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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.

Monday, July 16, 2007

The Open-Ended ‘Present’: Mahler’s Piano Quartet in A Minor

I deology seems to pop up precisely when we attempt to avoid it, while it fails to appear where one would clearly expect it to dwell.”
— Slavoj Žižek, in Mapping Ideology, 1994, p. 4.

DSM: This Quartet was written in 1876, when Mahler was around 16 years old . . . when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatory. It was written in A minor, a key Mahler believed symbolized the ‘unconscious anticipation of things to come.’ The melancholy end of the movement is clairvoyant—premonitory of sad things ahead for Mahler, the death of his children, sad things ahead for his country, for Europe, and the world. This quartet is the only chamber piece known to be composed by Mahler. And, as you know, it’s incomplete; only the first movement was finished.

CMT: There’s an intensification of the emotion in this Piano Quartet—an increase in the magnitude of what Žižek would call ‘disturbances of the real.’ The ‘real’ manifests itself in this Piano Quartet as an innocuous cadence whose presence becomes uncanny only when the cadence keeps recurring. Its constant presence disrupts the other motifs and symbolisms, and serves as a continual reminder that these realities are only constructions. The rendering of the ‘real’ seeps into the core of the Quartet, through the ‘leaping’ motif (in the left hand of the piano in this snippet):

which irrupts on the surface again and again, setting into motion the final passage which becomes a materialization of a pure, singular drive. What was abstract in the opening becomes pernicious and concrete motive by the end—a psychological ‘fixation.’ Yes, it’s a ‘fixation,’ monotonously dominating the Quartet. This motive, an empty signifier, represents the kernel upon which Mahler’s modern subject’s reality is grounded. Irruptions of the ‘real’ become an pervasive feature in Mahler’s musical discourse in this Quartet, to the exclusion of most everything else.

DSM: This Quartet may have been written in his young student days, but it isn’t ‘juvenilia.’ It does show some emulation of Dvorak, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. It has a dark consonance that grows denser toward the end. Mahler’s transitions into remote keys occur unexpectedly. This lends a sense of vulnerability and uncertainty to the piece. Uneasiness.

CMT: Look at this tenuto combined with a marcato—a ‘portato’—intermediate note-lengths, detached but not staccato. Accentuated one way or another, more détaché than martelé—it’s played on one bow stroke, but each note is gently articulated, used when a feeling of “carry” from one note to the next is needed. The portati consume the bow—moving from the bow tip back up to the frog, say—running out of time, running out of life. This is emotional writing (violin staff in snippet below).

DSM: The melodic elements sink deeper and deeper into the bass register until all energy is spent and only a quiet malignant evocation of the minor third of A minor is left. Grim pathos here!

CMT: To a certain extent, the Quartet finds its own means of managing and containing the ruptures of the ‘real’ within its constructed musical universe. But with the increase in the size of the ruptures, the ‘real’ affects the Quartet on an more and more ‘pathological’ level. The Quartet’s means of integrating the little piece of the real into the constructed universe is not so pathological. But by the middle of the movement, we have a recapitulation for the sonata form—a kind of ‘payment of symbolic debt’ that brings an end to the pure emotional ‘drive.’ By the end, the emotional devastation wrought by the ‘real’ in this Quartet is catastrophic. The piano’s last two chords are a poignant fatalism. All other meaning has been obliterated by the end of the movement, leaving only an empty husk. In a sense, the Quartet documents an almost complete destruction of the musical universe.

DSM: As such, its drama feels a bit like Barber’s Adagio. But, your qualifier ‘almost’ is important: history is not closed here with those last two piano chords. What was to be a suicide note, a work commemorating something or someone in memoriam, has failed: in the final chords we find that the work is a testament to the author’s, and to humanity’s, resilience and ability to survive.

CMT: Ultimately, the end of the Quartet proves the continued existence of the Quartet’s subjects—the composer; the performers; the listeners—by showing that the subject still remains, despite all that’s happened. So, while the Quartet argues convincingly that catastrophes definitely do happen, the catastrophes don’t bring about a complete end. In Lacanian psychoanalysis no act is ever totally complete: something always remains. For Žižek, there’s always a survivor or survivors, however damaged they may be. As the Quartet pushes towards its final notes, a conclusive End is an impossibility. The End doesn’t come. The exhausted survivors are left to carry on.

DSM: In Lacanian terminology, the survivors of the apocalypse represent the “the excess that cannot be accounted for by any symbolic idealization”—embodiments of the ‘real.’ With the apocalypse, the exhausted survivors, having survived The End, become representatives of a rendering of the ‘real’—they are the ‘ruptures’ in this symbolic reality.

