Showing posts with label companionship. Show all posts
Showing posts with label companionship. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Remembering Peter and Lorraine Lieberson: True Love as a Practice for Awakening the Heart

Peter & Lorraine, ©2006, Emil Miland
O    ihr Zärtlichen, tretet zuweilen
in den Atem, der euch nicht meint,
laßt ihn an eueren Wangen sich teilen,
hinter euch zittert er, wieder vereint.

O ihr Seligen, O ihr Heilen,
die ihr der Anfang der Herzen scheint.
Bogen der Pfeile und Ziele von Pfeilen,
ewiger glänzt euer Lächeln verweint.

Fürchtet euch nicht zu leiden, die Schwere,
gebt sie zurück an der Erde Gewicht;
schwer sind die Berge, schwer sind die Meere.

Selbst die als Kinder ihr pflanztet, die Bäume,
wurden zu schwer längst ; ihr trüget sie nicht.
Aber die Lüfte ... aber die Räume ...

[O you Tender Ones, you will walk, persisting
Through the cold breath that was not breathed for your sake,
Your heedless cheeks oblivious to its trembling.
Blowing as it does, the wind coalesces behind you after you've passed, without trace.

O Blessed Ones, healthy and whole though you be now,
Who seem to be enveloped and self-sufficient, the epitome of life and the heart's beginning.
Bows are there for each conceivable arrow and a target for all arrows:
Logical correlates of the perpetual brilliance of your pulsatile smile.

Fear not the pain and sorrow and stillness that will inevitably come,
Consign all of that back to the heavy Earth who knows good and well what to do with it:
Heavy are the mountains, heavy the seas.

Even as a child, you planted these trees:
Already they are awfully heavy, beyond belief really.
Despite this persists the pervasive space ... the ubiquitous breezes ...]”
  —  Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus, VI.
P eter Lieberson died of sepsis, a complication of his lymphoma and treatment for lymphoma last Saturday, at age 64. Lieberson gratified our ears not only with composerly talent but with a humor and warm personality that do not require atmospheric ‘soft-focus’ photos like the one above to convey the inner gentleness.

P eter’s wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, died of breast cancer at age 52, in 2006. She was a mezzo-soprano, known for her dramatic power and raw virtuosity as well as her artistry performing Baroque era and new compositions. Her career path to becoming a singer was unconventional. Formerly a professional violist, Lieberson changed her full-time focus to singing when she was around 30 (1985 and beyond). As violist she played in the Orchestra of Emmanuel Music in Boston under conductor Craig Smith and later sang in the chorus. For a time, she was also principal viola in Berkeley Symphony.

I n re-listening to recordings I have of Peter’s later compositions, Lorraine’s influence on Peter’s soul and heart becomes evident… how she provided him with insights and renewal. This is an undeniable element in Peter’s writing after 1997. Lorraine’s influence is diaphoric, trans-illuminating—an emblem of spirit-in-matter. Must be why he fell in love with her… good reason why anyone would fall in love with anyone.


    [50-sec clip, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson & Peter Serkin, Peter Lieberson, ‘Rilke Songs’, ‘O, ihr Zärtlichen’, 1.6MB MP3]

L ieberson was expert at syllabic setting and pitch repetition: the vocal part centers on particular notes for considerable proportions of passages. These songs are predominantly recitative. They have suspended accompaniment and rubato manifestations of the singing part.

