I wrote a Prelude and Fugue without thinking it would be part of a collection. Then gradually the idea [for composing a set of Etudes] came to me, because I was inspired by the Twelve Etudes in the Minor Keys by [the French composer] Alkan. I was playing a lot of [his pieces] at the time. But [while these Etudes were composed incrementally, over 25 years beginning in 1986] the ‘cycle’ didn’t really take shape until just a little while ago... When I had about nine of them finished, that’s when I got a letter out of the blue from C.F. Peters asking whether they could publish my Etudes. So that was really an incentive to finish the series.” — Marc-André Hamelin, interview with Topher Levin.
M arc- André Hamelin’s Harriman-Jewell Series recital on Saturday evening explored the relation of the individual to ‘place’—impressions and memories of place and identity.
Berg - Piano Sonata, Op. 1
Liszt - Piano Sonata in B minor
Debussy - Préludes, Book 2 (excerpts): La puerta del vino, Les fées sont d’exquises danseuses, Les tierces alternées, Feux d’artifice
Hamelin - Twelve Études In All The Minor Keys (excerpts): Études 2, 7, 8, 11, and 12
H aving never heard them before, the 13-minute Berg Sonata and the 24-minutes of excerpts from Hamelin’s ‘12 Études in All the Minor Keys’ were, for me, the highlights of the performance.
T he 12 Études are like a time-lapse self-portrait of Hamelin as a person and as a musician. Each person’s identity is actively created: of that there is no doubt. Impressions of new experiences and memories of experiences past engage us on a lifelong, daily basis as each of us constructs our [multiple] identities, multiple personae. The dimensions explored in these Études include the body [including the left-hand Étude, No. 7], the neighborhood and community and nation, Time (the epoch in which you live or the person remembered lived), and our mobility between settings (émigréness)—some settings that we ‘own’ or belong to; other ones that are not ours, or that we are displaced from against our wishes, or that we out-live—how these all shape, and are shaped by, people’s identities.
U nlike some composers, I don’t regard writing for one hand as an opportunity to display pianistic proficiency. Instead, I consider it a fascinating compositional constraint. There is not much point in composing for one hand unless one tries to make the textures as rich as possible, and it is a special delight to make one hand sound like two.” — Marc-André Hamelin, program notes.
T hese Études argue that sense-of-place and belonging are the result of our imagination as individuals and as families, communities, societies... that our identities are actively constructed over time, not passively received. Our narratives of place-situated belonging and identity are time-sensitive, context-sensitive. They mutate and evolve. They are a product of the things that we hold dear, fear, obsess over, remember; they are a product of where and with whom we spend most of our time. Hamelin is very modest about the happenstantial way in which the Études came to be the way they are—asserting that they merely or mostly accumulated over time; that they were never envisioned as a collection of 12 and were never meant to be autobiographical. And yet a great part of their beauty, I think, is that they are this 25-year pianistic portrait of his own personal Canadian narrative.
T hat they are all in minor keys is, I hope, not a consequence of his living in Boston!
H amelin’s encore, an obscure Prelude by Leonid Sabaneyev (1881–1968), was a captivating little character piece, mysterious, inviting, poignant, jewel-like... a by-now-nostalgic example of Soviet modernism embodying the will of the individual rather than the Party. Self-actualization of each comrade, is what it sounds like. Contemplate, if you will, the utopian dream of the national unity of free-spirit comrades creating, producing, acting in concert, is what it seems to suggest. This Prelude made me think, among other things, of how ungodly far humanity has come (regressed?) in 100 years! The things that, to many, once seemed reachable, in one’s own country! It feels like we are all émigrés now...
T he ineffable qualities of instrumental music meant that the authorities continued to regard music as a less-than-critical ideological arena.” — Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution, p. 243.
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, ‘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.
T he standard three-work structure of most quartet recitals normally limits the performance of contemporary pieces to just one quartet. In our programming of contemporary Chinese-American works, we have decided to include shorter works. This enables our audiences to sample a broader range of living Chinese-American composers in a single concert, in the same way that the style of eating Chinese food called ‘dim sum’ involves a wide variety of bite-sized delicacies.” — Phillip Ying.
The CD, ‘Dim Sum’, released on Telarc by the Ying String Quartet earlier this year is a wonderful collection of new Chinese-American chamber music miniatures.
