Special Occasion, Event Space, Midsommar Blues
Thanks for joining us again for our fourth Issue of 2020MG. This week we offer recommendations from two live musical experiences and one piece of recorded music, in the form of an opera, a sinus-infected listening of Keiji Haino, and a Swedish travelogue. We hope you enjoy them.
—2020MG
Alexander Iadarola, Nick James Scavo & Alec Sturgis
Recommendation: Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot at The Metropolitan Opera
Last Saturday, I attended The Metropolitan Opera’s 2025 presentation of Turandot, Puccini’s final opera that originally premiered at La Scala in Milan in 1926. I spent maybe four months last fall and winter pretty much exclusively listening to Puccini, specifically Il trittico (The Triptych), and so it became an emotional experience to get dressed up and go to the opera in the way that only a true “sense of occasion” provides to our daily lives. I don’t think I’m prepared—or frankly willing—to parse out the cultural commentary of the opera, which is set in a mythic China of “legendary times” from the exoticizing perspective of 20th century Italians. However, bearing witness to such a protracted container for music is absolutely a “special occasion” in today’s society. Opera is something to celebrate for still being produced and performed at such a high level, and even existing, as a musical experience today.
At first, the libretto of the work felt both convoluted yet familiar—a story of queries and riddles—various elaborate human entrapments—all having dire existential consequences. Loosely based on a play by 18th-century Italian dramatist Carlo Gozzi, Puccini’s Turandot forewent the original play’s portrayal of traditional commedia dell’arte characters wandering from Italy to China to become members of the Imperial court, and his satirization of Venetian society therein. Dispensing with such politics, at least overtly, the opera more directly centers the romantic drama of the foreign prince Calàf of Timur solving riddles to win the vengeful, frozen heart of the princess Turandot. After succeeding in (quite passionately) solving the riddles, thus saving his life, and securing their marriage, the prince flips the script and asks Turandot to guess his name. If she succeeds, he would sacrifice himself to being executed, thus saving her from betrothal. Basically some twisted Rumpelstiltskin type shit. Stripping back the narrative, I appreciated how the entire focus of the opera—despite its lavish, old-fashioned, esoteric fairytaleisms—was simply about love and death. The opera’s catharsis came most completely for me when the two protagonists sang “you only die once” and “you only live once” in parabolic arcs around each other, clashing and uniting in tautology.
I was ultimately struck by how all of this distilled a kind of humanistic romantic experience still wholly intact today—that of bondage and freedom. Turandot simply does not want to be marrying this fool. She is traumatized. Her ancestor, Princess Lou-Ling, was conquered, abused, and murdered by a foreign prince, and she has sworn revenge and is simply trying to be left alone. The opera pushes a narrative of love still saving the day across generational, political, and even personal boundaries—against the characters’ will. Still, both characters submit to it, both in spite of and as a result of being ensnared in the games society has woven around them. The prince’s lazy, heroic attempt to subdue Turandot’s vengeance is only successful through its gamification, oscillating within the work’s tense equivocation of love and death. All relevant stuff today.
The vocal style of this type of opera is bewildering. That we as human beings grew to produce this type of vocalization, this abstract rendering of visual and musical narrative, and this kind of hyper-mediated display of storytelling, is astounding as a human achievement of form and vision. My favorite musical moments were composed as sheer dissonance—passsages of atonality and bitonality, used to characterize cruelty. These moments were almost Swans-like in their sheer confident discord; and, to hear such a large orchestra produce disharmony was a rare and profound experience. The large Turandot orchestra calls for a wide variety of instruments, including alto saxophones, celesta, bass xylophone, harps, and an organ. I loved simply hearing the dissonant blasts—both loud squalls and quiet tonal variance—in the second and third acts. The opera also contains moments of pure melody in Puccini’s most lyrical vein, most notably in the tenor’s “Nessun dorma,” which opens Act III—maybe one of the most well known arias of all time. I didn’t realize that aria was in this particular work, so when it showed itself I was stalled.
