jwilzewske: nfa

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Sunday, August 10, 2008

Flute Chamber Music Is Not All Serious

M adeleine Dring … was born [I was born] on the moon and can therefore claim to be a pure-bred lunatic. Arriving on a speck of cosmic dust, she [I] came face to face with the human race and never really recovered.”
— Madeleine Dring, humorous autobiographical diary fragment, quoted in Ro Hancock-Child’s biography of Dring, p. 1.

Flutist Leslie Marrs performed a wonderful set of new music chamber works by Robert Fruehwald and Wil Offermans as part of the National Flute Association annual meeting today, attended by about 2,000 flutists and a few composers.

Fruehwald: Hymntunes IV: Imenetuki; Three Fantasies on Irish Folk Tunes; Duo on Bulgarian Folk Songs;
Offermans: Tsuru-No-Sugomori

The Bulgarian Duo pieces featured guitarist Robert Trent accompanying Leslie. The first movement, marked Allegro, is almost in a flamenco rhythm: demonstrative. The second movement (Adagio-Andante) is pastoral, with a pensive feel—initially with a melodic lead in the flute part, evolving to more conversational interchange between flute and guitar, and concluding with a soli flute passage at the end. The vivace third movement is an engaging dance piece. The entire Duo is about 8 minutes in length, which makes it compatible in many recital/concert programs.

The ‘Hymntunes IV’ and ‘Three Fantasies’, atmospheric essays performed on alto flute and bass flute, respectively, evoke ancient, ethereal folk epics and legends. Their strophic story-telling idiom is made especially vivid by subversive colors that the low registers of these instruments lend to the endeavor. In ‘Hymntunes IV’ the flutist produces thumping percussive effects by the protrusion of tongue suddenly into the flute headjoint aperture. Additional intriguing percussion is created by rapid, repetitive clapping of right-hand flute keys—not changing the pitch but merely clamping the pads quickly against the openings on the flute body. The acoustic effect is (as heard from a distance of about 5 meters from the stage, anyhow) like moist bamboo chopsticks plunging hungrily into a bowl mostly emptied of rice—subtle and evocative of the first large raindrops of an arriving storm hitting a metal roof. The resonance of the column of air accessed by the pads clapping down over their respective holes generates un-voiced clear pitches—similar to effects we sometimes hear in pizzicato strings or harp.

The solo piece by Wil Offermans is likewise an atmospheric meditation, replete with harmonics produced by over-blowing, tongue-flutters, pitch-bending, and undulating ‘tremolo’ dynamics. Bravo, to both Marrs and Trent!

Flutist Donna Shin performed the following flute-oboe-piano trio pieces:

Demersseman-Berthélemy: Duo Brilliant ‘Guillaume Tell’
Dring: Trio for Flute, Oboe, and Piano

with the able assistance of her University of Washington friends Shannon Spicciati (oboe and English horn) and Regina Yeh (piano).

The William Tell (arranged in 1865; adapted by flutist Jules Demersseman and oboist Felix Berthélemy from Rossini’s 1829 opera score) was delightful—an animated and inspiring display of rapid-tempo artistry by the three, playing in tight, crisp ensemble.

The trio by Madeleine Dring was remarkable—with rich sonorities, rapid chase ‘scenes’ between the flute and oboe, and wry humor powered by the fine balance achieved by Shin, Spiccati, and Yeh.

Madeleine Dring studied composition under Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, and Gordon Jacob. Although her output was substantially incidental music for television, radio, and films, she did compose a number of pieces that merit consideration in chamber music programming. Her husband Roger Lord, an orchestral oboist, provided Madeleine ample stimuli (domestic provocations?) for her several chamber music pieces for oboe as well as flute, clarinet, bassoon, and other wind instruments. The Trio performed at the NFA convention today is one of the better known of these works. (Madeleine died suddenly of a stroke at age 54, in 1977.)

Besides her accomplishments as a composer, Dring was also a singer, pianist, lyricist, actress, and—and cartoonist? This last avocation is amazing, especially considering the era in which she lived! How many women can you find—in England or anywhere else in the 1940s through 1970s—who were actively creating cartoons?

Madeleine had a remarkable sense of humor. It is a shame that this aspect of her personality is not more widely known. Many of her cartoons and line-drawings manifest an irreverence and hilarity that the passage of time does not diminish. Have a look at Ro Hancock-Child’s biography of Dring, which includes a number of Dring’s cartoons. In addition to drawing cartoons of her own, she also wrote incidental music for TV animation. She clearly enjoyed the challenge of creating music that is suitable for young audiences, in addition to the more serious works by which she is primarily remembered.

