jwilzewske: criticism

Showing posts with label criticism. Show all posts

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

A passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!”
— Joseph Swain, p. 55.

T he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.”
— Joseph Swain, p. 32.

K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.

T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)

I ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.”
— Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.

T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.

L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.

W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.

A poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]”
— Paul Celan.

I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.” — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

The Darwin Project: Does a Multimedia Biography Need to Have a ‘Center’?

A loose-jointed affair that never really found an aesthetic center.”
— Robert Trussell, Kansas City Star, 15-OCT-2011.

W hen I read Robert Trussell’s review, I thought about how different mindsets and expectations can produce profoundly different experiences for different attendees at a performance. Trussell came to the Friends of Chamber Music premiere of The Darwin Project event with one set of expectations, geared to his commitment to write a review to be published in a daily newspaper on deadline. I came to the event with a different set of expectations--with only a genuine interest, really; that is, with no specific objective or purpose. (I attend lots of events; I only write about some of them, mostly ones that are strictly chamber music per se. This event was theatrical and multimedia, and I only decided to write this blogpost after seeing what Trussell wrote. I feel that Trussell’s words do not reflect what I and others who attended experienced, and that is what prompted me to post about it.)

T hree actors (Gary Neal Johnson, Darwin and others; Kathleen Warfel, Emma Wedgwood (Darwin’s wife) and others; Cinnamon Schultz, narrator) portrayed Charles Darwin’s life story (script by Jeremy M. Lillig and Nancy Cervetti), accompanied by classical music performed by the Daedalus String Quartet, solo pianist Alon Goldstein, and Kansas City Collegium Vocale chamber choir, under the direction of Ryan Board. Above the performers on-stage, historical images and dramatic original nature photography were projected on a large, suspended screen—animations, montages, and stills.

T he musical performances were impeccable throughout. Direction by Kyle Hatley was insightful and dynamic. The actors—especially Gary Neal Johnson—fully inhabited their characters. The imagery was well-chosen to complement and synchronize with the dramatic arc and cadences of the music. The sound reinforcement (which Trussell complained about) was just fine for those of us who were down in the Orchestra section. (Not sure where Trussell was seated Friday night, but it should be recognized that it has only been a few weeks since the Kauffman Center opened, and the people manning the mixing console up in the studio loft are surely still just discovering as they go what the optimal level settings are for various ensemble types, genres, miking configs, and audience sizes.) The staging and deployment of the musicians and actors were thoughtful. The lighting direction was done in a manner that appropriately emphasized the shifts in action and mood. The antiques/props, complete with rare blooming orchids and fossils, lent just the right amount of atmosphere.

T he one issue about which Trussell and I agree is the bit about the small percentage of the audience clapping after each ‘number’. It is vital that—for productions that are comprised of multiple short segments or ‘scenes’, and where piddling, confused applause will disrupt the atmosphere and continuity of the performance—the presenter should instruct the audience before the program begins: ‘Please do not applaud until the end.’ Simple.

B ut, gee, look at what this thing is! And look, too, at the fact that this was its premiere performance! The writing of lives is inherently difficult and complex, and The Darwin Project should, I think, be considered on its merits as biography. The aims of accuracy and commemoration can undoubtedly be helped by multimedia content, to convey what is hard to capture in words. Well-chosen music and images can clarify and intensify the characterization of the multiple milieux that affected the person the biography is about, over a long (73-year) and illustrious lifetime. The agnostic and Unitarian and Anglican excursions in Darwin’s changing (‘evolving’?) religious/spiritual thought, were elegantly and empathetically suggested by the diversity of the music selected for The Darwin Project:

