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By Meghann Wilhoite

American composer and self-proclaimed “bad boy of music” George Antheil was born today 114 years ago in Trenton, New Jersey. His most well-known piece is Ballet mècanique, which was premiered in Paris in 1926; like Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, from which Antheil seems to have derived quite a bit of inspiration, the premiere resulted in audience outrage and a riot in the streets. The piece is scored for pianos and a number of percussion instruments, including airplane propellers.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Though he died at the age of 58, polymath Antheil managed to accomplish quite a bit in his relatively short life both in and outside the field of music. Here are some highlights:

• His name appears alongside the actress Hedy Lamarr’s on a patent, granted in 1942, for an early type of frequency hopping device, their invention for disrupting the intended course of radio-controlled German torpedoes.
• In 1937 he published a text on endocrinology called Every Man His Own Detective: A Study of Glandular Criminology. The book includes chapters on “How to read your newspaper” and “The glandular rogue’s gallery”.
• His music was championed by the likes of James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, W.B. Yeats, Erik Satie, and Pablo Picasso.
• Under the pseudonym Stacey Bishop, he wrote Death in the Dark, a detective novel edited by T.S. Eliot, the hero of which is based on Pound.
• After spending the majority of the 1920s and 30s in Europe, he settled in Hollywood and wrote dozens of film, television and radio scores, for directors such as Cecil B. DeMille and Fritz Lang (and with such titillating titles as “Zombies of Mora Tau” and “Panther Girl of the Kongo”).
• Last, but not least, here is Vincent Price narrating Antheil’s “To a Nightingale” with the composer himself on piano: George Antheil – Two Odes of John Keats – To A Nightingale: Vincent Price, narrator; George Antheil, piano

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

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The post George Antheil, the bad boy of early twentieth century music appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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Since joining the Grove Music editorial team, Meghann Wilhoite has been a consistent contributor to the OUPblog. Over the years she has shared her knowledge and insights on topics ranging from football and opera to Monteverdi and Bob Dylan, so we thought it was about time to get to know her a bit better.

Do you play any musical instruments? Which ones?

In order of capability, I play the pipe organ, piano, synths, and guitar. I also sing a bit, but I gave up on my dream of being an opera singer long ago!

Organ Console, Holy Trinity, Buffalo, NY. Photo by Jarle Fagerheim. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Do you specialize in any particular area or genre of music?

As an organist, I mostly play Baroque music (I <3 Bach 5eva), though I recently commissioned an excellent piece from contemporary composer Matthew Hough, which we’ll get to recording as soon as we have the funding. As a pianist, I play lots of different stuff from Classical era onwards. As a synth player and guitarist I play indie rock, mostly stuff I’ve written or stuff I’ve collaborated on.

What artist do you have on repeat at the moment?

My current lifestyle sort of dictates what I listen to right now: I’m either on the subway or blocking out ambient sounds in the office (nothin’ but love for my fellow cube dwellers), which means it’s difficult to listen to stuff where there’s an extreme difference between the loudest and the softest sound. Thus, artists like Interpol, Cocteau Twins (Elizabeth Fraser swoon), and Grimes dominate my playlist; if I had more time in quieter spaces I would also be listening to more avant-garde stuff as well.

What was the last concert/gig you went to?

The last concert I went to was part of the series I help run called Music at First; we were presenting the music of Jerome Kitzke, and it was pretty wild.

How do you listen to most of the music you listen to? On your phone/mp3 player/computer/radio/car radio/CDs?

Phone on the subways, computer (Pandora or Spotify) at work.

Do you find that listening to music helps you concentrate while you work, or do you prefer silence?

Music definitely helps me concentrate while I work, with the exception of creative writing.

Has there been any recent music research or scholarship on a topic that has caught your eye or that you’ve found particularly innovative?

Actually, my most recent scholarship binge has been on historiography, specifically the white-washing of European history (there’s a great Tumblr called MedievalPOC that focuses on the white-washing of European art). I would love to do more research on people of color with regards to the Western music canon (you know, those same hundred or so pieces by the same twenty or so composers that every music history textbook teaches you about).

