jwilzewske: novelty

Showing posts with label novelty. Show all posts

Sunday, December 7, 2008

Service, Legitimate Power, and Deep Novelty: Grażyna Bacewicz’s Instrumental Chamber Music

I do not agree with a statement that I hear quite often that if a composer discovered his own musical language he should adhere to this language and write [only] in his own style. Such an approach to this matter is completely foreign to me, it is identical with the resignation from progress, from development. Each work completed today instantly becomes the past. A progressive composer would not agree to repeat even himself/herself. He/she has to not only deepen and perfect the achievements, but also broaden them.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

I n terms of Polish music history, Bacewicz succeeded Szymanowski in the leadership role in her country, before relinquishing that position to Lutosławski and Penderecki. Her relative obscurity in the U.S. may be due to the conservative language of her music, reflecting her choice to conform to the political pressures of her times. Bacewicz’s music most often receives the adjectives ‘neoclassical’, ‘conservative’, and ‘influenced by Polish folk music’. Perhaps her apparent passivity was [in years past] of less interest to Americans than the rebelliousness and modernism of Lutosławski.”
— Ann McNamee, in MTO.

T here are rich textures and nuances that members of the Penderecki Quartet (PS4) are capable of. I was delighted to hear them perform recently and lucky to have a front-row seat, near enough that none of the delicacy was lost.

The Pendereckis’ repertoire covers the gamut from Baroque to new music and jazz but, founded as they were in Poland, they are particularly noteworthy for their accounts of Polish composers’ works. After the performance I went home and listened to their recording of Bacewicz’s String Quartet No. 3. Precise, disciplined: achieving a style that very much resembles the remarks that Grażyna Bacewicz herself made about her writing.

F or me, composing is like sculpting in stone, not like transmitting the sounds of imagination or fleeting inspiration. The majority of contemporary composers work as systematically as bureaucrats. If there is no inspiration, one produces at best ‘workmanly’ pieces; if there is inspiration, the creative process prevails. Discipline—strict discipline in composition—is essential to for me... I walk quite alone, because I mainly care about ‘form’ in my compositions. It is because I believe that, if you place things randomly or throw rocks on a pile, that pile will always collapse. So in music there must be rules of construction that will allow the work to stand on its feet. Naturally, the ‘laws’ or rules need not be old, God forbid. The music may be either simple in design or highly constructed—that’s unimportant; it depends on the language of a particular composer and the expressive task at hand—but [the music] must be well constructed.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

[50-sec clip, Penderecki Quartet, Bacewicz String Quartet No. 3, ‘Andante’, 1.6MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Penderecki Quartet, Bacewicz String Quartet No. 3, ‘Vivo’, 1.0MB MP3]

Some people have said the compositions of Bacewicz are ‘neoclassical’ and non-innovative. I wonder if such people ought not to sit in the front row and think again—or pick up the music and try to play it or analyze it, if they’re able. To deem someone’s work to be ‘non-innovative’ is an awfully serious charge, one that requires far more evidence than is usually offered. Anyhow, the chamber music of Grażyna Bacewicz does foster real experiences and deserves, I think, more frequent performance, especially in North America.

Returning home from the PS4 event, I listen to their account of Bacewicz—and the depth and surprise in this music make me wonder about the casual neglect that Bacewicz’s compositions have experienced in the U.S. Could it be that, ethnomusicologically, there has simply been a cultural ‘impedance mismatch’, in the sense that Bruno Nettl has discussed for 25+ years?

S peaking cross-culturally, what may be heard as ‘new’ composition in one culture might be regarded as simple variation of something already extant in another.”
— Bruno Nettl.

W hy is unprecedented ‘novelty’ a card that should trump all others, anyway? Particularly in the present time of economic upheaval, Grażyna Bacewicz’s music pleases and intrigues the ear in somewhat the way that ‘comfort food’ pleases and intrigues a stressed and anxious tummy; in somewhat the way that a well-crafted novel pleases and intrigues and nourishes us. ‘Rich, warm and widely voiced, and graceful,’ as the New York Times’s Allan Kozinn wrote some 18 years ago. Maybe it was just so at the time that Bacewicz composed these pieces…

I t is vital that the result has something transcendent. It is the ‘inner meaning’ [that matters]. While we [composers] may not aim [obsessively, compulsively] at inventing ‘original’ combinations of sounds, we are never complacent at having discovered a new sound effect. Our intention is, in any case, to create at least what would provide some kind of real experience for the listener—not just for ourselves.”
— Grażyna Bacewicz.

