jwilzewske: bolcom

Showing posts with label bolcom. Show all posts

Monday, March 7, 2011

Is Language Music? Sightreading Kirzinger’s Program Notes, BMOP w/ Bolcom

Garden of Cosmic Speculation, Dumfries, Scotland

W hen writing a score, there’s got to be something that you can do that will not just be a nice honor to the play, or the book, or the film you’re dealing with, but some aspect that maybe can explore something that the play just couldn’t do. Once I know what the first page [of music] is, then the rest will come.”
— William Bolcom.

T he Boston Modern Orchestra Project - Bolcom w/ BMOP program last night was exceptionally good. A thread held in common by each of the works was their concern for spirituality, for Time, and for how we experience our short lives and the lives of those we love.

Sojourner Hodges - Full-Fathom Five, elegy for Donald C. Hodges [première] (Bethany Worrell, soprano)
Michael Gandolfi - Garden of the Senses Suite (Allemande-audition; Courante-olfaction; Sarabande-gustation; Passepied-palpation; Gigue-vision; Chorale-intuition)
Kati Agócs - ...like treasure hidden in a field (Chorale; Peregrination; Pearl of Great Price; Cathedral with No Ceiling; Celestial Machinery)
William Bolcom - Commedia for (Almost-) 18th-Century Orchestra
William Bolcom - Symphony No. 3 (Alpha; Scherzo vitale; Chiaroscuro; Omega)

T he program notes by composer Robert Kirzinger are always a genuine pleasure when attending BMOP events or Tanglewood, and last night was no exception. Knowing the composers/artists as well as he does, he is invariably able to provide a great number of fascinating details about the composers’ biographies and current projects—far more vivid than you would find in any press-kit or agent bio package, and far more than most artists would think to mention. Terse, crystalline, provocative; never enigmatic or museum-plaquelike. And his 7 pages and 3,500 words of text for last night’s BMOP program reveal many intimate bits; the dates of composition and first performance, and where and by whom it was first performed; generous juicy quotes from each composer, on what she or he intended and what inspired or motivated each work; the occasional wry, funny, ironical ditzel; plus mini-summaries of what’s ‘under the hood’ of each piece and how it works.

H e gives the audience a sense of what to expect while hearing the piece, but is never excessively technical—sonata form, rondo, passacaglia, etc.—he does not ‘talk down’ or define each term for his readers, but rather gently makes it apparent in his ensuing paragraphs what the deal is and why it’s interesting. Seven pages and 3,500 words are not “a lot” when they are truly exciting like his writing is—any more than 400 pages and 200,000 words are too much for a really good novel that you can’t put down.

T he designation ‘symphony’ implies ambition—and the piece, in 30 minutes and four movements, delivers, if not precisely in a traditional way… the orchestra is more-or-less Mozart-sized, with modern doublings (piccolo, alto flute, E-flat clarinet) plus electric piano, which adds a distinct sonic touch… The beginning and end of the piece, musically similar, represent a ‘collective consciousness’ from which our individual spirits emerge and into which they return. The alto flute, English horn, and first bassoon are a ‘half-humorous visualization of three spirits who watch over the process of our birth and death.’ … Bolcom represents the collective consciousness with a miasma of string glissandi…”
— Robert Kirzinger, program notes.

W hile the primary consumers of program notes are the audience members, the notes can enrich the playing experience and understanding of the performers and the conductor as well. In fact, I suspect that the reason Kirzinger writes the way he does is because it is a genuine creative opportunity, not an ‘obligation’, not mere marketing ‘collateral’ that he is producing. Program notes are an artistic performance by its author(s), not a workaday ‘task’ with a commodified, mass-market ‘deliverable.’ Program notes are part and parcel of his ongoing dialogues with these people and with this music. It’s conversational—the writing of the program notes is an embodiment of the mutual commitment and the friendship that make high-quality conversation possible and real.