Who are a few of your favorite music critics / writers?

Anastasia Tsioulcas (NPR, et al.) and Steve Smith (Boston Globe) are two critics/writers whose work I admire. They give an honest take on the music they’re reviewing without getting polemical, and they both promote gender parity within the field.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Associate Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Getting to know Grove Music Associate Editor Meghann Wilhoite appeared first on OUPblog.

        

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By Meghann Wilhoite

I have a confession to make: I have a terrible memory. Well, for some things, anyway. I can name at least three movies and TV shows that Mary McDonnell has been in off the top of my head (Evidence of Blood, Donnie Darko, Battlestar Galactica), and rattle off the names of the seven Harry Potter books, but you take away that Beethoven piano score that I’ve been playing from since I was 14, and my fingers freeze on the keyboard. My inability to memorize music was in fact the reason I gave up on my dream of being a concert pianist—though, in retrospect, this was probably the right move for me given how lonely I would get during hours-long practice sessions…

I’ve since come to terms with my memory “deficiency,” but a recent New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini on the hegemonic influence of memorization in certain classical performing traditions brought some old feelings to the fore. Why did I have to memorize the music I was performing, especially considering how gifted I was at reading music notation (if I may say so myself)?

As Tommasini points out (citing this article by Stephen Hough), the tradition of performing from memory as a solo instrumentalist is a relatively young one, introduced by virtuosi like Franz Liszt and Clara Schumann in the 1800s. Before that, it was considered a bit gauche to play from memory, as the assumption was that if you were playing without a score in front of you, you were improvising an original piece.

I should be clear at this point that I have nothing against musicians performing from memory. Indeed some performers have the opposite problem to mine: the sight of music notation during performance is a stressor, not a helper. Nonetheless, I do feel that the stronghold that memorization has on classical soloist performance culture needs to be slackened.

One memory in particular related to memorization haunts me still. After sweating through a Bach organ trio sonata during a master class in the early 00s, the dear late David Craighead gave me some gentle praise and encouraged me to memorize the piece. “Make it your own” were his words. I was devastated. How on earth was I going to memorize such a complex piece?

In spite of my devastated feelings, I heard a nagging voice in the back of my mind telling me Dr. Craighead was right. If only I could memorize the piece, it truly would be my own. I’d heard before from other teachers that the best way to completely “ingest” a piece was to practice it until you didn’t need the score anymore. The lone recital I gave from memory during my college years was admittedly an exhilarating experience; I definitely felt that I had a type of ownership over the pieces, even if I was in constant terror of having a memory lapse. In hindsight, though, I believe my sense of ownership was not a result of score-freedom, but from the hours and hours (and hours) I spent in the practice room preparing for the recital.

Whether or not you are moved by my struggles (being a little facetious here), I think that, in 2013, it is time for us to acknowledge the multiplicity of talents a classical soloist may possess, and stop trying to squeeze everyone into the same box.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post To memorize or not to memorize appeared first on OUPblog.

By Meghann Wilhoite

2012 has been a poignant year for avant-garde music. German composer Hans Werner Henze passed away in October at age 86; a little over a week later American composer Elliott Carter passed away at the age of 103. The late John Cage was, as Musical America put it, “feted beyond his own wildest dreams” this year in celebration of his birth centenary.

All three of these composers wrote music that challenged listeners to reconsider the boundaries of what qualifies as music.

John Cage once stated, “I certainly had no feeling for harmony, and Schoenberg thought that that would make it impossible for me to write music. He said, ‘You’ll come to a wall you won’t be able to get through.’ So I said, ‘I’ll beat my head against that wall.’”

Elliott Carter (touchingly eulogized by Paul Griffiths last month on the OUPblog) likewise acknowledged that most listeners did not understand his music: “One thing I can’t understand is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see why people could find this perplexing in any way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it… I finally said the hell with that whole point of view and decided to write what I really always hoped to write, and what I thought was most important for me. I’ve taken that point of view ever since.”

Hans Werner Henze, according to Norman Lebrecht, knew that his music would not be fully understood or appreciated during his lifetime.

