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Posts Tagged ‘koyaanisqatsi’

Koyaanisqatsi 1, Hollywood Bowl 0

since i’m not a real critic i’ll just post my observations about philip glass‘s concert at the hollywood bowl from last night. but there are a few qualifications i have to get out of the way first.

the bowl is one of my favorite venues to see a show, but i have always avoided going to the ‘classical’ nights b/c i’m not so excited about seeing a pickup orchestra (or what amounts to the 3rd string of the LA Phil), but when i heard that they were going to perform Koyannsqatsi i was pretty intrigued how they program other music around it. i don’t go to enough symphony concerts to know if this is common but they played a pretty short first half (25 min? maybe) ofthe ‘lighter fair’ (selections of PG’s movie and opera music) on the first half and a pretty complete (i think the consensus is there might have been a few small cuts) 90 minute version of Koyaanisqatsi on the 2nd half.

1st half (PG Ensemble)

Opening (PG piano solo), Facades, Spaceship from Einstein on the Beach

  • PG isn’t a great piano player, but his musicianship comes through. i think its what yoda would sound like if he played piano (in a good way!)
  • the sound wasn’t that great (keyboards vs. woodwinds). it took much too long for the sound engineer to ‘dial it in’. and reinforced my assumption that he/she didn’t give a shit and had an agenda. i also assume a monitor or two was out on the stage because the saxes were having intonation problems and from my experience the worst thing in the world is to be playing a big venue through a PA and you can’t hear yourself in the monitors.
  • using a cut down group has lots of orchestration limitations. off the top of my head listening to them play ‘spaceship’ is with the keyboard heavy, the eight person ensemble doesn’t really do the music justice.  there are many financial limitations to touring, but i’m not really a fan of their solution.  listening to the performance i had to smile thinking of my keyboard player eric hendrickson, like the PGE and SRE i have attempted to solve orchestration problems in a similar manner (which puts eric in quite a pickle attempting to play some very non-idiomatic parts).  we have had many discussions on how hard and uncomfortable it makes him feel and i wish he could have heard the show because they PGE players were having similar problems. (i know its schadenfreude, but schadenfreude with much admiration) i think eric would walk away from last nights show with a new perspective and feeling pretty good about what i put him through. (eric you are the man!)

2nd half

  • the PGE performed much better, most of the balance problems were fixed
  • full orchestra was a waste of money. at its core Koyaanisqatsi is a piece for brass and the PGE, expanding it to full orchestra seemed like a marketing gimmick. the most engaging sections (especially during ‘the grid’ they were silent. overall  they probably played 25% of the piece and when they played i don’t see that it added much the film.
  • when the strings did play i think they sandbagged their parts. from my box seats the bowings didn’t look together (we was bumped our previous seats b/c of the film projection and were offered a box, yeah!)
  • the brass players didn’t fare that much better. maybe they didn’t like michael reisman’s conducting (it looked pretty clear from where i was sitting) and were pitching a fit. they were consistently behind on the upbeats and many of the hemiola’s were pretty sluggish also. on the other had it could have been a monitor situation on the stage, but i was pretty disappointed how sloppy the orchestra played. on the other hand the master chorale sounded great (other than being a bit muddy on their diction the vocal counterpoint was clear and consistent)
  • i think the film that was shown was mostly complete. it felt like there were some small cuts, but i couldn’t exactly place them.
  • there were some new musical sections (brass fanfare opening to “the grid”)
  • the simplest musical and video elements worked the best (keyboard and spinning rocket at the end)
  • it was nice to see godfrey reggio come up for the curtain call, i was half expecting to see ron fricke (but after all it is hollywood and the cinematographer never gets to do that do they?)

overall

  1. i wonder if the orchestra was added mainly for marketing purposes?
  2. thought it was very intersting that the show was mostly pot free and didn’t smell it till the way out(everybody i know claims they first watched it high in their parent’s basement)
  3. there are still many hassles coordinating electronic and acoustic instruments in performance. you would think that in a venue like the hollywood bowl the mix wouldn’t sound like a college new music concert
  4. listening to the show solidified my confidence in playing with a group of musicians over time. having your music playedbby the equivalent of a touring broadway show, its hard not to miss the inherent limitations which are compounded by the pickup orchestra playing music not in their repertoire. i’m sure they sound 100x better playing the old warhorses, but concerts like this are never going to be a full and satisfying experience.
  5. it also makes me question why i paid $65 for a ticket to have a pickup orchestra play film music badly. and the sound engineer not dial in a performance till the 2nd half

despite all my complaints and gripes i have to say the performance of Koyaanisqatsi was amazing. the piece transcended the performance and mesmerized the crowd.  unlike many concerts at the bowl the rolling of wine bottles down the aisle actually diminished as the concert progressed. initially the audience was a little goofy and distracted became engaged and drawn in as the evening went on. it was interesting that the simplest music and film was the final section ‘prophesies’ was the most effective (which was lightly scored solo keyboard and video of the Atlas-Centaur launch explosion in 1972).

for me the music/film combination that is koyaanisqatsi has stood as a high water mark of what art music and film should be and it was great to see that it could transcend and transform a venue like the hollywood bowl.