A nd if well-engineered program notes can manage to contribute to the performers’ and the conductor’s experience, then how much more we audience members can get from them! Hold the program notes in your hand. Open them. Begin reading them as though they were a piece of music. You are sight-reading a libretto! The story has characters in it—some who live; some who have died; all of whom have done some cool things. Things happen in that program-notes libretto—exciting stuff—and if you give a good ‘reading’, you might have a part! You really oughtta take that program home with you and re-read it. It isn’t a throw-away; it isn’t a only-for-show ‘sacrament’ of a religion you no longer believe in. Your sight-reading ability isn’t as great as it could and should be, you know…

T his work represents the desire to keep spiritual things close and present in everyday life, with recognition of just how challenging this goal can be… a series of saturated chords is cast antiphonally throughout the ensemble, and the otherworldly presence of unpitched, flat Chinese gongs sustains a rarified atmosphere over the work’s five-movement arc, culminating in a cacophony of bells.”
— Kati Agócs, notes for ‘…like treasure’.

R obert Kirzinger’s program notes texts read like concise, friendly ‘gists’… in-a-nutshell analyses, bolted onto exciting, expertly-redacted, friend-to-friend interviews with the composers—this is substantially what his program notes are. It’s really heartwarming to read program notes as lively and honest as the programs they’re about, and we consider ourselves very lucky to receive them as a bonus for the modest price of admission. The pre-concert chat between William Bolcom and Michael Gandolfi on-stage was fantastic, too—providing insights into their music, yes, but also enabling us to know what smart, decent human beings they both are. Went home happy, a little brighter, a little bigger-hearted, and more confident about the future of serious music and of program notes. Bravo, Robert! Bravo, BMOP! Bravo, Kati, Bill, Michael, and Sojourner!

T he ‘almost’ refers to the makeup of the [1971] then-very-new St. Paul Chamber Orchestra [who commissioned ‘Commedia’], of which Bolcom’s friend, composer Sydney Hodkinson, was conductor, and to whom the score of Commedia is dedicated… inspired (albeit distantly) by things Italian… the influence is the commedia dell’arte—the stock stage characters tossed against each other in a variety of situations, often comic but not without a dark side.”
— Robert Kirzinger, program notes.

T he kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field: which when a man hath found it, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant, seeking goodly pearls: who, when he had found one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”
— Matthew 12:44 - 46. (“…like treasure hidden in a field”).

Sunday, March 22, 2009

It’s Notes All the Way Down: Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ Quartet

Johannes String Quartet, photo © Lisa-Marie Mazzucco

I have long been fascinated (and amused) by the arcane Spermists’ theory, who held the belief that the sperm was in fact a ‘little man’ (in Latin, an ‘homunculus’) that was placed inside a woman to grow into a child. This seemed to them to neatly explain many of the mysteries of conception. It was later pointed out that if the sperm was indeed an homunculus—identical in all aspects but size to an adult—then the homunculus must have sperm of its own, [and, in turn, the homunculus’s sperm are themselves micro-homunculi with their own micro-sperm, which, in turn, are nano-homunculi, and so on]. This led to a logical ‘reductio ad absurdum’—an endless chain or infinite regress of [uncountable trillions of] homunculi within homunculi! This was not considered by [reality-challenged] Spermists to be a fatal objection, however—insofar as it neatly explained how it was that, in the biblical Adam, all [future human beings] had sinned: the whole of humanity [and its misdeeds] ‘was already contained in Adam’s loins’.”
— Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2008.

I wanted to compose a piece that would be very compact in form and duration, but still contain many different characters and textures. In other words, a little piece that behaves like a big piece... I decided to call my piece ‘Homunculus’ despite the obvious weaknesses of the spermists’ thinking, as I find the idea of a perfect little man strangely moving.”
— Esa-Pekka Salonen.

T he performance by the Guarneri String Quartet and the Johannes String Quartet together last night in Kansas City was amazing. The program included:

William Bolcom: Octet
Esa-Pekka Salonen: Homunculus (Johannes Quartet)
Derek Bermel: Passing Through (Guarneri Quartet)
Felix Mendelssohn: Octet

T imothy McDonald has a nice review in the Kansas City Star here.

Guarneri Quartet, photo © Dorothea von Haeften

T he Salonen ‘Homunculus’ quartet has many different expressions of parallelism and simultaneity in it—which is surprising, maybe, considering that the term ‘homunculus’ is ordinarily associated with concepts of hierarchy and encapsulation of things within things.

T here are rapid sixteenth-note figures and sextuplets that come in waves—liquid waves, violins spilling, viola spilling, cello spilling. The patterns evoke a sense of ‘being-as-process’, as opposed to ‘being-as-object’.

F rom the title, one might expect that Salonen had been inspired by—or is exploring—individual subjectivity: the interior experience of an individual self and the self-regard that each of us has through introspection, mapping and remembering our own history.

