May 27, 2011 On Music Out of the Vinyl Deeps By Marisa Meltzer Ellen Willis in 1981. Photograph by Jade Albert.I have never particularly enjoyed rock criticism. It has a tendency to read bombastic, and the references feel dated almost instantly. None of this is true of Ellen Willis. When I first started reading her a few years ago, I wondered if I liked her writing simply because we share the same gender; now I think I like her because she was right. Willis, who was a native of Queens and a Barnard graduate, was hired by The New Yorker as the magazine’s first pop-music critic in 1968. Her tenure lasted seven years, and her column, Rock, Etc., covered everything from The Rolling Stones and Joni Mitchell to the birth of punk and Bette Midler. Her criticism could be feisty (Carly Simon’s “wide-eyes lyrics inevitably aroused my class antagonism”) or dismissive (The Velvet Underground’s eponymous album was “all about death, junkies, Delmore Shwartz—stuff like that”), but it was always sharp (Elvis was “John and Paul in one package”). She understood fandom and feminism equally—something all too rare in the present, where music criticism is still dominated by men. Willis was able to love Patti Smith as a rock-and-roll heroine but criticize her identity. She found Smith’s “androgynous, one-of-the guys image” to be problematic. “Its rebelliousness is seductive, but it plays into a kind of misogyny that consents to distinguish a woman who acts like one of the guys (and is also sexy and conspicuously ‘liberated’) from the general run of stupid girls.” Which is why it’s so unfortunate that she stopped writing about music in the early eighties. She felt like music had lost its edge after punk. She certainly didn’t disappear—she taught at NYU, wrote nonmusic criticism, and occasionally chimed in with a review of a Bob Dylan album when she felt like it—but her legacy became somewhat obscure. Her death from lung cancer in 2006, at the age of sixty-four, only made it worse. Read More
April 28, 2011 On Music One New Wagnerite at a Time By Catherine Steindler The Ride of the Valkyries in Robert Lepage’s new production of Die Walküre. Photograph by Ken Howard, courtesy of the Metropolitan Opera. When Mark Twain spent a week attending performances of Richard Wagner’s operas in Bavaria, he complained that “seven hours at five dollars a ticket is almost too much for the money.” But by the end of his ordeal, he conceded it to be “one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life.” That was in 1891. This year, the Metropolitan Opera is rolling out a new production of Wagner’s famed four-opera cycle The Ring of the Nibelung, and I’m here to tell you that whether or not you like opera, this is an experience that is not to be missed. On Friday, I saw Die Walküre, the second of the four operas, and was reminded that the Ring is not only one of the most magnificent achievements of human creativity but also, contrary to reputation, one of the most accessible. I don’t fully understand why the Ring came to be considered impenetrable. It is long, I’ll grant that. In 1853, having completed the libretto for the Ring, Wagner wrote to his friend, Franz Liszt, “Mark my poem well, it holds the world’s beginning and its destruction.” This isn’t just Wagner’s notorious megalomania speaking. The cycle does tell the story of the origin of human conflict, the destruction of the human world, and everything else in between. Perhaps it’s these enormous themes that are responsible for the Ring’s reputation. But still, they’re nothing you don’t find in your standard myth. Perhaps it’s the dead seriousness with which Wagner approaches his ambitious enterprise that makes him a little perplexing, even suspicious, in these times—he hasn’t a trace of cool irony to protect him against mockery. Thank God. Whatever the reason, the Ring appears on the horizon like a monumental citadel, but venture just a little closer and you’ll see that the points of entry are as plentiful as the structure is immense. Indeed, because the Ring contains multitudes, you can use it to think through whatever’s on your mind: the environmental consequences of greed, your ugly competitive streak, why Gadhafi won’t just throw in the towel, your latest breakup—it’s all there. Herewith the half-dozen reasons I’ve been using on my friends to lure them to the Ring … Read More