M aybe her results are primarily what we would call ‘neo-Classical’ or ‘neo-Romantic’; maybe her compositional methods are ‘conventional’. But to hear them honestly is to grasp that these are the works that she had in her; that she would have written, no matter what; that she needed to write.

It seems likely to me, in other words, that she was not always conforming herself to the norms set forth by state officials. ‘There is no spoon!’ That is to say, it seems likely that Grażyna stoically denied the external totalitarian, Matrix-oid dystopian spoonocracy that was incongenial to her expressive purposes, spawned a musical world of her own—complete, ab initio—and inhabited that flexible, rich, warm and widely voiced, graceful not-a-spoon world instead.

Yes, we’ve heard that in those days all Polish composers were ‘implicated’ in the actions of the government. We don’t doubt it. As Adrian Thomas has written, in 2000 and earlier, “There were no ‘exceptions’, no ‘saints’,” at least none among those who wanted to eat. In his first book and his journal articles Thomas provides extensive evidence as to how Bacewicz and her contemporaries bent their aesthetics to the requirements of then-prevailing socialist realism and the will of the state. Thomas carefully portrayed this state influence as pervasive—at least in his writings from 2000 and before—maintaining that all composers were hemmed in, all the time. I am in no position to dispute what has been well-argued and defended. I am not a revisionist.

But what if Bacewicz did not need to bend in order to have her works performed, in order to eat? What if her truths were just deep enough to keep her beyond the understanding of censors? What if Bacewicz’s complexities were far deeper than the available evidence and extant documents enable us to know. I will get a copy of Thomas’ new book (link below) to see what may be new in there. But—Think about it!—if one lives in dangerous times, there are certain things that one simply does not write down. One’s life story will, in such cases, necessarily be incomplete. But would you rather live your life fully-but-cryptically, or live less-fully-but-leaving-a-breadcrumbs-trail? It’s a pretty easy question to answer...

So it is possible. I think it is possible (but maybe unprovable) that Bacewicz’s preference for classical techniques and understated forms was a way she found to honor foundational personal and Polish values—the value placed in durability and centuries-long endurance, for example: finding the Dignity that inheres in the quotidian; finding the Ineffable in motherhood; finding the Transcendent through patience and a longer time-horizon than tomorrow—the necessity of doing so. The implications of her enigmatic and philosophical remarks in interviews and some of her correspondence (at USC library) do lead us to imagine Bacewicz to have had a spiritual view and esoteric motives that did not bow to any secular authority.

T here she was in that darkened hospital ward [in October, 1954], fighting for her life—and, though she had difficulty talking, she spent the time [of our visit in the hospital] joking and refusing to discuss the accident or the seriousness of her condition with us. Her thoughts were of a future far removed from the present.”
— Stefan Kisielewski, ‘Grażyna Bacewicz i jej czasy’ [Bacewicz’s Times / Biography], p. 34.

I was having a great time, but I kept feeling there was a conceptual poverty in the society I moved within… More and more I find I want to be living in a ‘Big Here’ and a ‘Long Now’ [with a time-horizon of dozens of generations, or millennia].”
— Brian Eno, quoted in Stewart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now: Time & Responsibility, p. 28.

The textures and harmonies in Bacewicz’s chamber music are … like … those of sacred choral music. We expect—and composers demand of themselves—originality and innovation in writing sacred music, sure. But the standards for innovation are different in that realm. And the time-scale is the time-scale of myth and ritual, not the flash snap-scale of new-new and fashion. Bacewicz—at least in her instrumental chamber music and vocal chamber music, which have formed the scope of my own attention—seems to have embodied an ethic of ‘service’, much like the ‘servant ethic’ that attends to sacred compositional practice in general.

This String Quartet No. 3 is not a self-referential piece by a self-absorbed ‘neo-classical’ composer—it is an artifact of private ritual, consecrated and holy? This String Quartet No. 3 is not a quartetly ‘dialogue’ among four virtuosic adult musicians—it is instead a 38 year-old mother’s essay on togetherness and concerted activity long forestalled and now finally arrived? And other of her later string quartets—are these not informed by a mother’s meditation on the transcendent experience of giving birth and raising her family? of loss and long recovery from illness? of her close encounter with mortality? on the nature of duty and devotion? on waiting for what may never, ever come?

