Outside the Bachx

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acrobatics, Ana Garcia, architecture, ballet, bassline, blues, breakdancers, breaking, Chinese, choreography, dance, Filipino, funk, Gabriel Alvarez, Gabriel Dionisio, Gene Shinozaki, gin, hip-hop, improvisation, Japanese, jazz, John Vinuya, martial arts, martini, New York, Orphie and the Book of Heroes, Outside the Bachx, pentatonic scale, piano, poetry, popular music, proscenium stage, rehearsal, rock and roll, slam poetry, The Gift of Nothing, vermouth, video game, western art music

Hip-hop is always hungry. Like the katamari of video game fame or the doubly insatiable hippos of the childhood tabletop game, hip-hop music and culture has absorbed (and remixed and made its own) every genre that it touches. From when it was born on the streets of New York City in the 1970s, hip-hop has taken in the bass lines of funk, the vocals of R&B, the epic scale of rock, the improvisation of jazz, and the dancey jams of pop. So why not classical music?

That’s the question that the world premiere commission Outside the Bachx, promoted as  a mix of classical music and hip-hop, is supposed to ask. But in reality Outside the Bachx is a hip-hop show, displaying admirable talents of breakdancing, beatboxing, DJing, song, and slam poetry which all just happen to occupy a space with a grand piano that gets played on occasion.

The story of the piece, as fleeting as its inexpertly pumped theatrical haze, tells of a rental rehearsal space shared in successive time slots by a classical pianist and a breakdancing group, who come into conflict over sharing that space, but eventually realize the fun of collaboration. The trouble is that while the piece finishes with the promised unification of the classical and hip-hop genres, the audience spends fifty minutes of the sixty minute runtime taking in scattered, though technically adept, vignettes oriented toward either hip-hop or classical music. It was like ordering a martini at a bar and only being served a glass of gin, a glass of vermouth, and an expectant look from the bartender.

But the moments that those separate elements get mixed are elevating. The finale of Outside the Bachx combines classical music and ballet beautifully with hip-hop, artfully and correctly adapting classical motifs into true combination. Another high point comes in the middle of the show, when classic Asian pentatonics and martial arts inspire hip-hop dance, though, as the two Asian actors participating in this number point out, they are Japanese and Filipino, while the music comes from China.

Outside the Bachx is admirable in its attempt to show the inclusivity of hip-hop with an ensemble of Latino, Asian, Black and White actors, but the approach to diversity is strained. The play often resorts to stereotyping to express that diversity: the Asian cast members mentioned above, Gene Shinozaki and John Vinuya, use martial arts in their dance, and the text of Gabriel Alvarez, a Dominican cast member, is all about macho bravado. I wish, especially in a show marketed for young audiences, that stereotyping could have been left by the wayside.

The show is part of the Kennedy Center’s Theater for Young Audiences. There’s no swearing, violence, or overt sexuality anywhere in the piece. By a different token though, the Outside the Bachx is held back by what seems to be an oversimplification of story and character development, both of which are shallow to the point of nonexistence. To be fair, the architecture of the Family Theater doesn’t do the staging, done by cast members Gabriel Dionisio and Ana Garcia, any favors. What may have worked in a more intimate configuration as an encompassing expression of hip-hop style feels dulled and unenergetic on a proscenium stage.

But the problem runs deeper than that. Outside the Bachx feels dumbed and watered down for the young audiences it targets. While it has the ingredients that people who don’t know young audiences expect to be winners (flashy lights, loud music, acrobatic dancing), it lacks what young people really crave: good storytelling. Just ask the kids seated all around me who began the squirming burble of boredom not fifteen minutes into the show. Give the kids some credit (I think they’re tougher critics than me), focus on telling one good story first and then worry about the flash later.

All of these criticisms have one theme: the execution of dance and poetry and song in this play were strong, but the fundamental text and storytelling lacked cohesiveness and punch. That’s an issue in the writing, also done by Dionisio and Garcia, who may have taken on too much as directors, writers, and choreographers of Outside the Bachx.

That’s atypical for a Kennedy Center commission for young audiences, which has previously produced gems like The Gift of Nothing and Orphie and the Book of Heroes.

Alan Katz – DC Theatre Scene

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Richard Powers on Music

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bacteria, brain, computer programmer, Darwin, digital game, English, Galatea 2.2, genetic code, Genie, Goldberg Variations, MacArthur Fellowship, Messiaen, music notation, musicology, New York, Orfeo, Peter Els, Richard Powers, Stanford University, Steve Reich, television, The Echo Maker, The Gold Bug Variations, The Origin of Species, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter, video game

Richard Powers

Did you ever read a book review and realize that you have to get your hands on a title you’ve never heard of? That happened to me years ago, when I read a review in The Wall Street Journal of The Gold Bug Variations, a new novel by Richard Powers. In one sense, the plot was a love story about two different couples. It was also about many other things, including the intricacies of the genetic code, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations [BWV 988]. Powers immediately became one of my favorite writers.

