Landscapes

Posted on July 2, 2006 by MaLj

Kyle Gann in PostClassic has a long post about American art and music, American Romanticism: Music vs. Painting, with a discussion of what was new and specifically American in the Hudson River School of painters, and then in comparison how little original their contemporaries among composers were:

“Their music is a pale imitation of the European aesthetic of their day. In vain one listens to their symphonies, tone poems, piano pieces, and string quartets, for a new feeling for melody, a new sense of form, a departure from Europe. They were timid. Their emphasis was not on a bold new beginning, but on a sense of correctness, a balance learned rather than created, and a desire to impress. At their very best – as in, say, Chadwick’s string quartets – one finds an energetic smoothness, but even here the music seems to plead, ‘Look – I followed all the rules. Isn’t that enough?’ “

F. E. Church: Morning, Looking East Over the Hudson Valley from the Catskill Mountains

When I told my friend Pat Ross-Ross that I have started to paint in oil, and thought both landscapes and portraits were interesting to try, he mentioned The Group of Seven, and suggested I looked at the works of these famous Canadian painters, to see if my idea of Northern landscapes resonated with theirs. Yes, maybe. And then I read that some of the painters in the Canadian Northern school were inspired by the Scandinavians of a generation before them… If I understood this right.

Tom Thomson: The West Wind

The Nationalmuseum in Stockholm will host an exhibition in the autumn 2006, with works by romantic and early 20th century landscape painters from the Nordic countries. (The exhibition is in Helsinki this summer, starting in Stockholm on 30 September, will be in Oslo in spring 2007, comes to Minneapolis in the summer 2007, and then last stop is in Copenhagen in the autumn 2007)

Edvard Munch: Moonlight

Chasing foxes

Posted on June 30, 2006 by MaLj

This morning, I watched two small foxes playing in the meadow between the village school and the old feldspar mines. At first I wondered why two cats were running like that — or was it martens? No, foxes. A beautiful chase, like two waves of red fur flowing over the field, and then rolling on over the road and into the wood.

Marie-Louise Maude Ester Fuchs De Geer Bergenstråhle Ekman

Posted on June 22, 2006 by MaLj

Det här är en ny artikel om en av mina idoler – Marie-Louise med de många efternamnen. Det här är en äldre intervju. Jag har verkligen inte följt med i allt hon har gjort – sett alla bilder och installationer, sett alla filmer, läst böcker, sett pjäser, inrett med hennes tyger, eller så. Men jag uppskattar hennes klokt galna syn på konsten, och människorna:

– Jag har förstått först efteråt vad det är jag gör, ja, vad jag har hållit på med hela tiden. Jag är inte konstintresserad alls. Jag försöker förstå tillvaron genom att rycka ut fragment ur den som jag håller på med tills jag känner mig… lugnare, i alla fall med just den lilla skärvan. Men jag har ingen ambition alls att göra konstverk.

– Alla människor får miljoner idéer. Det svåra är att sortera, välja bort och välja rätt. Att göra ett bra val är det som utmärker en god idé. Man kan lära sig att vara uppmärksam på vilka människor eller saker man vill komma nära, och på när varningssignalerna lyser. Hjärnan håller på hela tiden.

[This linked article is a recent interview with one of my idols – the artist, playwright, movie director, and art professor Marie-Louise Maude Ester Fuchs De Geer Bergenstråhle Ekman. And this is an older article from another newspaper.]

work in progress

Posted on June 20, 2006 by MaLj

the camera was unsteady, which in fact makes this picture look better than in real life, but both two paintings of the helmsman (-woman) are unfinished, I can’t get the eyes right, and the whole thing is lifeless kitsch, but maybe someday..

the landscape seen in the background of the studio interior (the thing with the red road and the puddles) is in its first stages, so the colours aren’t right yet, but will be darker with more layers of paint.

Claude Ranger

Posted on June 15, 2006 by MaLj

My good friend Terry King has mentioned [on this tribute site] our introduction to Claude Ranger in 1970:

“I was playing jazz violin in Montreal around 1971, when I met Claude along with my friend, bassist Mike Morse. At that time we had never played with a musician of Claude’s stature (I’m not sure I’ve ever played with anyone of his stature since, either).”

We were the house band in a jazz coffee house in Val David called Jazz et Café. Some amazing people trooped through there, including Marius Coulthier, Peter Leitch, a very young Steve Hall, and Brian Barley. Brian amazed us, of course, and told us about Claude’s playing and writing. He showed us some of Claude’s tunes, and explained some things about Claude’s unique and insightful concept of harmony, based on the extensions of a seventh chord.