To answer such questions/speculations, you will probably have to ask Grażyna’s daughter, the artist and poet Alina Biernacka, or her sister Wanda, the poet and journalist, who is this year 95. Probably the answer will not be found in Thomas’s or Shafer’s cautious scholarship. Judith Rosen’s writing on Bacewicz does, however, pursue more expansive and personal dimensions.

W szędzie dobrze, ale w domu najlepiej.
Everywhere’s fine, but it’s best at home.

Piękna miska jeść nie daje.
An elaborately decorated plate won’t feed anyone.

Nie wszystko się godzi, co wolno.
Not everything that’s allowed is agreeable.

Kto szybko daje, dwa razy daje.
She who gives quickly gives twice.

Czekaj, Matka, latka.
Wait for years, Mommy. Wait till the cows come home [if ever].”
— Polish aphorisms.

Born in 1909 in Łódź, Grażyna studied first with her father, Wincenty Bacewicz (Lithuanian: Vincas Bacevičius), who gave Grażyna her first piano and violin lessons. She attended Warsaw Conservatory, graduating in 1932 with degrees in violin performance and composition. She continued her education in Paris, with a Paderewski grant to attend the École Normale de Musique, studying there under Nadia Boulanger and Henri Touret. Later she studied with Hungarian violinist Carl Flesch. After WWII, she became a professor at the State Conservatory of Music in Łódź. She progressively shifted from concertizing towards composing, a transition that was partly propelled by prodigious awards and commissions. After she was seriously injured in a car accident in 1954 (fractured pelvis, plus head and neck injuries; age 45, when Alina was 12), Grażyna gave up her concert career and devoted herself entirely to composing. She died 15 years later in Warsaw at age 59, in 1969.

Quintet, for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn - 1932
Theme with Variations, for piano and violin - 1934
Trio, for oboe, violin and cello - 1935
String Quartet No.1 - 1938
String Quartet No. 2 - 1943
Suite, for 2 violins - 1943
Concertino, for violin and piano - 1945
Sonata da Camera, for violin and piano - 1945
Easy Pieces, for violin and piano - 1946
Capriccio, for violin and piano - 1946
String Quartet No.3 - 1947
Sonata No.1, for violin and piano - 1946
Polish Dance, for violin and Piano - 1948
Quartet, for 4 violins - 1949
Sonata No.3, for violin and piano - 1948
Sonata No.4, for violin and piano - 1949
Sonata No.5, for violin and piano - 1951
Oberek No.1, for violin and piano - 1949
Oberek No.2, for violin and piano -1951
Melody and Capriccio, for violin and piano - 1949
String Quartet No.4 - 1951
Mazovian Dance, for piano and violin - 1951
Piano Quintet No.1 - 1952
Lullaby, for piano and violin - 1952
Slavonic Dance, for piano and violin - 1952
Humoresque, for piano and violin - 1953
Polish Capriccio, for piano and clarinet - 1954
Partita, for piano and violin - 1955
String Quartet No.5 - 1955
Sonatina - for oboe and piano 1955
Sonata No.2, for violin and piano - 1958
String Quartet No.6 - 1960
Quartet, 4 for cellos - 1964
Incrustations, for horn and chamber ensemble - 1965
Trio, for oboe, harp and perciusion - 1965
Piano Quintet No.2 - 1965
String Quartet No.7 - 1965

The Penderecki String Quartet was formed in Poland in 1986 and has become one of the most celebrated chamber ensembles of their generation. Their recent schedule has included concerts in New York, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, Paris, Los Angeles, Atlanta, as well as appearances at international festivals in Poland, Lithuania, Italy, Venezuela, and China. PS4 performs repertoire ranging from Haydn to Zappa to more than 100 new works to date. They are now in their 16th year as Quartet-in-Residence at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada. PS4 appears extensively throughout Canada, regularly performing at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival, Festival of the Sound, Festival Vancouver, and Music Toronto. PS4 collaborates regularly with un-‘neo-Classical’ artists such as Martin Beaver, Atar Arad, Antonio Lysy, Luba Dubinsky, Jeremy Menuhin, James Campbell, radical jazz saxophonist Jane Bunnett, the ‘un-tame’ pipa artist Ching Wong, choreographer David Earle, New York ‘illbient’ hip-hop artist DJ Spooky, and actor Colin Fox. The PSQ members clearly find depth in Grażyna Bacewicz’s string quartets. Maybe you do, too.

