguna Beach, California, was where I first met Joseph Lorge, but it sticks out in my memory for some reason. He’s there with a friend of his, a songwriter, who performs two beautiful songs as part of a master class that I was giving. By 2017, Joseph has become indispensable to my process as a studio artist. He records and mixes Book of Travelers, and acts as mix engineer and house psychologist during this project. He is tall and shy, quietly hilarious, with a heart of gold. His ears and imagination are astonishing; without him, this record would not exist.

2015 - In the lobby of the newly opened Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, Minnesota, I am accosted by a blonde man with a cheerful face and intense eyes. “I have a question to ask you,” he says, betraying the slightest hint of a Northern European accent. “On your song ‘Charming Disease,’ from your album Where are the Arms, is it three clarinets or one claviola that appear suddenly in the second verse?” This was Pekka Kuusisto, a true magician of the violin, and one of my dearest friends. I have fond memories from 2019 (“the before times”) of walking down to the water—his house in Finland sits against the Baltic Sea—in nothing but towels, freezing our asses off before retreating to the warmth of his wood sauna, which I guess is what Finns do in February? When his violin enters halfway through the tune, I feel the chill of that numinous, Scandinavian wind insinuate itself into the harmonic field.

2016 (part one) - St. Paul, again! Sam Amidon and I have known each other for a decade by this point, but it’s over burritos at Chipotle that we bond for real, talking about our shared love of Herman Melville and obscure jazz records. If I’m reading a great book, Sam is often the first person I want to tell. In a world brimming with highly individualized voices, Sam’s artistry—from his singing voice to his banjo and fiddle playing—stands out for its idiosyncrasies and emotional depth.

2016 (part two) - On a tour bus somewhere in Montana, Andrew Bird and I get to talking about how folk and orchestral music can coexist. A few years later, we work closely on Time Is A Crooked Bow, a cycle I orchestrated comprising six of his songs. Getting to hear him sing every night was a real master class. Andrew has magnetic rock star energy, but he is also a kind, gentle, quiet and deeply thoughtful soul. And no one plucks the violin quite the way he does. When I wrote the riff he plays on “To Be American,” I knew it had to be him.

2017 - From time to time, I head uptown to hear the NY Philharmonic. One evening, I’m hypnotized by a sound—serene, expressive, otherworldly— emanating from from the principal clarinet chair. Eventually I muster the nerve to write to Anthony McGill and tell him what I huge fan I am. It’s thrilling when he tells me that he knows my music and would love to do something together. And now, at last, we have.

2019 - Nathalie Joachim sends me mixes of her album Fanm D’ayiti. It is so damn gorgeous. We’ve been casual acquaintances for five years at this point, but now I am *a fan*. Over the course of the pandemic, we talk more frequently, counseling each other about the various challenges of being an artist in these confounding times. She joins the Creative Alliance with the Oregon Symphony, where I serve as Creative Chair. This June, the Oregon Symphony will present the world premiere of an orchestral song cycle drawn from Nathalie’s album that made such an impression. The combination of Nathalie & Alex on the title track, along with Holcombe’s vocal feature, has me feeling that my cup truly runneth over.

Appendix A:

Tony Berg is a joyous contrarian whom I’ve known for a dozen years, during which time he has shown me only generosity of spirit, resources, and wisdom. He co-produced Book of Travelers (which we recorded at his old home studio in LA), and was an indispensable early sounding board for the songs on this album. And now he’s got a dog named Bing-Bong. How about that?

Having said all that, may I remind you that tour begins on Monday?

The workings of the music business are murkier than ever, but the bottom line is that even an art-house oasis like Nonesuch can’t afford to keep putting out interesting music if no one is paying for it. I’m so grateful to all of you for your continued support, and hope you’ll consider picking up a copy of the record in one format or another if you’ve not yet done so.

