jwilzewske: eclecticism

Showing posts with label eclecticism. Show all posts

Monday, March 14, 2011

Robert Levin: Meta-Mozart and Mozart’s Own Experimentalism/Eclecticism

M olding the ‘clay’, getting your fingers ‘wet’: discovering how Mozart thought, how he might have written things, how he went about doing what he did. This is inevitably humbling—this improvising cadenzas and whole movements that are missing from his works. But it also enables you to more accurately perform and understand the parts that are not missing; to have a better sense that there are [performance] ‘options’ from which to choose.”
— Robert Levin, pianist.

I s it ‘creation’ or is it imitation? Honestly, it is both!

Mozart – Prelude and Fugue in C, K. 394 (4.0 min; 3.5 min)
Mozart – “Adagio variee” K3 Anh. 206a = K6 Anh. A 65 (1.5 min for each of 4)
Mozart – Suite “In the style of Handel”, K. 399 [Sarabande completed by R. Levin] (3.5 min; 3.5 min; 2.2 min; 4.3 min; 3.5 min)
Mozart – Piano Sonata No. 15 in F, K. 533/494 (26.5 min)

W hat you hear in this Adagio, K. Anh. A65, are two parts, A and B, composed by Mozart. And for each of these, I have deconstructed them, stripped them down, and created versions, A’ and B’, removing the decorations… to show what might have been.”
— Robert Levin, pianist.

I n Levin’s improvised material in last evening’s MainlyMozart program in San Diego we get a sense of genuine authenticity in terms of motivic elements, harmonic progressions, modulations, durations that each chord/key prevails until a change is introduced, and so on. Really convincing and wonderful. You don’t necessarily have to have comprehensive (or even ‘adequate’) explanations for the formal structure of Mozart’s music to produce new compositions (or, as Levin is famous for doing, completions of Mozart’s unfinished ones) that have tremendous verisimilitude.

T here is a lot of latitude for interpretation in these pieces—including Levin’s slow, dilated accounts of the first two movements of Sonata in F, K. 533. For example, Schiff, Eschenbach, Uchida, and others turn in Allegro times ranging between 7 min and 9 min, compared to Levin’s 11 min for the Allegro last night. Others’ performances of the Andante range between about 6 min and 10 min, with Levin’s account close to 9 min. And the Rondo Allegretto of this Sonata is, in others’ hands, incredibly varied, ranging from as short as 6 min to 8 min or more; Levin’s tendency toward hyper-masculine emphasis leads him to 6 min 20 seconds with a flourish.

I ’m studying—we all should be studying, like students learning a new language. People study French, German, Italian, Chinese… eventually they become fluent speakers, if they work hard at it. Well, why not think of Mozart as a language, one that must be learned, in a conversational way? I am studying Mozart! I’m just trying to improve my diction—trying to get my ‘accent’ better.”
— Robert Levin, pianist.

L evin’s remarks remind me of David Cope, composer and professor at UC Santa Cruz, who 20+ years ago created Emmy, a LISP-based software application that produced scores in the style of classical composers. Some time ago Cope decided to sunset Emmy. It has been superceded by a new package, called Emily Howell, another in his suite of computer models of musical creativity.

L iterary theorist Frederic Jameson considers the ‘effacement’ of a personal style and its replacement by ‘pastiche’—not parody as in Bruce Adolphe’s comedic and educational routines but the borrowing and recoding of historical idioms, adopting jargon popularized by others, and repurposing ornaments and decorations that previously held different meanings—as fundamental elements of post-modernism. It is a “celebration of surfaces, which denies the hermeneutics of depth” (Jameson, pp. 64-5.) It’s like speech in a dead language, but speech that is devoid of parody’s ulterior, satiric motives. [Satie and Debussy co-opted and experimented with other styles and did pastiches. Nyman’s book covers some of this history of ‘experimental’ music.]

L evin marveled aloud about the brevity of the fragments that were his starting-materials… conjured the notion of Mozart as a dilettante... abandoning a Gigue in 5 bars; the Sarabande that Levin completed, abandoned by Mozart in 4 bars, just the merest sketch now extant; Mozart becoming very quickly disinterested in the art of fugue, having been goaded into attempting it by his wife.