Known as a brainy literary fiction writer – he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 – Powers has attracted an intense following. The former computer programmer and physics major (he later switched to English) always puts in a great deal of research into science, musicology and other disciplines, but his novels also explore the pleasures of romantic love, music and literature. His ninth novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award for fiction. The main character has suffered a brain injury in an accident, but while you’ll learn a lot about cognitive science, the judges also must have been impressed with the clever mystery story that showed off Powers’ ability to construct a good plot.

Powers’ latest novel is Orfeo, about a modern classical music composer who attempts to obtain an immortality of sorts by rewriting the genetic code of bacteria, thinking that his biological “compositions” will live on when his music is forgotten. Instead, in the current atmosphere of fear about terrorism, he is labeled the “bioterrorist Bach” and becomes a fugitive from the US government. Ironically, the bad publicity finally allows his music to become better known.

Powers is the the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Stanford University in California. He answered my questions after flying back from New York City, where he did a reading at a concert that featured music mentioned in Orfeo.

Tom Jackson (TJ) One of my hobbies is listening to modern classical music – not a common pastime – so when I read Orfeo, I had a weird feeling that one of my favorite novelists had written a book for my personal enjoyment. Were you worried that a novel that discusses Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, etc. would lack mass appeal?

Richard Powers (RP) Well, I was sure that it wouldn’t have mass appeal! But then, in a time when there is so much creative work in all forms, and when the audience for books is dwarfed by those for film, television, games, and the Internet, I’m not sure that “mass appeal” is a meaningful goal for a literary novelist. The book itself takes art and connection as one of its subjects, and the life of Peter Els (the book’s hero) is a constant exploration of the trade-off between the expressive potential of music and the need to connect with large numbers of people. Orfeo is in part a meditation on the difficulty of making art in the age of “mass appeal” and the diversity of art that still gets made in obscurity. So I was pleasantly surprised, having written a story about a composer whose performances always have more people on stage than in the audience, at the numbers of people who bought, read, and wanted to talk about the book. A lot of people who thought they could never hear and enjoy “difficult” music discovered new sounds as the result of reading the book, and that thrilled me as much as any larger audience could have.

TJ Do you listen to music when you write, or do you prefer to work under silence?

RP Several of my eleven published novels have featured music of one kind or another in a starring role. One of the reasons I have come back to that subject again and again is that it gives me the chance to steep myself in listening, during the years that it takes to write a book. I can’t write at the same moment that good music is playing; the sounds are too interesting to concentrate on anything else! What I do is alternate, all day long: an hour or two of writing, then half an hour to an hour of intense listening, for refreshment and inspiration. It’s a great, two-stroke engine. When I wrote The Gold Bug Variations, I must have listened to one or another of Bach’s gems thousands of times.

TJ The Gold Bug Variations, Genie and Orfeo all discuss the genetic code. Do you view the genetic code as the primal code behind all other codes, such as language and musical notation?

RP Self-replicating molecules have set every living thing in motion, and that pattern-making impulse, at the inanimate level, is, in some profoundly mysterious way, the mother of all animate pattern-making and pattern-seeking urges. Of course, there are a lot of changes in nature as you move from molecules up to neurons and then to social institutions. But kinds of natural (and unnatural!) selection are at work all the way up and down the great hierarchy. Meditation on our molecular roots is tremendously inspiring, and thinking about the journey from the first self-replicating molecules to the pinnacles of human achievement is the deepest kind of spiritual reflection. As Darwin said at the end of The Origin of Species, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

TJ Did you find that readers of Galatea 2.2 assumed that the character “Richard Powers” was in fact Richard Powers? If they assumed that, were they largely right?

RP Readers (and even some sophisticated critics) often confuse a central character with the author. Our high school English teachers tell us not to, but we can’t help it. And when the central character has exactly the same name, age, and biography as his author, the invitation for conflation is pretty strong! Galatea is me having fun with this most basic of reading fallacies, as a way of reflecting on the power of fiction and imaginative reinvention. Nevertheless, the Richard Powers at the heart of that story is himself an invention and one who finds himself in the heart of one of the oldest fictions in the world: the one where a person’s creation – in this case, an artificial intelligence program – comes alive.

TJ If we are waiting for you to pop up on Twitter, will we have a long wait? (Orfeo includes Tweets from the book’s protagonist).

RP I’m afraid so!  I’m a long-form guy. I need space. But I did once write a six-word novel: “Lie detector eyeglasses invented; civilization collapses.”

