January 2007 Archives
Decasia, Decasia, Decasia!
The good thing about blogs is that you can correct yourself at any point. Normally, when I make a mistake, I correct myself very quickly. But in this case, I'd like to correct something I wrote over four years ago, in November 2002.
Back then, I went to see a film by Bill Morrison, called Decasia. I started off OK:
Decasia started life as a visual accompaniment to the premiere of a symphony by Michael Gordon. Last night, however, the symphony was reduced to a soundtrack, and the film itself was the center of attention.
But then, at the end of my review, I seemingly forgot what I'd written earlier:
The title (and the New York Times) seem to posit a link to Fantasia, which I don't see at all. Fantasia is one of the greatest films ever made, and I'd hate to think that anybody setting images to music thinks that they're working in the same tradition. I think a much more obvious influence is A Zed & Two Noughts, Peter Greenaway's meditation on the beauty of decay. But in a way, the films got made in the wrong order: there's so much more to the Greenaway than there is to watching old rotting newsreel. (And Michael Nyman is a better composer than Michael Gordon.)
Which is probably up there among the most spectacularly wrong parenthetical comments I've ever written. I stand by what I wrote about the film; it's the music I was wrong about. Decasia is not easy music, and it was pretty idiotic of me to dismiss both it and its composer when I hadn't even been concentrating on the music for most of the time I was watching the film.
I got a hint of how wrong I had been about a year ago, when Alex Ross put Decasia on a list of masterpieces from the past 25 years, along with the likes of Adams's Nixon in China, Messiaen's St. Francis, and Ligeti's Violin Concerto.
I was reminded of that post a few weeks ago, when I saw posters on the street for Decasia Live. For six performances, Decasia was coming to Manhattan: the full experience, with large-scale projections and a live 55-piece orchestra. I had to go, and so it was that I found myself at the fourth performance, at 9:30 on Friday night, sitting on the floor of the Angel Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street, surrounded by some of the most breathtaking music I have heard in years.
I went with Michelle, and as we were walking out we both said the same thing to each other: "We have to come again!". In the end, I found myself going to both the remaining performances, listening to Decasia Live three times in a row over the course of two successive evenings.
I have no idea if or when anybody else will have the opportunity to do the same thing again, but I can highly recommend it. As I say, Decasia is not easy music, and it certainly repays repeated listening. You can buy it on iTunes (only $9.99! Cheap!) – but, as Alex Ross says, "it packs a punch on CD, but it needs a live performance to unveil all its power."
(Weirdly, you can buy three bleeding chunks of Decasia on iTunes for a mere $2.98, which between them comprise about 34% of the total running time. Don't do it. Why that's even an option I have no idea, but Decasia is not split up into nice clean movements like many symphonies, and the whole is much, much greater than the sum of its parts.)
I think that one of the reasons why contemporary classical music has difficulty gaining traction among many people is precisely the need to listen to any given piece more than once, and the difficulty of doing so. Much non-classical contemporary music shares this trait: I wasn't even all that crazy about Crazy the first time I heard it. But it's a lot easier to hear a three-minute recording many times than it is to listen to an hour-long symphony many times.
On the other hand, Decasia Live essentially sold out all six shows with a hearteningly young crowd, so there's definitely a healthy appetite for intelligent music downtown.
What did they hear? I have no idea, to be honest, since the reaction of the people that I went with was all over the shop, and indeed my own experience changed markedly over the course of the three performances I saw.
One generalization I think I can make: If someone was not already familiar with the piece, then that person is likely to have been concentrating more on the film than on the music. (That's certainly what happened with me, the first time round, although admittedly there wasn't a live orchestra then.) And to a certain degree it's true that the more you're concentrating on the film, the less you're concentrating on the music. By the time I went for the third time, I paid almost no attention to the film, and indeed looking at the film was if anything a way of relaxing for a small while from the intensity involved in listening to the music.
