Memory of the Future: Joan Grossman’s Video and David McIntire’s Music

H   istory is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history’s bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition—The Blackout—as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of mass media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by [what might be called] a ‘Generalized Media Disorder’. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. The Blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with Catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits.”
  — BLACKOUT, jacket blurb.

A nd music can be both a political act and powerful antidote to the collapse of social memory and the erosion of community... the withdrawal into passive, vegetative isolation, each at home, continually surfing Netflix, surfing the web.

• McIntire – ‘Revenants’ (electroacoustic recording, live percussion, 20-min)
  
• McIntire & Grossman – ‘Singing Bowl’ (video, electroacoustic, live percussion, 47-min)

T he combination of the video imagery and the live and the electroacoustic music was imaginative and highly listenable and watchable. Joan Grossman’s video was elegant... with a simple beauty that leveraged symmetries across the vertical and/or horizontal axes in the center of the 8 x 6-meter projection screen in Epperson Auditorium. The video involved replication and reflection of imagery in kaleidoscope fashion, at times with superimposed additional imagery blended into the central part of the visual field.


U nlike certain computer music / media compositions where the composer-artists ‘try too hard’ or succumb to temptation and use too many of the diverse array of techniques and patches available to them (resulting in sensory overload for the audience, hindering our grasping a memorable meaning or narrative arc), McIntire and Grossman achieved a satisfying, deliciously cohesive, coherent effect.


P ercussionists Jennifer Wagner and Christopher Howard performed at percussion tables on the right- and left-hand sides of the auditorium, while the recorded electroacoustic tracks were played through Mackie SRS 450® powered monitors and SRS 1500® subwoofer at the front of house. Seated as I was front-and-center, the antiphonal bells and gongs and cymbals, and glass wine goblets bowed across their rims with violin bows, and hammered and brushed brass bowls, and Equilibrium® tuned-box slit-drums, and Daisy® BBs rolling on the underside of a tom-tom drum head—all of this was wonderfully ‘immersive’ with the house lights dimmed. Great sibilance of the live percussion sounds, creating a rich contrast to the electronically-filtered and distorted sampled-voice and other sound content in the digital-recording tracks. [The ‘live’ elements might be better still if yet another pair of percussionists were added, positioning them toward the rear of the auditorium/performancespace so that the entire audience could experience the intense immersive effects that we did at the front.]


T he electroacoustic recording and reproduction/sound-reinforcement EQ was expertly done by McIntire. Both of the pieces have a low-pitch ‘red-spectrum’ rumble—almost boilerroom-like, or intrauterine—that imparts a subtle but pervasive ‘interiority’ to the music, very chesty, very warm.

G etting the pre-recorded digital tracks to ‘sit’ well amongst live performers relies on the tracks having an even level, a congenial tonal and level balance, and the right reverberant ambience. McIntire does this superbly, gracefully executing minor adjustments at the workstation control-surface in response to moment-to-moment performance decisions made by Wagner and Howard. Compressor and gain automation settings were spot-on, so that the percussion sounds sat happily in-track, with none of the live percussion effects sounding too loud or too quiet or clashing with the pre-recorded sonic material and synthesizer tracks.

F or some of the voice content (e.g., DECtalk Hawking-esque recitations of NOAA National Weather Service Marine Forecasts; alpha-bravo-charlie...romeo-sierra-tango...zulu), McIntire adds density to the voice sample by upping the compression ratio to maybe around 6:1 or 8:1 and then adjusts the threshold to a couple of dB on average-level parts. This means quieter sections are left alone and anything louder is jumped-on hard, bringing it closer to the average level. The coherence or cohesiveness of these two compositions, each with its volume level and acoustic complexity ascending to a climax about two-thirds of the way through and then tapering to a quiet conclusion, is nicely enhanced by this approach.

M cIntire’s EQ and engineering are commendable as noted above, and he does not go overboard on special effects. His EQ cuts are made over quite narrow bands, and his boosting is gentle and wide. McIntire gently applies boosts in the 50-300Hz band to add warmth. He applies cuts in the 1 KHz band, to deemphasize nasal vocal sounds, and adds generous ‘presence’ with boosts between 4 KHz and 8 KHz. The magical sense of Nature and air and space involves a wide boost applied between 12 KHz and 20 KHz, and that was really beautiful up-front, seated in Row #1. With these two compositions that explore the interplay between Nature and Technology, between humankind and other species—between inanimate noisy things like water (sometimes seemingly talking to us, almost alive, almost human), and supposedly-sentient creatures (humans) who often act in hostile, destructive and uncaring ways as though they were inanimate—the musical and artistic success absolutely depends upon making these EQ choices right.