Stepping back, I’d like to conclude where my colleague Alec Sturgis left off in his assessment on the operas of Richard Strauss and Robert Ashley to now address Puccini. Comparatively to those composers, Puccini feels like downing a bottle of limoncello on church steps late at night—sweet and nasty, dangerous even. The saccharine nature of the dessert wine-gone-wrong—crystallizing the veins, arresting the heart. Turandot is “one of the most lavish and intricate productions in the company’s repertoire” and is a bloodthirsty work from top to bottom. Slightly sadistic even. Its rendering of love and death feels contemporary—through all its gamifying, comedic, and romantic risks. Although the music itself is only slightly contemporary, it’s enough to propel it forward into the 20th century on the winds of Puccini’s death. In our first 2020MG issue, Alec wrote how both Strauss and Ashley created musical works where “we might willingly enter into phase with sonic artifacts which express our limitations, [and] combine them with new versions of experience in order to liberate some corners of contemporary life, which only music can express.” I like the wording of artifacts here. Seeing Turandot did feel like digging up some decorative earthen object, glowing with history and previous cultural meaning, perhaps one with a slightly trivial function. Yet, its depiction of violence, love, and death—resounding both dissonantly and over-sentimentally—also showcased the trivializations of our societal machinations which accompany our desire for transformation, in this case, toward Love. Witnessing this, and to re-cite Alec, I did feel a liberation in the corners of my contemporary life—and in a way only music can express.
Simply, I recommend that you go to the Opera.
—Nick James Scavo
Recommendation: Nijiumu - When I Sing, I Slip Into The Microphone. Into That Void, I Bring Comrade “prayers”, Then, Turning To Face The Outside, Together We Explode
I have been sick this week. The ritual of everyday behavior has been defamiliarized: I notice myself not being able to focus the way I want to, or have energy to do the things that I would like. Engrossing stuff for our readership, I’m sure, but I wanted to set context before communicating: there was something I wanted to recommend this week, but it wasn’t the right time to follow the train of thought required to get there.
So, we start with the theme of timing, and this idea of the “right time.” I recommend this album. It feels like being in a cave. Damp earth smells and so on. You cannot see the sky. Extremely old rocks. This album has a great title. It sets up a space that is then punctuated by events, which in turn modify the character and affordances of the entrained rhythmic-temporal zone in which forthcoming events might occur. These events shape the event-ness of events to come. This happens in every song, but it’s all very lucid here.
Many of the memorable experiences I have had listening to Keiji Haino’s music are characterized by a bracing sense of lucidity. His music is known for its unsettling qualities, and while we typically associate the unsettling with bad feelings, it can have a positive, luminous valence as well: clearing things away, forging an opening, reframing a given juncture as a vantage point. As a kid, when someone tells you not to look at the sun, you do it anyway. The feedback loops of rhythmic entrainment accelerate in the fourth movement. There’s the sense that something gets closer.
—Alexander Iadarola
Recommendation - Mässingshornet Blues Jam, Malmö, Branko Bergstrand
This June, I visited Malmö, Sweden for a couple of days. I’ve spent a good bit of time in Denmark visiting friends, but had never been across the water. I stayed in a little closet-sized gardener’s room adjoining a house on the north side of town. I biked around, aimlessly sampling Afghani restaurants and swagged-out, high-concept Smör spots. I joined my host for a walk in the forest on the way to pick up her son from his extraordinarily Swedish outdoor pre-school, and borrowed her summer travel pass to visit the Skissernas Museum of Artistic Process and Public Art, in Lund. On my second day, I spent a good six hours posted up in the sun, with a bunch of old Swedes in my birthday suit at the incredible Ribersborgs public bath and sauna at the end of a pier, overlooking the Øresund. Malmö struck me as a global, cosmopolitan, yet suburban feeling city (compared to the condensed, affluent metropolis of Copenhagen). It reminded me a bit of Queens. Having some familiarity with Malmö’s reputation as an experimental music hub, on my final night, I figured I’d seek out the Inkonst venue in the hopes of catching some music. Biking up, the next advertised event was a month out. Whether the thin event calendar was a testament to the relaxed pacing of Swedish subsidized institutions, a lack of local appetite, midsommar vacation schedules, or something else, I couldn’t guess. But having sweated out my will to explore earlier that day, I headed back to the north side of town and settled for a drink around the corner from my room.
