TED Talks Music!

If you've never heard of the TED talks, go to Google and check them out. You can find a short, intellectual discussion on nearly any topic imaginable, and I promise you will leave feeling enriched or at the very least entertained.

Some fellow bloggers just posted this list of 20 Incredible TED talks for Both Music Students and Lovers alike*.

Click on the link you can listen to talks by musical superstars (Eric Whitacre and Bobby McFerrin both have their own piece), well-respected musical therapists, and multicultural artists.

Enjoy!

Sarah Bichsel
UMS Student Committee President

*Special thanks to Florine Church and company for the link*

Handel’s Messiah

Something really special about this year's performance of this long-standing Ann Arbor tradition, Handel's Messiah by the UMS choral union, was that the principals of the event all shared a strong connection with Michigan. Three of the four soloists (Caitlin Lynch, Nicholas Phan, and Jesse Blumberg) were actually UM alums., while the fourth, Meredith Arwady, was also a Michigan native -- a resident of Kalamazoo. Two UM music professors were also prominently featured: Edward Parmentiari on the harpsichord, and Jerry Blackstone, conductor and music director.

Handel's Messiah has a tripartite structure. Concerned as it is with the story of the "messiah", that is, Christ, Its three sections correspond to "the prophecy", "the passion" and "the resurrection", with the most intense part of the piece consisting of the "Hallelujah" section just before Part II. Traditionally the audience joins in the chorus during the singing of this "Hallelujah" section, and that was the case, too, in this performance. In fact, the University Musical Society actually made the music available to audience members to sing to. The text (oratorio) of Handel's Messiah is actually drawn from various verses of the Bible. The "Hallelujah" sections, for example, are taken from Revelation 19: 6, Revelation 11: 15 and Revelation 19: 16. (By the way, the British Library has made the original score to Messiah, in Handel's own handwriting, available on the Web.)

The stage of the Hill Auditorium was beautifully decorated, with a mass of white poinsettias near the front of the stage and a large wreath hanging from the cavernous ceiling. The red color of the harpsichord was a nice touch.

In performing a work like Handel's Messiah, the elements of the dramatic in the work have to be carefully balanced against the element that expresses piety. This performance, overall, managed to do that well.

"Sankai Juku" last Sunday, Oct 24

I had attended Sankai Juku's last performance in Ann Arbor back in 1999, and, ever since then, I had been enthralled by the dance form of butoh, of which Sankai Juku is a proponent. Last Wednesday, I went to attend the film screening at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, in which two films about butoh, both of them dating from the 1960s or 1970s, were screened. (You can see excerpts from one of the two films, Dance of Darkness, online). So, I walked into the Power Center on Sunday with some familiarity with butoh asw well as some expectations about what the performance was going to be like.

My expectations were both confirmed and belied in interesting ways. The performance that I had seen in 1999 had been much less lyrical and much more minimalist -- and, in that sense, with much more in common with butoh's early years of 1960s-1970s. That performance, with its slow writhing gestures and guttural cries that seemed to approximate cries of pain, had put me in mind of what the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has called "bare life". Christina Mcfee writes about this notion in a powerful passage:

'Bare LIfe' -- A Lyrical and Even Ecstatic Dimension

What is "bare life"?

This question underscores the sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being.

Bare life deals with that part of our existence from which no measure of security will ever protect us. It is the part of life that is absolutely exposed.

But as in sexuality, absolute exposure is intricately connected with infinite pleasure. There is an apocalyptic and obviously political dimension to bare life (brought out by torture and the concentration camp). There is, however, also a lyrical or even ecstatic dimension to freedom of bare life for new and unexpected possibilities (in human relations as well as in our relationship to nature or, more generally, to the world in which we live).

Butoh as a dance form is, I think, expressive of this "sheer vulnerability and complete exposure of being". Clad in minimal, raglike dresses and with a layer of white chalk-like paint covering their entire bodies, butoh performers tend to look anonymous on stage, with all indications of individuality stripped away: life at its most elemental. The philosopher Baruch Spinoza remarked (in 1677, in his book Ethics) that "we (still) do not know what the human body is capable of, nor the limits of what it can do." Thinking of butoh makes me think of that remark, because the practitioners of butoh, with their slow, mindful movements, and their emphasis on the physicality of the body and the mystery of its existence, seem to be exploring the outer limits of the possibilities of the movement of the human body.

Sankai Juku's performance both reinforced this ethos of butoh and simultaneously went against its grain. Titled "Hibiki: Resonance from Far Away" -- you can view UMS's program booklet about the event here -- this dance performance was uncharacteristically "pretty" (in a conventional sense) than one tends to expect in a butoh performance. (Jann Parry, writing in The Guardian newspaper of the U.K., has called 'Hibiki' "designer Butoh for new-age audiences," accusing it of having "little in common with the Japanese 'dance of darkness' that developed after the Second World War," and stating that "Sankai Juku have become the style queens of the Butoh performance circuit." So,well... is this diatribe justified? Have Sankai Juku really sold out, or sold their soul, in order to become a crowd-pleaser, betraying the uncompromising attitude of butoh as originally formed in the countercultural cauldron of 1960s Japan?