W   hen I was growing up, my mother, whose first language was German, would often quote lines from Rilke. I have been drawn to his poetry ever since. Rilke evokes feelings, states of being that are at the edge of awareness, mysterious but close to the heart. One can’t always understand exactly what he means. I believe this is a deliberate elusiveness in order to provoke our intuition. The Rilke Songs were written for my wife, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. I think of them as love songs even though the poems themselves are not overtly about love. They are about being childlike and open in ‘O ihr Zärtlichen’; in ‘Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht!,’ they are about the breath being a complete exchange between our own essence and the universe. They are about how the breath seems to go out into space like our wandering son; the mysterious way in which we might transform ourselves: ‘If drinking is bitter, turn yourself into wine’ (‘Stiller Freund’). To me these Rilkean insights are a gift of love..”
  —  Peter Lieberson, program notes.
K atherine Kelton maintains that Peter Lieberson “learned about the complexity of the human voice and the multitude of intricacies of which it is capable” through Lorraine. “Much as Robert Schumann’s love for Clara Wieck inspired him to compose in a genre he had previously disregarded,” so too Lorraine propelled Peter in directions that were, up to then, unfamiliar.

M aybe this is so; maybe a ‘push’ theory is right.

B ut it is also possible (and, I think, more likely) that it was a matter of ‘pull’, of natural attraction. In fact, it is hardly plausible that the diverse nuances of the voice could have been novel for Peter in 1997. If anything, his many years leading Shambhala sessions led him to develop acute sensitivity to myriad manifestations of ego/self and selflessness. And there was Lorraine, an eager collaborator, able to animate a composition so as to lead to discoveries for both, on the part of both.

L orraine’s performances of Peter’s compositions evoke what Mircea Eliade once called ‘dialectique du sacre’ and ‘hierophanies’. Sacred portrayal is realized as an individual creative act—one that embodies both spiritual insight and sensual perception. The relationship ceases to be merely ‘of-the-world’. It achieves transcendence, a dimension of sacredness. That, I believe, is what we hear in these wonderful recordings. The feeling conveyed is one of consummate ‘hereness’, ‘thisness’—a kind of presence, of living entirely in the present.

I    think of my Rilke Songs as love songs even though they are not overtly about love. They are, for example, about being child-like and open, as in “O ihr Zärtlichen;” about the breath being a complete exchange of our own essence with the universe in “Atmen, du unsichtbares Gedicht;” about the mysterious ways in which we might transform ourselves in “Stiller Freund” . . . To me, these Rilkean insights are gifts of love.”
  — Peter Lieberson, program notes to ‘Rilke Songs’.
T   he act of singing... when my voice is feeling free and soaring... it is a wonderful, healing experience.”
  — Lorraine Hunt, interview with Terry Gross, NPR, 1996.
T    he spelling sgra bla (‘la of sound’) found in the ancient texts as a matter of fact is based on a very deep principle characteristic of the most authentic Bön tradition. Sound, albeit not visible, can be perceived through the sense of hearing and used as a means of communication, and is in fact linked to the cha (the individual’s positive force, the base of prosperity), wang tang (ascendancy-capacity), and all the other aspects of a person’s energy, aspects that are directly related with the protective deities and entities that every person has from birth. Moreover, sound is considered the foremost connection between the individual himself and his la.”
  —  Namkhai Norbu Rinpoche, Drung De’u and Bön, translated by Adriano Clemente, Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1995, p. 61.
T o me, Peter Lieberson’s later compositions embody Shambhala texts that reveal and test our relationship to the “material world” and our sense perceptions. They teach the practice of enriching presence—the ability to instantly envision the inner wealth within oneself.

T   o compose ‘Neruda Songs’, I responded to the words and to the emotional tone of the poem. I heard notes when I read the words. Generally I like the tactile feeling, the sensual feeling of being at the piano, so I compose there. I listen very, very carefully to the words, and the harmony is very intuitive. The great period of jazz, that’s how I learned harmony, Bill Evans and Miles Davis. That was my ear training. Orchestrations come easily to me, and I often hear which instrument should be playing. It’s constant responsiveness; it’s somewhere between improvising and strategizing.”
  —  Peter Lieberson, interview with Pierre Ruhe, 10-JUN-2010.
T here is, to me, a cinematic quality to the songs—as though the composer were a cameraman.

