What Makes Music Good? Wu Man and Friends in Anchorage

Wednesday night at Out North was like being in an avant garde little theater in Berlin.  And yet we were here in backwater Anchorage listening to an exciting concert at OutNorth.  Where can you hear music composed by two Koreans, a German, a Chinese, and a Japanese for pipa, cauyaq, gayageum, saxophone, trombone, and marimba played by musicians from China, Bethel, Anchorage,  Juneau, and Canada via Fairbanks?  Not just musicians, but good ones, including an international star who recently worked with Yo Yo Ma. 

Wu Man is one of the most acclaimed pipa player in the world.  The Wikipedia entry on pipa says this about Wu Man:

Prominent students of Lin Shicheng include Liu Guilian (刘桂莲, b. 1961), Wu Man (吴蛮, b. 1963) and Gao Hong (高虹, b. 1964). Wu, who is probably the best known pipa player internationally, received the first-ever master's degree in pipa and won China's first National Academic Competition for Chinese Instruments. She lives in San Diego, California and works extensively with Chinese, cross-cultural, new music, and jazz groups. [emphasis added]

Here's Juneau musician (how little that conveys of her bio in the program)  Jocelyn Clark introducing a piece by German musician Karola Obermüller.  She warned the audience not to use normal music criteria, in fact, to just attend to the sounds in space.  Clark played the gayageum which the program describes as a Korean zither.



There were sounds from the marimba, then short breaks before other instruments threw out some sounds.  Now I happen to enjoy music that doesn't follow our standard conceptions of music, but I did begin to ask myself, how does one determine whether this is 'good?'  Later I asked several of the music professors there variations of this question - is there a difference that you could notice between a piece like this and something someone like me with almost no formal musical knowledge could produce in Garageband?   One said, "Maybe, maybe not."
Another responded, "How do you know if food is good?"

[Photo from left:  Wu Man holding the pipa, Jocelyn Clark, Morris Palter (marimba and other percussion), Stephen Blanchett (voice and cauyaq -Yupik frame drum), Richard Zelinsky (Sax), Christopher Sweeney (trombone).]

[Wu Man showing someone the music after the concert]



Does it even make sense to talk about good here?  Some of these pieces seemed to be more experiments in sound and silence which deliberately attempted to do things that were beyond the normal rules musicians might follow.  Whether the intent was to see what they could get by violating such rules or these pieces were in them and they simply had to write them even if they didn't follow standard musical expectations or something in between, I don't know.  I didn't think of that question until later.

One form of good, as one of the music professors suggested, would simply be whether the musicians actually played what the composer had written. And that was another question I'd had while listening to The Oort Cloud because the composer was in the audience.  You can see Yoriko Hase Kojima introducing the piece in the second photo above. Since she was there, I wanted to ask her if there were any points where she went, "Oh no, they missed that"?

And I got the chance to do that at the reception afterward.  Here she is talking with Canadian born percussionist and UAF music professor Morris Palter. 

 She smiled at my question and said, no, they did it very well and she was very pleased with the performance.  She had flown in from Tokyo and was headed back the next day.

But that begs the question of whether the piece itself is 'good.'  This music forces one to confront the socially constructed nature of good.  How much is good simply related to what we are used to?  Asian music such as Chinese opera isn't something that most Westerners can appreciate on first hearing it.  What if we had heard this sort of music all our lives?  It would sound totally normal.  One professor said he'd need to listen to it several times to start getting a sense of it. 

Alaska composer Phil Munger was one of the people who got to sit behind the performers close enough to watch the saxophonist's music.  Here he is talking to Morris Palter. 

[Update July 4:  Phil follows up on this post and addresses these questions about good and bad music in a long post at his blog.]

[Trombonist and UAA music professor Chrisopher Sweeney talking after the performance.  Anchorage saxophonist Richard Zelinsky is behind him.]

I need to say that a number of the pieces were more traditional music - particularly Chinese classical music for pipa, such as the second Youtube of Wu Man from wumusicpipa below.  Wednesday night's concert was being recorded and I hadn't asked permission beforehand to record any video so I have nothing from the concert. 


The concert was a collaboration of a number of organizations.  It's a little hard to put them all together from the program, but CrossSound in Juneau was one and OutNorth here in Anchorage was another. [Update: Actually there was a thank you page in the program but I missed it.]  On the right is Scott Schofield, Out North's new artistic director after the performance.  Preparation for the performance began just as he arrived at OutNorth.  His introduction Wednesday was a pleasure to listen to.  His words were good, his delivery fluent, and he effortlessly rotated to acknowledge the audience members sitting behind him on the stage.  (See, there are some things I feel have some basis for evaluating.)  We're lucky to have him here and I look forward to continuing great nights like Wednesday at OutNorth. 


This YouTube I found of Wu Man playing with the Kronos Quartet gives a bit of the sense of what I'm talking about in terms of the more experimental music we heard, though this sounds closer to more traditional music than a couple pieces Wednesday.









 I also found one that gives a sense of Wu Man playing a traditional Chinese piece.