Tom Jackson – Sandusky Register

A Guitar God Lives

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amplifier, arpeggio, Caprice no. 24 in A minor, CD, computer, Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, Dreaming (Tell Me), DVD, Eddie van Halen, electric guitar, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, Fireball, Genesis, grunge, guitar, Guitar Hero, guitar pick, heavy metal, Jim Fusilli, Jimi Hendrix, karate, long-playing record, Los Angeles, Marshall Amplification, Orlando, Paganini, popular music, Pro Tools, Rising Force, rock and roll, Rock Band, Ron Thal, Sayreville, shred guitar, shredding, Stockholm, Stratocaster, Swedish, Tampa, tennis, The Wall Street Journal, Tony Banks, video game, Woodland Hills, Yngwie Malmsteen, YouTube

Yngwie Malmsteen

A household name in heavy-metal shredding, guitarist Yngwie J. Malmsteen describes himself as stubborn and dictatorial. “I’m very set in my ways and not necessarily in a bad manner,” he said over breakfast. “I know what I want and I go for it.” Though his style of music isn’t as popular as it once was, he presses on with renewed vigor, his titanic talent intact.

Now on tour with Guitar Gods, a mind-warping, blizzard-of-notes-per-bar bill that also features guitarists Bumblefoot – Ron Thal‘s stage name – and Gary Hoey, Mr. Malmsteen, 50, is getting ready for the release in August of a live DVD and CD, recorded in Orlando and Tampa, respectively.

Ranked with Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Van Halen as innovators of electric rock guitar, the Stockholm native became obsessed with the instrument after he received a copy of Deep Purple‘s Fireball for his eighth birthday. But though he admired the band’s guitarist Ritchie Blackmore, young Yngwie was even more intrigued by the work of Genesis keyboardist Tony Banks, who made references in his compositions to J. S. Bach. In fact, it was a recording of a Niccolò Paganini composition that helped Mr. Malmsteen find his musical voice. Paganini’s Caprice no. 24 in A minor would eventually become a model for his style, which relies heavily on clearly articulated arpeggios and dazzling speed. “Niccolò Paganini and Johann Sebastian Bach with a Strat and a stack of Marshalls” is how Mr. Malmsteen described his approach last week, referring to his Fender Stratocaster guitar and Marshall amplifiers, his preferred gear.

He arrived in Los Angeles in 1983, recruited by a producer who placed him in a group that was beneath his talents. “It was the most banal band I could be with, but I wanted to be on a piece of vinyl,” Mr. Malmsteen said. “It wasn’t an ideal situation, but I knew I was going somewhere.” He released his first solo album a year later.

With ear-splitting, classically influenced shredding as his trademark, Mr. Malmsteen quickly became a star – and lived the lifestyle that went with it: In 1987, while driving drunk, he plowed into a tree near his home in Woodland Hills, CA, and was in a coma for a week.

“A lot of people pine for the ’80s,” he said. “I don’t.” No longer a drinker, Mr. Malmsteen’s game these days is tennis. Framed by right-angle mutton chops, his moon face was bright, his smile engaging. Vitamins went down with his scrambled eggs.

With the arrival of grunge music, the ’90s were a bleak period for gonzo guitarists such as Mr. Malmsteen, who had no US record deal and relied on touring in Japan and South America to keep going. Late in the decade, he composed Concerto Suite for Electric Guitar and Orchestra in E-flat minor, op. 1. Many rock artists have played with full orchestras, but Mr. Malmsteen said his concerto was the first to be composed in a classical mode with electric guitar as the solo instrument.

The recording industry in a shambles, his career received an unexpected boost via Guitar Hero and Rock Band, video games that featured his challenging music. Footage of his wild performances were viewed by millions on YouTube – the kind of exposure, Mr. Malmsteen said, that was impossible when the industry was in control. Resistant initially to new recording techniques, he eventually used Pro Tools software on his home-studio computer to record his most recent album, Spellbound (2012), which he released on his own label.

“In a bizarre way it’s like I was going back to when I was seventeen years old,” he said of life in rock’s new model. “I had no expectation of radio airplay, no anything else.” As a teen in Stockholm, he explained, “I would play a seventeen-minute guitar solo, sing four bars, and do another seventeen-minute guitar solo. That was the greatest means of expression then. I love to have that feeling.”

At the Starland Ballroom in Sayreville, NJ, a wall of Marshalls at his back, Mr. Malmsteen jumped and karate-kicked, spun the guitar around his back, flung picks at the rabid audience and discharged a torrent of fully articulated thirty-second notes – all during Rising Force, his first number. Later, he offered the Bach-influenced Dreaming (Tell Me) on acoustic guitar before returning to his Strat for metal’s roar. His relentless attack seemed effortless, and never did he seem to mind that he was playing for far fewer people than when he filled stadiums in his glory days.

“I don’t know what the carrot in front of me is,” he said the morning before the show. “I take criticism and praise the same way. Of course, everyone likes to hear good things, but I don’t change. I know what I’m doing.”

Jim Fusilli – The Wall Street Journal