C amera placement distinctly influences our perception of the world that’s portrayed and the characters in it. Shooting down at a seated character can diminish her presence and stature; it may make her seem submissive or even supplicative. Filming up at a character provides a sense of the figure’s power and command. By contrast, in Rilke Songs it is as if Peter Lieberson’s ‘camera’ is placed at eye-level, making the perspective like what we would see while sitting across from Lorraine having a conversation. The character isn’t ‘owned’ by the camera/cameraperson nor is she sensationalized by it.

C    ombien qu'a nous soit cause le Soleil
Que toute chose est tresclerement veue:
Ce neantmoins pour trop arrester l'œil
En sa splendeur lon pert soubdain la veue.
Mon ame ainsi de son objiect pourueue
De tous mes sens me rend abandonné,
Comme si lors en moy tout estonné
Semeles fust en presence rauie
De son Amant de fouldre enuironné
Qui luy ostast par ses esclaires la vie.

[Much as the Sun causes each thing
To lie so clearly before our eyes:
To linger too long in its splendor
Is to be suddenly made blind.
My soul and its object
Now abandoned by all my senses,
As if, within me, and to my great surprise
Semele were ravished in my presence
By her Lover [Zeus] who, with his thunderbolts,
Snatched her life in a flash of light.]”
  —  Maurice Scève, Délie, v.443.
T here is an interview that Lorraine did with NPR’s Terry Gross back in 1996, in which Lorraine confides her fascination with identity-bending, gender-bending roles—the journeys of self-discovery and transcendence that are made possible through these. Beyond angle, camera placement also affects the view that we have onto the action and the resultant meaning we can derive from a shot. On the surface, the Rilke Songs setting of several Rilke poems celebrate the then-undersung life and burgeoning talent of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. That her belated decampment from viola to singing was what vaulted her to international fame was an oddity: here was the soul and and the propensities of a string player inhabiting an operatic singer’s body.

P eter leveraged Lorraine’s enthusiasm for transcendent experiences to honor her. In Rilke Songs, it is as though composer Peter were a filmmaker choosing to shoot in a long profile ‘take’. The placement of the voice-leading/camera here and the accompaniment there; the choice to let the ‘shot’ play out as it does; these reveal the nuanced components, not only of composition but of microphone placement and physicality that Lorraine so deftly crafted in the use of her vocal instrument. No other ‘camera’ position and mic position could have permitted such insight into her craft, nor into the craft of the composer who created this vehicle for shared expression.

E   very 24-hour day is a tremendous gift to us. So we all should learn to live in a way that makes joy and happiness possible. The first miracle of mindfulness is our true presence—being here, present, totally alive. If you are really here, the other will also be here. Loving? It is recognizing the presence of the other with your love... Dear One, I am here for you... A human tendency is to see spirituality as a process of self-improvement—the impulse to develop and refine the ego when the ego is, by nature, essentially empty. The problem is that ego can convert anything to its own use, even spirituality.”
  — Thich Nhat Hanh.
N o atmospherics or sentimentality in this long ‘take’. Her delivery is straightforward and expository, articulated calmly and directly to the listener. Knowing as we do that these performances were sung—the compositions were composed—when Lorraine was already afflicted by breast cancer, the récits produce a kind of uncanniness; produce narrative convergences between Peter and Lorraine; they embody a tantric, elliptical concentration; they are an Unheimlichkeit, a Verklärung, eine Vorahnung.

T hese wonderful specimens of humankind will be deeply missed.

Shambhala
  • The Heart of Warriorship
  • Level I: The Art of Being Human
  • Level II: Birth of the Warrior
  • Level III: Warrior in the World
  • Level IV: Awakened Heart
  • Level V: Open Sky

  • The Sacred Path
  • Great Eastern Sun
  • Windhorse
  • Drala
  • Meek
  • Perky
  • Outrageous and Inscrutable
  • Golden Key




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Friday, June 29, 2007

Manasse-Nakamatsu: Two Jons, Zwei Begleitern mit Gleichheit

Jon Manasse
DSM: Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata in E-flat, Op. 120, No. 2, has a delicate and, in the woodwind-piano duet literature, unique ‘balance’ between the piano and the clarinet. What I mean is that the piano is not so much an ‘accompaniment’—in the way it is in some Concertante pieces that clearly have an accompaniment that’s subordinated to the solo instrument’s part—as it is an equal voice that has expressive ‘parity’ with the clarinet. This Sonata is much more in the dialogical mode of ‘chamber music’.

