Beat the clock

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
NewMusicBox, November 25, 2013.

Reviewing Discovery Ensemble.
Boston Globe, November 26, 2013.

Something's coming

Guerrieri: Zeal and Patience (2013) (PDF, 73 Kb)



Hey, Matthew, did you pencil in a new Advent introit for this year and then forget to write it until the last possible minute?

Of course nooooeeeeeh, maybe.

To be sure, we hadn't been doing the last one for a while, and even the really-for-Lent substitution was getting a little musty, so out with the old, &c. I figured I'd put it up here for anyone whose church-music planning is as behindhand as mine.

In my apostatical way, I've always thought that Advent is the church-calendar equivalent of a cult movie. Most people just want to cruise right past it into Christmas, but there is a hardy band that's all "seriously, this is some of Carl Weathers' best work" (or whatever the theological equivalent of Carl Weathers is) and watches everybody else jump to yuletide conclusions with a kind of benevolent pity. But honestly, with Christmas colonizing more and more of the calendar—even as I was assembling Hallowe'en supplies this year, most stores already had Christmas displays—Advent is taking on the aspect of some weird temporal origami: a kind of of Marvel-comics-like pocket dimension, a pleasantly disconnected parallel limbo to the normal time-space continuum of conspicuous consumption.

Into the blue again

More concerts seen and considered:

Anniversary Waltzes: Kronos Quartet and Community MusicWorks in Providence.
NewMusicBox, November 18, 2013.

Reviewing Joshua Bell.
Boston Globe, November 19, 2013.

(Also, from last week: a NewMusicBox review of the new Alvin Lucier orchestra-works CD.)

I have two more articles to get out the door today, so of course I woke up and instead did this:

My skill at time management: same as it ever was.

Do You Remember?

Score: Musical memorials to JFK, explicit and implicit.
Boston Globe, November 17, 2013.

Cut-for-space fun fact: In 1965, the Beach Boys played a show at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst—their first college performance on the east coast—headlining a fundraiser for a "JFK Room" at the school, "a room which would be filled with 'books written for Americans by Americans.'"

(Click to enlarge. Source.) I am not sure the JFK Room was ever actually built.

Done Changed

arr. Guerrieri: The Angels Changed My Name (2013) (PDF, 213 Kb)



Sometimes, you (and, by you, I mean I) want to color in an otherwise nice spiritual arrangement with every crayon in the chromatic box. In spite of myself, I think this one is not bad. I actually wrote it back in September, but gave it the benefit of two months of edits via rehearsal and, this past Sunday, performance (by this faithful crew). Which went well! Except for the recording, which is why there is a computer-realized placeholder until a) I get a good recording, or b) I tweak the realization so it's less clunky. (Unsurprisingly, neither is likely in the near-term.)

This tune has, itself, after a fashion, changed its name a fair amount. I used the version in J. B. T. Marsh's The Story of the Jubilee Singers (1880), which I think is the earliest version in print. (Marsh's book is a really interesting document of the push-pull of trying to write about the African-American experience for white 19th-century readers—the story is told pretty much exclusively through the eyes of white observers, but then Marsh includes biographical sketches of each of the Jubilee Singers, which is by far the most fascinating part of the book.) Probably working from Marsh's version, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor included an arrangement of "The Angels Changed My Name" in his Twenty-Four Negro Melodies, published in 1905; when Coleridge-Taylor sent a copy to his former teacher, Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, Stanford replied that the tune was, in his estimation, almost certainly Irish in origin. In 1939, Harry T. Burleigh reworked the tune into the hymn tune "McKee," altering the contour to fit the words "In Christ There Is No East or West," by English writer William Arthur Dunkerley. For his part, Dunkerley, too, enjoyed changing his name—he also wrote journalism under the name Julian Ross, and poetry and fiction under the name John Oxenham—a surname Dunkerley's daughter Elsie, a successful writer of children's books, also adopted.

A look that time can't erase

The New York Festival of Song celebrates Ned Rorem's 90th.
NewMusicBox, November 11, 2013.

We're putting the band back together

A double dose from yesterday's paper:

Previewing Gruppen at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

The performance itself was marvelous, incidentally.

Score: Mozart and Salieri, yet again.
Boston Globe, November 10, 2013.

One little word shall fell him

Score: The pilgrim's progress of "Ein feste Burg."
Boston Globe, November 2, 2013.

The Fast and the Curious

Score: Jonathan Swift and the annoyance of music.
Boston Globe, October 27, 2013.

A talk with Krzysztof Penderecki.
Boston Globe, October 29, 2013.