I n summary, a fantastic, powerful experience—beautifully composed, engineered, filmed, edited, and performed. Very happy!

T he ArtSounds series, of which the McIntire-Grossman ‘Memory of the Future’ program was a part, is co-sponsored by UMKC Conservatory and Kansas City Art Institute.

J oan Grossman is a Brooklyn, New York-based independent media artist and producer. Her work has been screened in more than 20 countries and won numerous awards. She is currently Visiting Professor in Film & Media Arts at UMKC. Grossman was formerly a producer for NPR and Voice of America on a variety of programs, including All Things Considered, Afropop Worldwide, Kids America, and The Territory of Art. She has worked in Africa, China, Russia, and throughout Europe, has produced media for public interest organizations and NGOs, and has also worked as producer on European documentaries and feature films. Joan has a Ph.D. in Media and Philosophy from the European Graduate School and has taught film production and theory. She has worked with leading theorists and filmmakers such as Agnes Varda, Claude Lanzmann, Chantal Akerman, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. Her book, ‘Blackout: On Memory & Catastrophe’, was published in 2009 (link below).

D avid McIntire is a Kansas City, Missouri-based composer who, with composer-musicologist Kyle Gann, co-directed the 2009 Second International Conference on Minimalist Music at UMKC Conservatory. In 2010, he launched Irritable Hedgehog Music, a record label focusing on minimalist and soundscape compositions. McIntire has performed with Colorblind James Experience. With pianist R. Andrew Lee he has produced a recording of Tom Johnson’s ‘Hour for Piano’ (link below).

• David McIntire website
  
• WordsAboutMusic (David McIntire blog)
  
• IrritableHedgehog website
  
• Joan Grossman website
  
• DropCity (Joan Grossman & Tom McCourt project)
  
• Grossman J. BLACKOUT: On Memory and Catastrophe. Atropos, 2009.
  
• Lee R. Tom Johnson: An Hour for Piano, (CDBY, 2011.)
  
• Equilibrium wood log-drums and slit-drums
  
• Da-Lite projection screen designer applet

I ♥ Different Enchantments: Unexpected Uses of Elliott Carter Recordings as Punk Repellant

A ll the Preludes to Felicity

It is Time that beats in the breast and it is Time
That batters against the mind, silent and proud –
The mind that knows it is destroyed by Time.

Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse
Without a rider on a road at night.
The mind sits listening and hears it pass.

It is someone walking rapidly in the street.
The reader by the window has finished his book
And tells the hour by the lateness of the sounds.

Even breathing is the beating of Time, in kind:
A retardation of its battering,
A horse grotesquely taut, a walker like

A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, platonic person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak,

A form, then, protected from the battering, may
Mature: A capable being may replace
Dark horse and walker walking rapidly.

Felicity, ah! Time is the hooded enemy,
The inimical music, the enchantered space –
In which the enchanted preludes have their place.”

  —  Wallace Stevens, The Pure Good of Theory, in Transport to Summer, 1947.

I ♥ you, too. Among the more unusual things you’ll ever hear is Elliott Carter’s ‘Enchanted Preludes’ being played on streetside loudspeakers as skinhead repellent ambient music, blaring down on the sidewalk from the eaves/soffits outside the Richdale Convenience Store on the corner of State Street and Pleasant Street in Newburyport, MA.

The kids scared the customers away. The kids loitered on the corner, crowded around the door so that you’d have to push your way through them to enter or exit the store. En masse, they filled the streetcorner outside the Richdale and blocked the Pleasant Street crosswalk, making it difficult to cross. The octogenarians were forced to walk in traffic or, better, avoid the location entirely. And then there was the occasional mention of shoplifting in the police blotter.


First the store tried Lawrence Welk polkas. Didn’t work. Too jolly, and maybe just silly enough to be perversely amusing to the intended punker victims.

They tried Beethoven—probably mis-remembering Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange or something; a seat-of-pants reckoning that, if a toxin is strong in one application, then its toxic efficacy will likely generalize to other species. But the Sonata in E major, Op. 109 (1820), and the Sonata in A-flat major, Op. 110 (1821), seem like enchanted gardens of the blessèd, even to skinhead ears. The skinheads stayed put.