As far as my own experience is concerned, at my first performance I was struck mostly by the amazing textures and rhythms of the piece. At my second performance, I concentrated more on the structure of the piece – which helped me to understand it better, although I wasn't quite as blown away by it as I was the first time around. And at my third performance, I let myself ignore the film pretty much completely, and immersed myself in music which by that point I knew reasonably well – after all, it was little more than an hour after my second performance had finished. This time around, I think I got more out of the music than I ever had before – and, interestingly, the real emotional punch hit me a few minutes after the performance had ended. I have no idea why.
Alex Ross is much better at writing about music in general, and about Decasia in particular, than I will ever be, so go read him if you want to know more about the piece. (Sample prose: "The darkest, grandest noise of the musical season so far—the fanfare to an angry American autumn... Gordon’s score weds the hypnotic aura of minimalism to the detuned snarl of highbrow punk... With chattering figures building into great washes of sound, the score is a feat of symphonic minimalism... Even as “Decasia” celebrates raw sound, it summons an atmosphere of dread.")
More generally, though, let me recommend repeat visits to any great musical experience, whether it be a contemporary symphony or a magnificently-performed opera. Too often, I think, people have the opportunity to go back and relive a wonderful performance, and don't. Many symphonies and pretty much all operas are performed more than once: take advantage of that, if you can! I remember once going to a London Symphony Orchestra concert at the Barbican in London, where Kent Nagano started off the program with a short piece by, as I recall, Olivier Messiaen. After playing it, he announced to the audience that new and unfamiliar music really needed to be heard more than once – so he played the whole thing a second time. I wonder if that kind of thing ever happens in New York.
Oh, and one other thing: Go student orchestras! Decasia was played by the Tactus ensemble at the Manhattan School of Music, and they were fantastic – just as every other student orchestra I've ever paid to listen to has been, from the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain to concerts at the Julliard School. If anything's lost in terms of perfection, it's more than made up for with enthusiasm for the music and sheer love of performing. When was the last time you went to an orchestral concert and you saw the musicians grinning with exhilaration while performing? It can and does infect the audience.
Posted by Felix at 16:58 EST | Comments (1)
Biking in NYC
I've been meaning to write a post about biking in New York for some time, but this little film says so much of what I wanted to say that you should watch it instead.
At the moment, everybody in New York hates the bicyclists – not only the car drivers, but the pedestrians too. The reason is that we don't have anywhere to be: everybody's trying to crowd into the same space, to disastrous effect. And the absence of safe bike lanes means that there's relatively few bikers, which means that pedestrians, especially, don't expect or think about bicylists – which means that they're perfectly happy stepping out into the road without looking, especially if traffic isn't moving (but bicyclists might well be).
It's simply not realistic to expect drivers to think about potholes when they're driving down the street. Me, when I'm biking, I'm on the lookout for potholes all the time. If I see one, I need to ride around it – and often that means swerving out into traffic. But often when cars whiz past me, and taxis are prime offenders here, they pass so closely that the tiniest swerve would take me straight into them.
What New York needs is more cyclists. That will reduce traffic, and also increase consciousness that we cyclists exist, especially on the part of pedestrians who currently consider that they basically own the small margin of the streets between parked cars and driving cars, which is the only piece of street real estate where we cyclists are allowed. Think about it: when you're walking in New York and you hit a red light, do you wait on the sidewalk? Or do you walk out a little bit into the street first and then wait? Thought so.
At the moment, New York is simply too dangerous to cyclists for the number of cyclists to increase substantially. So separated bike lanes are a must. I use the Grand Street bike lane now every day, and it's certainly better than nothing. But it's not remotely good enough to increase the number of cyclists substantially. Much more radical change is needed, and needed now.
One question for my bike-riding readers: I know we've all been in this situation many times. We're riding crosstown, and there's a red light in front of us. A car is behind us, and honks aggressively until we pull over, at which point the car speeds past us and stops at the light. Of course, we reach the light ourselves a few seconds later. Is there anything, at that point, we cyclists can or should do? Or is the only thing to be zen and let it wash over us? I get very angry at car drivers who think I have no right to be on the road and who tell me so in no uncertain terms – is there nothing I can do about it?