B ut instead Salonen’s ‘Homunculus’ suggests that a quartet is (can be) one individual-in-aggregate, or, conversely, that a single individual is (can be) a collocation of multiple selves, each of whom has its own real existence and identity.

I t’s not so much what the self ‘is’ that interests Salonen, I think, but what the self does (hears, sees, thinks, anticipates, intends, ... ) and how it does it. It’s all ‘process’. Identity has no reality except as it is enacted through acts and processes and events. ‘Homunculus’ not only asserts (abstractly) that this is so; it also defends the argument by way of quartetly examples and illustrates the cognitive and emotional range of self-as-process. ‘Homunculus’ illustrates how rapidly selfhood can be constructed/revealed—with gestures and textures that unfold over a few seconds only. Salonen’s craftsmanship here is clear, but it’s never over-worked. Organic plausibility, palpable Truth.

S ome portions of the work have ‘sectional’ writing for three parts (Vn2, Vla, Vc, say) and the fourth part (Vn1, say) is essentially autonomous, doing its own thing. Several bars/seconds elapse, and the ‘section’ has been reconstituted by a different trio (Vn1, Vn2, Vc, say) and a different one (Vla) is doing the extemporizing. The effect is vividly evocative of the ebb and flow of our normal thought-patterns—the shifting of attention amongst a variety of ideas and ‘mental sets’.

W ithin the model ‘self’ is a concept embodied in a [measurably] finite number of critical sub-units of the overall system of ‘mental sets’ that are accessible to our ordinary experiences. If there is no involvement of one or more parts of this ‘self structure’, then we feel uninvolved; our internal ‘observer’ will be felt to be not present.

S ure, the self can be ‘divided’—have a look at Jon Elster’s and others’ writings about this. But because each self exists in a set of subsystems that are totally finite, the ‘division’ can’t go on indefinitely. After a couple of hierarchical levels, ‘self’ can’t be divided further without either losing the normal sense of the word ‘self’ or division’s becoming arbitrary, unsupported by evidence from ordinary experience. There is a philosophical/aesthetic reason why Salonen wrote this for quartet and not sextet or octet or something larger. In ‘Homunculus’ we get a pretty specific statement from Salonen about how finite each of us really is...

S o there are in fact some neuropsychological models that still characterize how our minds work in terms of homunculus-like mappings and correspondences, but the encapsulations are finite—there is no infinite regress or vast hierarchical matryoshka-type nesting.

I n fact, self watching self watching self … is implausible on its face. Every day we are amazed at our forgetfulness and limited attention. Have a listen to ‘Homunculus’ in concert if you have the opportunity to do so. I think you’ll find Salonen saying (abstractly, musically) that we are each complex selves, but we are not arbitrarily or infinitely complex. (Salonen convinces me, and I take comfort in his having succeeded in this.)

O ne of the ‘complex’ things about ‘complex’ music is its quality of refusing to present a straightforward object (as for instance in much minimal sculpture): it is always perceived in the act of underlining its own ongoing and provisional nature. It doesn’t present the illusion of not being an illusion—in large measure because of the continual problematization of the performance/interpretaton context.”
— Brian Ferneyhough, Responses to a Questionnaire on ‘Complexity’, 1990.

T o fully explain how we experience what we do in this piece (or any other), a theory of consciousness would have to address real-time self-knowledge, self-understanding, self-awareness, self-monitoring, and goal setting: our selves as we know and understand and experience them; our selves as they are seen by others and used as a basis for their recognizing us as us; our selves as the sense of values and personal history and memory that constitutes our own recognition of who we are.

B ut, our minds (selves) do quite a lot of processing that’s ‘parallel’, not hierarchical or serial. We walk and chew gum at the same time; we contemplate and monitor several ideas at once; we process the concurrent expressions in this Salonen quartet and observe our own spontaneous reactions as we do this.

F or whatever forms and depths the ‘division’ of the self plausibly may have, though, the extent of the division is limited to the finite resources that in fact constitute ‘self’ within the system of mental sets that constitute our psyche. And those finite resources change on a moment-by-moment timescale. For example, the tutti and sectional structures in this 12-minute Salonen quartet do not place demands on us that are as great as the parts of the composition where the voices diverge from each other. As the processes unfold, the evolving cognitive demands—for the performers and for us listeners—are not excessive, and the musical result is coherent, pleasurable, beautiful.

