Ugetsu; Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi. 1953. 94mins.

Post-war Japanese cinema is noted generally for its prolific output and creative vision, and specifically for the way in which it obliquely but unmistakably dealt with the recent military cataclysm.  Mizoguchi’s stylistic gem predates Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai by a year and also recasts modern Japan’s difficult identity crisis in the setting of the war-torn 16^th century.

The story centers around the families of two men bent on lifting themselves out of poverty and obscurity, one essentially a war profiteer and the other one on a foolish quest to become a samurai.  The film opens with Genjuro, a potter, convinced that only money can bring happiness, and so the risks associated with carrying on his trade in a conflict zone are invisible to him.  Tobei, a poor neighbor, assists him for a cut of the profits, but his real goal is to gain a fortune as a man of war.  Both men fail to heed the warnings of their sensible wives, which seem like prudent advice for anyone with a gambling problem.  The female element, unable to reign in male ambition, disappears briefly and returns in the form of Machiko Kyō (of Rashomon fame), portraying an otherworldly temptress who tests the limits of Genjuro’s depravity.

The scene in which both couples take a boat laden with pottery across a misty lake is reminiscent of the river Styx of Greek mythology.  The entire film pivots on this penumbral boundary between the real and the imagined.  In the former, pragmatism, caution, and devotion to home life are the basis for happiness, while the latter can, at best, offer fleeting thrills devoid of substance.  These lessons may seem a bit trite to contemporary viewers, but Mizoguchi’s slow pacing of scenes in the dream-world of ghosts and visions creates a psychic distance that jolts us when we must inevitably return to reality.

On the Transmigration of Jazz and Modernity: John Adams at the Lincoln Center Festival

[first published on i care if you listen] John Adams conducted the Orchestra of The Juilliard School and the Royal Academy of Music in three works that showcased the expressiveness and energy of this precocious Anglo-American ensemble. I just love the upbeat communal vibe of these types of off-season concerts. The musicians were visibly reveling in the program, and savored the opportunity to follow the baton of one of the few composers who successfully embrace modern culture as source material for large-scale program music. Although the concert was billed as a ‘preview’ for next Monday’s concert in London, the event pointed to nothing but it’s own dedicated participants, imbuing the present moment with an astonishing grasp of some very dense orchestral textures.

Otto Respighi holds the reputation, along with composers like Rachmaninov, of being a throw-back, eschewing modernism and latching onto Romanticism long past its sell-by date. His Feste Romane (1929-1931) is said in the program notes to harken back to the symphonic poems of Liszt and Strauss, but to me it evoked nothing so much as passages from Scriabin’s Poem of Fire, in its hypnotic repetition of dense, charged chords; the use of piano and violin solo; and folk-like percussive motifs. The piece begins with a brief, ominous tutti explosion followed directly by an offstage fanfare of trumpets. The composer explained this opening section, Circenses (circuses) thus: “A threatening sky hangs over Circus Maximus, but it is the people’s holiday: Ave Nero! The iron doors are unlocked, the strains of a religious song and the howling of wild beasts float on the air…” This is program music, but not too gooey. A 1932 treatise against modernism, which the composer authored with nine colleagues, may induce us to think of his music as anachronistic, but the architecture of the piece seems very free and unplanned, and thus, in a way, modern. The brass section from the orchestra handled a wide range of timbres quite admirably.

Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major (1928) needs no such stylistic defense; the piece is unabashedly modern, evoking the urban space, femininity, and technological complexity of the jazz age, and, of course, embracing the jazz idiom, with its abundant “blue” notes (flatted 3rds over major harmony). It was impressive to hear a young orchestra achieve such effulgence and burnished sound, and do justice to the Gershwin-esque lilts and sighs. Wizened, mystical harp passages in the opening movement prepare us for big, bluesy tutti, although it’s important to point out that the piece lacks the improvisatory soul of true jazz.