Terry and I went down to Old Montreal, and heard him with Billie Robinson, Peter Leitch, and Freddie McHugh. Growing up in NJ/NYC, I had already heard many great musicians — but nothing like this. The energy and creativity never flagged for a second, nor did the utter beauty of sound from the drums.

Shortly afterwards, Terry and I asked Claude to play a set at a college concert. To our amazement he said yes, and even agreed to do a rehearsal. We played in the basement of the McGill student centre. Claude was affable but quiet, setting up with seeming unconcern. The first tune we called was Claude’s “Le Pingouin,: which we had learned from a record of Claude, Brian, and bassist Daniel Lessard. The bass line is a simple chromatic pattern in half steps. I started playing it, and after a few measures, Claude started to play. That first few moments was one of the defining moments of my life. He was playing the most complex things I had ever heard from a drummer, yet it fit so beautifully and simply with the bass line he composed.

We finished the rehearsal, and played the concert a few days later, in a kind of ecstatic daze. We finished our set, and had to find the promoter to get our salary. 20 or 30 dollars for all three of us? Something like that; we gave it all to Claude, naturally. In any event, Claude waited backstage. The next act had already started, a loud rock band. When we found Claude, he was sitting with his back to the wall, which shaking from the volume of the rock band–composing music! Thunderstruck, we asked how he could do this, and he said something like “only what you hear inside matters.”

Many folks have rightly mentioned Claude’s capacity to turn any musical event into something extraordinary and artistic. I remember once going to hear Claude up on St. Hubert someplace, with Terry and Jerry Labelle. The group was just a trio, an amiable but utterly pedestrian organist, singer — and Claude.

The music was the most banal bar trash of the day. One of the numbers was a merengue. The hook to the commercial merengue beat is four sixteenth-notes on the snare drum at the end of the second bar of the pattern, leading to the downbeat: ducka-ducka-DUM; ducka-ducka-DUM. When the tune started, my friends and I suddenly felt something utterly marvellous, and didn’t know immediately what it was. We soon figured it out. Claude was playing all of the standard accents for merengue, but was playing the principle figure on the ride cymbal instead of the snare. The first sixteenth note, he left out altogether. The next was piano-pianissimo, the next pianissimo, and the fourth and last piano, in a slight, incedibly controlled crescendo. The effect was magical, profoundly musical, and danceable, too! Even if someone else had thought of this ingenious variation, it demands virtuoso control of dynamics to pull it off. Who else but Claude could do that?

Claude always played the complete music, never just a drum part. I had the opportunity to work four nights with Claude in Ottawa, a trio gig with baritone saxophonist Charles Papasoff. It was all standards and jazz tunes, and Claude played with such sensitivity to the music that you actually hear the chord changes, both in his accompaniment and solos. Here was a drummer on the level of the greatest in jazz, a composer and theorist of the same calibre, and a profoundly inspiring bandleader and teacher to several generations of musicians.

I once spent half a year composing a postcard to Claude, in French. The substance was: if I have been able to glimpse a small part of the true glory of music, revered friend, it is thanks to you above all.

MW Morse

Here is a tune inspired by Claude Ranger’s musical ideas.

Kitchen quilt from 2004

Posted on June 12, 2006 by MaLj

This is a quilt I made a couple of years ago, and which I use as a drape between the hall and the combined dining room and kitchen. (Click on the photo to see a larger version). The design is a wild interpretation of a quilt from a book by Kaffe Fassett, and the colours are meant to match the ochre and blue of our kitchen. The technique is blocks made of 3-5 cm wide shreds, sewn around a small square in the centre. Then the slightly uneven blocks were cut after a square paper pattern, and some of them cut diagonally in halves. The quilt was composed with a greyblue/beige striped fabric between the blocks, and small violet squares in the corners. Around it all is a darker blue and violet border. The other side is in bright blue with golden stars.

Respect 2

Posted on June 10, 2006 by MaLj

(Photo Credit: Nick Galifianakis for The Washington Post)

Just something paradoxical to think about for a moment. It is possible to respect someone, and still not respect most of the things they do and say. Or, is it?

Tango: Orfeus & Ofelia

Posted on June 10, 2006 by MaLj

In October 2005, I made this sketch of a dancing couple, after reading some articles about Argentine tango in an old issue of National Geographic. Later, I have painted the same figures in a picture in a different colour scheme. Now, I think it looks more like a mythological scene. Maybe this is Orpheus, waltzing on the golden road up from the Underworld, with, not a sad and silent Eurydice who is just about to turn back to the dead, but – a sleepwalking Ophelia. Somehow, I also think the woman resembles Diana Krall. Don’t know why!