I think that the answer is both yes and no. The Guardian's reviewer does make a good point in pointing out that 'Hibiki' is too prettified, too mainstream. (But then, had Sankai Juku not acquired some degree of mainstream status, would the UMS even have brought it to Ann Arbor? Or afforded to? Organizations like the UMS do have to depend on ticket sales, and hence on audience tastes.) That aside, I do not think that the bareness and minimalism of butoh as it originally arose was necessarily missing from the 'Hibiki' performance. It was still there, with other layers and other influences having been overlaid on it and enmeshed with it. This was very apparent, I thought, in particular in a sequence within the performance in which the four or five performers would crouch very close to the ground, in almost a fetal position, and then abruptly rise up, draw themselves to their full height, and raise both hands upwards as if reaching for the sky, only to lie down again and crouch. Arguably, both the bareness that is elemental to butoh and the almost balletic, conventionally beautiful, lyricism of more conventional dance forms were present in that gesture. The two complemented each other, and together they managed to suggest, I thought, the complexity of man's being in the world: caught between animality and godlikeness, always pulled groundward by gravity but also always aspiring towards the sky in leaping exaltation. Man is, the performance seemed to say, a liminal creature caught forever between a nether world of despairing animality and an outer world of exquisite sublimity that always remains just beyond our grasp.

So too with the vase-like objects up near the proscenium's upper reaches, dripping a blood-red liquid in slow, spaced-out drops at a time, collected in a huge circular bowl around which the performers stood. From one point of view, it could be thought painfully kitschy, and perhaps it was. But it spite of coming in arguably New Age accouterments, it also reminded me of the fierce beauty of a famous passage from Aeschylus' Agamemnon:

And even in our sleep
pain that cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despite,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us

(Agamemnon, 179-183)

Perhaps this is all part of what Sankai Juku meant by the phrase "resonance from far away" in the title of the performance: not just elementality but resonance, with all human experience -- which perforce must include not only the strange and the unconventionally beautiful, but also the conventionally beautiful; for that, too, is part of human experience.

Danilo Pérez and Baaba Maal (on different days)

I'm going to combine my comments on the concert by Danilo Pérez and his ensemble, from Thursday, and the performance by Baaba Maal and his troupe, from Saturday, into this one and the same blog post.

While, during the first century of its existence, the University Musical Society almost exclusively hosted concerts of classically oriented Western music, in the last two decades it has been sponsoring more and more events with an increasing international flavor. In part, this is probably in recognition of the fact that UMS's audience, much like the demographics of the country as a whole, has grown more cosmopolitan and diverse, and continues to become more so. The concerts by the Panama-born Danilo Pérez whose group plays jazz with an international orientation and the Senegalese musician Baaba Maal, who plays West African music of an Afro- pop orientation that builds on traditional African music but is also inflected with Congolese, Afro-Latin and blues influences, illustrated this cosmopolitan trend that the UMS has been following.

First, the Danilo Pérez concert. Unfortunately, I had left my hearing aids at home (I remembered them only when I got on the bus for the concert and by then it was too late to go back and get them) and so I was somewhat handicapped as I was not hearing very well. Fortunately, the Hill Auditorium acoustics are very good, and the performers were all miked (a controversial issue, if you check out the posts at umslobby.org -- but which worked well for my situation).

I had been very curious to see Rudresh Mahanthappa, the saxophonist with Danilo Pérez, as he has been making big waves recently, especially in his ensemble work with Vijay Iyer. (Iyer and Mahanthappa will be playing together next Fall under UMS's auspices). Being as I am from India myself, I was especially curious to hear Mahanthappa play, as I had read that he brings Indian classical music, especially Carnatic music, influences to his playing. Actually, during one piece during Thursday's performance, Mahanthappa's saxophone seemed to provide the organizing principle and it definitely seemed inspired by a Indian classical musical sensibility.

I had been a little less enthusiastic about how the concert had been billed by UMS as "Twenty-first century Dizzy". That made the concert seem derivative: while Dizzy Gillespie was a great musician, jazz is ever-changing and forward-looking; so, to confine a musical description to the constraints of a "big name" from the past seemed somewhat like a marketing gimmick and also unfair to the musicians. Danilo Pérez is a superb musician in his own right, and to associate Dizzy's name with the concert in the way it was marketed seemed to me a trifle odd. In any case, Danilo Pérez played very well, and so did the other musicians, who all have very varied backgrounds.

I would suggest to UMS, though, that the Power Center (or even the Michigan Theater) might have been a better venue for jazz concerts of this kind than the Hill Auditorium. First of all, all too many seats remained empty at the capacious Hill for this concert, making the musical energy seemingly dissipate somewhat, whereas, in a venue like the Power Center or the Michigan Theater, the same size of audience packed into the smaller space of those venues would likely have contributed to a much more contagious and electric musical energy of the kind that feeds off a full crowd.