All my best, and hope to see you at a gig in the next few months,

Gabriel

[emvisual]

El tercer sábado de Agosto se celebra el concierto de Prinsengracht. Los canales abarrotados de gente en barcos para asistir a un concierto de clásica. Este es el de 2019. Este año por el COVID no se celebró al aire libre.

El violinista finlandés Pekka Kuusisto, el conjunto holandés Camerata RCO, el barítono holandés Raoul Steffani.

Hay que estar ahí para saber lo que se siente.

https://youtu.be/9YXIZ_4ajEs

[sinceileftyoublog]

Gabriel Kahane Interview: Ethic of Love

Photo by Jason Quigley

BY JORDAN MAINZER

During a time when the only safe way for us to connect with each other was in the digital realm, Gabriel Kahane was offline. 

In late 2019, the singer-songwriter and composter decided to run an experiment: spend a year away from the Internet and see what happens. Like many of us, Kahane was addicted to his phone, whether on social media, reading the news, or constantly taking in podcasts or records. He was curious to see how his life and maybe even his brain changed as a result of new habits. The curiosity didn’t come out of nowhere, either; Kahane had always been up for some sort of technology-less adventure of diaristic discovery, like the time he took an almost 10,000-mile train trek without his phone the day after Donald Trump was elected President, a journey that eventually make up his 2018 album Book of Travelers. Perhaps his Internet-less year would inspire another record.

We all know what happened in March 2020. A few days before the shit hit the fan with COVID, the then-NYC-based Kahane traveled to Portland for what was supposed to be one week. He never returned and now lives there. Despite being forced to lock down, Kahane for the most part stuck to his promise to himself to refrain from logging on. In the middle of spending time in a new city and finding composer work, he tried to write some songs about his perception of the world at large, an experience he told me over the phone last month was “paralyzing.” Finally, during his final month offline, Kahane started a new experiment: Write a new song every day. “It forced me to write about smaller, more modest things instead of attempting to write the Great American Novel in every song,” he said. Finally, from that experiment, came Kahane’s new album Magnificent Bird, out March 25th on Nonesuch.

The 10-song album is very much a collaborative effort, and yes, Kahane is aware of the irony that it wouldn’t have been possible without the technology to record remotely during the pandemic. He doesn’t feel the need to justify the contradiction; after all, it’s better to be safe, and this was an easy way for Kahane to interact with some of his good friends who were busy with their own projects. Remarkably, many of the songs sound like they were recorded live, all musicians in the same room. Casey Foubert’s drums and Alexandra Sopp’s flutes and whistles bolster “Hot Pink Raingear”. Pekka Kuusisto’s gorgeous violin provide a contrast in depth to Kahane’s stark piano and spacey synthesizers on “The Hazelnut Tree”. Caroline Shaw provides harmonically perfect backing vocals on “To Be American”, which also features Americana and indie rock giants like Andrew Bird and Chris Thile and Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers. And Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath duets with Kahane on “Linda & Stuart”, a tune about an elderly couple in isolation during COVID.

As you might expect, Magnificent Bird is riddled with references to Kahane’s year offline juxtaposed with a world filled with instant access to goods and services. “The trucks judder down city block / Young men bobble boxes full of almond milk and cell phone chargers / Packed up in the skin of dying trees / Baby, if that ain’t progress / Then what’s it gonna be?” Kahane sneers on “Hot Pink Raingear”. But he avoids self-righteousness with genuine reverence for the natural world. Whether paying tribute to his favorite arborous giant on “The Hazelnut Tree” or straightforwardly lamenting natural disasters on “To Be American”, Kahane recognizes that the physical world as exists in front of us is changing rapidly independent of any individual’s actions. He can, however, better himself by recognizing his faults. On the stunning title track, he admits to feelings of professional jealousy and explicitly references his Internet-less year as a means to avoid feeling envious. If the rest of us were spared from in-person FOMO during the pandemic, Kahane spared himself from, well, almost everything, and he’s critical of himself for doing so.

