jwilzewske: dissent

Showing posts with label dissent. Show all posts

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Phoenix Ensemble: Feldman and Babbitt Clarinet Quintets, Security/Acquiescence, Insecurity/Dissent, Morphogenesis

R enoir said that the same color, applied by two different hands, would give us two different tones. But in music, the same note, written by two different composers, gives us the same note. When I write a B-flat, and Berio a B-flat, what you get is always B-flat. By contrast, the painter must create his medium as he works. That’s what gives his work that ‘hesitancy’—that ‘insecurity’ so crucial to painting.”
— Morton Feldman.

M usicians are used to spinning a phrase or rhythm in a certain way. There is a kind of common grammar to the musical language that we all get used to. Babbitt seems to knowingly throw a wrench in it, intentionally pulling or tugging the musicians in very uncomfortable directions. It’s frustrating, but in the end it makes you think in completely new and different ways and causes a kind of wonderful tension in the music. As scary as it was, I grew to like the feeling. I think for all of the musicians in the group, this was the most difficult piece we had ever worked on. Babbitt made himself available whenever we had specific questions about the score... In [Feldman’s] clarinet quintet, and most of his late music especially, he has a way of sustaining this beautiful world and keeping it interesting over very long stretches of time, and for some reason it works. It’s a real challenge for the musicians because there is never any technique or ‘flash’ to grab onto or hide behind. It’s just this ‘stripped-to-the-bone’ musical expression, and our ability to spin a phrase at a constant ppp.”
— Mark Lieb, interview with Robert Carl.

L isten to these excerpts:

[50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Morton Feldman, ‘Clarinet and String Quartet, m. 283’, 1983, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Phoenix Ensemble, Milton Babbitt, ‘Clarinet Quintet, m. 1’, 1996, 1.6MB MP3]

F eldman’s quintet is like a window—a car window or a window on a train—and you can experience what goes by, what is happening outside: it is the epitome of passive observation.

B y contrast, Babbitt’s quintet is caring-but-confrontational: possibly an intense dialogue between fellow passengers who are on the train.

F eldman, instinctive; Babbitt methodical, mathematical.

B abbitt’s elegant contours—clarinet and string quartet lines thickly folded into each other at the opening, gradually becoming sparser, with reflective pockets of unaccompanied clarinet—radiate genteel yet incisive whimsy, and his pleasure at creating such delicate musical mechanisms expresses itself shamelessly.”
— Philip Clark, Gramophone, MAR-2010.

T he aim of each piece seems to be to convince the performers that they won’t be able to get it ‘right’ unless they’ve understood and accepted the composer’s point of view—even when that point of view is that you have no hope of ‘mastering’ the situation—of “winning”; of living forever; of getting your way. You can influence things while you are alive; you can initiate and change the patterns that develop; you can contribute, laugh, cry. But you are not getting out of here alive.

T he trick in the Feldman piece—with one instrument starting the bar, the next entering on the second beat, and so on until the final note is a chord made up of the motif—is to allow the textural device to do its job. ‘Let it go’ as soon as your note has been played. Otherwise, the building ‘chord’ will tie down the hand and the mind.

I f you are going to try to learn these pieces, it would be advisable to have a surgeon standing by.”
— Ludwig Rellstab (1799-1860), commenting on Chopin’s Etudes.

L aunched into the world, the compositions make their way... wild animals, just weaned. (It’s not like their composer-parent releases them with any didactic or political intention, right?)

A t this first meeting I brought John a string quartet. He looked at it a long time and then said, ‘How did you make this?’ I thought of my constant quarrels with (Stefan) Wolpe, and how just a week before, after showing a composition of mine to Milton Babbitt and answering his questions as intelligently as I could, he said to me, ‘Morton, I don’t understand a word you’re saying.’ And so, in a very weak voice I answered John, ‘I don’t know how I made it.’ The response to this was startling. John jumped up and down, and with a kind of high monkey squeal, screeched, ‘Isn’t that marvelous! Isn’t that wonderful! It’s so beautiful, and yet he doesn’t know how he made it.’ ”
— Morton Feldman, recalling his first meeting with John Cage.

Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Kristi Helberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Alberto Parrini (cello), on Feldman
Mark Lieb (clarinet), Aaron Boyd (violin), Alicia Edelberg (violin), Cyrus Beroukhim (viola), Bruce Wang (cello), on Babbitt

T his recording is an absorbing, totally engaging performance by Lieb and his colleagues and a superb, intimate exposition of Feldman’s and Babbitt’s ideas—about music, about life.

Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Chamber Music and Principled Dissent: Cross-Over Art Music of Hanns Eisler

S omeone who knows *only* music understands not one thing about it. A composer with integrity knows that music is written by human beings for human beings and that music is a continuation of life, not something separated from it. A musician with integrity must be an activist in his or her society, and stand up and say loudly what is wrong in that society and try to fix it. It is not right to make pretty, docile music. I could well understand it when in 1933 Hitler put a price on my head and drove me out of Germany. He and his lying bandits were the evil of the period. In fact, I was proud to be driven out. There was honor in this! But today I feel heart-broken over being driven out of the U.S.—this beautiful country—in this ridiculous way, by these ridiculous people. [black-listed by McCarthy Committee]”
— Hanns Eisler, public statement before being expelled from the U.S. in 1948.

