wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comment from Richard Mitnick
Date: June 30, 2008, 7:41 pm

Great to hear Susie Ibarra on WNYC. She is one of the best artists to come out of Innova. Dan Buskirk, a great Jazz person at WPRB, Princeton University described her music as “choice”. Thanks for getting her name out.

Comment from Miss Antropy
Date: June 30, 2008, 9:18 pm

Kanye West and Carole King would make great musical ambassadors.

Comment from Dièry Prudent
Date: June 30, 2008, 10:49 pm

Welcome to New York. I enjoy your show!

My vote fot the greatest Amnerican musical ambassador of all time is Loius Armstrong. Duke, Monk and Miles would make the cut, as would Diz. The 21st Century jazz unit most imbued with the living spirit of those pro-genitors is the Dizzy Gillespie Big Band. Led by musical director, the bassist John Lee and conducted by the great trombonist Slide Hampton, this multi-generational band features James Moody, Antonio Hart, Jimmy Heath, Roy Hargrove, Cyrus Chestnut and others playing raucus, rollicking classic bebop and funked up soul blues.

Don’t miss the 3rd Annual Lincoln Park Free Music Festival July 24 Newark, NJ - (Moody performs at 7:30)

Comment from Harry Matthews
Date: June 30, 2008, 11:46 pm

Outdoor performances can be fun. The atmosphere is always festive (barring a thunderstorm!) and it’s always delightful to SEE stars meet the performance standards, even if the entire cast can’t. But all that amplification and miniaturization do take their toll on the performance.

A unique question arises this year: did Peter Gelb make a decent trade-off by providing one sensational super-star recital rather than the traditional four-to-six concert operas in several venues?

As a former ad man, I think he’s throwing away important chances to reach a new market. But I do understand the economics of his choice, especially in these troubled times!

Comment from George Preston
Date: July 1, 2008, 11:42 am

In response to Harry Matthews’ comment about the big Met concert in Prospect Park, and in my official capacity as WNYC Music Director, I have a couple of things to say. I attended the Alagna/Gheorghiu concert. It was fun, but I personally will miss the presentations of entire operas in the various parks. As an opera afficionado, I enjoyed hearing the not-so-famous singers the Met would frequently employ for those occasions. The best known singers are not always the most interesting artists.

That said, I think the Met really got the maximum bang for their buck. They were all over NY1 for two days, and they got a ton of media coverage for this one event, which was much cheaper to mount than a whole series of full-length operas.

The crowd loved it, too, and I think Mr. Gelb is being frank when he states that this is an experiment and not necessarily the permanent demise of a summer opera-in-the-parks season. We’ll see what happens next year.

Comment from Catchy
Date: July 1, 2008, 1:06 pm

The River to River Festival has performances almost every day through September at various venues downtown. Worth looking into…..

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: July 1, 2008, 7:50 pm

Whether indoors or outdoors, music takes root in the three simultaneous theaters:
The within of psyche,
the pan-aural social of culture (and it’s saturated history),
and the comprehensive extent qatsi.

Music interrupts and exceptionalizes because it is an active inter-context, always kin to Koyaanisqatsi (Vitality out of balance), Powaqqatsi (Vitality of the sorcerer’s transform), and Naqoyqatsi (vitality as unending war), all from the Hopi language. If we are not asleep all three theaters engage the inflorescent urgent. Initially this may seem as if it’s a non-modernist perspective, but it is a way to open the locked doors of imagination so that listening can instantly access the intimate.

In addition to the city, if there’s a chance to visit Tanglewood or the Berkshire Choral Society in Sheffield, MA these are very fine places, although really it’s not the place that makes the music.

Oh yes, BTW, Yungchen Lhamo is at Joe’s Pub this evening July 1. Ciao, T

Comment from sunday
Date: July 1, 2008, 9:02 pm

hello terrence
i love your program… you play a great variety of interesting music- thank you! i wanted to mention that i braved the rain on my bicycle to get to prospect park for the salif kieta show last sunday & it was phenomenal! at one point lookin around me i saw that everyone in my view was smiling & either dancing or just swaying to the music… it was truly a fountain of positive vibrations out there that day… how wonderful the whole band was! as well as the audience…

Comment from Anne O’Byrne
Date: July 1, 2008, 9:51 pm

I have long been longing for a radio programme here in New York that would be as delightful and eclectic as one of the most ferociously popular radio programmes in Ireland, “The JK Ensemble” on RTE’s Lyric FM. (Check it out at http://www.rte.ie/lyricfm/jk/) Evening Music is just the thing, and Terrance McKnight has the same breadth of musical knowledge as John Kelly, presenter of the JK Ensemble, and his own warm charm. It’s a lovely show. Thanks.

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: July 2, 2008, 10:49 am

Music is a decision.

It is tempting to think of music as if it were a form, set out in composition from which a “literal performance” is read.

Instead, music is an aesthetic product, specifically a sequential inter-acting aesthetic product [SI-aAP]. Because we are usually introduced to music as a function of the body and then sensory emotions that have relation to either the body or to bodiless imaginings, we often miss the significance of how such a product functions differently from, say, a pencil (a direct instrument), or from a Ming vase (a crafted antiquity with illustration of some cultural evocation) . A helpful model of a SI-aAP is what James Joyce called an “epiphany”, which is his term for an micro-drama between fictional characters that plays into the robustly active reaction-system of the reader’s reception-theater, into the reader / listener’s sensitive IMPRESSION. Music, similarly, contains a composed conflict that develops and in some way resolves; it plays out in the mind of the listener (who is extremely reactive with their own expectations, cultural reflexes, egoist experience in search of rewards, emoto-comparative memories. This might be graphically represented as a horizontal line representing the polarities of compositional conflict, which is bisected by a vertical line representing the listener’s response-experience pleasure /displeasure. On this little “window” can be plotted a single listener’s ACTUAL subjective reactions. Such a mapping window then fully reveals the epiphany that occurs by engagement with the aesthetic product stimulus, the full EFFECT, at least up to the point where retrospection begins.

A SI-aAP is, as we see, an experiential stimulant and the WHAT of it’s stimulating EFFECT is an occurrence within the psyche of the individual listener. Each listener is rather unique, and therefore the effect varies marvelously from person to person. The effect is ultimately so subjective that many people find it uncomfortably de-linked from what they have come to regard as “proper” experience, socially acceptable, and subject to judgements about whether or not the effect is virtuous. This is because the psyche is a webwork of impulses and containments that are highly concerned with both “propriety” and social membership. The way the psyche listens, then, is to look for elements that are recognizable as socially acceptable, socially validated, reinforced by favorable social appraisal. This process is largely reflex and operates actively at the subconscious level. Psyche has expectations that the stimulus will be “proper”, and, oddly, in the subconscious we only hear what we expect to hear. The imperative is to, by social appraisal, receive psychologic validation. Certain kinds of EFFECTS are regarded by our authoritative validators as prohibited, or semi-prohibited. When an effect goes close to what is prohibited there is emotional tension.

As each person gets experienced with SI-aAP stimulus we become desensitized to how much the validation process is controlling our taste-preferences and how much stimulus we are being led to ignore or reject. Validation is a continuous ritual that reinforces our sense of what’s good and safe in the selection of SI-sAP sources. We each construct (though we are taught that it is merely our “likes & dislikes”) a way of applying our imagination. This involves permissions and prohibitions, heroizations and villainizations which become systematized and which are practiced as rituals that have the effect of affirming the system as an internal validative discriminator. Because this discriminator has its origins in socially conditioned judgements it is political and it actively operates as an intervener in our personal taste judgements, judgements which conform to a politics of the imagination [POI]. This politics of imagination system reflexively conditions what we will listen to, how satisfied we are, how much we can question, whether we find answers to questions satisfying or reject them. We make snap judgements that are grounded in POI system rituals of putative reward. Time and time again we find music stimulus to be “right” as american, or Jazz/classical/ Caribbean/ etc. and from these “righteous categories” we experience catharsis. The conditioning is so strong and so subtle that when we are off guard we can even feel catharsis at the mere mention of a beloved category, smiling involuntarily. The same categories reject conventionally “alien” stimulants. We habituate the categories into cathexis. The high-emotional charge of the categories seals us off from stimulants that we regard as “unright”. This includes resistance to mixing human speech and a background of music on which we aim to focus. By expressing our categoric insist that we “not mix” what we righteously contend is “pure” about the aural stimulus we engage in an interative ritual of declaring authority. It’s not just a whim. It is an intensified position, a psychologic behavior, an exercise of imprinted bias. Our cultural boundaries can be thought of as having three stages: 1st: premodern (emoto-sensorium, biologic and somatic), 2nd: Modernist (unbound from the myths and illusions of pleasure-bondage / reward-addiction so that more hygienic and non-hegemonic acuity is possible), and 3rd: Post-structuralist (meta-vision methods ably skeptical of all rote utopianism).

Comment from Tom, Cooper Sq.
Date: July 2, 2008, 10:50 am

In a healthy culture there is tolerant interchange, dialogic practice that involves tolerant listening and tolerant inquiry that is not structured to be insult (e.g., the form: “Even you must admit that you,secretly, feel it’s stupid to do as you did?”).

So we can pose some useful questions for examination on all of this:
1) Are we able to face the challenge of unbiased candor? If not, what is the obstacle?
2) Do we need preparation for experiencing music? What do we need to change if we are to apprehend the revolution of polyphony (Nature + orchestra) (Symphony + commentary) (Calypso + no dancing) (Movie + no soundtrack)?
3) Is the music-element of entertainment at all independent of acoustical reception? (Can it be that music is strong enough that it is never hurt by talk?) (Can improvisation ever hurt the music it is within or that it is para-quoting into another “piece / work” of musical expression?)

Music is a multi-layered inter-contexting which plays psyche against paradigm and conventional standards against innovation. Our imagination is not always capable of opening fully to the interaction on all of its vital layers. This is why the tool of “simultaneous theaters” can be a personal method to open our perceptivity. We keep listening as we visit what we hear via each of the three open theaters: a) psyche, b) social-culture (with it’s history), c) extensive ecology(transpersonal and transcultural). Perhaps we can listen to a musical presentation by stages in one or another of these theaters, then from an alternative theater, and then from the third and then from any two of them, then another two, etc. Until we can listen from the undivided perspective of all three at the same moment throughout the entire sequence of the SI-aAP. To what end? To the end of more-comprehensive immersion, unsecreting, barrierless engagement. In this sense, music is always a decition. Please reply with what you think on any of this.

Ciao, T

Comment from Richie
Date: July 2, 2008, 7:12 pm

Hey Terrence

Like what you started tonight off with. Ever listen to Joanna Newsom? Would like to hear something by her on your airwaves someday.

Comment from FM
Date: July 2, 2008, 8:16 pm

What was the name of the Mark Mellitz piece that ended at 8pm today? It was really fantastic. However, I haven’t been able to find much information about the composer or his work or where to buy a copy.

Comment from Hermit
Date: July 2, 2008, 10:57 pm

(FM - Try spelling it Marc Mellits, or http://www.marcmellits.com)

Comment from Gerald
Date: July 10, 2008, 9:28 am

Yea, what was that Mellits piece?! Fantastic.

Comment from Hermit
Date: July 10, 2008, 12:29 pm

Gerald -
Playlists tend to get posted a few days after the show:
http://www.wnyc.org/music/playlists/2008/07/02

String Quartet No. 2
Marc Mellits
The Duke Quartet
Black Box 1097