T he narrative arc is compelling, and the effort of the collected selves apprehending this Salonen quartet is richly rewarded. I’ll have to get ahold of a copy of the score, to get a more detailed sense of how Salonen’s design accomplishes so much in such a short piece.

F our, five, six, eight voices at a time are about my own cognitive limit, however—which stands in stark contrast to the recent maniacal, parallel-not-hierarchical IVF exploits of Octo Mom to explore far higher cardinalities and polyphonies in one household.

Friday, November 7, 2008

Brothers Selling Dreams: Ax & Bronfman Piano Duo

M any years ago, my wife Joan Morris and I got to know the once-very-famous William Saroyan [Armenian-American writer and playwright]. Many people just ‘blank’ on Saroyan’s name today. We once took Saroyan to dinner in Paris. Afterwards, we went to a friend’s house where I played some of our recorded music for him. He listened respectfully. As he was leaving us he said, ‘Art is what is irresistible.’ I’m still chewing on that all these years later. I think it means that if something of mine isn’t irresistible, it won’t last because it won't be needed by us. Knowing that I can’t be around to see if my stuff lasts has given me such a huge sense of relief. No lobbying or politicking for my own work will make it any more or less irresistible. In the end, it’s the performers who decide what they want to perform, and in the long run they will play what they really want to hear.”
— William Bolcom, interview with Christopher Wright, 2005.

The Harriman-Jewell Series hosted pianists Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman in a brilliant duo recital last night in Kansas City.

Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn
Bolcom: Recuerdos (Three Traditional Latin-American Dances) for Two Pianos
Mozart: Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448
Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances

The Bolcom piece was particularly interesting….

[50-sec clip, Elizabeth & Marcel Bergmann, William Bolcom, ‘Recuerdos: III. Valse Venezolano - a la memoire de Ramón Delgado Palacios’, 1.6MB MP3]

Clearly, the ‘perform a duo together’ gig is a different dynamic than to play in larger ensembles and very different, too, than solo performance. The intimacy and the intensity of the shared goals in ‘duo’ are exceedingly great. The project is infused with the historically-situated political pre-suppositions of both of the duo members, including the aim together to embody something true and enduring and universal and memorable. The dynamic of the exchanges between Ax and Bronfman was fascinating—in a word, ‘brotherly’.

And the Bolcom piece was a perfect vehicle for displaying their brotherly wit and ‘Oh, yeah? Well, how about this?!’ irony. The third movement (MP3 clip above) is an especially appealing tale, I would say—‘recalled’ ... Los ‘recuerdos’ fueron recordadas por Manny de forma diferente que Fima ... in progressively escalating, boastful paragraphs by two young boys, each of whom hopes you will deem his ‘version’ of the story to be the better, more amusing one. Classic Bolcom tonality and punchy, confabulating rhythms, in the service of tag-team storytelling. Bolcom’s chordal orientation and boy-like ‘neo-tonal vs. post-tonal’ mocking of both tonal and atonal devices. All of that! In that regard, Jonathan Bernard has observed [not about Bolcom or this piece, but broadly speaking] that “the so-called ‘return to harmony’ or even ‘return to tonality,’ much remarked upon by critics, is really an appropriation of harmony for purposes that are essentially new and not so well understood. To assume that composers, by retrieving such familiar sonorities as triads and major-minor seventh chords, have also taken on, whether intending to or not, the ‘hierarchical’ nature of common-practice tonality (if not its specific structures) may be assuming far too much.”

Bernard’s distinction between what he calls the third and fourth “Stages” in “the story of what happened after [the] initial establishment of minimalism” makes the point clear. In ‘Stage 3’, “pieces began sounding more explicitly ‘harmonic’, that is, chordally oriented, though not, at this point, necessarily ‘tonal’ in any sense.” In ‘Stage 4’, “harmony of an ever more tonal (or neo-tonal, or quasi-tonal) aspect assumed primary control, leaving minimalist devices pushed into the background, where they became stylistic objects” [see the Bernard link below, p. 114].

It was also Bernard who about 10 years ago came up with a useful gambit for analyzing compositions: compare a minimalist piece of music with examples of minimalism in the fine arts, where discussion is, as Bernard puts it, “less bound-up with exactitudes… Regions that alternate regularly between relative sparseness and relative density, very much like the alternating stretches of rhythmic synchrony and rhythmically out-of-phase transition...” In other words, very much like the features of these ‘Recuerdos’ by Bolcom [even though they are by no means ‘minimalist’ and are maybe beyond ‘post-minimalist’ even, heh!].