What is it about these composers’ music that “perplexes” people so, and yet holds their attention? What makes Howard Stern, listening to a young composer’s piece exclaim “We couldn’t even figure out if it was music” and then spend ten minutes of his show excoriating it?

I personally have long been fascinated by this type of music — highly structured, arcane music that challenges my ears, requiring deep listening, still managing somehow to stimulate my emotions. Really this music is why I studied music theory throughout my graduate years; I wanted to be able to talk about what I was hearing in a meaningful way.

My journey began with Morton Feldman’s music, but after I moved to New York City I quickly became involved with the thriving and vibrant community of avant-garde musicians that live here.

Last July I interviewed two composers about the progression of their compositional styles over their heretofore relatively short careers. One of the interviewees, Matthew Hough (who wrote the piece featured on Stern’s show), seemed to subconsciously channel Carter when he said “At a certain point [in my career] I realized I was thinking too much about how I was being perceived and not thinking hard enough about why I’m doing what I’m doing and what composition means for me.”

And here we get to the crux of the matter: Is it music when someone approaches composition in this way? Is it music when what we hear defies classification? Indeed, I use the term avant-garde here, but one of the challenges of talking about this music is terminology: What do we talk about when we can’t talk about chords, melodies, themes, etc.?

Ultimately, my answer to the first two questions is ‘yes’; my answer to the last question is ‘get creative’. Above all, open-mindedness and a willingness to listen actively and creatively are absolutely necessary if we’re going to appreciate avant-garde music on its own terms.

“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.” –John Cage.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts on Sibelius, the pipe organ, John Zorn, West Side Story, and other subjects.

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles the OUPblog via email or RSS.

The post Is it music? A listener’s journey appeared first on OUPblog.

By Meghann Wilhoite

It’s difficult to pin a label on John Zorn. Active since the early 70s, Zorn has effectively woven his peculiar style of musical experimentation into the fabric of New York City’s downtown scene. His work — in the general sense of the word — has varied from philanthropic to shocking, with a curatorial bent that has often held quite a bit of sway.

Where to start? I could talk about Zorn’s music venue, The Stone, which pays for itself through CD sales and other contributions, so that “100% of the nightly revenue” goes directly to the performing musicians.

Or I could talk about his Obsessions Collective, a “non-profit alternative to the commercial Arts scene,” which boasts zero overhead so that, like with The Stone, every cent derived from sales goes directly to the artists.

Or maybe I should tell you about Zorn’s record label, Tzadik, which releases the work of contemporary composers “who find it difficult or impossible to release their music through more conventional channels.”

But perhaps I should first tell you about his “radical Jewish music” projects, which found initial voice when Zorn curated the Art Projekt Festival in Munich in 1992, and resulted in what has since been considered a sort of radical Jewish music manifesto (written by Zorn and guitarist Marc Ribot).

What I really don’t want to do is try to “describe” the MacArthur Fellow’s music to you — because, to be honest, it’s almost impossible. Sometimes it’s noise, sometimes it’s atonal, sometimes it’s klezmer, sometime it’s jazz. It’s always pushing the boundaries of what you think it will be.

In honor of Zorn’s 59th birthday (which took place over the weekend), why don’t we just enjoy this clip from 1991, featuring Zorn’s group Naked City performing at the Vienna Jazz Festival? Be warned, this might fall in the “shocking” category for you! (Zorn is the one the camouflage trousers and that’s Mike Patton from Faith No More on vocals.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Meghann Wilhoite is an Assistant Editor at Grove Music/Oxford Music Online, music blogger, and organist. Follow her on Twitter at @megwilhoite. Read her previous blog posts: “Saving Sibelius: Software in peril” and “The king of instruments: Scary or sleepy?”

Oxford Music Online is the gateway offering users the ability to access and cross-search multiple music reference resources in one location. With Grove Music Online as its cornerstone, Oxford Music Online also contains The Oxford Companion to Music, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, and The Encyclopedia of Popular Music.

Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only music articles the OUPblog via email or RSS.