Music I Liked – Midcentury Modern and Industrial Violin

Last week was so much music. I discovered an Icelandic neoclassical composer – too late. My daughter’s orchestra had its winter performance. I attended Seattle Symphony Untuxed where I was exposed to midcentury modern music of the orchestral variety that still raises eyebrows today. Then electric violin and industrial soundscapes blew my mind at Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Director’s Choice. Through the week, a few themes emerged.

I rarely like piano music. Kate Bush and Amanda Palmer make me stabby. When I do like it, I like it hard. I liked a lot of piano this week. Usually when I like piano, it’s neoclassical. There was a lot of neoclassical and midcentury modern classical music on the menu this week as well. Some of the midcentury modern stuff amazed me, some of it challenged me. The places where heavy metal and industrial music collided with classical were more challenging to others in the audience, but scratched an itch on my soul.

Challenges were also thematic this week. A lot of the music challenged tradition, expectations, the very understanding of what constitutes classical music, ballet music, or even music at all.

Jóhann Jóhannsson

A few weeks ago, KEXP announced the untimely death of Icelandic neoclassical composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. I thought I was all over Icelandic Neoclassical, but I was unfamiliar with Johann’s music. It took me a while to get around to it, but I listened to his album Orphée. It was achingly beautiful, with all the melancholy hallmarks of Icelandic sound. It’s quiet enough to work to, too, as long as you don’t mind washing your keyboard with tears. It’s always a tragedy when someone dies young, and a double loss when the person is an artist. Even though his death introduced me to his music, I feel the loss of Jóhann personally.

Francis Poulenc

At the Untuxed concert, I heard the work of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos for the first time. This midcentury composer combined traditional folk music with the latest in modern classical music. I didn’t really like it. I couldn’t hear any melody, let alone folk melodies. I much preferred Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in D minor, written four years later, when I heard it at the ballet the following day. Somehow two pianos were more interesting than one piano. Here were big cinematic, Golden Age swells and readily identifiable emotions – all the drama with less chaos. I might actually have just liked the ballet, though. When I listened to the recording later, it was a little too much like a movie soundtrack.

Gavin Bryars

Gavin Bryars’ String Quartet No. 1 “Between the National and the Bristol,” on the other hand, is still intriguing. Although written much later (it was first performed in 1985), to me it formed a bridge between the neoclassical reveries that I love and the tense unpredictability of the midcentury pieces I heard at Untuxed. There is no putting this music on in the background, nor does it provide a soundtrack for an imagined movie. Here is music that demands active listening on its own terms.

Mary Rowell

Ugh. Oh my god. Richard Einhorn wrote Maxwell’s Demon for electric violinist Mary Rowell in 1990 and if I had known such music existed I might have actually practiced for my violin lessons. We were lucky to see Rowell perform the piece at PNB last weekend and ugh. Oh. my. god. She reminded me of Robert Johnson, the way people said he sounded like two guitar players on one guitar. All the double strings and percussive beats on the neck. Violin is the most versatile instrument and is traditionally associated with both the human soul and the devil himself. In Mary Rowell’s hands, it is both at the same time. As bracing and dissonant as heavy metal, it is yet a classical composition.

Here is an excerpt:

Here she’s performing it unamplified:

Thom Willems

The final ballet was scored by Thom Willems. People referred to the composition for One Flat Thing, reproduced as a “sound design” or “audio environment.” Loathe to call it music, they reminded each other that it was meant to be unnerving. But to me there was a symmetry to its patterns that the accompanying dance lacked. I spent years in college listening to this music. We called it “industrial.” And I still love it.

The only place I could find this piece of music online was a vimeo of a ballet performance. The choreography is different from what I saw, but the music is the same. It’s worth clicking through to hear/see it.

One Flat Thing, reproduced (2006), a film by Thierry De Mey from dance-tech.TV on Vimeo.

It reminds me of this music that I used to listen to a lot in college.

And here’s a link to another, better clip that I also can’t embed. (Isn’t it funny that the most rule-breaking music is under the tightest copyright lockdown?)