(+++) THROUGH THE GENERATIONS

Messiaen: Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964); Le tombeau resplendissant (1931); Hymne (1932). Orchestre National de Lyon conducted by Jun Märkl. Naxos. $9.99.

Penderecki: Fonogrammi (1961); The Awakening of Jacob (1974); Anaklasis (1960); De natura sonoris I (1966); Partita (1971/1991); Horn Concerto, “Winterreise” (2008/2009). Urszula Janik, flute; Jennifer Montone, horn; Elżbieta Stefańska, harpsichord; Michał Pindakiewicz, electric guitar; Konrad Kubicki, bass guitar; Barbara Witkowska, harp; Jerzy Cembrzyński, double bass; Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit. Naxos. $9.99.

Jonathan Leshnoff: String Quartet No. 2, “Edelman” (2008); Seven Glances at a Mirage (2003); Cosmic Variations on a Haunted Theme (2003); …without a chance (2002). Carpe Diem String Quartet; Jerome Simas, clarinet; Stephen Miahky, violin; Joshua Nemith, piano; Opus 3 Trio; Barry Dove, vibraphone; Svet Stoyanov, marimba; Dave DePeters, percussion. Naxos. $9.99.

      It was not only in the 17^th through early 20^th centuries that composers born later found new ways to handle material previously used by others – as Beethoven remade ideas from Haydn and Mozart, Wagner ones from Weber, Brahms ones from Schumann, and so on.  Composers of the later 20^th and 21^st centuries sometimes seem to lack connection with each other because their motivations are so different and the forces driving their music are so unlike each other.  But beneath the surface, and often not very far beneath it, there are intriguing similarities and contrasts between composers of one generation and those of the next.  The musical influences upon Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) are quite well known, ranging from birdsong to non-Western sounds to traditional Catholicism.  They were bearing fruit even in works as early as Le tombeau resplendissant and Hymne, both of which are permeated by religious symbolism and Christian mystery.  At the time of these works, Messiaen was particularly intrigued by Stravinsky’s use of evocative rhythms and by the sound of Debussy’s music.  He modified those composers’ approach to try to express important tenets of Christianty (the full title of Hymne is Hymne au Saint Sacrement) while attempting to impart to listeners some of the colors that Messiaen said he saw when hearing certain musical chords (like Scriabin, he experienced synesthesia).  Decades later, having absorbed birdsong and other influences – especially non-Western ones – into his music, Messiaen created Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum for winds and percussion, to commemorate the dead of World Wars I and II and place the conflicts and their victims in the context of Christ’s resurrection.  Although not especially long, lasting just over half an hour, Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum feels broad, calling up gigantic spaces and hinting at eternity through Messiaen’s use of the modes he developed and his absorption of a wide variety of influences from nature as well as from prior composers.  Orchestra National de Lyon plays all three works with sureness and skill, and Jun Märkl conducts them with care and a sense of their coloristic elements.

      Krzysztof Penderecki (born 1933) was also influenced by natural forces, but he interpreted and refined them in different ways: De natura sonoris I has an improvisational feel to it and shows considerable influence from jazz, itself a medium built largely upon improvised elements.  Religious influences are present in Penderecki’s music as well, but again, they are used differently from the way Messiaen used them: The Awakening of Jacob stems from the Old Testament story in which Jacob, after a dream, realizes that God is present even though Jacob had been unaware of the fact.  Interestingly, both these Penderecki works for orchestra were used to considerable effect in the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining, although neither was employed there as the composer originally intended.  The new, very well-performed Naxos CD of Penderecki’s music also includes pieces showing the composer’s compositional skill in areas other than the strictly orchestral.  Fonogrammi is for flute and orchestra, and it allows the soloist both the intimacy and delicacy of which the flute is capable – plus some passages of considerable intensity that almost seem to go against the instrument’s basic nature.  Anaklasis, for string orchestra and percussion, is a work with a highly modernistic sound, filled with sonic patterns superimposed on each other.  Horn Concerto, “Winterreise,” does not directly echo Schubert, but like the earlier composer’s famous song cycle, it too deals with a winter journey, as Penderecki has the soloist and orchestra evoke a frigid landscape with elements of glaciation that parallel those experienced by the human heart.  And Penderecki did not hesitate to employ unusual instrumental combinations in some of his works, as in his Partita for harpsichord, electric and bass guitars, harp, double bass and orchestra – a fascinating piece in which the sonorities of the past, of jazz and even of rock-and-roll appear in juxtaposition within a loosely construed version of a very old musical form indeed, paying tribute not only to composers of earlier generations but also to ones of earlier centuries.