Then the store tried Vivaldi. They’d read in the LA Times that Vivaldi was useful for this kind of infestation and had met with wide success in California. Yes, florid variations in dynamics and tempi did disperse the crowd at the Richdale for awhile. The fluorescent Mohawk-coifed punks moved down the street and began hanging out in front of Best of British. But over a few weeks they returned to the Richdale’s corner. They’d been able still to hear the Vivaldi all this time, faintly, from the 50 meters distance. And the fact was, it had ‘grown’ on them. Not to say that they liked it now. But they’d developed a high degree of tolerance for it. They knew the tracks on the Vivaldi CDs that the shopowner queued up, and they were now immune even to the outrageous juxtapositions that blared out when he put the player on ‘random shuffle’. They preferred to be close to their source of food, and to the frailer, more intimidatable souls on upper State Street.


How the storeowner found this ultimate weapon—the super-strength Elliott Carter punk repellant—I do not know. Recordings of Carter are not plentiful, and they do not leap into your hand from record-store discount remainder bins.



[ John McMurtery, flute; Craig Hultgren, cello; video 2006 ]

Carter’s ‘Enchanted Preludes’, for flute and cello, was commissioned in 1988 by Harry Santen for the 50th birthday of his wife, Anne Santen, the musical director of Cincinnati’s public radio station, WGUC. The duet contrasts the flute with the cello and roughly follows the ‘arc’ of the Wallace Stevens poem from which the piece takes its name. Each instrument follows its own moods and logic, and a constant tension pulls each in disparate directions: the world of the intellect and the world of the senses. The flute mostly propels the thing forward, with extroverted, Messiaen-like figures. The cello takes a mostly subordinate role until the end, when it finally accepts and inclines toward the flute’s dynamic.


The flute and cello have ever-shifting roles, but always with a sense of the evolving foreground and background. And the concession that the cello makes to the flute at the end is a gesture that is deeply offensive to the punk ethic of in-your-face confrontation. This is the feature that makes Elliott Carter’s writing so deadly to punks. The music mocks the punks’ poseurly faux dance along the societal fault-line. In a manner that resembles Stevens’s distinctive positioning of prepositions and prefixes and his demonstrative use of copular verbs, Carter plays with the disruptive metaphors and unexpected cadences. He dishes out developments unexpectedly pursued and developments unexpectedly abandoned.

The Stevens/Carter formula heightens the self-consciousness of the language/music. By making and unmaking the conventional patterns of language/music, the work draws attention to the temporal—the undeniably mortal, the inescapably transitory—nature of the text, of the performers’ personae, and of the listeners themselves. Twenty-something punks try to ignore this. But when the onslaught persists as an ambient acoustical feature it is like it penetrates their hardened carapaces and causes their systems to begin shutting down. It doesn’t have to be administered at high volume, in large doses that would interfere with commerce and the recreational life of others. No, low-dose continuous Carter is sufficient. Highly selective social death by musical alienation. Yobs, chavs, skinheads, punks, gangstas—gone. Selectively, nonviolently, quietly, voluntarily.


But it’s more than this, and the ‘more than this’ is why I bother to write about the ambient Carter at all. What I mean is, every spiritual alienation takes place within a space, within some enclosure, as does every spiritual union—even if the enclosure is an abstract or metaphorical one; even if the enclosure has no walls, really. When I walk by the Richdale, the ambient music outside defines a space, a space that is just as large as the radius within which I can hear the music. But not all enclosures are oppressive: the Beklemmt section of Beethoven’s Op. 130 is an example, and the Carter ‘Enchanted Preludes’ is also an example. They define enclosures that I long for, that I try frequently to return to. To me, they are ‘home’. In other words, ‘enclosedness’ isn’t alienating or confining; it may be an object of desire, a good place that protects and inspires and welcomes, ‘a place of refreshment for the exhausted hero, a foretaste of rewards to come, or the final goal and reward itself, where the beloved and the blessed society are waiting to receive you into their select company,’ as Auden put it. The door is open. It is not an exclusionary ‘gated community’ or a locked museum. The door is open, it’s a beautiful sanctuary, and there are lots of interesting people inside.

T  emenos (τέμενος , from the Greek verb τέμνω ‘to cut’) is a piece of land cut off and assigned as an official domain, especially to royalty, or a piece of land marked off from common uses and dedicated to a god; a sanctuary, holy grove or garden, or holy precinct.”