In the second movement, pianist Imogen Cooper’s introduction was a bit pedestrian, but was followed by an expansive orchestral response with a very moving flute solo. This slow waltz never became tiresome, establishing a very poignant and aurally generous ebb and flow, sending up a truly elegant oboe solo, and dying out with a placid piano trill. For the third movement, Adams demanded a more rigorous scherzando energy than the orchestra was able to deliver with clarity, but the transitions and stand-alone statements were convincing. Cooper’s manic keyboard work recalled the absurd assembly line frenzy of Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.

John Adams

I first saw John Adams conduct his own work during a dress rehearsal for Nixon in China at the Metropolitan Opera. I was impressed by how he intertwined the minimalist idiom with more lush passages reminiscent of Wagner, but I remember thinking that the music was somewhat straight-jacketed by a dedication to the characters, which were oftentimes stiff and guarded (it was Nixon and Mao, after all). Nevertheless, I was impressed with his mastery of zeitgeist. City Noir suffers from no such limitations. Its stylistic scope is alarming and awesome. Inspired by Kevin Starr’s “Dream” books, this piece is the last of three orchestral works that explore the California experience. Moreover, it gives us pause to consider that 80 years after Ravel, composers are still grappling with the process of integrating jazz into symphonic music.

Post-war, film noir Los Angeles has never been so scary and all-consuming. Orson Welles gave us A Touch of Evil, and Adams gives us fifty-seven evil anvils dropped from skyscrapers of varying heights. In the first section, The City and its Double, a hip, cool jazz drum kit foments a background that becomes foreground as improvisatory ideas are spun out and then scurry away before a blaring tutti. Here is Adams as conductor cum bandleader, egging on, rather than conducting, instrumental groups as they take their turn spitting out bad-ass statements of sophisticated savagery. Paranoia and imminent danger are expressed in a forward, frenzied tumult of the ugliest, most outer-spacey harmonies you ever heard. Orchestral tone colors, arrested strings bleeding magically into buzzing brass, evoke the potential of freeway disaster, as well as a starry sky ready to receive the souls of those who perish at the edge of the L.A. night.

The next section, The Song is for You, features a melodic alto sax solo flirting with traditional jazz language. The trombone takes over in an exclamatory passage approaching the knife-edge between anger and insanity, which the composer compares to the instrument’s appearance in the works of Duke Ellington. The concluding section, Boulevard Night, delivers a trumpet solo that the composer likens to the soundtrack of Polanski’e Chinatown, with its elegiac statement, helping to make sense of this danger-scape of glamorous illusions. Ejaculatory bursts of staccato strings bring us back to the narrative of life in the fast lane. This is a hostile atmosphere, but human beauty asserts itself in a saxophone theme, and a cerebral improvisatory marimba passage; and then back to a full complement of the bizarre and the grotesque. We thought California was about humans imposing their stylish will on nature, but goddamn – throbbing jungle night! This is the musical equivalent of the most abrasive Jackson Pollack vomit-canvas.
I thought at one point, “too cluttered… [ahem…] too many notes, my dear [Adams].” But then I reflected, a composer so brimming with ideas, connected by an overarching IDEA, owes us nothing in the way of spare texture. Indeed, zeitgeist isn’t about pensiveness and personal space; it’s about exposed nerves, an unwhetted appetite for spectacle, scandal, transgressive sex. This must be the music that Ralph Steadman hears as he sketches the humanoid creatures of his nightmares. It is not a can of diet coke. It is a bottle of Patron, swilled in three gulps by a convincing transvestite and smashed against the headlight of a police cruiser.

I have newfound respect for John Adams. He has convinced me of the need to marry an inner voice with the outer world of modern culture, no matter how fractured it may be. Hold a mirror up to us, and we will supply our own fun-house effects. That is the role of the contemporary composer.

Thank You for Smoking; Dir. Jason Reitman. 2005. 92mins. Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Bright, Katie Holmes, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall, Sam Elliott.