Formula One

Reviewing Yuja Wang.
Boston Globe, October 20, 2013.

Politics by other means

Score: Marie Fel in the midst of the Querelle.
Boston Globe, October 19, 2013.

He was old, he was young

Reviewing Corey Cerovsek and Paavali Jumppanen.
Boston Globe, October 15, 2013

Carry high the Blue and Gold

Attention, upper Midwesterners: I am pleased and flattered to be part of this year's Chippewa Valley Book Festival, which will find me at the L. E. Phillips Memorial Public Library in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, this coming Monday, October 14 at 7:00 PM. I will be talking, of course, about the only book I have managed to write, which means some far-flung Beethovenian tangents. Fun for all ages! Unless the subject of the Minnesota Orchestra Association comes up, in which case the fun will rapidly turn NC-17 (language).

The Eau Claire Bears! I do hope to make a pilgrimage to Carson Park, in honored memory of Andy Pafko.

Doric, Ionic, Corinthian

Score: Mauricio Kagel's elegant sabotage.
Boston Globe, October 12, 2013.

I know I've been terrible about linking to my various writings in this space, but this "Score" column is something that's been going on for a few months now: the Globe lets me do a calendrical riff on something each week: a concert, an anniversary, a piece of repertoire. The list so far:

October 5: Jehan Alain and the Battle of Saumur
September 28: Carlo Gozzi and The Love for Three Oranges
September 21: The Legendary Pink Dots and the theology of psychedelia
September 14: Henry Brant's 100th
August 31: Frederic Fradkin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra's one and only strike
August 24: Duck That! and other musical birdcalls
August 17: Alfred Hitchcock's Waltzes from Vienna
August 10: Joseph Schuster and other mistaken identities
July 27: The precarious political life of Cardinal Francesco Barbarini
July 13: John Jacob Astor, piano salesman
July 6: The Lyricon and its adherents
June 29: Francis Hopkinson, revolutionary and composer
June 22: The Pythian Games and the birth of music competitions
June 16: Early music connecting Boston and Bloomsday
June 8: John Cage's Variations III
June 1: The Bach family, for multiple hands
May 27: Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Hollywood moment
May 23: K. 550 and a Bollywood pioneer

Oh, how the ghost of you clings

Reviewing Radius Ensemble.
Boston Globe, October 7, 2013.

Werk ohne Opuszahl 1

As you might have noticed, this space has been quiet for some time now. That is because we have been preparing Soho the Dog HQ for the arrival of our newest critic-at-large. We are pleased to welcome Helena Beatrice Kim Guerrieri, 8 pounds, 1 ounce. Her in-depth opinions on all things musical will be posted here as she sees fit to make them known. I can tell you that, in the womb, she was particularly fond of drums and bel canto tenor squillo. The future seems loud.

One of the more surreal and absurd things about expecting a child in 21st-century America—believe me, the competition is fierce—is that seemingly every pregnancy guide in the known universe insists on tracking weekly gestational development in terms of fruits and vegetables. Your fetus is the size of a blueberry! Your fetus is the size of a pear! Your fetus is the size of a casaba melon! Apart from making one's impending progeny sound like the product of some dystopian science-fiction hydroponics experiment, that isn't even accurate from a materials-science standpoint: I began to long for a pregnancy guide with at least enough integrity to say that our fetus was the size of, say, a haggis. At any rate, as we were running this gauntlet of comparative produce, I marked off the weeks by making a commemorative drink engineered around each week's fruit. This one was by far the best. It is surely only a coincidence that it is also by far the strongest. It is rather like parenthood itself: cool and sweet at first, but within minutes, you will be wondering just what it is you have gotten yourself into.

Helena B

2 oz high-proof rye whiskey
2 oz lemon juice
1½ oz peach liqueur (I like Mathilde)
1 oz black rum
1 oz pineapple juice

Shake all ingredients with a good handful of crushed ice, then turn, ice and all, into a big tall glass. Fill the rest of the way with seltzer.

Sync all devices

Reviewing the Boston Chamber Music Society.
Boston Globe, May 14, 2013.

Hopefully it's fixed by the time you click the link, but, if not, yes, Schubert's String Quintet is D. 956, not K. 956. At least I didn't give it a Hoboken number.

Every bright description of the promised land

Reviewing the Cantata Singers and Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 13, 2013.

How It's Made

Reviewing Evgeny Kissin.
Boston Globe, April 23, 2013.

We've taken to you so strong

Reviewing the Boston Modern Orchestra Project.
Boston Globe, April 15, 2013.