Magnificent Bird ends with “Sit Shiva”, which references one of the few times Kahane bent the rules, to attend a virtual shiva for his maternal grandmother. Over swirling electric guitars and synthesizers, acoustic guitars from Foubert, and backing vocals from Elizabeth Ziman, Kahane tries to make sense of something so absurd. “My mother, describing her mother / Fought back tears, it’s weird, I thought, / The intimacy of seeing someone try / Not to cry in close-up on a screen.” The interplay between the tangible sight of a tear and the virtual barrier of a screen has likely mucked up the emotions of similar experiences for a lot of other folks throughout the pandemic. You can’t help but think of folks who weren’t able to say goodbye to their loved ones in person because of overcrowded hospitals with contagious COVID patients. The image of a virtual shiva, Kahane unable to fully understand the experience but rolling with the punches, is a microcosm of what Kahane refers to as an “ethic of love.” While the idea comes from the Civil Rights Movement and leaders like Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr. persisting in the face of those who didn’t recognize their basic humanity, Kahane uses it to adopt a semblance of empathy, whether on a days-long train trip with total strangers or interacting via screens with loved ones.

Read the rest of my conversation with Kahane below, edited for length and clarity. Catch him at Constellation on May 21st.

Since I Left You: When I first listened to Magnificent Bird, what immediately stood out to me was that it was pretty short in terms of runtime, and each song was like a vignette. Were you going for that feel?

Gabriel Kahane: I can’t say I was going for that, but...there was more stream of consciousness in the lyric-writing, which is something that interests me. In a weird way, some of these songs have more of a journey, even though they’re really short, than some songs I’ve written in the past that drop you into a moment and evoke a mood or a feeling. On earlier records, I’m using the three-minute song to tell a story that has a certain amount of plot. In these songs, there’s often some kind of psychological movement that happens where I start in one place and end up somewhere else. I think that’s a function of the diaristic writing process and coaxing these free-writes into lyrics.

These songs are definitely vignettes of my life here, and the world creeps in along the edges. There was also a deliberate attempt to reset after writing a big orchestral piece--emergency shelter intake form, a deep dive into inequality through housing issues and homelessness--around the release of my last record. I was running the risk of being pigeonholed as the “issues, ideological composer guy” but also feeling that there’s a real danger in the notion that beauty for beauty’s sake is a luxury or a privilege, when in fact, I think quite the opposite. That notion is kind of classist. There’s a great essay by the poet and feminist Audrey Lorde called Poetry is Not a Luxury that I had been thinking about a lot in terms of who has access to what kind of art. In a time as divided as the one that we’re living in, we’re so often closed off to each other’s experience, it feels like there’s something kind of radical and quite political in reaching someone’s heart. There’s a weird way in which the movement towards writing about domestic life, which seems anti-political, feels really political to me.

SILY: I’m reminded of the New York Times going into Midwest diners trying to find real America. It’s through such an Internet lens, whereas your project seems more genuine.

GK: It’s funny you mention that, because that sort of “man in the street,” the journalistic nickname for that kind of reporting of, “Let’s go into the diner and interview people” is kind of what was happening with [Book of Travelers] and the election in 2016. This is the antithesis of that.

SILY: You write on Magnificent Bird about learning about news through the newspaper, without the immediacy of the Internet. I read that you still don’t really use your smartphone. What do you still use the Internet for, and what do you not use it for that you used to use it for?