March 9, 2011 On Music Nadia Sirota and Her Viola By Dawn Chan Photograph by Samantha West. “You are such a good drink, for a four o’clock drink,” Nadia Sirota tells her Campari and soda. Then, with a sort of resigned discipline, she also orders pizza so as not to turn up sloshed at her next gig in two hours. Sirota, a violist and radio host, has dark hair styled into sideways bangs, dark eyes, a tough-talking, trenchant sense of humor, and inked forearms. She explains that her tattoos—a stylized letter N and letter H, followed by brackets—are musical markings. Arnold Schoenberg used them in scores to denote what he called the Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme, or the primary voice and secondary voice in a composition. Though she’s lately become an omnipresent figure in New York’s downtown music concerts, she’s probably less known than others in her circle (like her friend and frequent collaborator Nico Muhly). Perhaps it’s because creators tend to get more attention than interpreters. Or maybe it’s just because violists, to everyone’s detriment, tend to get no attention at all. Yet Sirota has collaborated with everyone from Meredith Monk to Grizzly Bear; she contributed to Arcade Fire’s recent Grammy-winning album, The Suburbs. This week alone, she goes from Webcasting a sold-out show at Le Poisson Rouge to moderating a discussion with conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen at WNYC to playing a recital with friends at the Ecstatic Music Festival that is tonight at Merkin Concert Hall. As with many violists, Sirota started by playing the violin as a child but soon grew frustrated with the repertoire. “The advanced-intermediate violin pieces are all these flashy stand-on-your-head études, which suck, musically. I mean, I just didn’t give a shit. And I didn’t want to put my time into learning how to do those kinds of tricks, when I didn’t feel like I was getting anything musical from it.” She adds, “I switched to viola around the same time I became an alto. Viola sounds like a man singing very high, or a woman singing very low. It has a sort of intermediate gender-weirdness thing which also I find very appealing.” She was a natural at the viola; as a Juilliard student in 2005, she won first place in the conservatory’s concerto competition. Read More
January 25, 2011 On Music The Dinnerstein Variations By Dawn Chan The startling success story of pianist Simone Dinnerstein. Photograph by Lisa Marie Mazzucco. Earlier this month, pianist Simone Dinnerstein celebrated her latest album, Bach, A Strange Beauty, with a six-hour-long release party in her parents’ Park Slope brownstone. She set her iPod to shuffle, and at the end of the evening, as the final few guests made their way out the door, her own recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations came on. “I hadn’t listened to it in years,” she said, “I hadn’t even realized how much I had changed.” The Goldberg Variations marked a turning point in Dinnerstein’s life story, the classical-music world’s rags-to-riches tale that’s by now familiar to many fans. Less than a decade ago, with her chances at a high-octane concert career looking dim, she had started to settle into a life in Brooklyn, a career of smaller-scale concerts, teaching, and performances in nursing homes and prisons. The discovery that she was pregnant with her son inspired Dinnerstein to work privately on the Variations as a way to mark his arrival. She went on to raise money from friends and family and recorded the piece herself, a decision that took some guts, given the many canonical recordings of Bach’s epic work out there (joined now by a pretty hilarious rendition of the aria by Stephen Dorff in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere). Improbably, Dinnerstein’s performance became the top-selling classical album of 2007, at one point even reaching number four on Amazon’s record sales for all genres. Her success is particularly startling when you consider the number of household-name classical pianists who either won a major competition or grew up in the spotlight as child prodigies. But Dinnerstein’s playing is one of a kind. The intense conviction she communicates is so arresting that, for me, hearing her rendition of a piece makes it impossible to imagine it performed any other way. (Classical musicians often refer to the importance of playing “with conviction”; or as my pianist friend’s formidable Russian teacher would often say, “My dear, you must be convicted of every note.”) Read More
November 15, 2010 On Music The Tao of Prince By Dan Piepenbring Photo: Scott Penner If you’ve felt a frisson in the air lately, it’s probably because Prince has announced a new tour. The sky’s all purple, there are people running everywhere—this is exciting news. Prince should’ve faded long ago from the public consciousness, but his mystique is oddly resilient. Even his failures adhere to some kind of Princely internal logic. What makes him such a strange, potent pop-cultural force? The answer has something to do, I think, with his elusive persona. The most convincing explanation of Prince is a tautology, something you’d hear from a stoned teenager: Prince is, like, Prince. At the risk of sounding more like a stoned twenty-something, I’ll call him a man of dialectics, a brazen mess of binaries. He’s the living refutation of Lincoln’s “House Divided” address. A house divided against itself can stand, Prince says, and it’s a great place to throw a party. As early as 1981’s “Controversy,” he asked us if he was black or white, straight or gay, God fearing or navel gazing. By 1984, when Purple Rain came out, Prince was all slashes: black/white, straight/gay, male/female, rock/R&B, voluptuary/ascetic, cocaine/peyote, garish/understated, Hendrix/Little Richard, gothic/ecstatic, authoritarian/anarchist, apocalyptic/Panglossian, hip/square, selfish/selfless. Any thesis about him came bundled with its antithesis. He was so at odds with himself that the odds synthesized into one whole, perplexing person. Read More