B ut these idiosyncrasies and peccadillos of Mozart’s become in Levin’s hands a wonderful asset—they serve as a pretext for better understanding the man and the music, or, as many have noted, reviving the art of improvisation and honoring ‘freshness’ and novelty in classical music performance.

W hat has happened in the last generation or so is that objects—musical scores—have become ‘sacred’. People focus far too much on adhering literally to the notes that are written on the page. It is far better, I believe, to have a sense of responsibility to create something new in performing each work—it needs always to be ‘dangerous’.”
— Robert Levin, pianist.

R obert Levin studied piano with Louis Martin in New York City, and composition there with Stefan Wolpe. He was invited to study with Nadia Boulanger at the American Conservatory in Fontainebleau, France, and in Paris while still a teenager. He studied composition with Leon Kirchner, and piano with Clifford Curzon, Robert and Jean Casadesus, and Alice Gaultier-Léon. He was appointed head of music theory at the Curtis Institute in 1968, on the recommendation of Rudolf Serkin. Levin’s highly praised Mozart fortepiano concerto series, with Christopher Hogwood and The Academy of Ancient Music, was released in 1994 on the L’oiseau-Lyre label. Levin has been commended especially for his improvised cadenzas, a once-popular performance practice that some have credited him with restoring to tradition. His version of Mozart’s Requiem was premiered in 1991 in Stuttgart at the European Music Festival, conducted by Helmuth Rilling. Since 1993, Levin has been a professor at Harvard, where he serves as a Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music Performance & Analysis and Professor of the Humanities.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

New Music, Summer Picaresque

Acoustic Locator Array, New ‘War Tubas’, Japan, Summer 1930

CMT: So I’m glad I’m not the only one who felt that John Toole’s classic, Confederacy of Dunces, is unreadable. A friend loved the book, but the very fact that he loved it annoyed me tremendously. The book is so unmitigatedly self-conscious! How could anyone love that book? It’s reassuring to know that you really really didn’t like it, for the same aesthetic reason that I find the book objectionable!

DSM: I think the same phenomenon happens with some musical compositions. They’re excessively self-aware, almost as though the composer thinks the work has to be weird and depressing to be considered serious ‘new music’.

CMT: But then, even with such music, if you live with the music for awhile, it often grows on you. Give it three or four listens. Give it the benefit of the doubt. The bits that, on first impression, seemed contrived or self-referential turn out not to be so calculating or stiff after all. True, the music may never ascend to become popular or “In”, but at least its merits do come into focus with repeated listenings. The composer’s conceits and methods do, when you reflect on the piece, deliver something honest and valid. You just were unable to appreciate it properly on the first hearing.

DSM: Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina and other of his tintinnabulations and iterative compositions were like that for me. But there’s nothing that intrigues me quite as much in music as a fractured analogy, a piece of music that tries to do something emulating another type of art. It is, of course, best if the construction is sound and the performance is convincing and feels ‘right’. But a big part of the fascination of new music for me is the flat-out novelty of the experience—the novelty of discovering for myself whether I like it or understand it. The novelty, if it’s a premier performance, of encountering terra incognita. There’s none of the ‘baggage’ of received wisdom and critical consensus, regarding what the significance and inner workings of the piece may be. The piece is simply a naked fact, something we absorb and react to—both extemporaneously at the time of the live performance, and afterward, usually after a lot of reflection—as you’re saying. That’s always exciting. Seldom comfortable, but always exciting!

CMT: In music and music theater, society only accepts literary Intellectualism if the music is “In,” highly popular and massively acclaimed by the mainstream media. If it’s valued by the broader community, then intellectualizing it is socially acceptable; if it’s not popularly valued, though, then intellectualizing about it out loud as we’re doing is totally unwelcome. In general, musical intellectualism isn’t valued in the U.S.—and it’s especially discouraged when it comes to new music. I don’t understand why intellectualizing about music is treated this way. Painting, sculpture, dance, other of the Arts are at least cut some ‘slack’ by the media and arbiters of public discourse.

T his is about a vacancy in culture, the absence of younger voices, perhaps the absence of a generation. The few—extremely few—intellectuals under the age of thirty-five, even forty-five, have seldom elicited comment. They are easy to miss, especially because their absence is longstanding. An intellectual generation has not suddenly vanished; it simply never appeared. And it is already too late—the generation is too old—to show up.”
— Russell Jacoby, 2000.