GK: The biggest practical shift is that I got rid of my smartphone. That was partly out of self-preservation, because I was pretty addicted to it, and some of those addictive tendencies have returned. I’m posting very little to social media--maybe once or twice a month--but I’m still looking at it, which actually feels worse. I feel like I need to be completely off of it or give in. I’m still mostly getting my news from the newspaper and radio. One of the big things I was reminded of in my time offline was that even the 24-hour news cycle is a construct. We talked about the Twitter news cycle being fake and constantly self-correcting as things that are reported turn out to be untrue. But as my news intake slowed down to at least once a day, I started to see what was being reported on a 24-hour cycle was even different [than the day before], particularly during the final year of the Trump administration. There was a lot of palace intrigue, stuff that’s not really worth anyone’s time to read about. Nothing to do with policy or the quality of anyone’s life, just salacious reporting about the disrepair and disfunction. There is a whole kind of genre of journalism that’s, “Let’s take you behind the scenes of what’s happening in Washington,” and I now have very little tolerance for that.

The signal moment for me in thinking about the news specifically was that I didn’t look at any online news for the first 10 months of my time offline, and the first time that I broke my rule--there were moments throughout where I broke the rules or bent the rules for various reasons where I felt like I didn’t have another option--was when there were horrific wildfires within 30 miles of Portland. I started looking at the local news online to look at the air quality and whether the fires were going to burn our house down. What was humbling about that was, in retrospect, how much I obsessively kept up with news that had very little impact on my life. I was reading it as much as entertainment even though I was telling myself for a long time that it was a sort of activism, even though it was just armchair activism, so not activism at all. That was a big shift for me in recognizing the advantages that I have in my life culturally and economically have made it such that I’ve often been at a remove from the most destructive things government is doing because they don’t have an impact on me. They obviously have an impact on people I care about, like everyone.

The other big shift, which was more psychological than having to do with specific technologies, was realizing that when I had a smartphone, I always felt like I had to be taking something in. I was always in input mode, listening to a podcast or the record or the news. Less and less was I able to just be with my thoughts and imagination. It took several months of being offline to realize I was trying to do that even when off the Internet, trying to find ways to constantly feed myself information. Even with reading, I realized I needed to spend some time not taking things in. We’re conditioned because there’s such a glut of information, and all these different companies and interests trying to buy a slice of our attention, to resist that is a project unto itself.

SILY: Like when you sing on “The Hazelnut Tree”, “The sun on the hazelnut tree / That’s something I still believe.”

GK: That was the first song I wrote for this project, on October 1st. There’s also a line in that song, “That’s more information than I need.” There’s also something going on there, feeling like information overload. In one way, it’s a privilege to step back from that, but in another sense, part of what plagues American politics is that a huge swath of the electorate is working 80 hours a week for basically slave wages and can’t pay attention to the news because they’re trying to make ends meet. I was never tuning things out. I’m inherently too interested in the world and the idea of democracy that I would never be able to check out. But there’s a question of how granular you have to get in the degree to which you’re paying attention in order to be an informed citizen.

SILY: I like the line on “To Be American”, “One criminal’s soft defeat can’t change the fact that we’re broken.” Are you basically saying, “Trump being removed isn’t going to fix everything?”

GK: It’s funny because I wrote that song in the second week of October. The reason I took the train trip after the election in 2016 is the feeling that Trump was more a symptom of systemic rot in the country than the problem. There are so many ways of talking about that. The challenges that we face are so much greater. Obviously, one person can do a huge amount of damage to the public trust, but his genius was tapping into a real kind of rage and twisting it in the ugliest possible direction. He’s not the only aspiring authoritarian: We’re seeing it all around Europe and in Brazil.

I really try to not editorialize in my song, and that line is a little bit where I’m editorializing a bit. [laughs] My reading that sounds a little Hallmarky is that there’s not a lot of love in our politics and in our organizing right now. I spent a good amount of time when I was offline reading work by the leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights movement, and one of the things I find the most moving and inspiring about people like Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, James Baldwin, and Audrey Lorde later is how committed they were to an ethic of love in the space of people who didn’t recognize their basic humanity. That song is both about nostalgia and critical of nostalgia. And with that line, we can see quite clearly that a year and a half later, we’re mired in a certain set of problems, and some have certainly continued.

