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VoiceBox: March 26, 2010 -- The Vocal MuseKALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the second program in the second series of VoiceBox, a new public radio show on KALW 91.7 FM dedicated to the art of singing. The show, all about composing for voices in a classical music setting, originally aired on Friday March 26, 2010.

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Audio Aesthetics a Bit Removed From the Standard Do-Re-MiNEW YORK TIMES

On a craggy outcrop in the Marina, the sounds of the sea become art. “The Wave Organ,” a sprawling waterfront sound-art installation created with materials from a demolished cemetery, has been quietly performing an oceanic symphony since 1986. Pausing to cup an ear to one of many protruding pipes amid the installation’s sun-blanched granite and marble terraces, you hear a strange liquid music. It alternately whispers like wind passing through conch shells, gurgles like an old man laughing and assaults the senses with cataclysmic thunderclaps.

Meanwhile, “Audium,” a sonic experience held in a specially built theater in the Lower Pacific Heights, engages differently with the melody of water. Waves, a stream and a dripping faucet are among the sounds heard by audience members as they listen to the hourlong performance. It takes place almost entirely in the dark, as 176 speakers embedded in the walls, ceilings and floors emit various acoustic and electronic noises controlled live by the composer and co-founder of “Audium,” Stanley Shaff.

With today’s culture placing a far stronger emphasis on sight than hearing (the oversize eyes and shrunken ears of the Na’vis in James Cameron’s “Avatar” emphasize the trend), we ought to pay closer attention to experiences that ask us to engage our auditory powers in unusual ways.

The Bay Area has been a hub for sound-art experiments since the 1960s. Composers like Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley carried out many sonic investigations under the auspices of the San Francisco Tape Music Center, an electronic studio that gained prominence in the ’60s.

Since then, sound art has flourished here, thanks partly to a lively experimental music scene, the presence of renowned audio companies like Meyer Sound and institutional support from universities and museums. Yet the medium frequently goes unnoticed. While these projects have to compete for audiences with myriad other less esoteric cultural happenings, the relative marginality of sound art may be inherent in the art form itself.

In these cases the issue partly stems from the way “Audium” and “The Wave Organ” are implemented and operated. Created in 1960 by Mr. Shaff and Doug McEachern, an equipment designer, “Audium” has been in its present location since 1975. Mr. Shaff and Mr. McEachern don’t advertise their work, having always relied on word of mouth. The theater’s understated storefront presence further keeps the project hidden from view. According to Mr. Shaff, the show, which plays each week on Friday and Saturday nights, typically attracts around 25 people.

The out-of-the-way setting of “The Wave Organ,” at the end of the breakwater forming the Marina Yacht Harbor, similarly contributes to its under-the-radar status. The Exploratorium, the science museum that commissioned the work in the early 1980s from the artists Peter Richards and George Gonzales, loosely estimates that about 300 people visit the installation each week. The day I attended, my friend and I were the only people around.

Certain aesthetic challenges can prevent many sound-art works from reaching bigger audiences. “Audium” and “The Wave Organ” point to two issues facing the medium.

Like “The Wave Organ,” many sound-art installations interact with existing environments. The Bay Area sound artist Bill Fontana is known for creating such works. His “Spiraling Echoes” sound sculpture, set in the rotunda of San Francisco City Hall last year, used ultrasonic beams to project sounds, like twittering birds and clanging bells, off the architectural elements. This November Mr. Fontana is creating an installation for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that will use sensors and speakers to explore corners of the building.

“Sculpture Garden Carillon,” a continuing sound-art installation by Joseph del Pesco and Helena Keeffe at the Oakland Museum of California, emits gonglike noises. The artists recorded their material by striking 12 of the museum’s outdoor sculptures, using a fleece-covered mallet. Passers-by on the street can hear the sounds on the hour while the galleries are closed for renovation. (The museum reopens on May 1.)

As inventive as some of these works are, they have to compete with many other distractions. It’s possible to walk right through a sound-art installation without even realizing it.

Projects created for tailor-made spaces, like “Audium,” come with different challenges. With a soundscape that harks back to the musique concrète tradition of the mid-20th century and its retro-looking domed auditorium, “Audium” feels like a throwback. The attempt to isolate hearing from the other senses creates an entirely personal experience that can be both transporting and meditative. But the insularity of this approach can make listening to sounds in the dark seem more like a 1960s-style psychedelic experiment than a cutting-edge art happening.

Despite the challenges of the form, the Bay Area’s role in nurturing sound-art projects shows its spirit of experimentation. “Audium” occupies one of the world’s very few purpose-built spaces for sound art, and “The Wave Organ” makes use of the Bay Area’s resplendent natural topography in an unparalleled way.

These works teach us to listen more closely to sounds that we often take for granted. “I think of liquid as an audio archetype of life,” Mr. Shaff said. “It is the most fundamental of all of life’s sounds.”