Anonymous - Antiphon for the Feast Day of St. Albert, Patron Saint of Science
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 2, Op. 13, adagio, allegro vivace
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Canope’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Des Abends’
Schumann - Fantasiestücke, Op.12, ‘Aufschwung’
Byrd - Mass for 5 voices, ‘Gloria’
Ravel - Miroirs ‘Une Barque sur l’oceane’
Haydn - String Quartet in C major, Op. 33, No. 3, allegro moderato
Chopin - Prelude in B-flat major, Op. 28, No. 21
Debussy - Preludes, Book 2, ‘Les tierces alternées’
Des Prez - Inviolata
Chopin - Prelude in A major, Op. 28, No. 7
Janácek - 1.X.1905 Sonata ‘Smrt’
Mendelssohn - String Quartet No. 6 in F minor, Op. 80, allegro vivace assai
Vaughan Williams – ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ (cantata from ‘In Windsor Forest’)

N o. Despite the fame of ‘Origin of Species’ and the reductionistic way in which modern popular society regards who he was and what he did, Darwin did not have just one lifelong aesthetic or ideological ‘center’, and it would be wrong for a biography of him to portray him as if he did. Lillig’s and Cervetti’s quotations and adaptations of Darwin’s writings amount to a kind of verbal portraiture—well-paced; at times humorous; a fine antidote to the monolithic ‘evolutionist-naturist’ caricature that exists of him in popular society. The music likewise opposes one-dimensional caricatures of the man. The production informs the viewers-listeners and invites the audience to think and reflect and imagine and feel and understand and apply, as any good biography should do.

I n fact, the matter of opposing claims and methods of science versus the imagination are a recurring issue in modern discussions of biographical methods. Serious biographers usually agree that their conclusions, while grounded in facts and a scholarly, scientific process of sifting and evaluating evidence, are at bottom ‘intuitive’ in much the way that medical diagnosis is ‘intuitive’: the biographer perceives meaning and reaches conclusions in a high-dimensionality, time-varying set of data; the biographer reliably finds patterns and takes decisions in the face of extreme complexity and contradictions and counter-factuals.

T he facts of his life become the most interesting—and perhaps the most ‘true’—just at the edge of mystery.”
— Jay Martin, commenting about the process of writing the biography of Henry Miller.

R eading all the the extant materials, being open to all points of view on the subject of the biography—these are just prologue to the biographer’s purpose, which is to intuit accurately what it all means and express that in a convincing and authentic way to others, even if the story is irreducibly complex and the intuitions do not reveal just one ‘center’. The Darwin Project succeeds beautifully as multimedia biography of a very remarkable, complex person.

P .S.—You may especially like the Hamilton and Rollyson books (links below).

P .P.S.—Lee Hartman's arrangement (for SATB and string quartet) of Vaughan Williams’s ‘See the Chariot at Hand’ was superb... warm, very moving with end-of-life atmospherics, beautiful orchestration, and a balanced and emotionally-fitting concluding work for this production. Bravo!

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Gene Pritsker’s Soliloquys and Colloquys: Chamber Music by One or a Few

R eligion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.”
— Franz Werfel.

C ertain insight: that there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and affective fiction.”
— Sigmund Freud, letter to Wilhelm Fliess.

T hese recordings have a warm, gorgeous tone; the performers embody a flawless technique; and, above all, the compositions are vehicles for intense heartfelt expression. They transport us from our everyday reality to times and places of rejuvenation, reflection, and recommitment.

M embers of Dan Barrett’s International Street Cannibals Ensemble (title after Montaigne) deliver tactile performances with a widely-variable, bounding pulse. And CCR’s production values are excellent, providing a recording quality that offers exceptional intimacy, great warmth and depth—perfect for these energetic chamber works.

S ome of the compositions on this disc are enigmatic, like track #3, entitled C17H21NO4. There is nothing to describe what this means in the liner notes. But I look up the chemical formula and see that this is the formula for freebase cocaine. Possibly this is Pritsker’s musicopsychotropic homage to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Mescaline’ or Lou Reed’s ‘Heroin’? (C17H21NO4 is also the chemical formula for scopolamine, an anticholinergic medication, and for fenoterol, a short-acting β2-agonist asthma drug, so don’t go leaping to any conclusions.)