      If Penderecki in effect sets a Baroque-style concerto of instruments against a ripieno of full orchestra (albeit with use of instruments that Baroque composers would not recognize), Jonathan Leshnoff (born 1973) uses both familiar and less-traditional instruments to create chamber music of highly varied mood and color.  His String Quartet No. 2, “Edelman,” uses the traditional four instruments, but it is a compressed work – its three movements last only 13 minutes – and one with a strong flavor of klezmer music, which has a long history but is scarcely common in traditional classical forms.  Seven Glances at a Mirage tries, as its title suggests, to create shifting perspectives through innovative use of clarinet, violin and piano sonorities, which sometimes merge and sometimes diverge into different and even apparently contradictory realms.  Cosmic Variations on a Haunted Theme is similar in some ways, although its sound is quite different.  But here too Leshnoff tries to evoke different ways of viewing thematic and sonic material, in this case looking directly back toward some major composers of the 20^th century (Bartók) as well as much earlier times (Bach).  On the other hand, the oddly titled …without a chance (with ellipsis and without capital letters) employs, as Penderecki did, an unusual instrumental combination, in this case for a specific purpose: to remember the terrorist murders of September 11, 2001.  Leshnoff chooses only percussive instruments here – vibraphone, marimba and a percussion complement – and while it would be reasonable to expect them to evoke the fear and intensity of the 9/11 attacks, the composer calls on them to do more: to resolve, or attempt to resolve, the mass murder in a moving and emotionally satisfactory way.  Not all listeners will find the work to their liking or deem it an appropriate response to the event it commemorates, but it is an effective piece on its own terms and, like the other chamber works on this Naxos CD, is performed with skill, heartfelt intensity and greater delicacy than might be expected.  Like Messiaen with his own commemoration of mass death and his forays into unusual sound worlds, and like Penderecki with his use of nontraditional instrumental combinations, Leshnoff builds upon and adds to elements of the past while accepting formal structures and sonorities to the extent that they contribute to his personal vision – and rejecting or expanding them when they do not.

(++++) BACK TO THE SORT-OF-FUTURE

Deadly Pink. By Vivian Vande Velde. Harcourt. $16.99.

      Every decade or so, Vivian Vande Velde revisits the world of Rasmussem Corporation, creator of video games that go just a bit beyond the video games of whatever decade we are in at the time.  First came User Unfriendly (1991), a role-playing game in the once-popular sword-and-sorcery mode in which one of the players’ mothers, of all people, turns out to have a crucial role.  Then came Heir Apparent (2002), a game with a medieval setting that gets messed up, with possibly fatal real-world effects, by protesters who are against the whole notion of video gaming (an outdated premise if there ever was one, but clever at the time the book was written).

      And now we have Deadly Pink, as intriguing in 2012 as the earlier books were in their time, and driven not by technology gone bad but by human concerns and relationships – a very effective approach that is likely to have some staying power.  The book’s protagonist is 14-year-old Grace Pizzelli, whose 18-year-old sister, Emily, has been working for Rasmussem and is now stuck in a not-yet-released Rasmussem game – not because of some technical flaw but of her own volition, according to a real-world note that Emily has left behind.  This is no dungeons-and-dragons or medieval role-playing game, either, but a syrupy, sweet one intended for young girls.  “This game looked like PBS programming for kids barely old enough to spell PBS,” comments Grace when she first visits the virtual world.  Grace has to go there to try to rescue Emily from – well, what, exactly?  That is the basic mystery here: why is Emily staying in virtual reality when she has a great life – better, in fact, than Grace’s entirely average one?  Grace laments that Emily is prettier, smarter, has more friends and is better-liked by just about everyone than Grace herself is – but is so nice that Grace cannot even resent her for it.  Grace is simply average; nothing awful but nothing special, either.  And she does not have Emily’s knowledge, understanding or experience of Rasmussem virtual gaming, an immersive experience that in the real world is now probably not far in the future.

      But Grace has to go into the game to find Emily and try to persuade her to come out, because Rasmussem officials have already tried to do that and failed, and the girls’ parents are no help: their mom is hysterical as well as totally uninformed about role-playing games, and their dad is out of town and doesn’t understand gaming either.  So Grace-the-ordinary has to prove that she is not ordinary after all by doing something that no one else has been able to do – a common plot line for Vande Velde’s Rasmussem books, for many of her other novels as well, and in fact for a large number of books intended for preteens and young teenagers.