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Taking a Children’s Tale to Dark New DepthsNEW YORK TIMES

In John Neumeier’s ballet adaptation of “The Little Mermaid,” the title character undergoes an extreme physical ordeal so that she might live on land. As the orchestra plays a stomping series of cataclysmic chords, a malevolent sea witch wrenches off the mermaid’s fluid blue costume and leaves her almost naked and shivering onstage. With one of her newly acquired human limbs grotesquely contorted over her shoulder, the former mermaid looks like an insect that’s been flayed alive.

For audiences weaned on the peppy 1989 Walt Disney animated film version of “The Little Mermaid,” Mr. Neumeier’s relentlessly bleak take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale — which opened Saturday night at the War Memorial Opera House in its United States premiere by the San Francisco Ballet — may come across as a bit of a shock. Mr. Neumeier, the director of the Hamburg Ballet in Germany, first had that company dance the piece, and cavorting crabs and singing sea urchins were nowhere to be found, as a viewing of the DVD of a November 2009 Hamburg performance shows.

Infused with stark blue and white light, angular movements, expressionistic visual imagery and an unsettling and often dissonant musical score by the Russian composer Lera Auerbach, Mr. Neumeier’s mature take on Andersen’s cautionary tale about a young woman who risks everything for love has about as much in common with the Disney version as Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland” has with Lewis Carroll’s original text.

Perhaps to retaliate against the prettification of many classic children’s stories, prominent artists are drawn to recasting such works in more somber hues. Projects like those of Mr. Neumeier and Mr. Burton help to reconnect audiences with the darkness that lies at the heart of the originals.

But sometimes the adapters go too far in focusing on mature themes, and risk estranging not only children but adults too. This can undermine the well-intentioned efforts to bring a fresh perspective to parts of our collective folklore that have been bowdlerized in the pursuit of audience-pleasing palatability.

Since becoming the Hamburg’s director and chief choreographer in 1973, Mr. Neumeier, who was born in Milwaukee and studied literature and theater arts before training as a dancer, has created psychologically intense works that straddle the worlds of drama and dance. His ballets, including “Nijinsky” (2000) and “Death in Venice” (2003), contrast the lead characters’ stormy mental states with an austere visual aesthetic. Demanding wide emotional range and kaleidoscopic movement that veers between flowing liquidity and spiky brittleness, Mr. Neumeier’s approach to “The Little Mermaid” plummets to the pitiless depths of Andersen’s watery fairy tale.

Unlike Disney’s dainty Ariel — and, for that matter, the central character in the miniballet that Roland Petit created for the 1952 film “Hans Christian Andersen” — the heroine in Andersen’s original is in constant pain when she walks on human feet. Mr. Neumeier captures Andersen’s descriptions of physical torture by creating dance steps that make the principal ballerina in the role of the Mermaid (portrayed alternately in San Francisco by Yuan Yuan Tan and Sarah Van Patten) look, as Anderson wrote, as if she were “treading upon sharp knives.” Knock-kneed, slump-shouldered and in a wheelchair for several scenes, the disoriented ex-mermaid is literally a fish out of water.

The second half of the ballet begins with a nightmarish vision of the heroine, stuck in a small white room and wearing a girlish gray dress. In the orchestration, Ms. Auerbach’s use of a flute and a cello playing in very high register gives the scene an otherworldly quality. The mermaid desperately bashes what used to be her tailfin (represented by the ballerina bending one leg at the knee and flicking a point shoe behind her) against the wall. She appears almost suicidal.

The Neumeier ballet isn’t entirely gloomy. He injects wry physical humor on occasion. In one scene three nuns wearing huge wimples cross themselves frantically. And the ending, though not uplifting, carries a sense of release.

Yet darkness threatens even these lighter moments. During the scene with the nuns, descending figures in the woodwinds undercut the humor. And the eerie tranquility of the final tableau suggests death more than new life.

“The darker side of the fairy tale is an essential aspect of the fairy tale,” Mr. Neumeier said in an e-mail message. “Without darkness there is no light.” But so little luminosity penetrates this adaptation of “The Little Mermaid” that the Disney version’s bubbly warmth is sorely missed at times.

I experienced a similar feeling while watching Mr. Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland.” The Red Queen’s unmitigated cruelty, the many eye gougings and the horror-movie-like sight of graying human heads bobbing in a moat prevented me from being fully immersed in the film’s gorgeous wizardry.

Some reworkings of the children’s canon — the musical “Wicked” (loosely based on “The Wizard of Oz”) and the 2005 film of C. S. Lewis’s novel “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” — have managed to straddle the worlds of youthful wonder and more adult preoccupations. Lately, though, the most engaging narratives aimed primarily at the young have frequently been original stories, like Pixar’s “Wall-E” and Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket books.

Often burdened by the baggage of the versions that have preceded them, those artists adapting long-established children’s works for stage and screen tend to swing too far in the opposite direction. Maintaining a better balance between dark and light is key to creating successful adaptations.

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VoiceBox: March 19, 2010 -- Cover Me BeautifulKALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the first program in the second series of VoiceBox, a new public radio show on KALW 91.7 FM dedicated to the art of singing. The show, all about cover songs, originally aired on Friday March 19, 2010.

