jwilzewske: criminal justice

A ttica… is … in … front … of … me.”
— Frederic Rzewski, Text of ‘Attica’ (remarks of prisoner upon being released from Attica prison, when asked what he thought of Attica).

I think the combination ... of age and the greater coming together ... is responsible for the speed ... of the passing time. it’s six months now ... and i can tell you ... truthfully ... few periods in my life have passed so quickly. i am in excellent ... physical ... and emotional ... health. there are doubtless ... subtle surprises ... ahead but i feel secure and ready.
as lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am i dealing ... with my environment. in the indifferent brutality, incessant noise ... the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings ... of lost hysterical men, i can act with clarity and meaning. i am deliberate—sometimes even calculating—seldom employ histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. i read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates ... feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.
special love to flotsam + brood, charlene, lenny, jetsam.”
— Frederic Rzewski, Text of ‘Coming Together’ (Sam Melville, letter from Attica prison, addressed to ‘dear brother,’ dated 16-MAY-1970.)

T he performance last night at NEC was deeply moving. The performances of Jo Kondo’s ‘Falling’ and György Kurtág’s ‘Scenes from a Novel, Op. 19’ by [nec]shivaree members were spectacular—I may have time to post some detailed comments about those later this week.

B ut the rare performance of Frederic Rzewski’s 1972 composition, ‘Coming Together / Attica,’ by the ensemble Gradient Us completely captivated us—blew me away, in fact. It is a superb example of ‘activist’ music, a composition motivated by social issues (in this case the situation 40 years ago at Attica penitentiary in New York, and the ongoing impact of incarceration as a means of implementing criminal justice in societies).

T he two-movement piece is in canon form, (re-)animated by a 10-piece ensemble performing en-face with a male speaker positioned to the side of the ensemble. The speaker recites text from a letter written by one of the leaders of the uprising at Attica prison, and the timing and inflections of the Sprechstimme-like recitation are scored in precise, explicit detail by Rzewski.

Kathleen LaFleur – director, and tenor saxophone
David Prum – speaker
Alicia Mielke – flute
John Diodati – clarinet
Jay Hutchinson – bass clarinet
Jason Belcher – baritone horn
Kayleigh Miller – viola
Stefan Koim – acoustic guitar
David Goodchild – electric bass
Benjamin Vickers – conductor

T he 20-minute first movement is full of polyrhythms—aleatoric rhythms that are only periodically in-phase or synced with each other. It is like we are witnessing the irrepressible, impulsive inner workings of a mind—someone who has 9 different trains of thought that are coursing through the brain simultaneously.

I ndividual motifs are triggered, fire synapses, propagate neural pulses down axons, arrive at junctions with other nerves and synapses, in turn causing those nerves to fire. Once fired, a synapse is ‘refractory’ for a finite period of time, before it is once more able to receive a signal and fire again. Nervous system as musical canon! Autopoiesis of personhood by synapses alone! This is an anatomist’s ‘Visible Human’ transparent polystyrene-model conception of what goes on inside us. To any who would challenge what is portrayed here as ‘reductionist’, Rzewski seems to have the ready-made rebuttal: the literal working machine: how the mind thinks these thoughts; how the mouth is made to move; hear the words that come out.

T he phat electric bass insistently plunks its robotic, obsessive 16th-notes, running, running, running—to what destination? for what purpose?

T he speaker’s (Prum’s) inflections are exquisitely measured and spoken with conviction—delivered in a taut, emphatic manner that is meant as much to (1) reaffirm for the prisoner himself that he does believe the things being spoken as to (2) carve out and defend a psychological ‘territory’ that the prisoner can call his own. The loss of freedom and property-rights while in prison induces a hyper-awareness of the boundaries of self and non-self, a hyper-sensitivity to what [little] is ‘mine’. The vivid, dramatic depiction of the results of the retributive justice ‘violence-perpetrated-by-the-system-upon-the-offender’ is heart-wrenching, especially for those of us who have never been inside a prison, or have never been closely acquainted with anyone who has been incarcerated for a long time.

I ronic, lyrical major-key, warm timbres. Pneumatics of wind instruments. The baritone horn, evocatively/symbolically plugged-up with a giant red-and-white straight mute. The whole composition goes for your jugular, truly. It intends to make you care—make you.

T he 10-minute ‘Attica’, while structurally a simpler musical canon, is likewise a glimpse into the heart of the rehabilitated criminal whose text accompanies and was the motive for the music. Time is warped to super-slow speed as the speaker utters one word (‘Attica’) or syllable, pauses many seconds, utters another one (‘is’), resets to the beginning and re-utters a word that was said earlier and proceeds on (‘in’) in a festinating (‘front’), damaged way (‘of me’)—almost like a Parkinson’s type of dementia. The legato music and the major-key warmth are manifestations of the fact that whatever anger may have landed the person in prison is long-since extinguished. Equanimity has been achieved for this prisoner—This is not veiled residual rage we are hearing, but honest equanimity with the situation of having lost so much while in jail, and having so little now with which to remake a future upon release!—but at a terrible cost.