T echnology has been at the heart of Pritsker’s work ever since he started making music. On this disc, he alternates his sampled electronic pieces, which tend to be around one minute in length, with longer acoustic pieces. The result is edgy, full of immediacy and a vivid conversationality, as though the performers’ control and precision could at any moment be derailed by matters arising—or by interaction of the performer with the listener. It is a titrated, dose-adjusted, relenting edginess that never wears out its welcome.

T he unaccompanied cello pieces ‘What Occurred in the Light, Goes on in the Dark’ and ‘In Memory of Giampaolo Bracali’, solo works performed by cellist Dan Barrett, are fine and intense compositions in the long, venerable tradition of cello soliloquys (see list at bottom of post).

W e have solo cello, in canon with itself. The soliloquy embodies a singular harmonic palette from which a series of hopeful reconsiderations are drawn, giving the impression that the artist’s mind is moving in sequences... not in [aporiatic] circles but in provisional sequences of thought that may or may not revisit positions held previously, rolled round and round in the cellist’s brain.

A fter an interim conclusion is arrived at, we find that the arc continues toward/into an extended climax, stretching out into broader rhythms and thinning the pitch-set.

T his conveys something of the impossibility of certainty——a pragmatic distillation of conviction from a subset of the points and evidence that one has entertained: the poignance of our human limitations and finite time on the planet.

I n some circles, soliloquy—as expressed by passionate, sexy cellos, or by anybody—is disparaged as a ‘naive’ form, irrelevant with respect to discourse theory. In turn, postmodern souls who engage in soliloquy are quick to dismiss theory as unconnected to real life, or, at least, to real life as they know it, their own real lives. Taking his cue from the works of Paul Roazen and Jacques Derrida in these fields, Gene Pritsker grafts soliloquy onto theory, exploring and producing one wild, anti-Freudian recording. He explores the unforeseen “collisions of interests” that unfold in the ‘space’ between the soliloquizing subject and the audience members who are witnesses to the soliloquys.

I rreducible uncertainties amid principled striving; civil but, like true cannibals, no strangers to outrage/despair/incivility/loss.

T hese pieces are captivating. The epitome of good will, the chamber and electronic compositions on this disc are enjoyably bold, muscular, and complex. I will be listening to them over and over. So, I hope, will you. The disc (link below) is to be released by CCR in February.

[30-sec clip, Gene Pritsker, Chamber & Electronic Music, ‘What Occurred in the Light, Goes on in the Dark’; (track 1), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Gene Pritsker, Chamber & Electronic Music, ‘Healing Paradox’; (track 13), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

[30-sec clip, Gene Pritsker, Chamber & Electronic Music, ‘Poem #1: Reflections on Elegy for Jane by Theodore Roethke’; (track 5), 2011, 1.1MB MP3]

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a side-long pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren: happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves: their whispers turned to kissing;
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.”
— Theodore Roethke, Elegy for Jane (My Student, Thrown by a Horse).