A glance at the trailer suggests this astute political farce may be a libertarian response to liberal muckraking flicks like SuperSize Me and the collected works of Michael Moore. Upon closer inspection, however, we can neatly categorize this satiric gem under Stephen Colbert’s spin-cycle, reality-bending genre of “truthiness.” Ruthless tobacco giants and the quixotic do-gooders who battle them are alike skewered, and thus for narrative direction and resolution the film relies upon the evolving relationship between divorced tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor (Eckhart) and his morally inquisitive son, Joey (Bright). Ethics, though, are quickly trumped by the sharp barbs of business-speak: when Joey’s stepfather asks if Nick is exposing his son to second-hand smoke, Nick deftly replies, “Look – I’m Joey’s father. You’re the guy who’s screwing his mom.” Reitman’s script, based on the novel by Christopher Buckley, moves quickly from Washington DC to the Salem-Winston sanctuary of big tobacco’s julep-sipping “The Captain” (Duvall), to the Hollywood offices of Jeff Megall (Lowe), a zen-obsessed PR whiz who promises to deliver his client the mother of all product-placement: Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones in an on-screen, galactic post-coital smoke (an effort to return to the unrepentant smoky heyday of Bogie, Bacall, and Betty Davis). Katie Holmes plays the “Washington Probe” reporter Heather Holloway, who screws Nick (literally, then figuratively) to advance her career (could Ms. Holmes art, perchance, be imitating her life?…). This film can be seen as the Bush-era update of Michael Mann’s 1999 tobacco exposé The Insider. Back then, the truth set us free; now, we are free to choose from multiple truths, and the fabulous caricatures (William H. Macy as schoolmarmish Vermont Senator Finistirre, Sam Elliott as the ailing original Marlboro Man) can never completely hide the ominous undertone of the Enlightenment’s demise in contemporary American politics.

Sophie Scholl; Dir. Marc Rothemund. 2005. 120mins. Julia Jentsch, Fabian Hinrichs.

Finally, a solid WWII drama to answer the question, “Where were the good Germans?” In February of 1943, as news of devastating losses in Stalingrad sends shockwaves through Germany, a group of Munich students known as the White Rose clandestinely prints leaflets appealing to the conscience of their fellow citizens and predicting the ultimate demise of the Third Reich. Jentsch and Hinrichs portray siblings Sophie and Hans Scholl, whose utter guilelessness gets them apprehended rather early in the film. The interrogations and courtroom scenes which make up the bulk of the film are notable for the defendants’ unflagging ability to provoke moments of doubt in their hard-nosed bureaucratic Nazi captors, even if only shown as a twitch of the lip. Charges of “demoralizing the troops” have an unfortunate ring even today. Indeed, the central action of the state against a few dissidents is blown open into a struggle between competing views of the will of the German people – “total war” vs. peace and absolution. Jentsch seems to channel Joan of Arc, praying for divine guidance against all hope in her jail cell as air-raid sirens wail outside. Although parts of the script seem pulled from a high-school history lesson, Sophie’s compassionate appeals to the dignity of all life – whether Protestant, Jewish, mentally-handicapped or “normal” – seem to momentarily reverse the roles of prosecution and defense. A favorite Orwellian conceit in depictions of totalitarian societies is the chilling split of families when indoctrinated children report parents engaged in subversive activity. Here we have nothing less than the triumph of family bonds over the fear-mongering state, made all the more poignant as the exercise of this family’s values demands the ultimate sacrifice.

Thresholds – the healing power of music

[first published at i care if you listen] Saturday night at St. Paul the Apostle on Manhattan’s west side, the Schola Cantorum on Hudson (SCH) brought the audience their season’s final concert, Thresholds, based on the theme of healing. As artistic director and founder Dr. Deborah Simpkin King states in the program, this “theme was chosen in honor and commemoration of those lost, and those left suddenly and unexpectedly behind, by the terrorist attacks of ten years ago… it was our feeling that our national grieving had only barely gotten underway when war engulfed national attention, thereby short-circuiting the healing process.” To restore this process, the ensemble performed works based on texts that highlight the transitory nature of life’s events, and of life itself, from a wide range of cultures: pre-Colombian New World, medieval Europe, and the Himalayas.