CMT: Clarinetist Jon Manasse and pianist Jon Nakamatsu perform this Brahms Clarinet Sonata No. 2 regularly. And, you know, the German for accompanist is ‘Begleiter’ or companion. It is not ‘servant’. It is not ‘note-schlepper’. It’s ‘companion’—full-fledged ‘companion’, with more than a whiff of ‘duty’ in that. Think of Brahms—the Brahms of Hamburg, Detmold, Vienna: how did Begleitern/Gefährten accompanists comport themselves?

DSM: The pairing of Jon Manasse and Jon Nakamatsu is an especially felicitous one—in terms of their matched temperaments, mutual sensitivities, and mutual sense of duty, one to the other. Ahhh, let’s see here . . . Jon Manasse’s appearances include New York City performances at Lincoln Center’s Chamber Music Society events (Avery Fisher Hall), Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Hunter College, Columbia University, Rockefeller University. In a busy schedule of concretizing, he also presented the world premieres of James Cohn’s Concerto for Clarinet & String Orchestra at the international ClarinetFest 1997 and, in 2005, of Steven Gerber’s Clarinet Concerto with the National Philharmonic. Manasse debuted Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto with Gerard Schwarz and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in a Barbican Centre performance in London in 2002.

CMT: Jon Manasse also has chamber music performances with the Brooklyn Chamber Music Society, the Amadeus Trio at Southern Oregon University, the Ying Quartet at Harvard University, plus the Manhattan String Quartet, the Borromeo String Quartet, the Amadeus Trio, Germany’s Trio Parnassus, the Orion String Quartet, and the Rossetti Shanghai Quartet.

DSM: Jon trained at Juilliard, where he studied with David Weber. Manasse was a top prize winner in the Thirty-Sixth International Competition for Clarinet in Munich and the youngest winner of the International Clarinet Society Competition. For twelve years he’s been on the faculty of the Eastman School of Music. And this Fall, Manasse joins the faculty of Juilliard.

CMT: You know, Brahms initially wrote Op. 120 for viola and piano. The viola part was then transposed for the clarinet, and it’s famously known now as the Clarinet Sonata—even though it’s still important in the viola literature, too. The two Brahms Clarinet Sonatas are anchors in the standard clarinet repertoire that’s required for clarinetists in music graduate programs. Examination and performance of the Second Sonata show that the “zero-order” technical aspects—such as fingerings and tongue articulation and phrasing and tone production in each of the registers—are not what make Op. 120 so challenging. Instead, the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas are a critical part of the repertoire because they contain sections that expose “first-” and “second-order” weaknesses of the clarinetist—such as breath support, and control of dynamics, and interpretive vision, and gestural fluency. As a consequence—or conversely—these same sections have a powerful ability to reveal the expressive and technical virtuosity of the clarinetist as well. The Second Sonata can really separate the wheat from the chaff! Here are some questions for you, and for Jon Manasse:
  • Do you move a lot when you’re performing?
  • Does this motion affect your performance?
  • Did your teachers encourage or discourage motions? What was their reasoning?
  • Is there a part of your body that you move more than any other, to achieve the expressive musical effects you intend?
  • What’s the proper role of gestural instruction in performance pedagogy?