Dring’s composerly methods, especially in her miniatures (like the three movements of this Trio), are basically descended from “English Renaissance” style. But the content of her melodic and thematic writing often incorporates elements of English folk music.

Since the time of her death 30 years ago, Dring has been under-recognized as a woman composer. Madeleine’s work has been curiously neglected in many of the anthologies of music by women (see links below), penalized possibly because of the idioms that she favored, which do not conform to elite notions of ‘seriousness’. But any composer who has written works in chamber music idioms for the stage or for film or TV as Dring did so extensively—must consider such an omission to be ‘conspicuous’ and unfortunate. Not every composition has to be a warhorse for display of technical virtuosity for it to have value and become part of the chamber music repertoire!

Composed in 1968, much of this Trio is comprised of exchanges between the flute and oboe over a jocular piano part. The second movement, marked Andante, supposedly symbolizes a duet between lovers. It opens with romantic chords in the piano part, which gives way to a poignant oboe solo—very fable-like. In fact, one can readily imagine a ‘Little Mermaid’ or other Disney-type animated feature as one listens to this beautiful melody. Donna Shin’s flute enters, taking over the melody, and, subsequently, we have a respectful dialogue between the flute and oboe—evoking images of a world free of serious conflict, promising nothing but harmonious adventures and happy endings.

The Trio’s final movement, marked Allegro giocoso, is the most playful of the piece, with highly animated lines for the oboe and flute and a ‘conspiratorial’ piano. The piano is substantially in a minor mode, with incidental major seconds and the occasional erratic/ironic chord. The wild passages in the piano part set the stage for flute-oboe caricatures that follow. Late in the movement the flute and oboe play a crazed cadenza with maniacal unison playing and chasing, ending in a sweet duet in major thirds.

Without doubt Dring was gifted in her abilities to write miniatures for children’s plays and for TV and radio. But her droll wit is evident in her more serious compositions as well. None of her drawings and cartoons is profane, but they instead manifest a thoroughly British sense of humor. They have an edginess and faux self-deprecation that were, maybe, about 50 years ahead of their time. This flute-oboe-piano Trio is a much-appreciated ‘window’ through which to glimpse the fun-loving, comical temperament of Madeleine Dring. Shin, Spicciati, and Yeh did a brilliant job of bringing this piece to life. Bravo!

Madeleine Dring’s ambiguous sarcasm. No one shall be spared.

Thursday, August 7, 2008

I Need a Semicolon Here: Punctuation in Instrumental Chamber Music

H istory has left its residue in punctuation marks—and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.”
— Theodor Adorno, Punctuation Marks.

W hen punctuation was first employed, it was in the role of handmaid of prose; later, the handmaid was transformed by the pedants into a harsh-faced chaperone, pervertedly ingenious in contriving stiff regulations and starched rules of decorum; now, happily, she is content to act as an auxiliary to the writer and as a guide to the reader.”
— Eric Partridge, You Have a Point.

[50-sec clip, Maxence Larrieu, C.P.E. Bach, Sonata for Flute or Violin and Continuo in G minor (BWV 1020), Adagio, 1.8MB MP3]

I was recently listening to C.P.E. Bach’s (or maybe J.S. Bach’s) Sonata in G minor for flute and continuo (BWV 1020), performed by Philadelphia-based Mimi Stillman on flute and Jeremy Gill on piano. Mimi’s playing was flawless, a near-miraculous realization of the coherence and feeling of the piece. But, in the Adagio, I found myself wishing for Gill to phrase his part more like Raphael Puyana did in the Maxence Larrieu 1994 Philips recording of this piece—more hesitantly, abstractly, resignèdly. Gill’s interpretation was technically fine, but the affect—the emotion—seemed a bit ‘flat’ to me.

What I was wishing for in the continuo part was something more like the Maxence Larrieu-Raphael Puyana phrasing——something more like the dour, contemplative phrasing that Glenn Gould used, for J.S. Bach’s Sarabande in D minor from French Suites No. 1 (BWV 812)—something that would’ve lent more of a dialogue effect to the interaction between the flute and the harpsichord. Each of us, I suppose, is entitled to his/her odd attachments to particular styles and interpretations.