SCH is a 35-voice choir with an impressive collaborative mission. ‘Thresholds’ was sung with the Caldwell College Choir, the soloists were chosen from SCH membership, and the ensemble supports new music by organizing a Featured Composer Program, which this year highlighted the work of Ivo Antognini. His Life is a Circle is based on a text by Black Elk of the Oglala Sioux:

The sun comes forth and
Goes down again in a circle.
The moon does the same
And both are round.
Even the seasons form a great circle
in their changing
and always come back
to where they were.

This meditation on the cyclical nature of existence was captured with very gentle beauty by SCH, whose high and low voices wove around one another through the great vaulted space of the church.

Following the sparkle of wind chimes, a spare series of plucked harp notes, and an electronic track of droning voices, the choir achieved a very convincing medieval chant atmosphere with “Media Vita,” a chant by Irish monk Notker Balbalus (9th century), set by Michael McGlynn. The refrain pleads, “Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and merciful Savior / Do not give us over to the harshness of death” and the low voices imbued these lines with a humility and resignation pointing to acceptance of the chant’s opening and closing line, “In the midst of life we are in death.” Soloist Alexander Wentworth took advantage of the natural resonance of his space with sostenuto delivery of stark, unadorned phrases.

Following the intermission came the featured offering, the cantata Tse Go La by Andrea Clearfield, in the premiere of its chamber scoring (mixed and treble voices, electronics, piano, harp, flute and the original scoring for three percussionists). In 2008, Network for New Music commissioned the composer to collaborate with painter Maureen Drdak, whose art is inspired by Buddhist iconography. Together with cultural anthropologist Sienna Craig, they traveled to the remote Lo Monthang, a culturally Tibetan region which, since it is located in Nepal, escaped the cultural destruction that is still visited upon Chinese-occupied Tibet. Clearfield recorded over 130 gar glu (court songs) and tro glu (traditional folk songs) of Tashi Tsering, the last of the royal court singers of Lo Monthang. She sent cassette tapes of these recordings along with boom boxes to Lo Monthang to preserve the songs for posterity.

Andrea Clearfield

Tse Go La opened with a prologue which features a feverish repetition of the word do, Tibetan for ‘stone,’ which found kinship ringing out within this marble edifice. The first movement, Kye (birth) is a poem by Sienna Craig, a meditation on the mystery of the creation of life, and the marriage of matter and spirit. The Tibetan words for the elements earth, water, fire, wind, and space are whispered by the choir (Sa, lung, chu, me, nam kha), along with an electronic track of sounds derived from these elements, which Clearfield recorded in Lo Monthang.

Shar Ki Ri (mountain in the east), for treble choir, is punctuated with vocal percussion (‘tss, tss, tss’) that helps mark time for this folksong-inspired movement, which the audience is invited to imagine being sung to dancing. ‘Thresholds’ could also definitely apply to the space between these six movements, as they lead into and out of each other with the smoothness of time, and yet use time to delineate the introduction of a new musical frame of mind. The next movement, Tse Go La (at the threshold of this life) gave soprano Sara Livolsi and tenor Kerry Stubbs the chance to sing of the desire, awakened by nature, which seeks the union of marriage: “This high mountain pasture nurtures luscious grass, / Just as this is so, it is my karma to wed this beautiful bride.” A bass flute solo plumbs the depths of a valley as seen from these high mountain passes. Kusum, the next movement, climaxes in explosive percussion, followed by conch shells and flute, phasing in and out of unison. A lament is sung with doleful piano accompaniment, mourning the departure of a queen. The cantata closes with an aleatoric reprise of the “do” motif, and the singers empty the performance space in processional, ringing bowls in hand, the basses chanting the Heart Sutra mantra.