DSM: Common gestures for clarinetists involve, say, vertical movement of the clarinet bell and of its barrel, and horizontal and sagittal movements of the barrel alone. And circular/elliptical movements of the bell and barrel. We should distinguish at least two categories of gestures. ‘Instrumental gestures’ are ones that play a direct role in the production of sound (e.g., moving the diaphragm to blow air into a wind instrument), while ‘ancillary gestures’ are not directly involved in the production of sound (e.g., raising the eyebrows; scowling; leaning the body forward or backward; raising the hands above the keyboard; elliptical movements of the clarinet bell; etc.).

CMT: Musicians tend to move expressively while they play. Watching a soloist, one sees a sequence of subtle gestures including body sways, eyebrow movements, knee bending and facial expressions, all of which occur in relation to the musical sound.

Wanderley, J New Music Res, 2005
DSM: Davidson (1993) designed a research study design in which participants were divided/randomized into three groups: they saw a musician performing, or heard the performance without seeing it, or both saw and heard the music. Surprisingly, Davidson found that the movements of musicians actually conveyed expressive intentions more accurately than the sound did. Wanderley (2005) has greatly improved and extended ‘ancillary gesture’ studies with digital photography of soloist musicians playing and quantitative analysis of that imagery, correlating it with surveys of listeners’ perceptions of the emotional content of the performances. To remove bias and insure comparability, Wanderley used digital time-warping, so that the tempi of the different performances to be compared were normalized and kept ‘aligned’ with each other for the statistical correlation analyses . . . Wanderley is now on faculty at McGill.

CMT: Gestures actually extend our sense of phrasing during ligatures, fermatas, pauses between sections, and so on. Though the sound comes to an end at a major transition between musical phrases, the performers’ gestures and postures continue into the silence. As a result, audience members who can see the performers moving perceive the phrase extending beyond the end of the note and into the silence. Likewise, certain gestures precede or anticipate the beginning of the new section or phrase (just as the movement of vocal articulators will begin before a target sound is produced in speech) – a process known as ‘co-articulation’. In that connection, you may like to have a look at Levelt’s 1993 book to see a detailed account of it. The interrelationship between musicians’ movements, musical sound and the observing audience, where movements convey or reinforce the performers’ musical intentions to observers, is clearly very complex. And it often makes big contributions to our understanding the music we’re hearing. An immobile musician won’t communicate as well or as much as one whose gestures are appropriate and accurate.

DSM: And it’s part of why seeing live performances matters. With regard to the nuances of physical ‘ancillary’ gestures, even broadcast imagery or DVD or film can’t convey as much as experiencing live performance. They may have excellent mastering and acoustic properties; they may have excellent cinematography and editing and visual production values; but they’re not adequate substitutes for seeing it for yourself, up close . . . What else? I would say that different performers tend to reproduce the same movements throughout the piece. And even if there’s no structural correlation of movements throughout the piece, there may be some movement patterns that tend to be produced by a player in different circumstances. It’s much the same as the personal and ethnosocial gestural style that each of us exhibits in conversations that have varied content and emotions. I have a certain style and gestural vocabulary that ‘works’ for me, a set of habitual gestures that are culturally conditioned—learned quite early in life, many of them.

CMT: Do the expressive body movements of musicians play a similar role in relation to the musical sound? Of course! Music is analogous to speech in that the sound carries the core ‘content’. But non-verbal gestures also contribute to the emotional sense of an utterance, and they help speakers to time their exchange in a conversation. Same thing in music!

DSM: We can think of different categories of clarinetists’ expressive movements:
  • Material/Physiological, i.e., the influence of respiration, fingering, the ergonomics of the instrument, etc. At each time when performers breathe there’s a tendency to bring down the instrument to a vertical position and soon afterwards start an upwards movement again. This can be partly an ‘instrumental’ gesture, but often it’s predominantly an ‘ancillary’ one—a cue for the listener.
  • Structural, i.e., dependent on the characteristics of the piece being performed. Some performers tend to mark the rhythm with their instrument, as an aid to metrical precision. And, although there are various differences in these movements, there seem to be similarities—a cross-correlation that’s higher than we’d expect by statistical chance alone.
  • Interpretive, i.e., related to the mental model of the piece that the performer has. The mental conception of the arc of the piece will usually be different for different performers, or may often differ for a given performer across the span of her/his career.

