The composer and teacher Elinor Armer above was born in Oakland on October 6, 1939, which means she turned 75 this week.
To mark the occasion, conductor Nicole Paiement and her Blue Print ensemble at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music offered a birthday concert last Saturday that was filled with world premieres by former students of Elly. I had never heard of Ms. Armer, so I asked the pianist Sarah Cahill about her, and this was part of her reply:
"Armer has been living and working in the Bay Area for a long time, and her music is respected and admired, but it's never gotten the attention it really deserves. She studied with Darius Milhaud at Mills College, and collaborated with Ursula Le Guin on a big symphonic/choral work about an archipelago of islands, each with its own "use" and personality. She's beloved as a person and as a teacher. I took her musicianship class in 1977 at the SF Conservatory, and she was a brilliant teacher. She's funny and smart and very strong. Can you imagine being the only woman composer at SFCM, and one of the few in the Bay Area, for fifty-something years?"
It was Armer herself who set the ground rules for the commissions, that they be short pieces written for the same septet of instruments Stravinsky used in The Soldier's Tale, which are violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, cornet/trumpet, trombone, and percussion. A few of the composers cheated, including Aleksandra Vrebalob above who used a larger contingent for her Armer Fanfare, which was an exciting, jubilant opening.
Armer's Ursula Le Guin collaboration is called Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts, and the composer Linda Holland above composed a beautiful, two-part, slow-fast riff on a few themes from that work.
Sasha Matson above wrote an impressionistic piece called Berkeley Hills...
...while the baby of the group, Kyle Hovatter (born in 1986), offered a charming Gavotte for Elly.
After intermission, Blue Print performed the only piece of "old" music on the program, Arnold Schonberg's Herzgewachse, for colorature soprano, celeste, harmonium and harp. Paradoxically, the song sounded like the most "modern" music of the evening, and it was spectacularly sung by Chelsea Hollow above.
The Elly Armer celebration continued with Ostinato for Elly by Barry Phillips above, Handsome not Pretty by Carolyn Yarnell, and Soldier to Soldier by Dan Becker below.
It's a testament to Armer's teaching skills at the SF Conservatory over the last 46 years that all the music was interesting and exciting to hear, with a slight nod to the female composers for creating my favorite pieces.
The concert ended with a new piece by the birthday girl herself, I left my heart, where she calls for, in her own words, a "ridiculously extravagant battery of percussion" in her homage to Rube Goldberg.
At a birthday party reception afterwards, to which the entire audience was invited, I wished Ms. Armer the best and told her how good I thought the concert was, and she replied, "I thought so TOO!" It's hard to imagine a better birthday present. Paiement and her talented student musicians deserve high praise for playing eight world premieres (with Schoenberg as an amuse bouche) so expertly and with such verve.
San Francisco City Hall was illuminated with purple gels for the entire month of October last year as a salute to Domestic Violence Awareness Month, an issue that Mayor Ed Lee and DA George Gascon have wrapped around themselves in a cape of moral superiority. The only problem is that under Gascon, prosecutions of domestic violence lag far behind every other law enforcement agency in the Bay Area (click here for a thorough SF Public Press account). Equally hypocritical, under Mayor Lee the San Francisco Police Department has not bothered to test thousands of rape kits for reasons that still haven't been satisfactorily explained (click here for an SFGate story about Heather Marlowe who created a one-woman muckraking soliloquy about her own rape and untested kit). But who cares about consistency when there's a photo-op available?
This year the purple gels went up on October 1st again, presumably for the entire month, but the Giants managed to win their Wild Card baseball playoff game against the Pittsburgh Pirates on October 2nd and suddenly purple became orange. This seemed rather cavalier even by the Lee administration's ethically dubious standards.
So here's a toast to the Giants, and a hope that San Franciscans do our best to vote in some local politicians who aren't taking orders directly from Willie Brown, Jr.
