Tag: 05.11.17

This may be as a good a time as any to offer Richard Goldstein’s confession. It isn’t anything he has tried to hide, and, in fact, he mentioned it briefly in his 2015 memoir, “Another Little Piece of My Heart.” But the revelation may be startling to Beatles fans, who have devoted their lives to interpreting every lyric, recording flourish and photograph presented by their band. The stereo Goldstein used for his review was broken. Repeat. The guy who slammed “Sgt. Pepper” in the New York Times had a busted speaker.

“In order to make music, I need three healthy relationships: with the materials of my art, with the world around me, and with the people with whom I share it. These are the building blocks of what I think of as an externally facing artistic practice. The goal of an externally facing practice is to become as complete a human being as possible, in whose life music plays a central and defining role. On the other hand, the goal of an internally facing practice — the default stance of much academic training, especially in this country — is to be the most skilled musician possible. A rich and rewarding extra-musical life is secondary. The external view is built on education; the internal one on training.”

New-music nerds of a certain age will remember Crumb’s haunting García Lorca song cycle Ancient Voices of Children or his anti-Vietnam War piece for “electric string quartet,” Black Angels. They may have been weird, but they were cool. Now the grand old man of the American avant-garde at age 87, Crumb is still composing away – most recently, Metamorphoses Book I, a cycle of piano works based on his favorite paintings. Avant-garde diva Margaret Leng Tan gave the premiere in D.C. on May 7, and David Patrick Stearns was there.