H ans Abrahamsen’s Storm and Still
Alessandro Appignani’s Soliloquy
Richard Arnell’s Suite for Unaccompanied Cello
Johann Sebastian Bach’s six Suites
Bernard Barrell’s Soliloquys for cello solo
Burton Beerman’s A Still, Small Voice for cello, dancer and video
Eve Beglarian’s Eloise Alone
Elizabeth Bell’s Soliloquy
Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés
Benjamin Boone’s Buffing the Gut
Walter Branchi’s Forms of the Wind for cello and electronics
Benjamin Britten’s three Suites
Matthew Burtner’s Fragments From Cold
Garrett Byrne’s Sprocket! for solo cello
Robert Griffin Byron’s Epitaph for cello and MAX/MSP
Elliott Carter’s two Figments
Gaspar Cassado’s Suite for Solo Cello
Joel Chadabe’s Many Times Madeleine for cello and live electronics
George Chave’s Three Reflections
Paul Constantinescu’s Sonata Bizantina
Andreina Costantini’s Jion
Tom Cora’s (Thomas Corra) Man with the Movie Camera
Anthony Cornicello’s I’ll have an Electric Mahabarata, Please
Franklin Cox’s Clairvoyance, Recoil
George Crumb’s Sonata for Solo Cello, Toccata
Douglas Cuomo’s Only Breath
Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms No. 3
Paul Michael Dooley’s Gradus for solo cello
Henri Dutilleux’s Trois Strophes sur le Nom de Sacher
Ludovico Einaudi’s Canto
Alejandro Escuer’s El Arco de Encina
Robert Fleisher’s Two Movements for Violoncello
Domenico Gabrielli’s Seven Ricercari for Solo Cello
Guillermo Galindo’s TX3
Orlando Jacinto Garcia’s Night Fragments for solo cello, Mixtura, After Humans for cello, electronics, video
Djivan Gasparian’s Memories
Ge Gan-ru’s Yi Feng
Ada Gentile’s Per violoncello solo
Mara Gibson’s E-Tip for cello and electronics
Alberto Ginastera’s Punena No. 2
Philip Glass’s Songs And Tissues For Solo Cello
Geoffrey Gordon’s Lorca Musica per Cello Solo
Michael Gordon’s Industry for solo cello and electronics
Sofia Gubaidulina’s 10 Preludes
David Hainsworth’s Other Worlds
Joseph Hallman’s Three Monologues and sixsolopieces
Patrick Hardish’s Sonorities IV
Jonathan Harvey’s Curve with Plateau
Joseph Hayes’s Soliloquy
Michael Hersch’s Sonatas for Unaccompanied Cello Nos. 1 & 2
Jennifer Higdon’s Soliloquy
Paul Hindemith’s Sonata Op. 25
Toshio Hosokawa’s Sen II
Alan Hovhaness’s Yakamochi
Marie Incontrera’s Playing in the Caves
Ben Johnston’s Toccata
Frederick Kaufman’s Inner Sanctum for solo cello
Daniel Kessner’s Four Studies in Melodic Expression
Aram Khachaturian’s Sonata-Fantasy for cello solo in C
Mark Kilstofte’s You (unfolding)...
Hi Kyung Kim’s Five Bagatelles
Jin Hi Kim’s Kae Maek
Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata Op. 8 for Solo Cello
Karl Kohn’s Soliloquy II
David Lang’s World to Come for cello, tape, and video
Mario Lavista’s Cuaderno de Viaje
Ana Lara’s Koaia
Tania Leon’s 4 Pieces for solo cello
György Ligeti’s Sonata
Magnus Lindberg’s Stroke
Andrew List’s Tango-Tango for Solo Cello and Dancer
Witold Lutosławski’s Sacher Variation For Solo Cello
Tod Machover’s Electric Etudes for cello and electronics
Robert Maggio’s Winter Toccata (I can’t believe you want to die)
Kevin Malone’s Four Pieces for ‘Cello
Ovidiu Marinescu’s Quodlibet Sonata
Charles Norman Mason’s Ospedaletto for cello and electronics
Harold Meltzer’s Blush
Alfred Mendelssohn’s Suite for solo cello
Lawrence Moss’s Three Chinese Poems
Zae Munn’s Projectual for Solo Cello
Clancy Newman’s Song without Words for solo cello
Niccolò Paganini’s Caprices, Nos. 13, 17 and 24
Arvo Pärt’s Fratres for cellos
Kryzytof Penderecki’s Capriccio for solo cello
Riccardo Piacentini’s Con fuocco
Gene Pritsker’s What Occurred in the Light Goes on in the Dark, In Memory of Giampaolo Bracali
Shulamit Ran’s Fantasy Variations
Max Reger’s Three Suites for solo cello Op. 131c
Miklós Rózsa’s Toccata capricciosa, Op.36
Edwin Roxburgh’s Solilquy 4
Paul Rucker’s Strange Fruit and Soliloquy Timeless Language in the Present Tense
Paul Rudy’s Vastly Shrinking Space for cello and electronics,Degrees of Separation, Grandchild of Tree
Kaija Saariaho’s Petals
Marc Satterwhite’s Witnesses of Time for Solo Cello
Robert Saxton’s Toccata
Salvatore Sciarrino’s Ai limiti della notte
Mark Sforzini’s Remembrance Upon a Midnight Hour
Judith Shatin’s For the Birds for cello and electronics
Thomas Simaku’s Soliloquy II
Stuart Smith’s "Said, nearly", Willow
Christine Southworth’s Khaen Song
Halsey Stevens’s Sonata for Violoncello Solo
Randall Svane’s Three Unaccompanied Suites and Dreams Go Wandering Still
Kasper Tagel’s Spanish Suite
Karen Tanaka’s Song of Songs (with CD playback)
Boris Tchaikovsky’s Suite for Solo Cello
David Tcimpidus’s Brock Mountain Passage
Augusta Read Thomas’s Spring Song, Ring Bells Summer
Jukaa Tiensuu’s oddjob
Chinary Ung’s Khse Buon
Craig Walsh’s Pipeline Burst Cache for cello and electronics
Charles Wuorinen’s Cello Variations
Iannis Xenakis’s Nomos Alpha and Kottos
Yahuda Yannay’s I can’t fathom it...
Eugène Ysaÿe’s Sonata for solo cello, Op. 28
Zhou Long’s Wild Grass (with CD playback)
Evan Ziporyn’s Kebyar Maya for solo cello and prerecorded CD.”
— Some notable works for unaccompanied or electronics-accompanied or self-accompanied/looped solo cello.