      Grace initially doesn’t have a clue what to do, of course: “I had no idea how I was supposed to talk sense into Emily.  Surely she knew she couldn’t stay hooked up to the equipment indefinitely.  That she was risking brain injury, or even death.”  Well, yes, Emily does know all that – Rasmussem builds safeguards into its games to prevent people from staying in them for too long, and Emily has deliberately overridden the protections.  So what exactly is going on here?   Deadly Pink is particularly attractive because of Vande Velde’s decision to place the action in a game tailor-made for what Rasmussem officials tell Grace that focus groups say little girls like: a world of “pink and lavender and lilac and violet and teal.  Any self-respecting boy would be gagging already.”  And a world filled with unicorns and dolphins and kittens and swans, plus some dragons and dinosaurs for girls with a more adventure-oriented orientation.  The contrast between a virtual world that is not supposed to be deadly and the real-world concerns of people who want to prevent Emily from living permanently in that world – or dying in it – is effective; and if Grace’s lack of personality is a flaw in the novel (she really does seem to be pretty much a tabula rasa), her slow realization of her own abilities makes the book quite satisfying for its target audience, and a worthy addition to what might be thought of as Vande Velde’s “Rasmussem Chronicles.”

(++++) LIFE LESSONS, LESS AND MORE SERIOUS

How to Fight, Lie and Cry Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date): Lousy Life Lessons from 50 Teen Movies. By Nikki Roddy. Zest Books. $12.99.

47 Things You Can Do for the Environment. By Lexi Petronis, with environmental consultant Jill Buck. Zest Books. $10.99.

      You do not want to base your life decisions on movies about teenagers or ones targeting them as an audience.  But what if you did?  Well, you’d make a complete mess of everything, probably.  But what if you didn’t?  This line of questioning gets really intriguing, in an exceptionally silly way, and Nikki Roddy pursues it with considerable enthusiasm in How to Fight, Lie and Cry Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date).  Take, for example, A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), one of the quintessential teen horror movies.  Roddy neatly summarizes the film’s plot, includes a photo of heroine Nancy falling asleep in the bathtub as monster Freddy’s clawed hand reaches for her, and comes up with the lesson: “If you aren’t afraid of the psychotic killer, you might be able to conquer him. But maybe not. Good luck with that.”  Or take Never Been Kissed (1999), which teaches the lesson, “Inappropriate teacher-student relationships are totally acceptable as long as the student is a desperate, undercover reporter.”  Or Clueless (1995), from which readers can learn that “a smart, sensitive guy will eventually fall for a ditzy, self-serving girl as long as she promises to be a little nicer to people – and is ridiculously hot.”  The wonderful thing about How to Fight, Lie and Cry Your Way to Popularity (and a Prom Date) is that it is easy to envision the “life lessons” as part of the way in which these movies were green-lighted in the first place – they accurately sum up what happens in these wildly improbable movies, and at the same time pinpoint the films’ attractive elements.  The plot summaries are brief and accurate (plot not being the main point of any of these films); the stills from the films neatly encapsulate what happens in them; the “sound bite” chosen from each movie gives a nice sense of the dialogue; and there is even a multiple-choice question or set of guideposts offered for each of the movies to make the film’s flavor even clearer.  True, Roddy’s writing is often embarrassingly bad: for example, in the entry about I Know Want You Did Last Summer (1997), a character is described as “straight-laced” rather than “strait-laced” and the word “accidentally” is spelled properly one time but incorrectly as “accidently” another time.  In fact, the correctly spelled word appears in an unintelligible sentence: “They accidentally hit a stranger crossing the windy road with their car.”  How was the stranger bringing their car across the road?  And what’s that about the wind?  (Roddy means “winding” road.)  But good writing is scarcely the point here: the core of this book is the “life lessons,” some of which are utterly hilarious.  From Risky Business (1983), for example, moviegoers can learn that “if you lie to your parents, steal your dad’s car, and solicit a prostitute, you’ll get into an Ivy League school.”  Now, what better lesson could anyone want to get from a movie?

      The lessons in 47 Things You Can Do for the Environment are far more important and far more realistic, so it is a shame that the book isn’t nearly as interesting to read.  It gets a (+++) rating for its earnestness and the quality of its suggestions, but the problem is that Lexi Petronis and Jill Buck (the latter being founder of the “Go Green Initiative”) don’t have many things that are very unusual or creative to suggest.  Their ideas are perfectly fine, but many are simply not involving enough to capture the imagination of any reader not already committed to environmental attentiveness – and those who are committed will know a lot of this stuff already.  “Check out the Home Depot YouTube Channel or smartphone app for short, useful videos on reducing energy and water use around the house” – good idea, but scarcely revelatory.  “Your old cell phone may be a piece of junk to you, but there are many charities that think it is a little piece of solid gold – so donate it.”  Turn the car engine off “if you are going to be stopping somewhere for more than 30 seconds.”  When giving a party, “send e-invitations instead of paper ones.”  And so on.  There are some unusual ideas here: host a “green film festival” to help make people care about the planet (film suggestions included), or have your car cleaned at a car wash rather than washing it at home because, at home, “the icky water doused in toxic car muck trickles into the storm drains and then eventually into our waterways where it poisons aquatic life.”  There are occasional bits of interesting history in 47 Things You Can Do for the Environment (example: solar cells were developed as long ago as 1883), and certainly there are plenty of good ideas.  But too many of the thoughts will likely be ones that young readers have heard before: reuse paper and shampoo bottles, eat a more-vegetarian diet, shut down your computer when not using it for a long time, hand-wash small spots off clothes instead of immediately throwing clothing in the washer.  The parade of obviousness means readers may miss out on the more-creative ideas simply because they tend to be buried among the more-ordinary ones.