Finally, I have to report a problem that really drives me up the wall: too many people seemed to be checking their ipods or phones during the concert. Although the UMS is meticulous about asking people to turn off their cellphone ringers, maybe it should also ask people to desist from checking emails or otherwise using their phones or ipods during concerts, as the backlit blue screens of these devices happen to be very distracting to the people sitting in the row behind the people using them. Are people's attention spans so short these days that they cannot even last a concert's span without feeling compelled to check their email?

Next, let's talk about the Baaaba Maal concert of last Saturday. After Nomo, the African-music-inspired world music fusion band originating from Ann Arbor opened for them with a solid performance, Baaaba Maal and his entourage of Senegalese musicians, each wearing a flowing African robe of a different color, took the stage. The ever-smiling Baaba Mal, with his serene and melifluous voice, singing and speaking inspiring music and words calling for African unity and advancement, was a regal presence, and the audience participation was overwhelming. It seemed that a large body of the West African disapora in the South-Eastern Michigan area had turned up for the concert, many of them dressed in traditional costume, and kept climbing up on to the stage to dance energetically at every opportunity that presented itself. During the concert, Baaba Mal sang mostly in an African language that, I believe, was probably the Pulaar language. (The one song that I recognized was his song "Television" from his recent album. In course of the concert he introduced Mansour Seck, his bandmate, a blind Senegalese musician who has been a friend and influence on him since his earliest days as a musician, and who provided the backing vocals at this concert. The very tall Momadou Sarr, playing percussion both western and traditional, and Massambla Diop playing the talking drum, were also bundles of coiled musical energy.

On Chekov and Translating: Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersberg’s Uncle Vanya

Uncle Vanya is a play that drives literary critics crazy: there is no main character, there is little plot and many of the monologues make little sense. The play centers on the aged Professor Serebriakov (who isn’t the main character) and his relatives, who spend their time on the Professor’s country estate having rather complicated relations with each other and going through a “midlife crisis.” A realistically bittersweet portrayal of regrets about opportunities missed and lives wasted, it is also a play about the search to create a new life, one that will exist a hundred or two hundred years from now, when people will know how to be happy. And the fact that nothing happens except reminiscences, conversations, and attempts to find too late the happiness that slipped through one’s fingers – that is Chekov’s way of making his point. As the play goes on, the audience too feels the dull reality of the characters, and understands the madness of their desires. It is poignant – and yet heartbreaking – to watch the madness of people who have missed their chances or who (like Sonya, suffering from unrequited love) see their chances slip through their fingers and their dreams break.

The audience, however, seemed to find the Maly Drama Theatre’s performance of this “tragicomic masterpiece,” as it has been called, funnier that it was intended to be. A tragicomedy is something between a comedy (which means not that it’s supposed to be funny, but that everything will end “happily”) and a tragedy (where everything does not end “happily,” such as in the story of Oedipus). In short, it is a play whose ending is neither “happy” nor tragic, and that is not intended to be funny. There is nothing inherently amusing about Uncle Vanya trying to make up for the opportunity he missed years ago by courting Elena, for example, or in Sonya’s sometimes unreasoned actions due to love. Yet the audience laughed.

Perhaps the audience’s misinterpretation of the play was due in part to the overtitles; Russian being my first language, I was lucky enough to be able to understand the play in the original, however, I occasionally followed the translation - enough to realize both its inexactness and the difficulty of translating this play. A viewer will obviously not have time to ponder the nuances of a particular word or phrase as the play is going on, yet I found the overtitles inexact to the extent that they were misleading. Phrases were left out, the song sung by Doctor Astrov was completely different than the text in the overtitles…and the significance of some key phrases was lost. The Professor’s phrase about the necessity of “doing the deed,” for example, was not a sexual reference, but an ironic statement by somebody who has spent his life reading and writing to the hardworking people around him that they have been doing nothing and that they must start doing work; Elena’s response to Uncle Vanya’s vows of love, translated as “Your love…it makes me numb,” suggests in the original that Elena could be becoming blunt, numb, or stupid, and the emphasis seems to be on the idea that his vows of love make her unresponsive, blunt, withdrawn – she simply does not care, and his vows do not move her. These nuances are difficult to convey in a written translation, and even more so in overtitles, but I found myself disappointed that a greater attempt was not made to capture the essence of Chekov’s meaning.

In the end, however, the words were no more powerful than the lack of them. The agony, anguish and despair of the characters (so brilliantly portrayed by this troupe of actors) and the tense moments of silence (possibly the director Lev Dodin’s addition) were as full of feeling as the powerful speeches, and required no translation to convey the pain of people who are searching for a way to make the world happy one day, even though their dreams of happiness were thwarted and their hopes melted into mist.

By: Ana Klimchyskaya
UMSSC Member