Wednesday, December 31, 2008

Chamber Music of Charles Ives: Authenticity Of, Necessity Of, Aberrancy Of

L ong before his death in 1954, at 80, Charles Ives seemed less like the father of American music than an eccentric uncle whose antic behavior and uncensored opinions at birthdays and funerals conscript his relatives into manufacturing an endless series of apologies and disclaimers... During the past decade, the picture of Ives has metamorphosed from eccentric uncle into cagey impresario and entrepreneur, a process explained by Gayle Sherwood Magee in her aptly titled ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’... Magee’s book is a model of contemporary musicology—sympathetically sober in its judgments and interdisciplinary in its methods… Ives may have experienced every sound he perceived and every emotion attendant upon those sounds … as music. If we imagine this differently-eared, alternatively-wired Ives, a lot of what critics have found problematic about his music and career falls away. He probably possessed an acute and unaccountable impulse to use sounds expressively. As he matured, he had to balance the need to acquire skills through musical education against the preservation of this impulse.”
— David Schiff, review of Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Ives biography, ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’, in The Nation 05-JAN-2009.

W hy do I work in this way and get all upset over what just upsets other people? No one else seems to hear [the music] in the same way [that I do]. Are my ears on ‘wrong’?”
— Charles Ives, response to violinists’ criticism of his Violin Sonata No. 1.

T he current issue of The Nation has a wonderful review by David Schiff, of the Charles Ives biography/musicological analysis by Gayle Sherwood Magee. Magee’s book is a delight. Schiff’s review is a delight as well.

A t its best, good criticism genuinely returns the [Foucault-ian/Adorno-ian] ‘gaze’ of the subject whose work is reviewed. Not content to merely be constructive in explaining or characterizing what the work is/was, the best criticism is deeply original in its own right. It is no way ‘derivative’ or predictable or fashionable, nor does it parasitize the reviewed work by way of using the review as an occasion to massage the egos of others.

F ashion is fraud.”
— CrimethInc, Recipes for Disaster.

D avid Schiff’s essay is a wonderful example of excellence in criticism. He commends Gayle Sherwood Magee for her musicological scholarship and explains in detail the merits of her new book and the rationale for his judgment. These are not so much features of a distinctive authorly ‘voice’ but of an engaging authority—the friendly and well-tuned mind behind the voice.

W hat has been lost [in journalism in recent years] is the authority of the critic - his/her strength of voice. In an age where every opinion is valid, there are no more great critics in the mould of Bernard Shaw, Tynan, and Toynbee.”
— Mark Ryan, former Director, Institute of Ideas, London.