Baudrillard’s connection between alienation and the hyper-real is cited by Adam Possamai in his chapter in Lynne Hume’s and Kathleen McPhillips’s recent book. Hyper-reality is structured with signs and symbols such that people increasingly seek spectacle rather than transcendance. According to Possamai, hyperreality relocates personal identity within the domains of choice, individuality, aesthetics, and consumption. In Australia, Star Wars Jediism—a simulacrum of a religion created out of popular culture that provides inspiration for believers/consumers—constitutes a hyper-religion. Maybe Carter is, for me, a sort of hyper-religion. It pleases me to think so…

Is there an affinity between heroic characters in music and development of latent abilities? Could this affinity be motivated by a desire for sanctuary and for hyper-real re-enchantment of the world? For me, my taste for Carter’s writing involves a craving for ‘inner adventure’, not literally a search to become divine or super-human. It’s a quest for a higher self—maybe like a Westernized search for Buddhist enlightenment. It’s not a quest for abilities that would be instrumental in achieving other ends. It’s a search for illumination and wonder. How lucky for me that the Newburyport Richdale store owner inadvertently provides me with just the acoustical enchantment and spiritual nourishment I need as he simultaneously doses the multiply body-pierced, scarified and self-mutilated post-card punks, for whom wonderment is—evidently—poison.

“... grotesquely taut, a walker like
A shadow in mid-earth . . . If we propose
A large-sculptured, skin-headed person, free from time,
And imagine for him the speech he cannot speak.”

Imagine, too, the music he cannot play or sing or or write or even stand to hear. Just the same, I ♥ him, too.

T  he displacement of music-making by music-listening breaks the connection between creation and inspiration. Inspiration carries a motivation to act. And anyone who sits down and plays at the piano is inspired to act. The creative imagination motivates them directly. But once music is construed as a sonic equivalent of painting, the question arises—how does creativity inspire those who merely contemplate its products? What is it they are inspired to do?”
  —  Gordon Graham, p. 110.

P  roponents of [modernity-as-] disenchantment share with those who lament its loss the assumption that only a [human-centric] teleological world is worthy of enchantment. I contest that assumption. A world capable of enchanting need not be designed or disposed toward human happiness, or expressive of intrinsic purpose or meaning. It seems that there is musicological support for this, for chant is modal music, which means that it doesn’t have the powerful drive modern music has to arrive at a final [explicitly purposeful] harmonic destination.”
  —  Jane Bennett, p. 11.

• Austenfeld T. Rituals of reading in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. South Atlantic Rev 1993; 58:67-83.
  
• Becker J, et al., eds. Enchanting Powers: Music in the World's Religions. Harvard Univ, 1997.
  
• Becker J. Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing. Indiana Univ, 2004.
  
• Bennett J. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton Univ, 2001.
  
• Collingwood R, Boucher D, James W, Smallwood P, eds. The Philosophy of Enchantment: Studies in Folktale, Cultural Criticism, and Anthropology. Oxford Univ, 2005.
  
• Crane S. The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War. Univ Pennsylvania, 2002.
  
• Critchley S. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Routledge, 2005.
  
• The Economist. Classical music and social control: Twilight of the Yobs. 08-JAN-2005.
  
• de Grazia D. American Skin. Touchstone, 2000.
  
• Elliot A. Concepts of the Self. Polity, 2008.
  
• Faivre A. L'esoterisme. Univ France, 2002.
  
• Graham G. The Re-enchantment of the World: Art versus Religion. Oxford Univ, 2007.
  
• Herbert R. High-decibel hate. NYT 20-AUG-2001.
  
• Hume L, McPhillips K, eds. Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment. Ashgate, 2006.
  
• Jenkins L. Wallace Stevens: Rage for Order. Academic, 2000.
  
• Kent G. Unpeaceful music, in Urbain O, ed. Music and Conflict Transformation: Harmonies and Dissonances in Geopolitics. Tauris, 2008 , pp. 104-11.
  
• LeBlanc L. Pretty in Punk: Girls' Gender Resistance in a Boys' Subculture. Rutgers Univ, 1999.
  
• Longenbach J. Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things. Oxford Univ, 1991.
  
• Maeder B. Wallace Stevens' Experimental Language. Macmillan, 1999.
  
• Moore T. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life. Harper, 1997.
  
