A little dose of class and pretense: Free concerts at MoMA

Here's something that I consider extremely exciting and would jump on in a heartbeat... but then again, Xue did tell me that I'm the most pretentious person she knows (and keep in mind she knows Adam Fishman '09**).

MoMA's Summergarden concerts: Free but Still Pretentious

Lincoln Center Jazz and the Juilliard School are putting on free concerts in MoMA's sculpture garden (speaking of which, do go see the Richard Serra exhibition there if you haven't already). It's been going on for a while, sorry I didn't post about it before. The last two concerts in the series are:

Sunday, August 19 8PM
The New Juilliard Ensemble plays contemporary classical music by composers Jukka Tiensuu, Andy Vorhes, and Paul Schoenfield. Knowing these people will put you one step above everyone else in Lucier's Intro to Experimental Music class. If you ever want to impress somebody with your knowledge of new music and contemporary composers, mention any of the above, especially Vorhes--the guy doesn't even have a wikipedia article!

Sunday August 26 8PM
Jazz Concert: Cyro Baptista's Antropo-Fagia. Nothing says it better than MoMA's own little blurb, which calls it "a musical manifestation of the process of eating, swallowing, and digesting all the tendencies that are part of the sonic landscape and our environment." If you have the nerve to pretend to know what that means, don't miss it.

**I mean that in the best possible way, Adam.

I am sitting in a room...BLOGGALOGGING.

Music Professor Alvin Lucier is another tour de force at Wesleyan. Like Finn, he has garnered his own following among students. Most notoriously, nearly every student at Wes is familiar with his 1969 recording "I am Sitting in a Room." Here, today in the Washington Post, he is noted as one of the greatest composers of the 20th century:

"I Am Sitting in a Room." (Alvin Lucier, performer. Lovely Music.)

After 10 minutes, you'll probably hate this piece, but by the time it reaches the half-hour mark, I'll bet you are fascinated. The idea behind "I Am Sitting in a Room" is very simple, rather akin to making a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy with the inevitable fuzzy dissolution of the original image. What Lucier (born 1931) did was to take a tape recording of a brief speech, play it into another tape recorder, then take that tape and play it into another recorder, and so on, until all language was filtered away and what was left was a mercurial patina of sonic residue -- the "ghost" of the speech, if you will. It may sound arty and pretentious, but it couldn't be more lovely, especially as the distortion moves in to stay. Words become music, sound becomes shimmer and a natural process of acoustics is demonstrated in the most elegant and strangely beautiful fashion.

On a completely unrelated note, Xue is the hyperactive puppy of the internet search. I tell her to fetch, and she fetches. Good Xue, good. Sit, booboo, sit. Good girl.

Xue adds: I was speaking to Brian Decker '08 (a music major) on the phone just now as I was listening to the mp3. To me it just sounds like hurt. But Brian insists that he hears whales. Whatever, Brian.