D uring his lifetime, Eisler, who was one of Schoenberg’s favorite pupils, created a massive body of work. But these songs—written to inspire and enlighten a world gone mad with alienation and rampant greed—are his most immediate and successful musical contributions. The seventeen individual songs on this album classify as ‘agitprop’; they are political, anti-Nazi, pro-worker, pacifist—but their stirring sentiments and clear-eyed melodic and rhythmic appeal make them art songs as well.”
— Stephany von Buchau, review of Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, and Stephen Roans quartet CD, ‘Eisler: Nothing Quite Like Money’, in High Notes.

Mendacity cannot go unopposed.

Hanns Eisler (1898 - 1962) knew this. Eisler’s time with Schoenberg coincided almost exactly with the transition from atonal to twelve-tone music, and some of Eisler’s early compositions might be mistaken for Anton von Webern’s or Alban Berg’s.

But by the mid-1930s, Eisler became fed-up with the hermeticism and inaccessibility and elitism that typified the music of the Schoenberg School. Social responsibility and relevance were the moral justification for serious music, in Eisler’s view.

So he broke with Schoenberg, and Eisler’s new music—choral music, chamber music, music theater—came to be a fusion of atonal, jazz, cabaret and pop. Most of his pieces have political back-stories. These pieces (‘anthems’, ‘battle songs’) were intended to influence the feelings of performers and listeners, and to change their attitudes. The pieces were not merely entertainment. They didn’t behave nicely, re-upping for more of the ‘same’.

In 1942 Eisler moved to Hollywood, at that time also home to many well-known refugee artists. He continued his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht, wrote the music for a number of films, and taught at USC. In 1947, one of Eisler’s accusers was Richard Nixon, who testified that ‘the case of Hanns Eisler is perhaps the most important ever to have come before the Committee.’ A dossier with song texts which Eisler had set to music was brought as evidence against him. When the leading witness was asked why he was reading out so much material, the reply of the official was: ‘My purpose is to show that Mr. Eisler is the Karl Marx of communism in the musical field, and he is well aware of it.’

Eisler was nominally the first one of what was to become a very large number of artists and intellectuals who were blacklisted in the U.S. on account of real or alleged political views. An international support group came to his defense—including Thomas Mann and Charlie Chaplin—but to no avail, and in 1948 Eisler was deported from the U.S.

His film-score credits include:

Aktion J (1961)
Les Arrivistes (1960) [The Opportunists]
Geschwader Fledermaus (1958) [Bat Squadron]
The Crucible (1957) [Les Sorcières de Salem]
Katzengräben (1957) [Cat Ditch]
Bel Ami (1955)
Nuit et brouillard (1955) [Night and Fog]
Schicksal am Lenkrad (1954) [Fate at the Steering Wheel]
Frauenschicksale (1952) [Destinies of Women]
Das Leben unseres Präsidenten (1951) [Life of Our President]
Rat der Götter, Der (1950) [Council of the Gods]
Unser täglich Brot (1949) [Our Daily Bread]
Křížová trojka (1948) [Three Cross]
So Well Remembered (1947)
The Woman on the Beach (1947)
The Life of Galileo (1947)
A Scandal in Paris (1946)
Deadline at Dawn (1946)
The Spanish Main (1945)
Jealousy (1945)
None But the Lonely Heart (1944)
Hangmen Also Die (1943) [Lest We Forget]
The Forgotten Village (1941)
A Child Went Forth (1941)
Pete-Roleum and His Cousins (1939) [oil and political oligarchies in 1939!]
The 400 Million (1939)
Vie est à nous, La (1936) [The People of France]
Nieuwe gronden (1934) [New Earth]
Dans les rues (1933) [Song of the Streets]

What a great lot of these have to do with progressive themes and social justice!

So Hanns Eisler is fascinating for his having both embraced and dismissed Schoenberg and serialism—switching abruptly to accessible ‘pop’ idioms. It is not so much that he tried to ‘bridge’ the gap between classical and popular music. And it is not the case that he resorted to composing for musical theater and films simply to make a buck. He refused to conform (even though he did later return to a sort of variety of serialism that he felt was emotionally accessible and non-elitist). His String Quartet Op. 75 (1938) in two movements (Variationen, Finale) is an illustration of his principled idiosyncrasy.

The Op. 8 (1925) has lots of internal symmetry between pairs of trichords—pitch-class/set-theory, Allen Forte-style: [0,2,5] [0,3,7] [0,2,5] [0,3,7] for the No. 2, and [0,1,4] [0,1,2] [0,1,4] [0,1,2] for the No. 6. The String Quartet has [0,3,6] [0,1,3] [0,1,6] [0,1,2]—far less symmetry than Eisler’s earlier pieces; almost a rejection, as it were, of the symmetries he had previously found beautiful and meaningful.