CMT: The devastation pushes Mahler’s apocalyptic narrative to its limit, as the Quartet’s narrative concludes with a catastrophic act. To continue the intensification process of the apocalyptic narrative is, I think, not possible. Maybe that’s why Mahler never wrote other Piano Quartets: how does one write after the apocalypse? How does one compose a sequel to an ‘end’ that does not bring The End?

DSM: Along with the narrative break, there’s also a dissolving of the barrier of the distance created by the apocalyptic trajectory of this Piano Quartet, and a humanizing of the pathological irruptions of the ‘real.’

CMT: I think so. And, in his book, Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin differentiates between the stylized, ‘absolute’ past of the epic and the open-ended, solvent-like ‘emergent’ or continuing reality found in the novel. An ‘epic’ is set in a past that is so distant that the ‘gap’ created is unbreachable. It is a place where everything is “absolute and complete…everything is finished, already over.” It’s a place of unwavering protagonists and narrative trajectories that never divert from the path. The beginnings of epics are “idealized” or “brightened” and the endings are “darkened.”

DSM: On the other hand, ‘novels’—or in this case, novelistic musical compositions—don’t speak to a remote experience but instead address current reality. Epics have one language, an omniscient voice that knows and tells all. In the novel there are multiple languages, a variety of voices caught in the act of development. In short, the epic is a single-voiced discourse; the novel a multi-vocal discourse. Where the epic prophesies, the novel predicts; while the epic must end in death, the novel depicts “a life process that is imperishable and forever renewing itself, forever contemporary;” the epic is closed and complete, while the novel contains “an unrealized surplus of humanness.”

CMT: Following Bakhtin we can think of this Mahler Piano Quartet as a narrative trajectory of an epic form. Its opening begins with stylized innocence, referring to an absolute past. In the middle of the piece there’s a narrowing of focus to the singular (epic) story where no provision is made for varied voices or points of view. The epic distance is solidified at the end of the Quartet as the world of the past becomes completely inaccessible. At the end there is the violin cadenza—a “canonizing of events” that leads up to the catastrophe or apocalypse.

DSM: But, if we continue following Bakhtin, a novel has discursive features that are capable of seeping into other genres, including the epic. What happens at the end of the Quartet is not the end of history but, to use Derrida’s words, “the end of a certain concept of history,” in this case the epic history of the apocalypse. Mahler’s 16 year-old premonition is of modernity itself. That’s what I hear in this!

CMT: So we have a ‘novelization’ of the Quartet’s discourse when a single voice no longer speaks monologically from an absolute, epic past, but instead multiple voices now sound from current reality—life in the aftermath of the apocalypse. The process follows Attali’s notion of innovative music, leading to “a…conception of history…that is open, unstable.”

DSM: The Quartet strikes me as a searing elegy, a dirge where “death chords” are interrupted by laments equal in their emotional force. The individualistic utterances that are set apart from the surrounding music (both physically and emotionally) have their lyrical and harmonic beauty effaced by the irruptions. The ending passage opens the way for the diffuse finale that represents an unfinished, still-evolving contemporary reality.

CMT: The finale is the longest section in the Quartet, and in it material from earlier movements returns cyclically. The increase in tempo over the five movements combined with the cyclic return of themes, the intensity and sheer length of the finale create an end-oriented trajectory for the work culminating in the final movement that is an exhausting tour de force. The movement is a sonata form in which every section has developmental tendencies and the recapitulation returns themes not only from earlier in the movement, but also the cyclic returns.

DSM: Well, ‘long’ is a relative term. Melissa Rose and her fellow ensemble members who performed yesterday in Kansas City performed this Quartet in 9 minutes and 20 seconds. By contrast, Christoph Eschenbach’s performance with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra last year was 13 minutes. Various other artists’ performances of this Quartet are also 12 to 13 minutes long. So it was a tremendous disappointment to hear Rose compress this piece by more than 30% and, in so doing, extinguish the portato and the emotional drama. The ‘arc’ of the recurrences lacked dignity, and the existential impact that the piece should have was blunted by this interpretation. The last two chords became no more than appendages. Regrettably, it retained nothing at all of the depth that Eschenbach projects:

[30-sec clip, Eschenbach, 2.6MB MP3]

T he dignity of Mahler’s music lies in the fact that it can be understood and understands itself, but eludes the hand that would grasp what has been understood.”
— Theodor Adorno

H ow can an artist expect that what he has felt intuitively should be perfectly understood by other people, since he himself feels in the presence of his work—if it is genuine art—that he is faced by a riddle about which he too may have illusions?”
— Richard Wagner, letter dated 25-JAN-1854, to August Roeckel