W ell, only if you ignore the work of David Schiff, Arthur Danto, and quite a few others.”
— DSM.

S chiff goes (in the last page of his essay) well beyond the idioms of ordinary ‘review’ or criticism to reflect on the problems of doing biography and biographical musicology, including the vagaries of elusive personalities—subjects who [deliberately, cagily] left fragmentary and conflictual evidence, as a means of manipulating their own legacies and public personae. He poses additional novel possibilities that might account for Ives’s unusual career(s) and compositional output—stimulated in part by David’s recollections of his own father’s idiosyncrasies. He suggests entirely new avenues for medico-musicological exploration. He does this casually, in a three-page review, with a conversational style that reads like a letter from a friend or a transcript of a conversation in your living room.

In other words, Schiff’s review starts out reading like an excellent-but-conventional piece of criticism but gradually takes on some of the qualities of a Borges short-story—with conjectures that may or may not be feasible to pursue but are nonetheless captivating in their intriguing ‘No rules! Question everything!’ possibilities.

[50-sec clip, Bekova Sisters, Ives, Piano Trio, ‘I. Moderato’, 1.2MB MP3]

Ives pallido ci dice di iniziare ‘ma deciso a non mollare’ ... Okay. We begin playing decisively but mezzopiano then, as instructed, and without ‘letting go’. Wow. What an amusing notation in the first bar!

Ives’s 4 violin sonatas (1908, 1910, 1913-?14, 1906-?16) and 3 piano sonatas (1905, 1909, ‘Concord’ 1915) are well-known. There are good recordings of them; the pieces are relatively often performed—more often in conservatory recitals maybe than other programs or concert series, but still... The San Francisco-based Ives Quartet and Blair String Quartet do regularly perform Ives’s string quartets, as do others. The Miró Quartet will perform Ives’s Quartet No.1 on Friday 23-JAN at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie in NYC...

T he Second Quartet is Ives in his early maturity, written between 1911 and 1913. The perplexing and sudden conjunctions, conflations, revelations, quotations and miasmic cuts are all firmly evident. But the somewhat tersely romanticised opening doesn’t quite prepare one for the fulminous writing to come: unceasingly powerful chromaticism. Here the quotations abound in tense, often hallucinatory rapidity... The [Blairs’] playing is involved and involving and conveys Ives’s journey from late Romanticism to modernism with conviction.”
— Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb International, FEB-2007.

B ut Ives’s piano trio does not receive so much attention as it deserves.

A nd if your taste runs to the exotic or experimental, then there are other pieces of Ives’s chamber music that you may like to be aware of. Ives’s throw-down Fugues in B-flat and D; his bombastic Fugue in phrygian, hypolydian and dorian modes; his contemplative Largo for violin, clarinet and piano, for example.

O r his ‘Largo for piano quintet’, subtitled ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’? Quirky finance inspiration for an insurance-man-cum-composer! What the heck does that sound like, I wonder? Go to the Yale University library and check out a copy and find out! Or go to PeerMusic Classical who publish these unusual Largos Risolutos Nos. 1 & 2.

Charles Ives, Largo ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ for Piano Quintet, 1908-9; M.S. at Yale Univ

I ves in his last works finally regained his undiluted, uncompromised, uncontentious, and un-ironic compositional voice—the voice of innocence that he had left behind so long ago.”
— Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, p. 162.

S chiff exposes impolite tastes, judgments and ideas for what they are. He lets the reader infer how unjust or ill-founded our received prejudices may be. In Schiff’s elegant 3-page essay, the indeterminate nature of Truth is laid a little barer than it has ever been, barer even than Magee has done. Without doubt, bare, original Truth is more beautiful than pretty verisimilitude. It is especially beautiful and surprising to find such beauty in a short review/criticism article in a publication for a general audience. Bravo!