• Partridge C. The Re-Enchantment of the West: Alternative Spiritualities, Sacralization, Popular Culture And Occulture. Clark, 2006.
  
• Pinney C, Thomas N, eds. Beyond Aesthetics: Art and the Technologies of Enchantment. Berg, 2001.
  
• Possamai A. Cultural consumption of history and popular culture in alternative spiritualities. J Consumer Culture 2002; 2:197-218.
  
• Rouget G. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations Between Music and Possession. Univ Chicago, 1985.
  
• Savage J. England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond. St. Martin's, 2002.
  
• Stevens W. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. Vintage, 1965.
  
• Strong M. A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain. Penguin, 1999.
  
• Tacey D. Re-Enchantment: The New Australian Spirituality. Harper, 2000.
  
• Timberg S. Halt, or I'll play Vivaldi. LA Times, 13-FEB-2005.
  
• Vendler H. Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire. Harvard Univ, 2006.
  
• Pink fluorescent hairspray at CostumeZone.com
  
• Orange fluorescent hairspray at CostumeAndPropShop.com
  
• Fluorescent hairspray at ChamberOfHorrors.com

Юрий Башмет (Yuri Bashmet): My Viola, My Voice

T he viola has suffered the ups and downs of musical treatment more than any other stringed instrument. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century it held much the same position in the orchestra that the 1st and 2nd violins occupy today. We now feel that the viola is often merely a source of anxiety to the composer. We feel that [s]he regards its existence as something in the nature of an unexpected prehistoric survival: the hoary instrument was [still] there and had to be written for. [In 1914,] interesting but subordinate contrapuntal middle parts [are] still a thing of the future. The viola, therefore, either does nothing, or does something which … is made [by the composer] to appear as much like nothing as possible.”
  — Cecil Forsyth, Orchestration, 1914

CMT: Bashmet’s viola produced such a lush, singing sound in last night’s concert in Kansas City! If kids could hear viola like that, they would all want to play viola! A very legato account of Brahms’ Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, Bashmet’s movement from note to note was truly seamless, almost as though it were a sleight-of-hand trick. It’s a delight to be tricked, to have the privilege of being tricked in this way! You must truly understand your instrument to be able to “trick” a roomful of attentive people with it!

DSM: Britten’s Lachrymae, Op. 48A (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland), received an insightful and subdued rendering—virtuosic but without trickery. The Moscow Soloists contributed far more than mere accompaniment to Bashmet. In the end, though, the virtuosic display by Bashmet led to a serene resolution. Wonderful. I have to admit, I was not previously familiar with this Britten piece. Quite unusual, even for Britten. And so distinctive were the effects it was having on me that I couldn’t help myself—while barely into the variations I began immediately in my “delighted-obsessed engineer”-like way, finding out how it was doing what it was doing. What was making it “tick”? Fascinating!

CMT: Fascinating violas!?! Think what you’re saying—how heretical it would be to some, to admit this! The Cecil Forsyth blockquote above, from his venerated book on orchestration—the remarks on the viola’s and violists’ poor stepchild status in the 19th and early 20th centuries—is in striking contrast to what Yuri Bashmet achieves! You know, this kind of artistry makes you rethink why there are so few violists. Purely misapprehension and prejudice, I think! Two cellists claimed in recent interviews that the reason there are so few solo cellists is the ‘limited repertoire.’ I am crying for them! As a lapsed cellist I’m convinced that this is not a valid reason. In fact, given the number of orchestras and concerts in a performing season, it seems unlikely to me that this is even a significant factor. And who can name more French Horn or Bassoon concerti than those available for the cello? For them, we might be able to feel some sympathy! Maybe it’s all Mozart’s fault. Or maybe it’s due to the difficulty of transporting cellos. But what excuse would you give (to explain a shortage of literature and players) for the beautiful and eminently more totable viola?

DSM: The question might instead be, given a finite number of orchestras of presumed equal willingness to include a viola soloist in their programming and given a modest supply of qualified soloists (smaller than the number of orchestras), can you see any mechanism by which the size of the repertory influences the opportunity for performance, other than in an inverse relationship?

CMT: No, I can’t. I believe that orchestra players and conductors might actually have an upper limit on the number of works ‘in stock.’ But inventory is probably not an issue, as most can work up new material quickly, so long as it’s within the general ‘classical envelope.’

DSM: Chicken-or-egg: must the demand (‘market’) for viola works precede the supply (‘composition’)? Or is composition antecedent to development of a market—an audience wanting to hear more viola, and accomplished violists to serve that desire?

