jwilzewske: David Behrman and Chamber Music Storytelling

I have seen and endured the sufferings... and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust... I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting troops are being sacrificed.”
— Siegfried Sassoon, Statement against the War, 1917.

T his is maybe the best, most eloquent and moving, most beautiful anti-war music I have ever heard. It is also a work that vividly illustrates the powerful narrativity that chamber music can embody. And I am not just referring to the concrete textuality of the poems and excerpts of private correspondence that engage in dialogues with the instrumental parts; I am referring also to the ways that David Behrman treats the vocal parts as instruments per se, and the ways that the composition reveals the inherent narrativity of the instrumental parts.

My Dear Siegfried (2003 and 2005)

Statement against the War, London, 1917
My Father’s Grocery Store, Worcester, MA, 1902
Watercress Well, Kent, England, 1902
Letter from Samuel Behrman (to Siegfried Sassoon), 22-AUG-1939
Letter from Siegried Sassoon (to Samuel Behrman), 01-SEP-1939
Everyone Sang (Siegfried Sassoon) 1919

T hese ‘movements’ are performed by Thomas Buckner, Eric Barsness, Meria Ludovici, vocalists; Ralph Samuelson, shakuhachi; Peter Zummo, trombone; David Behrman, keyboard, electronics; and Tom Hamilton, engineering, special effects.

S tatement against the War’ (6:42) has a punctate bass line, sometimes processed to increase the unison-width. Like a piano, to change the timbre or color of the sound, a piano tuner introduces small tuning differences between the three strings struck by the hammer. The unison width, that is, the difference between the lowest and the highest frequency produced by the three strings of a single note is usually narrow, but, in the case of ‘honky-tonk’ piano, may be very wide. Here the plucked bass is digitally post-processed and fed back, to impart a pretty big pitch dispersion to each note.

T he honky-tonk timbre of the bass part enables it to serve in a dour narrator’s role through this piece. It may seem like it is not doing much, but in reality it is an important, essential contribution to the overall storytelling that happens.

I went to study with Stockhausen because I was a fan of some of his music, especially ‘Gesang der Juenglinge’, a wonderful tape-music piece made in the mid-Fifties—taped boys’ voices. La Monte Young and I were both in his composition class at Darmstadt in the summer of 1959; Cornelius Cardew and David Tudor were there as advisers. Stockhausen’s course was an eye-opening experience for me—in part because of his intense devotion to new music; in part because he encouraged my efforts; and in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began. It seems far in the past now, but there was a kind of optimistic feeling there, as though a new, good society was emerging from the horrors of the recent past.”
— David Behrman, interview with Jason Gross Furious, AUG-1997.

T he bass trombone here is sometimes straight acoustic trombone and sometimes vocoder-distorted or comb-filter processed to create eerie, macabre effects that are deeply disturbing—appropriate to the anti-war thematic intent. ‘My Dear Siegfried’ was commissioned by MutableMusic for baritone Thomas Buckner.

M y Father’s Grocery Store’ (11:27) has the narrator’s sprechstimme overlain with liquid synth glisses, skulking and pugilistic. The narrative is an account from David Behrman’s father’s (Samuel Behrman’s) early 20th-Century experiences growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Worcester, Mass—a tale of broken eyeglasses; tampering with cigarette packages in the store, in order to filch the promotional photos of prize-fighters that the packages contained; the not-so-innocent acquisitiveness of children; the consequences of being caught red-handed by the parent; the existential agony and rupture of trust within the family that this precipitates; the irony of this minor trauma on the eve of WWI. Had only the pictures been ones of Maimonides and Spinoza instead of prize-fighters who kill for money, the sin of the theft of pictures would not have been so great.

I n ‘Letter from S.N. Behrman’ (9:50) we have irregularly-irregular atrial-fibrillatory, asynchronous dubbing of a woman’s voice in the foreground and an electronically-distorted man’s voice, comb-filtered and heavily reverbed, in the background. Spooky, spectral words, foreshadowing the horrific events of 1939 and beyond. Discursive, bubbling synth and reedy, muted trumpet. The relevance of this dusty 70-year-old letter to our contemporary situation is uncanny—and the poetical/composerly beauty and pungency of David Behrman’s incorporation of this old text into his musical polemic opposing the Iraq War are shattering, iconic. Chamber music as voiced cardiac arrhythmia. This effort will be a tough act to follow... and cardioversion may not succeed, or may not last.

I n ‘Letter from Siegfried Sassoon’ (11:41), even the pulse of the narration and the instrumental parts is moribund, clinically depressed. Composer Nic Collins says in the liner-notes (p. 22) that Behrman’s writing embodies a ‘talmudic, self-referential’ critic’s stance in this composition.