What impresses me the most about Andrea Clearfield’s compositional ethos is her fidelity to both the spirit and the form of Tibetan chant. When Stravinsky and his colleagues set out to recreate ancient pagan Russian rituals in Le Sacre du Printemps, they used considerable artistic license, and musicologists have sometimes pointed out that it shouldn’t be seen as an authentic ethnological treatise. The tremendous global upheavals in the last century have made plain the fragility of indigenous cultural traditions, and artists like Clearfield and her colleagues should be commended for celebrating these traditions in a way designed to save them from extinction, with a view to preserving their authenticity. This is not the routine, ritual music of detachment heard in a yoga class, but a more polished meditative exercise, the piano, harp and percussion poking and plucking out points in time while the choir chants in a weightless probing of space. Anthropology, musical elegance and creativity, and a spirit of interconnected human experience coexist in her work in an organic way, which obviates the question, “Is it activism, or is it art?”

Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora); Dir. G. W. Pabst. 1929. 100mins. Louise Brooks, Fritz Kortner, Francis Lederer, Carl Goetz, Gustav Diessl.

I had the privilege of listening to pianist/composer Steve Sterner accompany the Film Forum’s showing of this treasure from the end of the silent era. Shot in Berlin, the film is a dizzying allegory of the mayhem wrought by the over-the-top allure of a carefree young woman. As the film opens we see Lulu (Brooks) languidly throwing herself about a plush apartment with a revolving door of male admirers spanning three generations, each with a different plan for this bewitching chanteuse. Carl Goetz’s tipsy Schigolch aims to put her in a trapeze act, while the lovestruck Dr. Schön (Kortner) and his equally enchanted son Alwa (Lederer) cast her in a stage revue. The backstage antics of this scene are a hilarious stream of petulant foot-stamping, the frantic scurrying of a wide-eyed stage manager, and steamy dressing room seduction. More innocent and endearing than a Madame Bovary, and yet somehow more beguiling than a Sister Carrie, her morality is so compartmentalized as to be almost non-existent. We see her flipping through a catalog of decadent, racy flapper dresses, and she eventually gets to model, in turn, a bridal gown, mourning weeds, and the rags of an exiled fugitive gamine, though this latter sign of her demise cannot dampen the spirits of this ebullient party girl. Pabst’s camera deals with Brooks and her willowy beauty on her own flighty terms, without the suspended facial close-ups that treated her contemporary Greta Garbo as a porcelain icon rather than flesh-and-blood woman. Anyone who longs to see the screen equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz-era gentlemen laid low by impossibly headstrong, demanding vixens should keep an eye out for screenings of this erotic classic.

Mystery Train; Dir. Jim Jarmusch. 1989. 113mins. Masatoshi Nagase, Youki Kudoh, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Cinque Lee, Nicoletta Braschi, Joe Strummer, Steve Buscemi.

Die-hard Elvis fans might find this cooky-noir tribute to the King unsettling, but Jarmusch succeeds in capturing the simple, elegant seediness of Memphis in three droll, loosely-connected tales.  Centered around a cheap hotel run by a flamboyantly-dressed clerk (Hawkins), this film, more than any other I’m aware of, anticipates Tarantino’s ideas of cinematic cool, including sliced & diced chronology, cavalier gunplay, and the humorous skirting of racial and linguistic boundaries.  The art-house ethos thrives on this sort of a screenplay, devoid of strong leading characters and rigid plotlines, so that the mundane flavor of real life can be toyed with by a gallery of losers and budget travelers.  The initial vignette is in Japanese without subtitles, but if we pay attention we can pick out names like Carl Perkins and Elvis from the smoke-filled dialogue of Jun & Mitsuko (Nagase and Kudoh).  Jarmusch would go on to explore the theme of unlikely cross-cultural pollination in films like Ghost Dog.  Visually, the director excels in framing seemingly ordinary events (a purchase at a magazine stand, breaking glass, a guided tour in the tiny Sun Studios), and then stepping back and allowing their core absurdity to distill at it’s own pace.  The vintage Rock-a-billy soundtrack is the perfect complement to the gritty nostalgia of a decaying American city.  Star performances include Nicoletta Braschi as a slightly confused Italian widow, and Steve Buscemi in perhaps the first of many roles as the obligatory recipient of gruesome bodily harm.