Dec 30th 2013

Goodbye earworms, hello Keeril Makan

by Michael Johnson

Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano. 

Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.

Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux. Besides English and French he is also fluent in Russian.

You can order Michael Johnson's most recent book, a bilingual book, French and English, with drawings by Johnson:

“Portraitures and caricatures:  Conductors, Pianist, Composers”

 here.

Nothing clears the mind of overplayed Christmas season tunes – popularly known as earworms -- like an hour in the company of Keeril Makan’s music. His new CD, Afterglow, is as refreshing as a glass of cold Chablis.

Makan is the respected American composer, now an assistant professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who once famously said he wants to explore the continuum between noise and pure sound. This CD (Mode 257) has a fair amount of both, with nods to John Cage and Edgard Varèse. His unusual instrumentation in some of these six pieces does not bring him down to earth, however. For his technique is to “poke” an instrument, looking for “a squawk, a cry, anything”, as he says in his introduction to this collection.

The image fits. Flute-oboe-harp combinations contend with percussion (bells, cymbals), bass clarinet, trumpet, double bass and others to create his unexpected results. He works by improvisation, like many new music composers, trying out sounds and following them into the realm he seeks.  Robert Kersinger’s excellent program notes acknowledge a certain strangeness in the music of this CD but encourages us to “accept immersion in (Makan’s) unique emotionally significant musical ideas”. I could not agree more. 

The title piece, Aterglow, relies on pure piano—with strings neither prepared nor twanged. It opens with one of the most peaceful introductions in new music – a repeated middle C that is allowed after each stroke to decay into silence. The resonance of the piano does the rest, hence the title. Gradually more complex chords are then introduced until 13 minutes have somehow passed unnoticed. I have heard this piece in recital and observed an audience mesmerized. As pianist Ivan Ilic said, “Either you get it or you don’t.”

More jolting intros are supplied for Mercury Songbirds and Husk (Makan has a talent for naming his works). After Forgetting, conducted by Adam Silwinski with the International Contemporary Ensemble is led by a pulsing piano that brings in clarinet, violin, percussion and cello as the piece develops, always moving in tandem with the piano. Accessible to new music doubters, it represents Makan’s recent “gentle, open approach” to composing. He once told me the days of cerebral composition for its own sake are coming to an end. “Now the emphasis is more on attracting an audience”. 

Makan is pessimistic however about U.S. trends in new music. Subsidies are drying up and suddenly rehearsal time is at a premium. Shorter, less complex pieces are becoming the way forward. His own 48-minute Letting Time Circle Through Us originally ran 48 minutes. To meet today’s constraints he trimmed it to 12 minutes. One yearns to pick up the rest from the cutting room floor and listen in peace.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Amazon.com about Keeril Makam:

Image of Keeril Makan

Described by The New Yorker as “an arrestingly gifted young American composer,” and by The New York Times as “consistently stimulating,” The Boston Globe portrays Keeril Makan as a composer “whose music deserves to be more widely heard.” Recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Luciano Berio Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, he has also received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, the Aaron Copland House, the Utah Arts Festival, the Fulbright Program, and ASCAP. His work has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, American Composers Orchestra, Harvard Musical Association, and Carnegie Hall, among others. His CDs, In Sound (Tzadik), Target (Starkland), and Afterglow (Mode) include performances by the Kronos Quartet, Either/Or, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Persona, his opera, written for Alarm Will Sound and produced by Beth Morrison, is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s classic film, with a libretto by Jay Scheib. Schott is publishing his compositions.

Makan was raised in New Jersey by parents of South African Indian and Russian Jewish descent. After training as a violinist, he received degrees in composition and religion from Oberlin and completed his PhD in composition at the University of California–Berkeley, with additional studies in Helsinki and Paris. Makan makes his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is Associate Professor of Music at MIT. For more information, visit www.keerilmakan.com




  

 


This article is brought to you by the author who owns the copyright to the text.