Jeremy Bell, violin
Simon Fryer, cello
Jerzy Kaplanek, violin
Christine Vlajk, viola

Saturday, November 15, 2008

BMOP: Always Lots New to Say

Martin Boykan, Robert Erikson, Elliott Schwartz, Ken Ueno

I think of the concerto in terms of a musical narrative … [unfolding] as a dialogue between the individual (represented by the solo) and the crowd.”
— Martin Boykan, notes for Concerto for Violin & Orchestra, 2003.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project BMOP presented a concert of new string concertos (plus Schoenberg’s 1933 concerto for string quartet and orchestra) last night at Jordan Hall in Boston, conducted by BMOP Artistic Director Gil Rose.

Martin Boykan: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Curtis Macomber, violin)
Robert Erickson: Fantasy for Cello and Orchestra (Rafael Popper-Keizer, cello)
Elliott Schwartz: Chamber Concerto VI: Mr. Jefferson (Charles Dimmick, violin)
Ken Ueno: Talus, Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (Wendy Richman, viola)
Arnold Schoenberg: Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra

This exciting program reaffirmed that the concerto continues to thrive as an expressive idiom even today. These ingenious composers continue to find new ways to match the timbre and rhythmic and melodic capabilities of a solo instrument to the sonorities of an orchestra. The virtuosity of a concerto soloist always fascinates us; our appetite for soloists is boundless.

But it’s de rigeur in western cultures to focus on the soloist. What about the orchestra (vis à vis the Boykan blockquote above), the ‘society’ in which the soloist appears?

T here’s nothing wrong with interpreting concerto form socially. That’s not too subversive, interpreting this music in the context of these composers’ social views … Schwartz’s postmodernism; Erikson’s veganism; the inconstancy of Schoenberg’s quantum Judaism and regard for apocalypse; Boykan’s fascination with the textuality and temporality of everything; Ueno’s cheerful anarchism that considers anarchy as a ‘greenfield enterprise’.

Ueno says “Should justice and love not be observed also toward a stranger? The answer is that this, too, is according to a ‘just’ principle of public order, that regular citizens and subscribers are honored beyond outsiders and strangers, lest everything be uniform and ridiculously equal.” Honor the concerto soloist, then, but not in a topsy-turvy way that does injustice to ‘regular-anybody’ else.

There are indications in the music served up last night that each of these composers considers (and that the BMOP considers, as a matter consequent upon its charter and founding principles) the figuration of the orchestra in Ueno-ian conditional-egalitarian terms. (The Schwartz piece, explicitly ‘Jeffersonian’, in fact.) Their conceptions of the orchestra do not have to be understood as ‘representational art’—as literal depictions of contemporary society. Instead think of it this way: our social structures and story-telling processes come from certain habits of thinking, our predispositions, our political and moral stances. These habits and social processes and their consequences are (partly) what the composers—what these concertos—reveal.

I don’t imagine that these composers (or BMOP as sponsor-provocateur) advocate or foresee ‘revolutionary’ action against contemporary social hierarchies any more than Bach anticipated or agitated for revolutionary social justice with his concertos in Leipzig. These concertos are not tame, but they are accessible, listenable. But there can be little doubt that in last night’s concert Ueno, Schwartz, Erikson, Boykan, and Schoenberg ‘reminded’ the listeners and performers—of lively issues in controversial/revolutionary relations between the individual (‘soloist’; or, in Schoenberg’s case, ‘quartet’) and the society (orchestra) as a whole.

T he Ueno piece, for example, has toward the end of it a beautiful section where the viola part becomes immersed in the orchestral waves, and then the texture of the orchestra parts becomes progressively sparser until the solo viola once again emerges, pure and whole. This ‘restoration’ was elegant and convincing—indicating the resilience of the traumatized individual, so long as there is an effective social support network in operation, plus a modicum of good luck and good protoplasm that’s able to heal.