E veryone Sang’ (6:20) is Behrman’s setting of Sassoon’s 1919 poem commemorating the end of WWI, replete with ambient thunder, birds chirping and trilling, breathy trombone obviously exhausted and grieving but glad to have survived, and other-worldly organ synth patch intoning chords from the netherworld. Devastating in 1919 and devastating once again in this 2005 Behrman reincarnation.

E    veryone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was filled with such delight
as prisoned birds must find in freedom—
winging wildly across the white
  orchards and dark green fields; on; on; out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
and beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears, and horror
drifted away... O, but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing ... will
  never be done.”
  — Siegfried Sassoon.

O n disc No. 2 of the set, we have QSRL (1998), performed by Jon Gibson; Viewfinder (2002) , and A New Team Takes Over (1969) on the occasion of Richard Nixon’s inauguration, both performed by Behrman; Touch Tones (1979), performed by Frankie Mann with Arthur Stidfole; and Pools of Phase Locked Loops (1972), performed by Katherine Morton and David Behrman. In the first two of these, we have sensors detecting ambient activity in the installation space, and software algorithms automatically implementing changes in the synths’ pitches and harmonic and rhythmic structures based on the events and velocities and masses detected by the sensors. In this situation/configuration, the ‘chamber’ is the instrument, and the ‘performers’ are the random, ambient people who enter the chamber: throw-down chamber music.

B y contrast to conventional jazz where the sound palette and riff possibilities for improvisation are pretty well known to the performers in advance, Behrman’s installation-art scenarios feature on-the-fly discovery of improvisational tools by inadvertent, happenstantial ‘performers’. Deliberation is consequent upon discovery—discovery of one’s performerhood, and discovery of the tools that are at your disposal. Very cool. Deeply revelatory of what it means to be human (at least it is so if the ‘performers’ who enter the chamber are cooperative, emotionally engaged, curious/creative souls).

C ollins: Knowing your work as being primarily non-lyric-based, non-text-based, ... how is human voice and the text aspect different from working with other instruments? What happens to your work?

Behrman: It becomes an ‘amalgam’ of the two things: the music and the spoken text. It’s a wider dispersion of the idea of music. If you think of sound-art as encompassing anything that comes into the ears, it can include spoken or whispered or sung language, as well as noise, pitched sound, or environmental sound. I’ve been a great admirer of Robert Ashley’s use of linear narrative text in his music since the 1960s. Of course, our styles are very different. But in a sense his work served as a model for the ‘Siegfried’ piece. Also, I’ve gotten interested recently in enhancing and transforming the voice with the help of newly-available techniques, both in live performance and recording.”
— David Behrman interview with Nicholas Collins, AUG-2004, ‘My Dear Siegfried’ linernotes, p. 19.

P ool of Phase-Locked Loops’ (13:56) is, as chance would have it, the famous 1972 piece that caused me to buy this CD. I was not looking for Siegfried or any of the wonderful things that are on these discs; I was working with PWGL and I needed a ‘benchmark’ for my exploring PLL algorithmic control of a piece of a score I was working on. I had never heard ‘Pool of PLLs’ before, and the Siegfried recording was a source where ‘Pool’ could be found. Throbbing sixteenth-note mm = 200 phase-interference and phase-modulation constitute the predominant pulse and rhythmic structure in this hypnotic, minimalist adventure, revealing and obfuscating many different layers/voices/narrators. But, regardless how this CD came to be in my possession, I am deeply grateful for and inspired by the political content of ‘Siegfried’. There is much to learn here: Behrman’s consummate skill as a storyteller-composer-poet expands the bounds of chamber music. ‘Epistolary’ chamber music, in the novelistic style of ‘Clarissa’? ‘Polemical’ chamber music, in the idiom of itinerant troubadours?

[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Statement against the War, 1917’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘My Father’s Grocery Store’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Watercress Well’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘QSRL’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Pools of Phase-Locked Loops’, 1.6MB MP3]

D avid Behrman was born Salzburg, Austria, in 1937. Since the 1960s has made sound and multimedia installations for art galleries, as well as works for performance in conventional concert venues. He worked with John Cage, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham in the 1960s and 1970s and, with Robert Ashley and others, was a founding member of the (now defunct) Sonic Arts Union. Among Behrman’s works for soloists and chamber ensembles are Unforeseen Events, My Dear Siegfried, Leapday Night, On the Other Ocean, Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches, Useful Information and Protests 1917–2004, and Interspecies Smalltalk. Among Behrman’s sound and multimedia installations are Cloud Music, Pen Light (2002), and Viewfinder (2005). Recordings of his works appear on the XI, Lovely Music, Alga Marghen, Classic Masters and Ellipsis Arts labels. He has collaborated with Veenfabriek in the Netherlands on music for a (revived) Futurists’ Orchestra. Behrman is based in New York and is a member of the faculty at the Avery Graduate Arts Program at Bard College.

jwilzewske

Saturday, April 4, 2009

David Behrman and Chamber Music Storytelling

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