P henomenal! Art as therapy or as collective neutralization of past violence; as meditation on who the human beings are who are incarcerated, and why, and how they got that way; as a call to empathy; an exhortation to rethink what it is that we as a society are doing, really, through our correctional systems and policies, finding ways for effectively reducing recidivism and restoring dignity and some semblance of a desirable future to the lives affected.

U ndeniably, works like this are difficult for presenters to program: the subject material is awkward/disturbing, even though the music is accessible and attractive—poetic, lyrical, beautiful. The performance last night is ample evidence of salutary, humanizing effects that live performances of such works can have on us, as individuals and as a broader society. We should do this more often.

R zewski is a musician, not a pamphleteer. None but the naïve could imagine contemporary classical music as the lever for social upheaval. It was a teaching job that brought him to Belgium, not the state of the American nation. ‘No philosophy,’ he said recently. ‘I had a family to support.’ ... Once asked if commentators were right to call him a Marxist composer, he snorted, ‘Harpo or Groucho or what?’ The anarchic streak in his music is as much comic as it is political.”
— Mathew Gurewitsch, interview with Frederic Rzewksi, 27-MAR-2003.

S hort motifs predominate... any feeling of meter is, basically, ‘local’. The majority of sections are only 8 bars long, with strong downbeat emphasis. Each section/variation offers new and different kinds of transparency, some more arpeggiated, some less so. The music may be Irish and Scottish in origin, but through this 2-hour recital I am drawn more than anything toward comparisons with Indian ragas—evolutions of a series of waves progressing over the ocean’s surface for hundreds of miles.

C omparisons with other kinds of minimalist music, a la La Monte Young, Reich, Nyman, Riley, and others seem apt as well.

[50-sec clip, Jordi Savall, ‘Macpherson’s Lament’; 2011, 1.4MB MP3]

I n Savall’s conception of the Scottish folk tune ‘MacPherson’s Lament’, the prospect of being hanged focuses the mind wonderfully. [The prisoner condemned to die requested the privilege to play one last tune, and this is the tune that he performed. Many fast trills, initiated on downbeat and then tapering—little symbolisms of trembling, waning life. After finishing the last note, the prisoner smashed the fiddle: the fiddle would die with him, a second homicide, violating the personhood of the instrument and compounding whatever other crimes MacPherson may have committed.]

T here are surely many musicians who have continued playing up to within a short while before their deaths, usually from cancer or other chronic illness. Consider the gesture as a form of palliative self-care. This is terminal abjection. The music is not meant to be salvific or curative, like a Tarantella! The musician knows full-well that s/he is about to die, and that there will be no reprieve, no escaping this fate. If anything, we hear a brave, dignified aesthetic of fast-approaching doom. [Did Shackleton’s Expedition have amateur musicians abord, I wonder? If so, what did they play toward The End?] All told, the repertoire of those whose lives are ended by the State must be a very small and specialized one. Savall’s performance suggests that jewish musicians of the Theresien (Terezin) Holocaust prison camp do not have a world monopoly on this literature. But I digress.

T he feature of the Jordi Savall-Paul O’Dette-Shane Shanahan performance last night that most fascinated me was the minimalism of it—and how this music (which is ordinarily performed in a freewheeling, raucous manner—at noisy dances with liberal imbibing, lots of stomping and shouting and carrying-on) resembles error-correcting codes in communications and software. The intermittent loss of phase-lock (due to signal attenuation, or multi-path reflections and other interference, or fluctuating changes in signal-to-noise ratio in the communications channel) in ballads and dance music is rapidly detected, the parts (treble viol in Jordi’s lap; Paul’s cittern/lute; Shanahan’s bodhran) are de-skewed, and phase-lock is recaptured, in large part due to the structure of these low-entropy framing “packets”, these 8-bar phrases.

H ave a look at Prof. Hartmut Obendorf’s recent computer science book (link below) to see what I mean.

I wish that Paul O’Dette and Shane Shanahan had had more substantial parts to play during the Celtic Viol concert last night, parts more illustrative of their expressiveness and musicianship. But despite their relegation to low-key ‘accompaniment’ roles, O’Dette and Shanahan seemed to enjoy themselves a great deal on-stage. Accompanists manifest a unique dignity arising from modesty, nurturing, and support—another species of minimalism, I suppose, providing the ‘canvas’ for the soloist’s artistic vision. It was all pretty cool.

jwilzewske

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Criminal Justice & Chamber Music: Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together / Attica’

Friday, June 17, 2011

Minimalism/Designing Simplicity: Jordi Savall’s Celtic Viol