How does it help understand Bolcom’s music better—to know that it resembles a painting as Bernard is fond of suggesting—or, in my case, to know that it has certain features that are like the dynamic between two competitive 10-year-old brothers, each trying to tell the more successful, irresistible version of a story—[or to know that it is mathematically measurable, and has a distinct rhythmic density or a time-varying power-spectrum or (as in the previous CMT post on Gubaidulina) a Shannon entropy that varies over time]? Do analyses like these—both the ones without any discernible exactitude, plus the ones with some intermediate [e.g., literary-theory] level of exactitude, and the ones with precise mathematical exactitude—help?

W ell, the art comparisons are evocative enough. Lots and lots of people have been to enough art museums to have the contextual knowledge so that comparing a piece of well-known art to a piece of music can be broadly accessible and understandable and helpful. And literary comparisons are also pretty accessible and evocative in stimulating critical discussion among people. The only question, I guess, is how helpful mathematics can be, given the current state of ‘numeracy’ around the world. Can the mathematical features in a piece for two pianos help the performers play it or the listeners listen to it more insightfully and profitably? I firmly believe the answer is ‘Yes.’ You just have to have a decent level of ‘numeracy’, and you have to be in the mood for it. Based on several emails I’ve received on the maths in some of the CMT posts, it looks like the math music geeks are an underserved market in music criticism and music journalism. Maybe in a future CMT post, I will look at the math of Bolcom compositions...

At any rate, with Ax and Bronfman in-charge, we find ourselves in the mood to buy any dream they want to sell us, consider any fabulous tale they want to recount for us, see any neo-tonal/post-everything art they want to show us ... go anywhere acoustically and expressively they want to take us. They make us this irresistible offer that’s ‘aspirational’—and it invariably embodies things that we aspire to have, to be, to do, to experience, to feel. Attractive in the extreme. An irresistible offer—one that has a return-on-investment (ROI) that’s big and immediately recognizable and believable. ‘Irresistible’ in that it is not a one-time ‘special offer’—it offers assurances of dependability and reliable ongoing presence—it’s safe to depend on it being there. It is not compulsive, ‘over-the-top’ novelty—it is comfortable, credible. As an ‘investment’ it has a beta that is not too high, with liquidity and financial ratios that denote tolerable risk.

In short, at the Ax-Bronfman recital last night I was (we were) ‘sold’. Their brotherly sales pitch was irresistible. And as I reflect on the Bolcom quote at the top, I think it was nice, too, that these pieces—and the colors and ideas that they contain—are what Fima and Manny like to perform together. Their choice of these pieces says a great deal about their affection for each other, and about their optimism and enduring/endearing enthusiasm for life.

Emanuel Ax website
Yefim Bronfman website
Harriman-Jewell Series
Opus 3 Artists Inc (agents for Yefim Bronfman and Emanuel Ax)
William Bolcom’s (and Joan Morris’s) website
Bergmann E, Bergmann M. Bolcom: Music for Two Pianos. (Naxos, 2004.)
IlluminatingBolcom.org
Bernard J. Minimalism, postminimalism, and the resurgence of tonality in recent American music. American Music 2003; 21;112-33.
Eagleton T. Literary Theory. 3e. Univ Minnesota, 2008.
Fink R. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Univ California, 2005.
Gaut B, Lopes D, eds. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 2e. Routledge, 2005.
Kerka S. Not just a number: Critical numeracy for adults. ERIC Digest, FEB-1996.
Lehmann A, Sloboda J, Woody R. Psychology for Musicians: Understanding and Acquiring the Skills. Oxford Univ, 2007.
Longinotti-Buitoni G, Longinotti-Buitoni K. Selling Dreams: How to Make Any Product Irresistible. Simon & Schuster, 1999.
Shaffer L. Timing in solo and duet piano performances. Quarterly J Exper Psychol 1984; 36:577-95.
Sloboda J. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford Univ, 2005.
Wright C. The unrepentant eclectic: An interview with American composer William Bolcom. AdventuresInMusic, 2005.
St. Olaf College Quantitative Literacy
St. Olaf Numeracy Quotes
DFES U.K. Numeracy page
MathForum.org page on numeracy

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Biava String Quartet: Too Much Is Never Enough

T oo much is never enough.”
— Mick Jagger.