CMT: I think instrument ‘cachet’ more than offsets other factors. So are tuba and piccolo less well-endowed in this ‘cachet’ or sexiness or Darwinian survival competency? One way to look at your question is to examine the timeseries of works created in the literature of each instrument. Look at Lotka-Volterra equations for ‘predator-prey’ dynamics, where generation of excess ‘prey’ compositions gives rise to a boom in ‘predatory’ performers and performances that get satiating and die off. Stability in one instrument’s literature provides niches for other emerging ‘species’ and parallel predator-prey niches to evolve under diminished resource constraints.‘Species’ (literatures and instruments) that were living underground now blossom and develop and grow in popularity.

DSM: At any moment in time, yes, you can tabulate the qualifying ‘prey’ works and set up a table where ‘predators’ are classified into (A) large predator instruments, that tend, if they survive, to have around them plentiful amounts of prey and (B) small predator instruments, that can subsist on modest-size prey literature populations. (We won’t ask what, logically, this analogy makes the composer…) Of course, there’s the difficulty of predator misclassification. For example, the oboe is physically small, but it’s a large ‘predator,’ in terms of its popularity and statistical ecological dynamics! I calculated the Kruskal-Wallis statistic on a table I compiled for ten instruments, and it’s significant at p<0.009 for works up through 1995. The phenomenon we’re discussing is real!

CMT: You’re also talking about population stability and the dynamics of unstable musical repertoires—quantitative mathematical ecology of musical genres—somewhat akin to Dawkins’ famous Selfish Gene. But, in regard to another type of instability, do you think there’s evidence in the Lachrymae of the tonal instability that’s been observed in other of Britten’s work?

DSM: What? You mean the tonal stratification that denotes a division of register space into discrete layers—strata—each associated with an independent functional-tonal process? Well, yes. Conflict in Britten’s music is felt as a clash of opposing pitches, and there are considerable examples of that in the Lachrymae. Pitch ambiguity undermines the security of key definition associated with triad monotonality. And a wide register gap between strata undermines the harmonic integration of voices. These multivalent textural interactions are prominent in Britten’s War Requiem—the tension between the C/F# Bell-tritone and the remnant “pull” of D minor. But they’re also present in the Lachrymae. The piece is short, so if you may miss them. The piece is short, and so probably musicologists and music theorists don’t study it as much as Britten’s larger pieces . . .

CMT: Britten’s use of tonal stratification is related to the expressive uncertainty in Billy Budd and other pieces. And tonal stratification, to me, seems in the Lachrymae to be a device to evoke the interplay between the Present and the Past. Think of Dowland and what ‘lachrymae’ means. To grieve is to long for, to pine for, the past—something that is no more. Britten is using this device as a means to convey verb tense and to establish foreground and background. It’s amazingly effective, the conflict between the motives in the different voices!

DSM: The Brahms Op. 115 has a very different kind of motivic integration, of course—Brahms’ use of motivic 6/3 chords at points of formal articulation, for example. Experts propose two categories: (a) 6/3 chords that arise via a 56 motion over a tonic bass, and (b) 6/3 chords that function as inversions of the tonic. Examples of category (a) include passages from Brahms’ Piano Quintet, the C minor String Quartet, and the F minor Clarinet Sonata. Category (b) include the B-flat minor Intermezzo, Op. 117, no. 2. Brahms uses both types of 6/3 chord to destabilize or delay tonic articulation. In that respect, I suppose there is a parallel to some of what Britten was doing—the aim is to generate anxiety and temporal contrast.


CMT: Well, there’s first-order anxiety, and there’s second-order meta-anxiety! You know, Brahms is somewhat famous for his musical “borrowing”—many of his techniques are fairly overtly derived from or traceable to other composers. Have a look at the Indiana University ‘borrowing’ website. You may want to have a look at Raymond Knapp’s 1998 paper, “Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion” in the Journal of Musicological Research 18: 1-30.

CMT: Yes, Knapp applies Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ concept and construes Brahms’ ‘anxiety’ as the force that drives and modulates expectations of the audience. Brahms realized that his audience would receive and judge his works in comparison to other works with which they were acquainted. So he deliberately composed so as to create convenient frames of reference, similarities to familiar compositions, to make a platform for his originality. He more or less “foregrounded” his non-referential music with these referential allusions. The allusions were a platform to stretch and innovate from. Step off the platform and you generate significant tension in the listener.