DSM: But I don’t think of what we’re discussing as a kind of ‘intellectualizing,’ really. We like to identify some reasons that support our opinions, yes. It wouldn’t be meaningful conversation if you couldn’t explain why you think as you do. But, beyond that, I think we have no prejudices as to what the nature and quality of ‘acceptable’ reasons are or should be—regardless whether it’s new music or otherwise. The whole point is to experience the music, preferably ‘live’, and to (re-)experience and enjoy discovering and refining our experience of the music together through conversations about it. That’s still why we do this, right?

CMT: Yes, of course it is. The dialogue’s the thing! Much in the way that chamber music itself wouldn’t be chamber music were it not for the dialogue among the parts, the various voices. But the summer season is upon us, and summer means that performances of ‘new music’ are harder to find than at other times of the year; our dialogue needs to be more actively cultivated, to keep it going. Summer’s the season for chamber music festivals, so there’re a lot of events to attend. But many of the festivals confine their programming to the classical canon. The Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, however, includes new music. The Banff Festival has its Canadian Commission Round, with a new quartet by Kelly-Marie Murphy that each competing ensemble will perform. And the Kuhmo Festival in Finland has considerable new music in its line-up.

DSM: And the Aspen Festival as well. The Ying Quartet will perform Tan Dun’s Eight Colors for String Quartet, Zhou Long’s Song of the Ch’in, and Chen Yi’s Shuo in Aspen on July 28. Emerson String Quartet performed Charles Ives’ String Quartet No. 2 and Kaija Saariaho’s Terra Memoria there last Saturday. The Ottawa Festival has some Saariaho and other new works (Roddy Elias, Evan Ware, Victor Herbiet, Christian Elliot, Kevork Andonian, Evelyn Stroobach, and Jan Järvlepp – Aug 01) in their events this year.

CMT: Tanglewood has their new-music segment, too, from July 29 to August 3. Zwilich’s String Quartet No. 2; Eckhardt’s New work; Sollberger’s Advancing Moment; Harbison’s Abu Ghraib for Cello; Corigliano’s Troubadours – Variations for guitar and chamber orchestra; and Alvin Curran and others with Musica Electronica Viva on August 3.

DSM: I’m not sure I can be enthused to hear something entitled ‘Abu Ghraib for Cello’. That suggests to me something about as self-conscious as your John Toole book, Confederacy of Dunces. But Alvin Curran’s work, including his collection of solo piano pieces called Inner Cities, will be performed in Italy at the Santarcangelo International Festival of the Arts. That is both topical and honest and elegant. Daan Vandewalle will perform Curran’s Inner Cities No.13 on July 12 and 13. And Pierre-Yves Macé’s musique concrète piece, Passagenwerk, will be performed there on July 6.

CMT: How about MicroFest? MicroFest this summer has a program of Harry Partch’s music, performed on original Partch instruments, at California Plaza in L.A. If you like microtonality, this event is not to be missed.

DSM: You know, not all of Boulez’s music is ‘new’ in terms of its compositional techniques, neither is Terry Riley’s, nor Elliot Carter’s, say. And aleatoric music, “music of chance”, may transform the composer/performer relationship—but that isn’t inherently ‘new’ either, even though the improvisational aspect of it may be ‘new-as-of-this-minute’. Microtonal compositions likewise are not inherently ‘new’, even though microtonality may be far from conventional.

CMT: Okay! Eclectic and unconventional as our “newish” tastes may be, we’re not alone! So what new music do you want to go and hear? What rolicking musical adventures do you crave? When and where?

I n contemporary popular parlance, the attribution ‘picaresque’ refers to any rolicking adventure that delivers the travels and travails of a central character as he or she careens along the narrative way. ... To contend that a new ‘American picaresque’ has emerged ... is not only to call for an eclectic yet responsible use of the designation ‘picaresque’ but to propose an extended continuity in formal literary terms with other [narrative and dialogical] configurations that had their quite distinctive origins in other lands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ... The picaresque [genre] [ —like new music— ] changes masks, shifts, dodges, proves resilient, survives … [despite the apparent lack of visible means of support!]”
— Rowland Sherrill, Road-Book America, 2005.