Or was it? In the Op. 8 No. 2 row, is the third trichord not a subversion of the series initated by the first trichord? Is it not a private rebellion against the politics of the serial method, rankling from inside the method—a minor third and a whole tone within a perfect-fourth interval [0,2,5]? Aren’t the Variationen of the Streichquartett de facto subversions-by-permutation? Or even the Op. 8 No. 2’s second and fourth trichords—both triads but a whole tone apart, an equal amount of permutation in their reversal of major-third/minor-third intervals?

Rather than revealing a change of heart on Eisler’s part, as David Blake interprets things, it seems to me that these features illustrate a consistent and durable attitude toward free will and the human quest for meaning. Principled dissent! Agitprop!

Blake does explore (p. 109ff) Eisler’s election not to use transpositions or explore some combinations—he says these remain ‘latent’ in the works.

Yes, but their latency or absence is itself conspicuous, like white-space in paintings or sculptures or like un-pursued back-stories in novels. And that, I think, is the source of considerable beauty in Eisler’s writing:

he creates a humanistic architecture that demands freedom;
he devises ironical serialist edifices that demean doctrinaire serialism and other isms; and
he engineers musicocosmological worm-holes that enable us to escape political oppression and live to fight another day.

Eisler insists on an emotional integrity that, as he saw it, serialism threatened. He deviates deliberately from a literal ordering and prefers intuitive permutations of the tone-row. If we perform it or listen to it, we perceive this directly. You don’t need an advanced degree in music theory to figure it out. And we can only imagine that this was Eisler’s deep intention, a pre-compositional and editorial mantra: create inherent radical liberty, where expressive freedom takes precedence over the tyranny of the tone-row.

The obsessiveness of some serialists, versus the iconoclasm of Eisler? Oh, but Eisler did indulge in a sort of meta-obsession. He is not an anarchist. He has his own detailed methods and values. The Streichquartett series is built from motivic ideas and is an ‘organic’ expressive space, in a way that’s reflected in how the piece progresses. But these series are not casual, ‘throw-down’ explorations. They are [obsessively] calculated so as to be precisely suited to [suitable for] the subsequent contrapuntal variations. The architecture for variation is itself the result of variation. Eisler draws and re-draws the architectural plans; surveys the building site; digs the holes for the piers and foundation; and begins constructing his building from the ground up, so to say.

But wait! He has architected the thing with provisions that anticipate the demolition of the building 50 years later, with provisions that facilitate the deconstruction and reclamation of the land, and its re-use for subsequent construction, for subsequent societies.

Wait again! He has architected the thing with provisions anticipating the return to a verdant naturalism. The departure from strict serialism reflected Hanns’s belief that innate and spontaneous motives will eventual prevail; reflected his deep mistrust of any ‘system’. Poetic license is not merely ‘taken’; according to Hanns Eisler, it must be taken, to produce anything of aesthetic value.

Not all Eisler’s music is challenging or ‘in-your-face’ political. In fact, some of his piano parts have an almost Schubertian tenderness. Other of his pieces are ironical or over-the-top comical. Some are combinations of all of these things.

[50-sec clip, Sylvia Anders, D. Justus Noll, Stephen Roane Quartet, There’s Nothing Quite Like Money, ‘Abortion Is Illegal’, 1.9MB MP3]

Sadly, Eisler’s communist leanings have caused his music to be long neglected in the West, although the Vogler Quartett and others have added his works to their repertoire. There is much to be admired in Eisler’s compositions, and I hope more ensembles choose to perform these works. In the current political season in the U.S., Eisler’s music feels like ‘relief’—like a much-needed antidote to the relentless neoconservative, theocratic onslaught that is upon us; like an inspiring call to ‘mindfulness’ in this terrible era of the proudly ignorant ‘low-information’ voter.

E lias Canetti asked me how I got on with my father. When I pointed out that Hanns had been already dead for a dozen years, Canetti answered that he did in fact know this, but nevertheless wanted to learn from me how I got on with my father. ‘Very well,’ I replied. Canetti then assured me that the relationship with my father ‘would be still better in the future’ [than it has been thus far], a remark which seemed to me extremely odd, aggressive, and troubling... During my childhood, I saw my father rarely and at irregular intervals. My parents’ separation and divorce, which from my point of view occurred relatively early, was partly to blame for this, but above all it was due to events of the time. The meetings in Vienna are particularly clear in my memory—visits together to the Café Museum where my father met his friends, members of the Schoenberg circle... Because my mother was a singer and pianist I spent a significant part of my childhood amongst a circle of musicians, whose specialized language was familiar to me from an early age. My father was for a long time perceptible to me primarily through his ‘reflection’, through impressions I have of the people who were his friends... I often reflect on life in a musical family: the frequent chamber music [played by my parents friends, in public concerts and in the household of my childhood] signifies for me the ‘submerged’ world of childhood, the essence of childhood.”
— Georg Eisler, quoted in Blake’s biography of Hanns Eisler, p. 73.