(“Tango: Orfeus & Ofelia”. Oil painting, ca 33×24 cm. Copyright: MaLj (Sweden) 2006. Click on the image to see a larger version.)

Jazz listening on radio

Posted on May 24, 2006 by MaLj

Yesterday I heard a recorded concert from jazz club Fasching in Stockholm. The aired program was from Maria Schneider’s visit to Sweden in October 2005. She worked with a Swedish big band, and you can read about the concert at Sveriges Radio’s pages about it (and read more about the program here, and if you are lucky with the technology, listen to the program!).

“Favourite Composer?”

Posted on May 12, 2006 by MaLj

[The following sermon by MWM is a republished posting from a composer forum discussion on the topic “Who is your favorite living composer?”]

Let us, dear brethren & sistren, attend the word at issue. “Favo(u)rite” does not mean “greatest,” “most admired,” nor even “best.” It entails a notably more relaxed and personal commitment than value judgment.

At the least one could say this: ever since the pantheon set up shop, more than a century ago, composers have had to deal with the question of why they bother, put in the pointed, accusatory fashion “why should we listen to you(r music), when we can listen to [fill in the icon of choice] instead?” At the very least, the answer to that has got to be that one thinks fondly of one’s own music; “proudly” is a bonus that, it seems, a dwindling number of composers can embrace. Whether that is due to the increasing imposition of bellicose challenges like the one I cited, I couldn’t say.

I agree, however, with Taylor Silver’s comments (*): in addition to all our other problems, striking some sort of sane balance between arrogance and modesty seems difficult for composers. I feel this is because the core notion of compositional art and craft is obscured. That is not so much due to decadence, to a decline in the standard of excellence, but to a general historical confusion that overwhelms us. Even within a single tradition, there is not just too much too learn, but too many things, too many different kinds of exemplars to absorb and understand.

Too many of the lessons [of the past] offer at least contradictory interpretations, if not indeed contradictory realities. To take a simple example, Mahler & Webern proffer directly contradistinctive lessons on musical economy. Yet it’s fair to say that a real understanding of either composer presupposes a keen insight into the other. A professed enemy of Mahler will be a limited, if not piss-poor conductor of Webern. The development section of “Veni, Creator Spiritus” was not only a direct inspiration to Webern’s Cantatas, but a case of genuine musical affinity. That affinity is one of the deepest levels of both composers’ music, and so indispensable for performers and students of their music. It can take years to appreciate that affinity; without it, though, an admirer and would-be emulator of either composer is virtually certain to catch nothing but mannerisms. Absent the real sympathy of musical understanding, what they will be able to learn is so superficial that nothing but disconnected phrases will result from their effort: in a (dreaded) word, pastiche.

It does seem to me that the vigorous, surly, and bloody-minded defense of mere exercises as real music, and the defiant/triumphant confusion of simulacra with reality, is uncomfortably close to a symptom of decadence. The SibMus world can’t be that different from the music world at large. And every week, there will be literally dozens of reviews that read, en clair: “Hey! Like, wow! Here’s a staggeringly crude imitation of Mozart/Rachmaninoff/Dvorak that’s got as much in common with its original as an coarsely manufactured mannequin does with a person. But: a. I’m easily swayed and fooled, because I haven’t spent any time studying the originals — hey, I’m busy, and I don’t love them that much; b. the composer is a personal friend/only a kid/someone I feel sorry for/’sincere’/etc; c. who’s to say? it’s all just opinion anyway, namsane?”

It’s becoming clearer to me that people only invoke such pathetic, relativistic standards because they don’t know any better, because they haven’t any (or enough) experiences to ground them in anything more solid. And, despite my grave philosophical issues with the term, I will say it, because it belongs here, inescapably: they have not experienced anything more real.

I’m saying that a cultural atmosphere of profound cluelessness is anything but a nurturing one for both the humility and the pride of a committed composer. As I’ve repeatedly (and shrilly, by now) argued, relativism is no victimless crime. If/when enough people flat out refuse to recognize any difference between some shockingly far-off (and inept) imitation of Mozart, and Mozart — then the capacity of Mozart’s music to teach is, to that extent, compromised, or even at an end. In such circumstances, clearing away the debris and weeds of misunderstanding to a path to Mozart is exponentially harder for everyone, very much including composers. Unless we want to argue that our culture plays no role whatsoever in our learning processes — and only the most aggressively brainless relativist will step up to the plate on that one — then we have to accept that the general conditions of our musical understanding present many of the particular obstacles we face as musicians. In the present circumstance, being able to enjoy our own music without delusion or (residual) self-loathing can seem a distant triumph indeed.