Sitting out on the patio of the Mässingshornet pub in the 10:00 PM sun, I noticed a sudden influx of people of all ages walking up with guitars, amps, drums, and the like. The sound of electric amp buzz, warming up and noodling bled out from the back door of the place and escalated to full-band renditions of classic blues songs. Grabbing another drink, I filed into the back of the small, increasingly packed room, taking up real-estate behind the standing room in the hallway by the bathrooms. My first thought was that this must be some sort of generalist open-mic, or amateur jam session (like the ones I used to participate in as a young guitar player in North Carolina). A group of older guys kicked off the night (the long, gray-haired front man in a tie-die button down) with impressive musicality and evident vernacular blues literacy and style. Guest players began to cycle in to call tunes with the house rhythm section. And as I observed – not only the high musical level of the players, but also the engaged and knowing laughter and nods in the audience at idiosyncrasies and particular variations on blues forms, riffs and references – I realized that I’d stumbled upon a real community, deeply committed to and knowledgeable about American roots music. There were fanatics of all ages: old motorheads, an entire moving/logistics crew (still in work uniform), and younger kids (one of which - who must have been about 12 - wore a Stevie Ray Vaughn wide brim hat and a leather jacket and kept his fingers warm on his unplugged stratocaster, while he waited for his time. He shredded, by the way.) As the only covert American in the room, I enjoyed the irony of being out-of-country, and on the outside, looking in on a European blues masterclass.
Stepping out for a smoke, I found myself on the periphery of a group of younger people — the most animated of which had a case full of harmonicas on the table, and was giving a full blown, demonstrative lecture on virtuoso harp and extended techniques. Amazed, I blew my cover and had to join the conversation. As the group identified that I wasn’t just a stranger, but also an American foreigner, they seemed as amused and excited by my presence there as I was. The gregarious harp man, Branko Bergstrand (“Like the Denver Broncos, I like to say.” - with a swaggering Swedish-accented Delta affect), and his compatriots fully took me under their wing and introduced me to practically the whole scene, in what became an evening-long exchange of mutual curiosity and shared interests in musical interpretation, localized music communities and questions about internationalized music taste.
Each player from the teenagers to the elder core band members had fascinating stories about their relationships to Malmö, the jam (which has been going on for nearly 20 years, and has seen generations of players come, go, and come back), and to the blues. Not surprisingly, one of the many shared themes of conversation was about the way that a sustained, (financially) uncompensated passion - nurtured by the consistency of the venue and its community - managed to persist and grow, despite its niche appeal.
There are more stories embedded here, but at the end of the night, as the majority had trickled out and biked home, the last folks standing huddled around to share with me the original song they wrote - “Brass Horn” - about their scene at the Mässingshornet, which they recently performed at the Nottenden Blues Festival in Norway under the name The Lost Charming Boys. In a testament to their pride and general bemusement at my being there, the younger players busted out the iPhones to document the moment of me watching and nodding along to the YouTube video on Branko’s phone screen. We parted ways and I promised to bring something to the stage next time I’m there, if and whenever that may be.
Looking back, I can’t help but think of the cleverly titled book of conversations with Sylvère Lotringer: I Was More American than the Americans. Even as the blues has given way to new, more dominant contemporary popular forms in the States, its power persists at the core of a distinct American racial, cultural, and political sense of identity. And with the precipitation of far-right politics in the U.S. and across Europe, this experience of the global presence of the blues reminded me that there’s another, more historically embodied front to the avant-garde: there are some battles to be won in simply giving yourself over to the groove.
Special thanks to those in the Mässingshornet community, not mentioned by name, for their hospitality and infectious music appreciation.
-Alec Sturgis