Posted by Felix at 22:22 EST | Comments (10)
Felix update
So it looks as though posting on felixsalmon.com is going to be light to nonexistent for the foreseeable future: my day job, blogging ten times a day at economonitor.com, seems to take all the blog right out of me. For the time being, I'll try to put up some links here to economonitor pieces of slightly broader interest. Yesterday, for instance, there was this one, on my hobbyhorse theme of journalistic innumeracy, and this one, on how the New York Times seems to believe creationists saying that the Grand Canyon is 6,000 years old more than they believe the Daily Telegraph on the future prospects of Jeb Bush.
I should also, in the wake of my Antarctica trip, respond to my sister, who recently wrote this:
I really struggle with Antarctic tourism. Having heard so much about the White Continent from me, and invested so much time and love supporting me while I was down there, I was happy [Felix and Michelle] could go and see it for themselves. But in the big picture? Something doesn't sit right. And I know that's hypocritical. I am concerned. Not just about the physical impact of tourism on this delicate environment. I also wonder about the experience of the individual. A selfish part of me feels that people should only go to Antarctica if they can really invest the time to truly be immersed in it's wonder, and digest it afterwards. But maybe a short trip, and a memory pill, serves the same purpose. Tourists could be both Antarctica's greatest danger, and strongest ally.
It's a long post, so I don't blame Rhian for not spelling things out even further, but of all the dangers facing Antarctica, tourists are surely at the bottom of the list. What could Rhian mean when she says that tourists could be Antarctica's greatest danger? No one is building hotels on the continent, or anything like that – indeed, the number of tourists who actually spend a night on the ice is vanishingly small, especially compared to the total number of people in Antarctica at any given time.
Rhian is right that tourists are, potentially, Antarctica's strongest ally. The International Association of Antarctic Tour Operators (IAATO) has observer status at Antarctic Treaty meetings, and is invariably at the most stringent end of the spectrum there when it comes to regulations and protocols protecting the wilderness and the environment. Which makes sense: the reason to visit the Antarctic is that it's a pristine wilderness, so the tour operators have every incentive to keep it that way. By contrast, the amount of activity and pollution going on at, say, McMurdo Station makes the impact of tourism utterly negligible. I'm not saying that McMurdo should be torn down – far from it. I'm just saying that it's worth keeping the impact of tourism in perspective.
And I hope Rhian will forgive me for not being grateful that she's so concerned about the "experience of the individual" on an Antarctic tour – especially since the experience that she seems to value the most is no tour at all. I can assure her that the experience of all the individuals on our tour (run by the excellent Antarctic Expeditions, who I can highly recommend) was that of, literally, the trip of a lifetime. Going to Antarctica was the most amazing and wonderful journey I've ever taken, and I can promise you that if you go, the trip will be the most amazing and wonderful trip you've ever taken, too.
But that's not enough for Rhian, it would seem: She worries that the trip should be even more amazing, and even more wonderful, but mainly, I think, just longer – on the grounds of we tourists needing to "invest the time to truly be immersed". Rhian, of course, has had the wonderful privilege to spend not weeks, not months, but even an entire winter in Antarctica – so she knows what she's talking about. Obviously, the experience of living there is more immersive than merely visiting – but then again, it's a lot more environmentally harmful as well. And more to the point, not everybody is like Rhian, which means that not everybody would necessarily react the same way to a longer and more immersive experience.
I haven't taken any "memory pill", but I doubt I'll ever forget the experience of driving around icebergs in a Zodiac. The white continent is so breathtaking that nowhere else you ever go is likely to compare. So it depresses me that Rhian would deny that experience to people she's never met, on the grounds that it's not "immersive" enough. Maybe once you've lived there, a mere visit isn't quite the same. But for those of us who haven't wintered at Halley, a tour to Antarctica is something I can't recommend highly enough.
Posted by Felix at 14:47 EST | Comments (3)
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