February 7. Tafelmusik at WDCH. Adventurous programmers might not want to hear it, but playing a concert of near-contemporaries is fun and instructive and gives better scope to connoisseurship than the conventional miscellaneous concert that tries to “connect” Mozart and Composer X somehow. This gave us Baroque music in four distinct flavors. Bach, graceful and humane, like the conversation of civilized people. Vivaldi, dramatic, surprising. Handel, charmingly pompous and showy. Marcello, the novelty, provided an elegant if not exactly earth-shaking oboe concerto. The specialist players emphasized the ensemble playing: the players cued each other, signaled each other, nodded to each other. They were playing like actors interacting with each other. The finale was Bach’s triple violin concerto and the three women played the hell out of it.
February 13. Hespèrion XXI at WDCH. The theme was Christopher Columbus. There were recitations of texts by, about and relating to him and his times, in Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish and Nahuatl. There was choice Spanish instrumental and vocal music circa 1408-1506. We covered the Fall of Grenada, the expulsion of the Jews, the forced conversion of the Moors, …. Naturally it was a long tale of woe, ending with a high-spirited chacona by Joan Arañés. Some of the episodes worked better than others, but the music was all fantastic. The musicianship was extraordinary. When the psaltery-player Begoña Olavide suddenly let loose with an Arabo-Andalusian lament “Nuba Hiyay Msmarqi,” it was heart-stopping. Driss El Maloumi’s big moment wailing “Mowachah Billadi askara min aadbi lama” was like the original of the Armenian techno music blasting next door, but conversational, human-scaled.
Feburary 16. The L.A. Opera production of Otello is one of the best things I’ve ever seen. The music is phenomenal—it’s a symphony with voices. The drama is brilliantly concise and compelling; as theater it’s an improvement on Shakespeare. The singers—especially Iago (Mark Delavan) and Otello (Ian Storey) were brilliant voices and good actors. Elena Neveaseenya (OK, it’s really Evseeva) flew in that morning to replace the ailing Desdemona. The staging was straightforward, elegant and effective. The sets and costumes were good-looking. L.A. has redeemed itself. Meanwhile, the quartet of crumblies behind us talked into the overtures: “I don’t understand what happened to the handkerchief?” And at the end: “So he murders her?” “Yes, it’s a story that wouldn’t happen in modern times.”
February 25. Southwest Chamber Music played John Cage’s 1961-2 Atlas Eclipticalis at the Colburn School Atlas is scored for up to 86 (specific) instruments. Southwest Chamber Music did it with 11: 3 violins, 2 flutes, clarinet, percussion, viola, cello, double bass, harpsichord. JVDS raised both hands above his head and we were off. Or, rather, everything suddenly stopped: no tunes, no beat, no harmony, no dissonance, no melody, no refrain, no sequence, no drama, no ingenuity, no symbols, no theater, no virtuosity. There was a score, and the musicians were performing it, but it felt less like a performance than events taking place, unwilled, unbidden. It consisted of single notes, some sustained, most not, and periods when nobody made any sounds at all. The tones tended to be quiet and low. The tempo—or whatever the illusion should be called—felt slow. Most of the sound-events occurred in isolation, but there were moments of simultaneity, where different sounds overlapped. The performers radiated alertness and focus, and achieved prodigies of nuance, delicacy, finesse. The clarinet and the double bass had moments of ravishing beauty. For a Cage piece, there were no unusual instruments and no unusual performance techniques; and no electronic equipment, no noise, no theater, no aggression. It was both intense and intensely relaxing, the most casual air of offering a few sample sounds for our delectation. It would take hearing different performances by different performers to get a sense of the shape of the piece. But that’s not likely, and I suppose part of the reason Cage wrote it the way he did was to derail all that chatter. It was like steeping in a nice, hot bath for 40 minutes.
The February 23 New Scientist is a special issue devoted to The Music Enigma. It features several articles on the biology, physics and neurology of music. 