CMT: In the case of the same expert clarinet player performing one piece different times, we can reasonably imagine that there’ll be a strong correlation between the player’s movements at the same points in the score in the different performances. This is what Wanderley and other researchers have found. In fact, it suggests a strong relation between what’s being played and how it’s played. With the experimental evidence that’s been published, it can be asserted that ancillary gestures of clarinet players are not produced randomly or just as a visual effect, but that these gestures are an intrinsic part of the musical performance process itself.

DSM: In its first movement, we have in the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas a musical form that begins its development in the tonic. Jack Adrian published a paper several years ago that gave two conventional explanations for sonata forms of this unorthodox type. Adrian says the first explanation is an ‘apparent’ return of the tonic, with a return of the tonic chord at the beginning of the development but not a return of the tonic scale step. He calls the second explanation a ‘real’ return, and it contains a return of the tonic chord and the tonic scale step at the beginning of the development. Adrian says that the Brahms Clarinet Sonatas are examples of ‘real’ returns.

DSM: But Brahms doesn’t stop there! Adrian offers other possible explanations of this unorthodox sonata form movement. The orthodox framework of sonata form is in the background structure and in its interruption at the point of recapitulation.

CMT: In this Brahms sonata, then, we have an initial voice-leading of the fundamental line that’s incomplete—and which ends before the end of the development. The motion is interrupted at the recapitulation by the return of the primary tone, and the Fundamental Structure is carried to its close. Adrian notes that, when the tonic chord as tonic scale step occurs at the beginning of the development, the development begins the motion to the dominant rather than continuing the second subject towards the interruption.

DSM: So the whole development section of Brahms’s Clarinet Sonata is then a deviant, mutant transition to the second subject area. It doesn’t equate the dominant of the second subject area with the dominant at the end of the development—after all, the first motion to the dominant is subsumed by the second . . .

CMT: Though there are these two interruptions, the first motion to the dominant occurs in the middleground, and the one at the end of the development is in the background. With this example of Brahms’s unorthodox sonata form we have a ‘challenge’ to the conventional concept of form. It also shows that concepts and definitions of form are vulnerable and malleable. Jon Manasse’s account is refreshing and brings these challenges to the fore. Not in an abstract, scholarly way—but exciting and juicy!

DSM: And, again Jon Nakamatsu gives us this frisson of sensory over-stimulation; melody, harmony, allusion and quotation shimmer tantalizingly, often just barely out of reach. Immense detail is packed into short time-frames, particularly in the Clarinet Sonatas, but never to the point of confusion – there’s always a clear line projected through and a thoroughgoing stylistic ‘companionship’ evidenced by the two Jons’ playing.

CMT: Here is Jon Manasse’s upcoming schedule:
  • July 11: Strings in the Mountains Music Festival : Steamboat Springs : Brahms: Clarinet Sonata #2, with Jon Nakamatsu, pianist
  • July 14: Strings in the Mountains Music Festival : Steamboat Springs : Weber: Grand Duo Concertant, with Jon Nakamatsu, pianist
  • July 29: Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival : Chatham : Brahms: Clarinet Sonata #2, with Jon Nakamatsu, pianist; Weber: Grand Duo Concertant; Ravel/Hamelin: Pièce en forme de Habanera; Kovács: Hommage à Manuel de Falla
  • August 3: Cape Cod Chamber Music Festival : Wellfleet : Mozart: Clarinet Quintet, with Borromeo String Quartet
  • August 30: The Skaneateles Festival : Beethoven: Clarinet Trio, Op. 11

W hen you are accompanying someone, you are listening to them the way you listen to a Bach Chorale, where several parts are going on at the same time, all of which are gorgeous melodies, all being played simultaneously.”
  — David Amram.




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