The disc has twelve tracks:
Zhou Long: Song of the Ch'in
Chen Yi: Shuo
Bright Sheng: Silent Temple II; Silent Temple IV
Ge Gan-ru: Fu
Vivian Fung: Pizzicato for String Quartet
Lei Liang: Gobi Gloria
Chou Wen-chung: Leggeriezza; Larghetto nostalgico
Tan Dun: Drum and Gong; Cloudiness; Red Sona
Of these, ‘Song of the Ch'in’ is by far my favorite. Song of the Ch'in employs string quartet to emulate the seven-stringed Ch'in. As such, the four voices are immersed in a sort of intimate collectivism, a ‘post-deconstructionist’ realism, rather than conventional quartet-like inter-part dialogues. The effect is not symphonically ‘sectional’ as much as cohesive or unified; expressing ‘interior’ views of a collective voice consisting of the four individual voices that comprise the one collective ‘self’. Through its 8’30’’ length, it’s predominantly contemplative and meditative, but its middle section does have louder dynamics and a more emphatic pulse and deconstructionist parrying among the parts, still with a pervading sense of unity and interiority.
Zhou Long, born in Beijing in 1953, is renowned for pioneering the fusion of idiomatic sounds and techniques of traditional Chinese music to modern Western instruments and ensembles. Dr. Zhou’s compositions span many different genres, from solo instrumental and chamber ensemble pieces, to orchestral works. His orchestrations combine traditional Chinese instruments with western instrumentation. In 2003 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A United States citizen since 1999, Zhou Long is married to composer-violinist Chen Yi. Both are faculty members at the UMKC Conservatory.
The Ch'in (guqin) has naturally quiet dynamics. It has a range of about four octaves, with its lowest pitch two octaves below middle C, the same as the lowest note on the cello’s open C string. Sounds are produced by plucking open strings, stopped strings, and harmonics.
Here’s the opening section:
[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Zhou Long, Song of the Ch'in, 1.4MB MP3]
And another clip here, at the end of the piece:
[50-sec clip, Ying Quartet, Zhou Long, Song of the Ch'in, 1.4MB MP3]
The gliss, pizzicato and snap pizzicato, tremolando, battuto, and other effects in the Zhou Long piece are beautiful and effective. Glisses on ch'in evoke cello effects in the low register with plenty of harmonics up in to the nether regions of the violin’s range. But here, in the Ying Quartet’s performance, violinistic technic is not some pale emulation of ch'in coloration and textures; the quartet’s execution instead conveys a consistent, unquestionable naturalness. The Yings are entirely at-home and at-ease in the material they are performing. They inhabit the pieces convincingly—they hungrily appropriate them and intently express the ‘interiority’ of the perspective they share in ensemble, from inside the work. This excellent recording must become an icon for how this can be done—an example that others can follow.
The pieces on this CD are innovative in testing the extent to which the string quartet idiom is malleable. With the long history and extensive literature that exists for it, string quartet orchestration does come with more expectations or interpretive ‘baggage’ than most other forms.
But these composers’ pieces all succeed as honest, fresh and forthright expressions, and the Yings perform them without a ‘safety net’. What I mean to say is that it is not so much an embodiment of programming bravery as a thorough-going demonstration of genuine, honest emotion. And an invitation to wonderment—honest wonderment at the world and the beauty that’s in it—this is vividly conveyed, especially in the Zhou piece. Through music, Zhou shows that the world is intelligible—not benevolent or hostile or necessarily value-laden, or conclusory, or deistic; but intelligible and meaning-ful—yet there arises the ineffable, eternal question how this could be so.
G ifting appropriation is the positive dimension of the event, in which the thing itself always escapes [‘La chose même se dérobe toujours’], leaving in its wake, behind itself (and, hence, around us) a trail of what might constitute our environing world. This fugal movement, the flight of the thing itself, could be interpreted, in the first place, as its flight from itself (‘La chose’ flees from ‘le même’; it subtracts itself from its sameness, self-coincidence, or identity with itself) and, equally, as an instant of the thing’s self-appropriation and self-realization. More interestingly still, when it is most itself in the interior unfolding of its otherness and différance.” — Michael Marder, Derrida and Différance of the Real.
This is just one piece on this beautiful CD, the Zhou Long ch'in piece. It is transcendent and accessible, and in the Yings’ hands it does these amazing, lasting, beautiful things. That’s something that any audience—even an unprepared one—can understand and enjoy and find meaningful.
Like a dim sum meal, I recommend that you savor each piece, with a gap in between. The textures and styles and meanings of these 12 tracks are widely varied, and proceeding through them pell mell would be the wrong thing to do. Any of these would make a congenial element of a chamber music concert program. I hope that more quartets choose to incorporate these into their performance repertoire.
I no longer know at all how one composes. One instead ‘creates’ [and creates, and re-creates].” — Johannes Brahms, 1855, quoted in New Groves Dictionary of Music And Musicians, 2e, Vol. 4, p. 181, Macmillan, 2001.