M agee’s efforts to debunk the medicalization/psychiatrification of Ives’s emotions are praised and synopsized in Schiff’s essay. But [‘It takes one to know one’] composer Schiff goes still further in normalizing Ives’s experimentality within the diversity of mainstream-composer personalities. To Schiff, every last one of us has his/her own unique ears and inspirations and obsessions, each her/his own skills and gifts and blind-spots. Not one of us is exactly like Ives, Schiff says, but neither was Ives any more aberrant or less aberrant in the spectrum of humanity than any of the rest of us is, lest auld acquaintance be rudely forgot.

H appy New Year! Peace!

Differently-eared Charles Ives, engulfed by coat, (c) Naxos

D on’t pay too much attention to the sounds, for if you do you may miss the music.”
— George Ives, remarking to son Charles about the proper way to conduct hymns at a revival meeting.

Tuesday, April 22, 2008

New Music ‘Expectations’ vs. ‘Expectancy’: George Perle

H is [Perle’s] pieces also raise what has become a confusing question: What do classical composers writing music like this expect from listeners?”
— Bernard Holland, NYT, 20-MAY-2008.

W hat do composers writing music like this expect from listeners? They expect nothing, except honesty and an open mind. They don’t expect charity or an unearned free ride. They expect no more ‘smarts’ than the curiosity one finds in cats watching ambient television in their owner’s house, for free. We self-select, those of us who are transfixed like cats, enthralled by Perle’s music. There is a contrary self-selection, too, by those who aren’t even mildly curious about what it is or how it works or what it might mean or what comes next. Honestly confessing to ‘not liking’ something is fine. And calling it a different language, as Holland does, is also fine. But choosing not to attend to a language, and impugning the comprehensibility of the language and those who speak and write it, and justifying one’s position by asserting the inevitable, righteous marginality/disenfranchisement of the shunned language—as Holland does—are indefensible, xenophobic choices. If we follow Holland’s lead, I guess we need not bother to learn Tlingit, or Monguor, or Southern Tiwa—because there are only a few hundred speakers of those, the languages are dying anyway, and the songs and the ideas they are about seem nasty or irrelevant to classical Euro-centric white metro consumption-crazed culture.”
— DSM.

I t is true that in the natural course of things, languages, like everything else, sometimes die. People choose, for a variety of valid social reasons, not to teach their children their own mother tongue. In the case of American Indian languages, however, the language drop-off has been artificially induced and precipitous, and just as with the human-caused endangered species crisis, it is worth doing something about it. Amerindian languages were deliberately destroyed, particularly in North America. In the earlier days of European contact, Indians were separated from their linguistic kin and resettled hundreds of miles away with individuals from other tribes who couldn’t understand each other. Historically, this is the single most effective way to eliminate minority languages (for obvious imperialistic reasons).”
— Laura Redish, NativeLanguages.org.

Bernard Holland, one of the New York Times’s music critics, repeatedly bashes new music and composers of new music every few months or so. His piece on George Perle in Sunday’s NYT is another installment. Holland’s rants generally exhort composers to create audience-friendly works, works of ready-made ‘relevance’ for unprepared general audiences—as if doing so will somehow solve classical music’s sales and marketing problems in this era of mass-media consumerism. Holland, the staunch advocate for a Tyranny of Mass-Market Relevance.

I will continue to read Bernard, even though these anti-new music attitudes of his annoy me—and annoy Greg Sandow, Frank Oteri, David McMullin, and almost anyone who is composing or performing or attending or buying and experiencing new music.

But I think of these experiences differently from Holland. I think of them as explorations. An opportunity to hear, or perform, or write new music is a form of exploration, or art tourism, or musical anthropological adventure, into virtual cultures that are infrequently visited by ‘civilized’ consumeristic/capitalistic people. The ‘aboriginal’ musicians are spontaneously doing and creating what they do—not as though they have never encountered white men [of Bernard Holland’s imperial ilk] before, but as though they need to do it for their own real, honest, indigenous reasons.

In fact, they (we) are quite interested in trade with people from other ‘lands’. We welcome the visitors. But commercial trade with them is not what makes us most of us tick. And we are not about to allow ourselves to be subjugated by them. We don’t intend to end up making derivative ‘musical trinkets’ or commodities catering to the needs and mass-market aspirations of imperialists.