DSM: The clarinet is in its timbre and texture a wonderful choice in this Quintet—and in the Moscow Soloists’ hands it melds well with the string ensemble. The ornamental figures all pass from the viola (clarinet) voice to the other strings—at times it feels like a Greek play with the chorus. Brahms even distributed his ‘Hungarian’ flourishes in the Adagio distributing them among all the instruments. But without the distinctive timbre of the viola/clarinet, little would separate the solo part from the rest of the ensemble. Bashmet’s color-saturated playing mimics the clarinet very well. It’s as though the piece were waiting for the possibility of Bashmet’s transcription!

CMT: Britten’s Lachrymae also shows exceptional insight into the character and possibilities of the viola, probably because he was himself an accomplished violist. It’s hard to think of a more sympathetically written viola piece. It was written in 1950 and dedicated to violist William Primrose. Britten’s Lachrymae begins with introspective bass lines with motives drawn from Dowland and then develops diverse variations, each of which manifests the Present-Past tension we were discussing earlier. The denouement at the end resolves the tensions with a restatement of the viola’s early motive.


DSM: Yuri is—what?—a renowned Professor at the Moscow Conservatory and Artistic Director of the Moscow Soloists. The Moscow Soloists is comprised of Conservatory students under 30 years old—the group made its debut in 1992. What phenomenal success they’ve enjoyed! What a busy and demanding schedule they have! And despite the burdens of this, what remarkable energy and enthusiasm for more and yet more conversation! The after-concert discussions with Yuri and members of the Moscow Soloists were amazing. I thought they would be tired out. But they could easily talk us under the table any night of the week!

M  aybe viola will be not so ‘mystic’ an instrument. Viola has some mystery, in history, and today, also, and that is the main thing why viola is the most exceptional of string instruments. Some people say that the viola is the middle between violin and cello. I will tell you that from one point that’s right, but from another it’s historically wrong. … Of course, now is a Renaissance for viola because a lot of modern composers write for viola. … What viola has special is first the tessitura. It is very special because main thing happens in the middle. If you go very high, it is the same like a violin, but it has much more ‘tensive.’ Could you believe violinists would play everything without the high string?”
  — Yuri Bashmet

CMT: Yes, they do love discourse—both verbal and musical. In Lachrymae we see possibilities of discourse unfolding in front of us—locutionary and illocutionary acts, discursive shifts between the voices that imply changes of speaker, possibly the current self who grieves and the former self in times remembered.

DSM: What I was characterizing earlier as ‘quotations’—the Greek chorus-like parts of this work—really are discursive shifts that are Britten devises from fragments of Dowland’s motives. And the register gaps are matched by temporal gaps—the Elizabethan Dowland and the 20th Century Britten. That feature, more than anything else, is what establishes the sense of grieving and backward-looking sense of time for me. That’s part of why and how this piece “works,” I think. It’s a compositional analogue of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii Reaction in chemistry: the tensions and conflicts are a ‘morphogenic field.’ Both the Brahms and the Britten, really, are ingenious ‘autopoietic fields’ that automatically induce these cognitive effects and structures ! These notes on the staves—they’re not tropes so much as trope-generators! Britten’s writing in the Lachrymae has all this ‘runtime indirection’ in it—you’ve written LISP code: doesn’t this composition look like a program written in LISP?

CMT: Yes, that seems right. And the discourse in Lachrymae moves between Dowland’s “unmediated” direct speech and the Brittenesque variations or “reflections”—the mediated and indirect speech acts—that form the majority of the piece. That, to me, is another very effective device that explains how the piece works or has the sense and meaning that it achieves. And it, too, manifests autopoeisis and runtime indirection. Pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.

DSM: In the Lento, Dowland’s direct voice is shadowy, and the balancing phrases in the bass (Phrase 1a, Phrase 1b; m9) trail off unresolved. So if you were looking for an aporietic feeling, this Britten is definitely for you! Yuri and the Moscow Soloists will be at Carnegie Hall this coming week, as part of the Carnegie Hall Moscow Soloists program, 25-JAN-2007. Cовершенно изумительный ! Kрасивые тембры и, что очень важно, высокая культура пения !

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W  hat is the real ultimate value of music? The best what I can tell you about this is that I don't know. Second, I can tell you that if I would know this, then music would be not music.”
  — Yuri Bashmet