Basically, I was wishing Gill had been applying more ‘semicolons’. A colon says, ‘Pay attention. This next bit I want to emphasize.’ But a semicolon is like politely clearing your throat. The semicolon says, ‘There’s still some caveat or paradox that I need to explain to you. There is a reservation I have about what I just said—something more you should know about.’ The semicolon speaks to the other performer(s), as well as to the listeners. What I wish is that we musicians added some new punctuation marks to our annotations of music—especially the semicolon.

A phrase that ends on a higher note than it began, followed by a rest (pause)—just as your voice does if you ask a question in Western languages—must almost certainly construed as a musical query (by Western players and listeners). Similarly, a phrase with a lower-pitched ending note gives the phrase a finality or semantic ‘terminal’ quality, just as when a question is answered—and is almost certain to be construed as declarative.

T here is a limit to the information any language can convey without introducing such devices as quotation marks that differentiate between what logicians call ‘language’ and ‘metalanguage’.”
— E.H. Gombrich, Art & Illusion.

Q uotation stands at the intersection of Iconography and Intertextuality.”
— Michael Bal, Quoting Caravaggio.

Paragraphs, sentences with primary and subordinate clauses, and so on—all of these have near-equivalents in music. Once, 150 years ago, Robert Schumann had a dream of a “higher poetic punctuation in music, liberated from the tyranny of the measure.” Well, of course beyond bar lines, we have:

Rests
Ligatures
Cadences
Commas (above the staves, to indicate phrasing; breath marks)
Fermatas
Pedaling marks (for keyboard instruments)
etc.

But, except for some new-music compositions, fewer and fewer chamber music pieces have ‘adequate’ annotation as to phrasing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not wishing for obsessive instructions via more punctuation markings. It’s just that I think composers (and publishers’ copy-editors and typographers) have tended to under-value the artistic value of the commas and other markings. Jennifer Brody, Associate Professor of English, African American Studies, and Performance Art, at Northwestern University in Chicago captures perfectly the aesthetic/expressive sense that I have in mind.

D isagreeing with e.e.cummings’s poem ‘since feeling is first’ [‘life’s not a paragraph / and death i think is no parenthesis’], I argue that punctuation can be thought of as a matter of life and death as well as embodiment.”
— Jennifer deVere Brody, Punctuation, p. 2.

Jennifer Brody’s nice new book recommends that punctuation need not be a handmaid or a chaperone but instead should be regarded as art in its own right. She does note that excessive punctuation can be a defect (stilted or overly affected or controlling). But liberal amounts of punctuation can be a valid element of performative style—extending the reader’s/performer’s power to interpret freely in broader ranges of expression [broader than an unannotated score may evoke]. Her treatment of ellipsis—which appears… to de-compose the page and speech [or musical utterances], and which leads to enigmatic or contra-dictory ends—is especially good. She uses Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ jazz idioms to reveal the blackness of Blackness and gender and racial dis/enfranchisement—encapsulated in phrasing marked by cadences and punctuation. Every bit of what Jennifer has to say about Ellison and jazz has direct correlates in discursive chamber music idioms.

A nd Death shall be no more;
Death, thou shalt die!”
— John Donne, Holy Sonnet No. 6, inept edition.

A nd death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die.”
— John Donne, Holy Sonnet No. 6, Gardner edition, quoted by Brody, p. 142, remarking on the effect of substituting a comma—how a semicolon is too theatrical in this context and, along with the line-break and exclamation point, ham-fistedly destroys Donne’s implied,subtle, aporetical meaning. Omitting the comma of address in the second phrase of the preferred Gardner version lends a hebephrenic inertia that’s consistent with Donne’s pervading fatalism and is also an elegant, coherent cadence.

Remember: National Punctuation Day is fast-approaching. More important than that, though, is the National Flute Association’s annual meeting, which this year is held in Kansas City at the Hyatt Regency Hotel. It begins today and runs through Sunday. There are several conference sessions and performances specifically devoted to the chamber music repertoire for flute. See you… there! (Full stop.)

I grew up with a lot of punctuation myself, so I can understand your nostalgia for parentheses,’ the dashing Sister Ka exclaimed to her dingbat friend across the periodic table.”
— Harryett Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary.

How wrong to think there are ‘exact’ semantic correspondences between music and text punctuation. This wacked example is from ‘The Editor’s Toolbox,’ by Leland B. Ryan, Buck Ryan, Michael O'Donnell, p. 142.