August 10, 2010 On Music Michael Rother Comes To Hoboken By Josh Lieberman Last Wednesday at around 9 PM I sipped bourbon in Hoboken and waited for Michael Rother to take the stage. That is not something I thought would ever happen. Rother is co-creator of the influential seventies German band Neu!. (Though talking about them is indeed exciting, that exclamation point is actually part of the band’s name.) Neu! hasn’t been an active band for some time now: they recorded their fourth and final album in 1986, though for various reasons it was finally released just a few weeks ago. In 2008 the other Neu! co-creator, Klaus Dinger, died. So the idea of ever seeing Neu! music live seemed unlikely. Yet there I was last Wednesday at Maxwell’s. I was alone, because no one I’m interested in is interested in Michael Rother. This is not music you can drag your girlfriend to, or at least I can’t—mine said that the show would just be people standing there bobbing their heads forward in 4/4 time. (Which was true.) Most Neu! songs are completely instrumental, perhaps the biggest hurdle for many people. I also tried to persuade a high school friend to come (he’d never heard of Neu!) but even after we’d had a few drinks, and even after I’d offered to pay for his ticket, I found myself going it alone. Given the resistance of both girl- and high school friends to seeing one half of a band they don’t care about, it was perhaps no surprise that the place wasn’t full. I was leaning on the bar with my bourbon, half-listening to the ethereal opening act, when I noticed Michael Rother standing next to me. Of course, when you see an artist you admire, your first thought is, “What should I say to him?” To which the answer is: nothing. Because there’s rarely anything to say to someone you don’t know, except perhaps “They say on Monday it’ll cool off” or “Milk, no sugar.” Yet music (like books, or movies) gives us the strange impression that this person is anything other than a stranger. I went up to Michael Rother and said, rather lamely, “You’re Michael Rother?” “Yes,” he said. “I just thought I’d shake your hand,” I said, and I did, and he laughed. Our meeting wasn’t much—these things generally aren’t—but at least I made Michael Rother laugh. Then I ordered another bourbon. Right before the show began I walked straight to the front of the crowd. At a general admission show this is sometimes a difficult and rude thing to do, but it’s not as if the venue was at capacity. The room had filled by now, though not with girls—I counted seven in total. The crowd was almost completely white and in their thirties. I saw many pairs of glasses and one-and-a-half violations of the first rule of concert going: don’t wear a shirt featuring the performer you’re going to see. (A guy in a Kraftwerk shirt was the half-violation—Michael Rother was an early member of that group.) I stood in front of where Rother would be. The table which supported Rother’s laptop—not a Mac, surprisingly—rested for some reason on four paint cans. They began. I won’t describe the show at length. I once heard that describing music is like doing card tricks on the radio, and that’s true. I will say that it was arguably the best concert experience I’ve ever had. Last year’s Leonard Cohen show was incredible; Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks in concert had quasi-religious power. But I couldn’t believe the intensity of being in such a small room with this music, with its booming, propelling drumming, its repetition, repetition, repetition, and then playful, slight variation. The music’s power is so primitive that in theory all humans should love it, but as we have seen this isn’t the case. To say that the music of Neu! has held up well over time is like saying the same about the ocean: it’s so obvious that even mentioning it seems silly. This is music that doesn’t sound like it was created decades ago—it sounds like it is created the second it is played, or maybe even a moment or two in the future. The name Neu! (“new” in German) couldn’t be more appropriate. During the show the only time a microphone amplified voice was when Rother introduced the band. Then he quickly began another song, saying, with Teutonic terseness, that he didn’t want to “waste so many words.” He’d used maybe fifteen. When it ended I hung around for a few minutes, snagged the setlist from the stage, and walked to the PATH train. I’d never witnessed such a perfect concert. If only I could’ve found someone to go with. Towards the end of my trip home I ran into another high school friend. He’s someone who knows a thing or two about music and I expected him to have heard of Neu!. He hadn’t. I thought of telling him to go to Michael Rother’s free Lincoln Center show on Friday. But no. I didn’t want to waste so many words. Josh Lieberman lives in Brooklyn, New York.