I write music that I intend to be beautiful, and I hope that it will please listeners. My strange idea of beauty may not resonate as widely as Bach’s or Britney Spears’, but it’s what I have to offer, and it doesn’t mean I hate my audience. All I ask of listeners is an open mind.”
— David McMullin, American Composers’ Forum.

And, in general, we who do new music are not ‘defying’ anything, any more or less than any genuine indigenous culture is ‘defying’ a dominant-culture with which it comes into contact. We refuse to be tyrannized by the dominant out-culture’s traditions or expectations. Nor are we self-tyrannized by an obsession to always be ‘new’, in a way that deliberately, perversely races ahead of any audience’s ability to comprehend or enjoy, in the manner that Holland implies. We know that radical novelty in and of itself is no guarantee of meaningfulness or value.

Bernard Holland is right about one thing: we do create new languages—ones that he simply prefers not to learn and sees no possibility of enjoying and damns by faint praise.

I can speak only the languages I was born to. Sometimes I feel guilty. Maybe I should work harder at [Perle’s] grammar and vocabulary. With age I feel guilty less and less [about my indolent attitude toward new music].”
— Bernard Holland, New York Times, 20-APR-2008.

We invent things. It’s what we do; it’s what we have to offer. And, to be worthy of the Patent Office’s term ‘invention’, by definition the things must be novel, non-obvious, and valuable—valuable to future societies, if not to the ones that exist right now. To be worthy of the term ‘invention’, by definition not everyone will have thought of it or immediately think it’s ‘fun’.

A ‘language’ is a dialect with an army and a navy. [And anything lacking military force is merely a ‘dialect’ to be dismissed, not reckoned with.]”
— Max Weinreich, 1945.

Language extinctions:

497 languages are projected to become extinct within 15 years;
~3,000 will be lost within a generation [David W. Lightfoot, NSF data].

North America:

700 languages in 1492 C.E.;
Now only 162 have living speakers;
75 are now spoken only by a handful of elderly;
Only 12 languages are spoken by more than 10,000 people;
100 languages spoken in the Arctic but dramatic changes over the last 40 years [e.g., Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida].

George Perle himself gave the best answer, to Bernard Holland’s question as to what composers expect:

Y ou should approach a new piece the same way in which you would any other new experience—with a sense of curiosity, and with the hope that it will be a challenging, interesting, and exciting experience ... When I first came to San Francisco to take up my post as composer-in-residence, I was introduced to the symphony’s board of governors. One of them asked me, ‘Is your music fun to listen to?’ When you see a new piece on the program, you have a right to hope that it will be fun to listen to. There is a very good chance that you will be disappointed. There must be ten times as many young composers around today as there were when I was a young composer. The only aim that I can discern in the music of some of them is not to offend anyone by offering him music that he might not find entirely obvious at a first hearing, so they give you second-hand versions of Debussy, or Mahler, or early Stravinsky, or even Vivaldi. Second-hand versions of anything are a bore, which is itself an offense, to my way of thinking, but the new piece is rarely allowed to last more than ten minutes, and so you put up with it, and both you and the management of the orchestra feel that they have done their part in furthering the cause of contemporary music. I ask you to expect much more from new music, and to be prepared to recognize the difference when the real thing comes along. And I think you will recognize the difference ... The older music that is an important part of your lives represents only a selected and very limited portion of the music of any particular period. It is music that has stood the test of time, which only means that it is music your predecessors have culled out of the music of the past. You should be intrigued and challenged by the notion that you, too, will be playing a similar role in the unfolding of music history. It seems to me that nothing can be more important for the future of that history than the relation that you establish to the music of your contemporaries.”
— George Perle, Commencement address, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, May, 1991.

Composers hope for open minds, for expectancy. We hope to be accorded the dignity and respect that anthropologists should give to any culture. Each of us is, after all, our own far-away ‘land’, lacking an army or navy.