(++++) GET WITH THE BEAT

Monster Mash. By David Catrow. Orchard Books/Scholastic. $16.99.

When I Left Home: My Story. By Buddy Guy with David Ritz. Da Capo. $26.

      Musical fun for young readers and musical autobiography for adults – music connects to people of all ages, albeit in different ways.  David Catrow’s Monster Mash connects through a complete lack of seriousness, with a whole series of monstrously amusing illustrations to the 1962 novelty song by Bobby Pickett and Leonard Capizzi.  Catrow writes nothing here – all the words are from the song itself – but what Catrow does contribute is a finely honed sense of the bizarre and not-too-scary.  After the “monster from his slab [begins] to rise” and starts doing a weird and over-enthusiastic dance with the laboratory rat, or cat, or whatever that thing is, the scene shifts outdoors, where dinosaur-like skeletons cavort and a two-legged, one-eyed, long-trunked something-or-other tromps along followed by a levitating brain, a sort of tailed spider (also with one eye), and…well, you get the idea.  Catrow excels in creating bizarre beings that could be very frightening but, in his renditions, really aren’t.  There’s the amorphous blob with seven eyes stacked one over the next (with one ear next to the third eye and another next to the sixth), a kind of squid with a human skull, a Dracula sporting not only two long fangs but also an entire mouthful of extremely pointy teeth, a doglike something with three eyes and seven noses – and the list goes on.  As does the beat.  As the Crypt-Kicker Five (pretty in pink) performs onstage, Dracula plays an organ made by Vladway & Sons (with exceptionally pointy white keys), and an extremely long checkered snake with a single huge front-facing eyeball (with eyelashes) for a head greets two human children and a traditionally canine dog to the monstrous party…where, it turns out, even kids and dogs can have a great time.  Harmless and often hilarious fun, Monster Mash as envisioned by Catrow helps a 50-year-old song remain a rockin’ hit.

      Buddy Guy rocks, too – he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005 – but this winner of six Grammy awards is primarily known for the blues: he is considered one of the best blues guitarists alive today.  Born in 1936, Guy grew up poor (in a family of sharecroppers), credits Muddy Waters with inspiring his career, and himself became an inspiration for Eric Clapton, John Mayer, Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many other musicians.  With the writing assistance of David Ritz, co-author of biographies of Ray Charles and Etta James, When I Left Home tells Guy’s story from his early days in Louisiana, to his departure for Chicago on September 25, 1957, to his successes and setbacks over the following years.  Ritz deserves credit for helping Guy tell his story in a voice that seems authentic: “I been in jail a bunch of times – but never for nothing I did. Went to get Junior out. It got so bad that one time the cop – a man I knew well – came into where I was playing and put the handcuffs on me. ‘What I do?’ I asked. ‘It ain’t for what you did. It’s for who you know.’ ‘You can’t arrest me for who I know.’ ‘I ain’t arresting you – just making sure you don’t get away.’ We went outside, where he put me in the squad car. ‘Who’s this about?’ I asked, knowing the answer. ‘Your brother.’ ‘I was playing with my brother Phil up in the club when you came to get me.’ ‘Not your blood brother,’ said the cop, ‘your soul brother.’”  This short excerpt shows both the strength and the weakness of this (+++) book: the detail and personal insight are wonderfully well communicated, but there is so much detail that only readers wanting to know the many, many ins and outs of Buddy Guy’s life and times will have an interest in When I Left Home.  The book is, by definition, a niche product, and even fans of Guy’s playing may find there is more about his life here – and less about his music – than they would ideally prefer to know.  The 16 pages of black-and-white photos are, like the text, quite wonderful for those devoted to Guy – the picture of him in jheri curls is quite something – but, again, these are photos for fans so devoted that they want to see Guy with as many of the musicians he influenced as possible.  Guy comes across in this autobiography (or semi-autobiography) as a modest, caring and highly talented man.  Really highly talented: “Things got so good and easy that when Junior Mance was sitting up in the control booth, me and Junior Wells began making up shit on the spot. Those songs – ‘Talkin’ ’bout Women Obviously,’ ‘A Motif Is Just a Riff,’ and ‘Buddy’s Blues’ – were caught on tape and became part of the final album put out by Blue Thumb records.”  Guy’s fans will enjoy hearing his voice come clearly through in this book, and the many names that he drops will be of interest to them, too.  But his music reaches beyond the deeply committed fan base in a way that this book never does, or tries to do.