SILY: On the opening track “We Are the Saints”, when you sing, “It’s mourning in America,” I noticed on the lyrics sheet it was spelled “m-o-u-r-n-i-n-g.” Were you trying to be ambiguous? It’s very likely folks listening won’t have the lyrics sheet.

GK: “Morning in America” was a Reagan slogan. If you hear it as “morning,” it’s deeply ironic, the Reagan callback but with a sneer. So it can be either way. Does the Reagan version of that phrase have any resonance for you? I weirdly know that phrase because it was referenced in a musical I worked on when I was in my 20s, and then I went back and watched the Reagan commercials.

SILY: I know the context, and as much as political ads are inherently cringeworthy, for someone like Reagan whose policies were so cruel, that slogan is especially vomit-inducing.

GK: [laughs] But yes, ambiguity is baked into it on purpose.

SILY: There’s further irony on the album, like that you spent a year off the Internet but it was made with the help of the Internet, as you were able to collaborate digitally. Track 2, “Hot Pink Raingear”, is one where I listened to it and thought, “This sounds like everybody’s in the room together.” On a lot of records made over the pandemic that were made remotely, the artists seemed to lean into the digital collaboration, whereas others were trying to still make it sound like it was recorded live. Where were you on that spectrum?

GK: The paradox of making a record with all these people is that I planned to make a really sparse record. For the first time living out here in Portland, I put together a modest recording studio in my backyard, what had previously been a woodshop, with a piano and some microphones. I had planned to record more of the 30 songs, and there are some I recorded but left off the record, but it focused around these 10 songs that felt like they had an arc to them. Initially, my thinking was that I would bring in one person per song and feature one friend/collaborator. I realized afterwards that everyone who I asked to play on the record was someone I really loved as a person. Even though I was talking on the phone offline, it became really isolating as the pandemic began, both because of lockdown but also because everyone was so online all the time, that people were too exhausted to talk on the phone. I spent a lot of time looking inward, meditative, and alone. When I was done, making this record was a good excuse to be in touch with my friends, some of whom can be hard to pin down. I guess I was trying to make it feel as natural as possible.

It’s funny you mention “Hot Pink Raingear”, because I think we made three versions of it with totally different arrangements and instrumentation. It was the last piece of the puzzle to figure out. It’s the most tortured song. It makes me happy that to you it sounded like people in a room. Ted Poor, one of the two drummers on the song, had a lot to do with it. He has an amazing way of playing around a click track. One of the things that can make recording remotely very frustrating is the dominance of the click track, and it can suck the life out of things. Ted has this way of ignoring the click track, being very much in time but also playing around it. There’s something about the energy of his drumming that’s very wonderful. My friend Casey, an amazing multi-instrumentalist who has played on every one of my records and actually lives in Galesburg, Illinois, figured out a different drum idea for the chorus. That track is mostly Ted and Casey and me playing everything.

It never would have occurred to me to lean into sounding remote, and none of the mixing does so. If one were to come away with that impression, it’s not on purpose. [laughs] The first and fifth song [“Chemex”] are the ones that are basically just me, and those are very much studio jams of me trying to create a world by myself. Everything else is some version of trying to emulate people in a room.

SILY: Is the record meant to be listened to on vinyl?

GK: Yeah. I guess I started maybe two records ago, with The Ambassador in 2014, [thinking about] the experience of each side. I’d say yes in the sense that this album more than any other I’ve made feels like every song is in a really particular place. I wouldn’t want people to listen to it on shuffle. I think because it’s a short record, I love the idea of people listening to it twice in a row. I do feel like the end of “Chemex” really feels like the end of the first side, and I was thinking about introducing the little bit of electronic texture as a way to prime the listener’s ear for the beginning of the second side [“Linda & Stuart”], which is a very different sonic world. In that sense, I love the idea of someone getting to the end of the first side and thinking, “I wonder what’s gonna happen now?” and then flipping it and saying, “Okay, we’re over here.” What’s the question or observation behind the question?