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VoiceBox: March 19, 2010 -- Cover Me BeautifulKALW 91.7 FM

Click here to hear the first program in the second series of VoiceBox, a new public radio show on KALW 91.7 FM dedicated to the art of singing. The show, all about cover songs, originally aired on Friday March 19, 2010.

read more...

British TV Ads Flaunt Their Arty SideNEW YORK TIMES

In a recent British television commercial for the Barclaycard credit card, an office worker strips down to his briefs, saunters past his co-workers and enters a storage closet, where he jumps down a chute and sets off on a wild water-slide ride across an urban landscape, sailing down the sides of buildings, whizzing past shoppers and sloshing through a public library to the sound of the 1976 Bellamy Brothers hit “Let Your Love Flow.” When his joyously soggy ride comes to an end, he says, “Can you get me a towel?”

In contrast, in this country Bank of America — showing considerably less inspiration than Barclays — is advertising its bill-payment service with a tinny jingle and statically shot images of people spilling coffee on their paper bills.

British commercials have long been known for their creativity and innovation. But from an artistic standpoint, most American advertising, perhaps except for those made for the Super Bowl or the Web, pale in comparison with their British counterparts. And unsurprisingly, British ads have long attracted a huge following in America.

Next weekend the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will bring the latest batch of award-winning British commercials to the Bay Area for the first time. The program — featuring the 2009 winners of the British Television Advertising Awards — visits 10 United States cities annually. Recently, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis sold more than 20,000 tickets to its British ad viewings, which it has been presenting for more than two decades. The Museum of Modern Art in New York has shown these bite-size films for more than 30 years.

That the program has taken so long to reach the Bay Area is surprising considering the region’s strong advertising and independent film communities. Joel Shepard, film curator at the Yerba Buena Center, decided to import the program to fill the gap.

“It’s a bit of a mystery as to why these ads haven’t made it to San Francisco yet,” Mr. Shepard wrote in an e-mail message. “Part of the reason these screenings are so popular elsewhere is that they have been shown annually for a long time, and audiences know to expect a mix of artfulness, humor and commercial appeal.”

Many of the commercials in this year’s program are minute masterpieces. A sleek ad for the Audi RS6 features a corps of gymnasts undertaking amazing physical feats with machinelike precision. Shot in a muted palette and gorgeously lighted so that the athletes’ bodies shimmer as if they’re made of mercury, the commercial is as much a work of kinetic art as it is a sales tool.

In another ingenious ad, set in a city cafe, a young woman listens in disbelief as her friend gossips in hushed tones about a man named Don who commits a rape and a murder before trying to force himself on another unsuspecting woman on her wedding day. It’s not until the end of the commercial that we realize that the woman is recounting the plot of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni.” The close-range cinematography, sensitive execution and unexpected denouement make this advertisement for a Royal Opera House production memorable.

“In general, TV advertising has always been a high form of public art in the U.K.,” said Richard Silverstein, co-chairman and creative director of the San Francisco-based advertising firm Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. “People over there watch commercials as if they are entertainment.”

On occasion, the American advertising industry is equally capable of producing inspiring commercials. Google’s recent “Parisian Love” ad simply communicates the company’s services. The 52-second spot tells the story of a young man who travels to France, meets the woman of his dreams and settles down solely through displaying search terms on screen like “impress a French girl” and “how to assemble a crib.” The spot doesn’t feature any actors or dialogue, yet it manages to imbue something as sterile as a Web search with emotional force.

A spot for Frito-Lay Dips, conceived by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, imagines a Mexican culinary cornucopia through the use of lush, colorful animation, including an erupting tomato-shaped volcano spewing chunks of salsa.

Yet such creative efforts are not part of this country’s standard TV advertising lexicon. Television ads in the United States tend to be more sales-driven and less focused on aesthetics. Artistry exists, but it’s more likely to be found on the Web. In fact, the Google ad played on YouTube for three months before being broadcast at the Super Bowl, and the Frito-Lay spot was initially created for the video-centric social networking Web site Vimeo.

“Companies want everything buttoned-up in a 30-second ad,” Mr. Silverstein said. “This often leaves nothing to the imagination, so you get pretty pedantic advertising.”

There may be several factors behind the British advertising industry’s more innovative approach. With that country’s film industry a fraction of the size of Hollywood, many talented British film directors spend part of their career in advertising. (Ridley Scott, Hugh Hudson and Alan Parker have all made commercials.)

Also, it could be that black humor, oblique sales messages and deliberate provocation — common in many British ads — don’t go down as well in the United States. And in such a big country, commercials with direct and friendly sales messages are more likely to appeal to broader audiences than artful creations that risk causing offense or confusion.

A commercial is principally a sales tool. But it can also be art. Perhaps if the American advertising industry were allowed to create more imaginative, aesthetically engaging and thought-provoking commercials, viewers would be less inclined to fast-forward their way through commercial breaks.

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