Should you want to support the author’s creative work you can use the PayPal “Donate” button below.

Your donation is a transaction between you and the author. The proceeds go directly to the author’s PayPal account in full less PayPal’s commission.

Facts & Arts neither receives information about you, nor of your donation, nor does Facts & Arts receive a commission.

Facts & Arts does not pay the author, nor takes paid by the author, for the posting of the author's material on Facts & Arts. Facts & Arts finances its operations by selling advertising space.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Music Reviews

Oct 28th 2015
A decade ago, any mention of a choir would probably have brought Sunday morning hymns to mind. But there’s been a revolution in attitudes towards joining the local choir.
Oct 24th 2015

The Boston Philharmonic Orchestra opened its season this week with rousing performances of two works that had never before been combined on a program for Boston audiences – Gustav Holst’s “The Planets” and Richard Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra”.

Oct 18th 2015

Morton Feldman’s delicate, will o’ the wisp compositions demand of the listener a special mental and spiritual investment, a belief in music’s potential to pervade human consciousness.

Oct 9th 2015

Boston is that most musical of American cities, so there is never a shortage of recital and concert to choose from. I visit Boston twice and year and partake freely of the offerings.  Boston’s talented performers are the equal of New Yorkers, Parisians, even Berliners.

Sep 6th 2015

Not to brag, but I've stood upon some pretty rarified podiums: I've conducted "New York, New York" for Frank, "The Candy Man" for Sammy, and "Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie," for Don McLean.

Sep 5th 2015

Frank Castorf’s maintained his anti-romantic stance with his production of “Götterdämmerung” at Bayreuth on Wednesday, August 26th, and went further by giving the heroic music of Siegfried’s Funeral March and the final measures of the opera to Hagen.

Sep 3rd 2015

Perhaps Frank Castorf was in a bad mood when he conceived his production of “Siegfried” for the Bayreuth Festival –or he was just mischievous.

Aug 31st 2015

The decadence of the Nordic gods continued to be a major theme in Bayreuth’s “Die Walküre” as envisioned by Frank Castorf, who grew up in East Germany with the Marxist view of the world.

Aug 30th 2015

Two outstanding young pianists – one from Hungary, one from Italy – have been selected to become the first Oberlin-Como Fellows, two tuition-free years of study in a new partnership of the International Piano Academy Lake Como and the U.S. Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

Aug 26th 2015

In the Frank Castorf production of “Das Rheingold” that I saw in Bayreuth on Friday (August 21), Wotan and company have their god-like powers, but they are just a bunch of gangster types in a low-life setting.

Aug 14th 2015

Some stage directors probably would say that it’s insane to take a full-sized orchestra out of the pit and put it on stage during an opera performance, but that didn’t stop director François Racine from doing it for Seattle Opera’s production of Verdi’s “Nabucco.” Racine also had the company cov

Aug 5th 2015

What originally got Philip Glass going as a composer was the realization that he was “living in a world where all the composers were dead. Even the living ones were dead.” He decided to do something about it.

Aug 4th 2015

WHEN I TOLD a snarky friend I was writing about the new Philip Glass autobiography, Words Without Music, she asked, “Does it go like this: I, I, I, I, I, I, was, was, was, was, was, born, born, born, born …?” Snarky.

Jul 2nd 2015

The International Tchaikovsky Competition in St. Petersburg and Moscow ended last night (July 1) in a virtual American sweep in the piano category, with gold and bronze prizes going to American-trained Russian boys and the silver to a Chinese-American player from Boston.

Jul 1st 2015

With mixed results, the San Francisco Symphony performed Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” using projected imagery and movement on June 11th [2015] at Davies Symphony Hall.

Jun 7th 2015

The Bordeaux Opéra Nationale has been packing its 18th-century Grand Théâtre for a week of sellout performances of Norma, the great Vincenzo Bellini opera on which much of his reputation rests.