SILY: Just that the liner notes said “Side A/Side B” and that the track order started over in them.

GK: That’s a convention with my label, not an artistic choice. [laughs]

SILY: In the song “Linda & Stuart”, I’m curious about the line, “Linda tells me she’s taking a writing class / On the art of the short story, and I say, ‘Hey that’s great, ’cause / We all need a way to make sense of the world.’” Is that in a way the summary of the entire record?

GK: I think that’s for you to decide. [laughs] I will leave it at that. You’re my first interview on this album cycle, and I’m usually much cagier about lyrics. I’ve said more to you in your questions about lyrics than I normally do. My usual stock response is, “What do you think?” [laughs] The problem with an artist telling you what they think a lyric is about is it deprives you of your ability to make your own meaning or makes your own meaning compete with the artists’. I leave you to decide whether that’s the thesis statement of the album.

SILY: I think it is.

GK: To take a step back, it’s so important for the world that we have people who care about music enough to write about it, and I really believe in people who care about music enough to write about it to have autonomy. I also feel like once I’ve made something, it’s not mine anymore. I truly believe that the meaning you make around something is the relationship you have with it as a listener. I don’t know if I would have thought of that reading, but I really like it. [laughs]

SILY: When did you decide to name the record after the title track?

GK: That came very late. There were a couple different titles floating around, and I thought [Magnificent Bird] sounded good as a title. I feel like that song is perhaps the song I’ve written where I, as the narrator, come across in the least flattering light. On the one hand, professional jealousy is a common experience, but on the other hand, it’s an ugly feeling. The transparency of that speaks to what I was trying to achieve with the record. It’s also the only song on the record that explicitly alludes to my time offline.

SILY: You talk about how you’re partaking in your Internet-less year in order to avoid the shame of envy. It’s a very self-reflexive and self-critical part of the album. 

GK: The thing that I like about that song is that it comes around to this place of generosity of spirit, putting a record on and trying to sing along to it. In a way, it connects back to the ethic of love and generosity, something I’ve struggled with myself but am always striving to be greater at. In that song, the narrator is both engaging in a shameful feeling of jealousy and coming out the other end in a slightly better place.

SILY: What’s the story behind the album art?

GK: John Gall is a really great book designer, the head of designer for [The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group]. He’s done lots of covers for Nonesuch going back about two decades. I love to read, and I love book covers. The last three records I made have had these really brooding covers, and the last two were these full-bleed, emotionally dark photographs. He and I had one conversation, and I said I was interested in something with an inset and a collage--he does a lot of collage-based work in his book design--and as a reader and wannabe literary guy, I kind of like that the cover feels adjacent to a book cover as much as a record cover. I don’t want to be too specific. He’s left a lot of Easter eggs in the cover art, and I’ll leave them there for listeners to decide what’s happening.

SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?

GK: There’s a book I’ve been proselytizing everywhere I can called How To Blow Up A Pipeline by historian and activist Andreas Malm, a short and interesting book about the limitations of nonviolent action. He’s not necessarily advocating that people blow up pipelines, but looking at what other nonviolent movements have used to get their agenda past the finish line, from Civil Rights to Women’s Suffrage. The Gift by Lewis Hyde has really rocked my world. It was initially published in 1983 and was for me a life-changing book about how to be creative and hold on to the center of your practice while living in capitalism, something I’ve been thinking about over the past year. My decision to go offline had a lot to do with feeling like so much of our digital world is the most distilled expression of capitalism. If the point of capitalism is to take friction out of transactions, the smartphone is the ultimate frictionless device, whether we’re communicating, buying stuff, or selling stuff. I’ve increasingly found myself uncomfortable with that premise. The Gift was a really helpful way for me to orient myself, because it’s hard to resist desire and wanting to be famous. It’s kind of what’s going on in the title track, working through that stuff.

[kuu-ukkeli]

Pekka Kuusisto - My Darling Is Beautiful

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