Jul 24, 2009 | Categories:Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Bookmarks for July 16th through July 19th [del.icio.us]

Bookmarks from July 16th through July 19th:[del.icio.us]

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  • WNYC – New Sounds: Minimalist Music Theatre (July 2009) -”Minimalist Music Theatre Hear some music theatre pieces on this New Sounds show. Listen to Philip Glass‘s recent release “Waiting for the Barbarians,” adapted from the novel by the South African writer and Nobel Prize Winner John Coetzee. Also, there’s music by Paul Bailey – his post-minimalist music theatre piece “Retrace our Steps.” He describes it as a four act vocal/instrumental spectacle based on texts by Gertrude Stein, Guy Debord and Jenny Bitner. The “alt-classical garage band” Paul Bailey Ensemble performs the work”
  • Big Brother Is Listening – The Classical Beat (Anne Midgette) – washingtonpost.com - -Anne Midgette neatly sums up musoc.org “But statements like “Art Music is in many ways objectively superior to Pop ‘Music’” (note the quotes) make me grit my teeth and want to play Talking Heads albums really, really loudly. And this, from the FAQ, is just stupid: “The ‘music’ is melodically, harmonically, rhythmically, structurally, texturally, dynamically, thematically and conceptually barren compared to Art Music; it’s also spiritually and politically shabby by comparison. It’s short, trite and highly repetitive.” One is tempted to order a copy of Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” for the site’s editors, just for starters, but one wouldn’t know where to send it. Indeed, there’s something vaguely creepy about musoc’s deliberate anonymity, which is evidently part of its philosophy, though there are limits to how much an audience will care about what a website says if one doesn’t know who’s writing it.”
  • Celebrating Cronkite while ignoring what he did – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com – In the hours and hours of preening, ponderous, self-serving media tributes to Walter Cronkite, here is a clip you won’t see, in which Cronkite — when asked what is his biggest regret — says (h/t sysprog): What do I regret? Well, I regret that in our attempt to establish some standards, we didn’t make them stick. We couldn’t find a way to pass them on to another generation. It’s impossible even to imagine the likes of Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw and friends interrupting their pompously baritone, melodramatic, self-glorifying exploitation of Cronkite’s death to spend a second pondering what he meant by that.
  • Philip Glass to perform film, opera works at Hollywood Bowl – Los Angeles Times – With “Koyaanisqatsi” — the name means “life out of balance” in Hopi — Glass had more than two years to work on the score. “There was no one waiting for the film — there was no distributor! So we were left alone to make a film — which I realized later was a great luxury.” Today Glass is struck by how pertinent the film seems, at a time when its notions of the world’s interconnectedness and the runaway power of technology have gone mainstream. But the film’s identity has changed since its premiere in 1982.”When we first showed it,” he says, “people thought it was a head trip. People seriously thought you had to get high before you watched it. It wasn’t too long, only four or five years, for people to realize there was actually a movie.”
  • Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering – Carrots ‘N’ Cake -Guest Blog: The Actors Diet: How I’m Recovering “…I’ve been struggling with binge eating and anorexia for a while; if you read my bio on our blog page you’ll see a little more about my history with food. I know a lot of women look up to actresses, and there are plenty of them who are in great shape, healthfully (my co-blogger Christy being one of them). As somebody who has been celebrated for her figure (in my feature film debut I played a ballet dancer AND got naked), I am proof that sometimes it is a false ideal, even when you have all the resources available to you, like a personal trainer, meal deliveries, a shrink, hypnosis coach, a best friend who’s a nutritionist…I felt like I had legitimate reasons to obsess about my weight – after all, my career depended on it.”
  • Intolerable Beauty: Chris Jordan Photographs American Mass Consumption – Photographer Chris Jordan describes the photos in his series “Intolerable Beauty: Portraits of American Mass Consumption” as his “first foray into being an engaged artist.”
  • US State Department employees ask Hillary clinton for Firefox – Video – “Have you been trying to get your corporate IT staff to let you use Firefox or another web browser instead of Internet Explorer? Then you apparently know how a fair number of folks at the US State Deparment feel. At a recent town hall meeting with staff, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton received a question from one government employee who wanted to know if they could “please” use Firefox instead of Internet Explorer. You can see the Q&A by skipping to the 26:32 point in the video above. ” [del.icio.us]
  • Los Angeles News – Russian or Armenian Mob Used “Model Employee” Con at PCH Arco --
    An organized-crime ring that police believe is Russian or Armenian targeted a high-volume Redondo Beach Arco gas station, assigned a low-level soldier to infiltrate it and waited eight months while he worked himself into a position where he could implant a tiny, high-tech “skimmer” to steal customers’ credit-card information.
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Jul 20, 2009 | Categories:bookmarks | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment »