Karl Miller writes: >I am reminded of something one of my teachers once suggested. Her idea was >to place a ban on the music of Beethoven for some unspecified time period. I'm ambivalent about this. At one point, I would have agreed completely. On the other hand, I've just gotten into standard rep. At my local symphony (which, incidentally, does enough new stuff to keep my interest), some of the most revelatory performances I've ever heard were of things I'd known forever: Tchaikovsky 4th, Beethoven 3rd, Dvorak 9th. Of course, all of them were led by Klauspeter Seibel, the music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic (or, as I like to call it, La Phil). I think the key is balance, which is why I'm at such a disadvantage arguing for new music. Brahms, who for years and years had put me to sleep, I now like, so I'm not really inclined to complain about programming him. Nevertheless, my main musical interests aren't really satisfied, since few are willing to indulge me. The harm, of course, is that what we always hear - from a very narrow sliver of years, incidentally - tends to reinforce a narrow notion of what music is and, worse, what great music is. Speaking of La Phil, I went to a very interesting concert of French music, mostly with a New Orleans connection: Gretry, Dede, Gottschalk, Lambert (not Constant, and pronounced "lamb-BEAR"), Bizet, Guiraud, Weigel, and ending with a "cheater," Ravel's La Valse. Gretry arranged a Creole dance. Dede and Lambert were Black Creoles (one slave, the other a "free man of color") who provided mainly music for dances. Gottschalk, of course, is better-known. Seibel and La Phil's pianist, Mary Ann Bulla, did a piece for two pianos. Gottschalk's name survives mainly on the strength of his "Creole" pieces, but most of his stuff resembles standard Chopin & Liszt Romanticism. This piece, however, was more exotic and jazzy. The Bizet was the L'arlesienne Suite No. 2, one of my favorites. This time, I learned that the major creator of the suite was Ernest Guiraud, the man who completed Les Contes d'Hofmann and who provided the recitatives for Carmen, and a New Orleans native. I never thought much of the Carmen recitatives, so I underestimated Guiraud. It turns out he composed major portions of the L'arlesienne suites. The farandole as composed by Bizet, for example, was originally something like 60 bars. Guiraud expanded it to over 200 and provided my single favorite moment in the suites: the combining of the martial tune with the fife-and-drum tune at the end. The end of the intermission brought with it an original Guiraud piece, Overture to d'Artevant. A technical marvel, nevertheless it sounds like early Wagner of nearly forty years before - something like Tannhauser, Rienzi, or Lohengrin. I was talking with one of the orchestra violinists during intermission (it's the only player-owned professional orchestra in the US, and orchestra members come out to schmooze with the patrons during the break), who complained of its being written in "five sharps, with accidentals, yet!" Outside of the Ravel, the most interesting piece was Jay Weigel's clarinet concerto. Weigel's a New Orleans native who studied at USC and came back home. He now heads the New Orleans Contemporary Arts Center and in that job has revitalized the place. This year he's inaugurated (and, just as important, raised the funds for) a re-imagining of Diaghilev with a series on collaboration. It's been incredible so far, with a collaborative work by Hannibal Lokumbe and a local church as well as a talk by Philip Glass. As for Weigel's music, I think it's some of the best now being written, and not just in this country. Weigel really does have something new to say, probably because he became a classical composer by accident. He started as a rock and jazz bass player and got into arranging. In his talk before the performance, he added his fellow musicians hated his arrangements because the arrangements were too detailed. He was taking away their fun. Someone told him, however, that if he re-scored for string quartet, he could get players to read it for him. Weigel also comes from New Orleans, with musical traditions and an approach to rhythm not found anywhere else. Indeed, Weigel's strongly individual profile often works against him, since most classically-trained musicians have to puzzle over what he's doing. On the other hand, jazz people get it, although Weigel's idiom isn't jazz. The closest composer to him I can think of is the jazzy Milhaud. The orchestration is lean, the harmonies have bite. But he doesn't sound like Milhaud either, and the difference is his approach to rhythm and phrase, very much a part of New Orleans music. The clarinet concerto takes a Cajun waltz tune for a walk - the first part slow and contemplative, the second part a super-jam. The opening is beautiful: a solo clarinet against rain sticks and distant rolls on the bass drum - an evocation of rain, which we get a lot of in Louisiana. The eskimos have 50 words for snow; we've got 60 for rain. After the performance, Weigel said that he imagined a Cajun fiddler on his porch, who played as he watched the rain come in. Great moment. The tune itself, like a lot of folk melody, is in both major and minor modes. Weigel exploits this throughout the concerto, especially when he sets up the two to clash simultaneously (maybe that's why he reminds me of Milhaud). During the second part of the concerto, audience members were moving and tapping their feet, as were the performers who locked in to it. Both the soloist, first chair Steven Cohen, and conductor Seibel were just about dancing on stage. It's not easy to find the groove of that music, especially for the percussion. For most composers, counterpoint is the simultaneous handling of different melodies. For Weigel, it's more the building up through constituent rhythms of an underlying rhythm. Weigel's percussion players have to "hit it where it ain't" a lot. Wonderful piece. Weigel is imagining a new kind of American concert music, deriving from popular sources and neither superficial with them nor overwhelmed by them. After the Weigel, a little secular cantata by Gottschalk - "Rustic Scenes" - for soprano, tenor, and bass, with orchestra. An infectious South American rhythm pervades the score. Again, the audience moved and tapped their feet to the music. There was even a hint of the Carmen "Habanera" in the soprano's solo number. I suspect Gottschalk wrote it for his Cuban concerts. Anyway, quite charming and somebody ought to record it. We ended with La Valse, which brought the audience to its feet. Even the vocal conservatives were chatting about how wonderful the Ravel was in the lobby. I remarked to my wife that they'd been raped in their sleep. That score is avant-garde even today. Ravel stands conventional orchestration on its head. For example, the bass is usually the foundation of the harmony. Ravel deliberately muddies the bass, with note clusters in bass and (I think) contrabassoon and tuba. It's as if he took his fist and banged on the lower end of the keyboard. There are also these loopy slides up and down the strings in the cellos, and that's really just maraschino cherry. There's the whole sundae to go. All in all, a very interesting time. Steve Schwartz