However big the repertoire for string quartets gets, it is not possible to have too many string quartets.

The Biava Quartet performed Saturday night at the annual black-tie gala/soiree benefiting the Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. Approximately 250 attendees enjoyed the concert-dinner-auction event in the Kirk Hall of the Kansas City Public (Central) Library, a 1906 historic building which was renovated/restored in 2004.

The Biava Quartet was founded in 1998 at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Its members were trained at the New England Conservatory of Music, the University of Southern California, Yale University, and The Juilliard School. Currently the Biavas are the Lisa Arnhold Quartet-in-Residence at Juilliard. They were also the winners of the Naumburg Chamber Music Award in 2003.

The Quartet is named after violinist and conductor Luis Biava, who has been a mentor to members of the group. Biava is Professor at Temple University Boyer College of Music and was previously Conductor-in-Residence with the Philadelphia Orchestra. A native of Colombia, Biava was a founding member of the Philarte String Quartet and continues to play first violin with the Philadelphia Chamber Ensemble.

The Biava Quartet’s repertoire features American composers John Harbison, Mason Bates, William Bolcom, and Ezra Laderman. Last year the Quartet premiered and recorded composer Stacy Garrop’s String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’.

[50-sec clip, Stacy Garrop, String Quartet No. 2 ‘Demons and Angels’, Biava String Quartet, 1.2MB MP3]

The Biavas last night gave the gala attendees a dazzling 30 minutes of ‘bon-bons’.

Schnittke—Polka, 1980 (arr. Sergei Dreznin): parts alternately take on serious and jesting poses; extreme rubato propels the circus theatrics; sheet music available from Sikorski; 2 minutes 30 seconds of ironical hilarity in B minor;
Puccini—Crisantemi (chrysanthemums), 1890: a G minor caricature written in a single night, in memory of duke Amadeo of Savoy; Puccini later reused this work in his opera Manon Lescaut; ‘pneumatic’ phrasing heightens the lyrical and dramatic effects, which alternately call into question the authenticity of theatre and of so-called ‘real’ life; Biavas’ incisiveness succeeds in animating these questions in just 5 minutes; sheet music available from MusicForStrings;
Turina—Oración del Torero (Bullfighter’s Prayer), 1925: opens quietly with stealthy pizzicato (What is this bullfighter praying for?); pace progresses impulsively and reveals out-of-control impetuosity and narcissism, then gets a grip in an expansive and calming melody; sheet music available from MusicRoom;
Beach—Theme and Variations for Flute and String Quartet, Op. 80, 1916: sometimes paired with readings from poet Emily Dickinson or American Indian folk literature; coloristic American/Macdowellian whimsy at its finest; sheet music available from RecitalPublications.com;
Shostakovich—Age of Gold Polka (arr. Jason Calloway): incongruous dissonances that opine that ‘stuff happens’, humans are never really ‘in control’ of anything.

The Biava Quartet’s pacing is edgy and precise, neat, white-knuckled—exciting. Passages played expressively in other settings (conventional concerts; recordings) here come across as paradoxically stern (watch violinist Hyunsu Ko furrow her brow!), whereas rigid sections are in a festive mood read more lyrically and infused with humor and theatricality. The Biava Quartet devises a program that is perfect for a gala benefit!

The Biava Quartet’s members are:

Austin Hartman, violin;
Hyunsu Ko, violin;
Mary Persin, viola;
Jason Calloway, cello

This coming week the Biavas will be performing at the Juilliard String Quartet Seminar in New York. (Probably the repertoire there will be not quite so jocular as at the gala?)

It should go without saying that there is no ‘affluenza’ of string quartets, anymore than there is an affluenza of paintings or photographs or films: the threshhold of unmet market demand for excellent string quartets is still higher than the current supply. Instead of the growing classical musical wealth freeing us from ‘materialist’ preoccupations, it has the opposite effect—of making us more conscious of how much more there is to create and to have, and more conscious and less accepting of mediocrity. Not ‘acquisitiveness’ really; just a hedonistic joy in seeking out more of the experiences that the Biavas are providing!

Would there ever be ‘Enough’? If ‘enough’ means ‘satisfying desire’, ‘adequate to meet the need’, ‘sufficient’, I doubt it. What we have right now is, at best ‘in a tolerable but not super-abundant degree, denoting mere acceptableness or acquiescence, and implying a degree or quantity rather less than is desired’. As in, “This quartet was well enough, but I’m still hungry for more.”