Reminded whom? These engaging concertos are works designed mostly for fellow new-musickers. Not historiographic time-capsules addressed to unknown future generations, nor narratives for audiences desiring to be told comfortable musical stories they already know oh so well, nor urgent pleas put in bottles and set afloat on distant seas against the improbable chance of discovery and rescue by somebody, anybody. No, these concertos are manifestos for the parties pro-tem, powerful incantations for new congregants already here.

One tendency defining the American works could, I think, be fairly labeled ‘classicism’. The ‘turn’ to traditional concerto form is a kind of classicism, and these works do each display a strong retrospective awareness, an historical consciousness. But they display this as Schoenberg did, believing in “Art as a profound instrument of ethical transportation and moral transformation”: we can_has futures that are really new, and we can go places really different from the past.

Now in its 13^th year, BMOP provides a valued public service by aiding and abetting new, notorious, transportable and non-transportable things. What a wonderful start to the new 2008-2009 season! Bravo!

The next BMOP event is a Club Concert on 09-DEC-2008 (Tuesday, 19:00) at the Moonshine Room at Club Cafe Bistro & Lounge, 209 Columbus Ave, in Boston.

I n the spring of 2006, my friend Wendy Richman fell off the stage at MassMoCA during rehearsals for a David Lang opera, ‘Anatomy Theater’, and broke her ankle (the talus, tibia and fibula bones). [The opening of the concerto begins in a most surprising way (which I will not divulge here), before Wendy addresses her viola with the bow.] When Wendy sent around a jpg of her foot x-ray [by email to her friends], the horizontal lines of the bolts in her ankle immediately suggested harmonic possibilities to me. Some of the harmonies in this piece are, in fact, generated from spectral analysis that I did of the digitized x-ray. Seeing Wendy’s courage as she worked to recover from this severe injury reminded me of my mother’s courage during her recovery after tearing three ligaments in her knee from a skiing accident (I deferred a semester of college to take care of her during that time). My mother was determined go back and ski down the same hill in Park City where she was injured and accomplished this feat in two years’ time. A spectrogram that I made from the jpg of Wendy’s ankle x-ray is here:”
— Ken Ueno, interview with David Bruce, CompositionToday.com, 29-OCT-2008.

Ken Ueno’s digital spectrogram of digitized x-ray of Wendy Richman’s ankle, ca. 2006, the basis for Ueno’s composition ‘Talus’

A major focus of my work has been trying to reconcile the grammatological distance between ‘transportable’ and ‘non-transportable’ sounds. Transportable sounds are those elements that usually comprise the grammar of western music: rhythm, melody, and harmony. Non-transportable sounds are those sounds that have to be produced on a specific instrument in a specific way, which, in the West, have often been labeled as noise. Takemitsu’s compositions have helped to convince the world of the validity of non-transportable sounds, in that they are beautiful and worth listening to ... silence as expressive of the Japanese aesthetic principle of ‘ma’... I hope to have prepared the listener to focus on a [really] wide rubric of timbres.”
— Ken Ueno, interview with Brian Sacawa, 2005.

T he history of music from Haydn to Mahler, via Beethoven and Wagner, was a narrative of obfuscation. The logical conclusion to all this was Schoenberg’s: harmonic form ceases to function, and the diatonic scale is no longer a reliable reference point. Each note is as important as the others, and this ideal is ensured by prohibiting the resounding of a pitch until its eleven colleagues have been allowed to speak. The Galileis, père and fils, are circumscribed: we’re out of orbit, we’ve escaped the pull of tonal gravity, we’re in the floating, directionless heaven of Schoenberg’s beloved Swedenborg. That was in 1908. He had converted to Lutheranism ten years before. He fled Christianity and returned to Judaism in 1933, when he composed the peculiar ‘Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra’— the same year as he fled Berlin for Paris and, finally, Los Angeles.”
— Joshua Cody, ‘10 + 5 = Gott’: Die Macht der Zeichen, 2004.

T he thesis of ‘violin in the age of shopping’ is that musical— ] content as a recognizable idea has anymore ceased to exist because all ‘the content’ has become interchangeable: it doesn’t matter what is going on, provided there is evidence that something is going on—a merely quantitative world of mass copies and fakes. All music—whatever its origin, status or supposed function—would now exist in a digital ‘dreamtime’ that the originators of ‘muzak’ could never have imagined.”
— Jon Rose, Violin in the Age of Shopping.