We took a crowded 5L Fulton Mui bus to the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in Golden Gate Park on Friday afternoon...
...where we saw a veteran Louisiana group, Buckwheat Zydeco, above...
...finish off their set with a call and response anthem that had the overwhelmingly white crowd singing, "Peace, Love, Happiness."
They were followed by Hurray for the Riff Raff, a New Orleans band fronted by Alynd Lee Segarra, a Bronx-born Puerto Rican singer/songwriter who somehow ended up in Louisiana singing Americana tinged folk music.
The band was exceptional, but there was no shade for the audience or performers so we finally foraged for relief with hundreds of other people who were foregoing music for comfort.
Unusually for San Francisco, there weren't many costumed audience members, except for a few individuals who proudly managed to fly the freak flag.
We took another 5L bus to the ocean and made our way to the backyard lawn of the Beach Chalet in Golden Gate Park, which has a sweet Monday-Friday, 3-6PM Happy Hour...
...where we caught the last innings of the Giants 3-2 playoff win against the Washington Nationals.
Returning to the Civic Center, we witnessed a miracle, which is going to prompt a phrase that has never appeared in this publication before, "Muni Does It Right." For years, city authorities have been urging people to take public transportation to the huge, free music festival, but then they wouldn't bother putting out enough extra buses and employees to deal with the demand. This year, finally, somebody at the SFMTA got their act together and it seems to be working.
Best of all, SFMTA fare inspectors were put to work at 25th Avenue and Fulton to make sure that no taxi, Lyft driver, Uber driver, or any vehicle other than a Muni bus was allowed to pause at the bus stop. When they would try to do so, a large woman in a neon vest would dramatically pull out her ticket book and move towards the offending vehicle. Like I said, it was a miracle.
For the second week in a row, the San Francisco Symphony conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas above offered a bizarrely eclectic program. However, unlike the earlier Brant/Tchaikowsky pairing, last weekend's mixture of Foss, Ives, Strauss (both Johann Jr. and Richard), and Ligeti worked well together. The cohesion possibly arrived with the shared eccentricity of three Americans: composers Lukas Foss and Charles Ives and film director Stanley Kubrick who had the inspired notion to score the sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey to music from the Austro-Hungarian Empire (the Strausses and Ligeti).
The concert started with an acapella chorus, prompting my concert companion to comment, "There's no musicians!" The Symphony Chorus sang a wordless Lukas Foss piece from 1978 weirdly titled "...then the rocks on the mountain began to shout" -- Charles Ives. Foss was a concert pianist, conductor, and composer in whatever style happened to be progressive and fashionable at the moment, which in this case was Minimalism.
Though the ten-minute piece started off slowly, once the rocks started shouting their nonsense syllables it really got cracking, and the performance by the Symphony Chorus, including bass Shawn Ying above, was tremendous.
This was followed by a sensationally good performance of Charles Ives' Three Places in New England, with its central Putnam's Camp movement depicting a half-dozen small-town bands, all slightly out of tune, playing patriotic marches and hymns in a giant mashup. The final movement, The Housatonic at Stockbridge, has an alternate version that includes the chorus which I had never heard before, and now can't imagine hearing it without the singers.
The second half of the concert featured pieces used in Kubrick's 2001, starting with By the Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz by Strauss, Jr. which hadn't been played on a regular season program since 1938, and they performed it seriously. Another acapella chorus followed, singing Ligeti's 1966 Lux Aeterna, which is on the soundtrack during the lunar module making its way to the Monolith. I had always thought the piece was mostly electronics, so it was startling to hear human voices creating the unearthly soundscape.
The concert ended with Richard Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra. Kubrick only used my favorite part, the opening fanfare for trumpets and organ and full orchestra, but there's 30 more minutes of tone poem which have never done much for me although the rest of the audience seemed to be thrilled. Mark Inouye, the principal trumpet player above, may be the best performer on his instrument in the world. He's a reason alone to go to the San Francisco Symphony these days.