B rahms could be such a good player, but he will not stop his incessant composing [and revising].” — Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel, 1852, quoted in Hofmann (in Musgrave), p. 11.
Stanislav Ioudenitch (piano), Martin Storey (cello), and Ben Sayevich (violin) delivered a vibrant performance of Brahms’s ‘Piano Trio No. 1 in B’ (Op. 8, 1854 and 1891) on Friday evening in Kansas City. The motivations of the revisions that Brahms made are still the subject of vigorous scholarly debate. But even for an amateur like me, there are nuances in the 1854 verson that evoke a youthful stance, fascinating for the directness of the composer’s ‘voice’.
Such a piece, well played, imposes special demands on the performers, in terms of interpretation and recreating this voice. Ioudenitch, Storey, and Sayevich succeeded brilliantly in enabling the ambiguities in the music to come through and linger in the air and in our minds.
It seems to me that the point of revisions lies in ‘metaphoric indirection’——for the composer surely, but also for the performers and us listeners. The subjectivity in the 1854 version is ‘stubborn’——it valorizes experience, a succession of experiences. The 21 year-old Brahms did not at the time of composing Op. 8 have such a long experience, and the accretion of each experience could not help but carry more significance than a comparable experience late in life. The drama that we hear in Op. 8 is, I think, not so much that of a young Brahms finding his ‘chops’, but rather the urgency and fascination that someone who is 21 experiences in each day. Or maybe we are hearing in Op. 8 a sublimated expression of his love-life, or lack thereof?
F or all the wealth of good reasons for loving differently, loving better, loving despite not being in love, etc., a stubborn voice is raised which lasts a little longer: the voice of the Intractable Lover.” — Roland Barthes, Lover’s Discourse, 1979, p. 22.
Roger Moseley, Nick Cook, and others have compared the 1854 and 1891 versions of Op. 8, to see how musical allusions in the piece revealed Brahms’s attitudes to critics, friends, other composers. Allusions to the music of other composers are heard in the 1984 version, but the 1891 version expunged the allusive material. And in successive drafts and sketches and revisions the political aspects of the Trio became subdued.
T here is nothing innocuous left. The little pleasures, expressions of life that seemed exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have an element of defiance, of callous refusal to see, but directly serve their diametrical opposite ... Mistrust is called for in the face of all spontaneity, impetuosity, all letting oneself go, for it implies pliancy towards the superior might of the existent ... The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal. No thought is immune against communication, and to utter it in the wrong place and in wrong agreement is enough to undermine its truth.” — Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 25.
So Brahms was not satisfied with the 1854 version. Possibly this derived from his conflictedness over ‘absolute music’ versus ‘Zukunftsmusik’ (“future music”), and his conflictedness over his own expectations for himself as a composer. It would be good to go and read his letters from 1853 and 1854 to see what light they shed, regarding his state of mind ...
Interestingly, Moseley comments on parallels in surgical innovations by Brahms’s friend and musical ally, Theodor Billroth. According to Moseley, both Brahms and Billroth were “engaged with the removal of ‘foreign bodies’ in order to preserve organic integrity” or improve the function and its coherence/reliability/authenticity. This observation will delight musician-physicians who have not previously known of the Brahms-Billroth connection. Iatrogenic (composerly) musical bezoars as the indication for the repeated surgeries on Op. 8!
There is persistent linguistic playfulness in this Piano Trio that distinctively resists any totalization or summation of meaning. In this respect, I feel it resembles some science fiction texts that are similarly distinctive for their discontinuous sign-functions and progressive dislocations of the author and the reader, a persistent play of reorientation and inference. Ultimately, the sci-fi composer/reader/player/listener wonders about her/his emplacement, and feels a tenuousness arising from the need to continually, actively ‘construct’ the text in the process of reading/playing/hearing it. Ioudenitch’s, Sayevich’s, and Storey’s account of Op. 8 reminds me of this—an allusion to musical ideas of others and events whose urgency is exaggerated by youth; a spontaneous youthful ‘non-terminal’ identity; and a hunger for what comes next. Brahms: This is me! Is this me, really? This is my place! Is this my place, really? Where am I?
Emplacement and displacement: just as constructing ‘landscape’ is how we turn terrain into territory and territory into something knowable and then known, so emplacement is how we figure out the specifics of selfhood and human nature in a musical ‘landscape’. This is, I think, what Brahms was doing (and re-doing)——and what Ioudenitch, Sayevich, and Storey accomplished in their performance, in their brilliant ‘meta-revision’ of Op. 8: Successive revised, tenuous, intimate emplacements, leading finally to the Allegro molto agitato and a standing ovation.