There can never be too many string quartets—not compositions; not ensembles; not performances—especially when carried off with such panache. The Biava Quartet’s wonderful performance contributed significantly to reaching the Friends of Chamber Music’s fund-raising goals. A heart-felt thanks to the Quartet members for generously making a place for these sorts of promotional events in their busy schedule of teaching and concertizing! (It’s hard maybe for performing artists to place a value on promotion and audience development. But presenters know well how vital and valuable promotional events are. Without such events there would not be nearly so many commissions for composers, not nearly so many opportunities for up-and-coming performers and ensembles, and, ultimately, a less vibrant community in which publishers, recording companies, and presenters and other stakeholders also can thrive.)

Gala promotional events may not be ideal from acoustic or musical aesthetic perspectives, but they are a life-blood to the classical music community and privately funding chamber music in the U.S. These events are vital not only for retention and bonding with the usual, older philanthropist-patrons in the community; they are also vital for attracting new corporate sponsors, for whom the events have a certain desirable cachet.

F ind an ‘in’. Find a Board member or even a LinkedIn connection who can introduce you [to the business person you intend to solicit for sponsorship of your chamber music organization] so you’re not ‘cold calling’. I always respond to people who come recommended by someone I know, and businesspeople do, too. Start your sentences [addressing potential corporate sponsors] in the right way. Instead of ‘This is what we do,’ say ‘[Look at this.] This is what we can do for you.’ ”
— Katya Andresen, NetworkingForGood, 17-MAR-2008.

Besides this, gala events also attract a fair number of under-40s who see black-tie experiences as a sort of musical ‘adventure travel’. (‘Tourism’ would be the wrong word; too passive. To this group, gala cultural events are ‘expeditions’—opportunities to visit an esoteric place and society that few members of the group would encounter otherwise; a cross-genre dual art of ‘elegant conversation and dining’-plus-‘chamber music’, ‘hybrid art’ as the Australians would say; an ‘extreme contact sport’.) Participating in a civic cultural event, clustered in dinner tables of ten, these under-40s actively create memories. The uncertainties and risks and thrills involved are very much the same sort as arise in travel abroad, to places where you don’t speak the language.

A spirited and thoughtful volume. One of Bruner’s greatest contributions is his constructivist position, from which he views cultures as continually reinventing themselves. Tourist practices are seen as neither simulacra nor ersatz, but as active social performances in their own right. This position allows Bruner to free anthropologists from their previous impasse of thinking along the binary of authenticity-inauthenticity, a persistent focus of tourism scholarship ever since Dean MacCannell’s 1970s writing on ‘staged authenticity.’ Because culture is always emergent, alive, and in process, every cultural act is authentic.”
— Miriam Kahn, review of Bruner’s book, in American Anthropologist, 2004.

Not merely sight-seeing or posing as explorers, they immerse themselves; they talk with the Biavas and bid against socialites for choice live-auction items. Respectful amateur anthropologists, they conduct themselves politely and with earnestness and interest, as they would do when abroad in a foreign country. ‘Destination Culture’ enthusiasts, they take ‘tribal’ photos of the scene and of each other (discreetly on cell phone cameras, to be uploaded later and virally shared), recording the historical facts of their night’s expedition.

This sort of high-touch ‘face-to-face’ audience development (of Bruner-style active destination-cultural ‘explorers’) just doesn’t happen in conventional concert hall settings or tamer pre-/post-concert ‘socials’. There is no doubt that encounters like these are healthy for all concerned—the ‘natives’ and the ‘explorers’.

W hat we have is a circuit of embodiments and disembodiments, a passage of vivid sensations through bodies—first extracted from perceptions and affections, then rendered perceptible in the expressive matter of the artwork, then engaged by audiences swept up into the artwork.”
— Ronald Boque, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, p. 170.

Basically, vigorous, civic-minded ensembles like the Biava Quartet are, through gestures like their superb, unusual performance in Kansas City last night, helping to insure the future of chamber music in this country—by revealing wider, more improvisatory, and less ‘serious’ dimensions of chamber music—to a wider audience, many of whom never imagined that these dimensions existed. Too much gratitude from us for their generosity is impossible—too much is never ‘Enough’.