H istory is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history’s bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and cognition—The Blackout—as a condition that plagues history, and is particularly problematic in an era of mass media, in which memory is increasingly disembodied and virtualized, undermined by [what might be called] a ‘Generalized Media Disorder’. Technologies of media and war are creating a condition in which the virtual world is displacing the ethical world. The Blackout is a space of memory and thinking that collapses with Catastrophe and falls into a stupor. Humanity has been nearly extinguished by the tremendous violence it has enacted, pushing philosophy, language and ethics to their limits.” — BLACKOUT, jacket blurb.
A nd music can be both a political act and powerful antidote to the collapse of social memory and the erosion of community... the withdrawal into passive, vegetative isolation, each at home, continually surfing Netflix, surfing the web.
McIntire – ‘Revenants’ (electroacoustic recording, live percussion, 20-min)
T he combination of the video imagery and the live and the electroacoustic music was imaginative and highly listenable and watchable. Joan Grossman’s video was elegant... with a simple beauty that leveraged symmetries across the vertical and/or horizontal axes in the center of the 8 x 6-meter projection screen in Epperson Auditorium. The video involved replication and reflection of imagery in kaleidoscope fashion, at times with superimposed additional imagery blended into the central part of the visual field.
U nlike certain computer music / media compositions where the composer-artists ‘try too hard’ or succumb to temptation and use too many of the diverse array of techniques and patches available to them (resulting in sensory overload for the audience, hindering our grasping a memorable meaning or narrative arc), McIntire and Grossman achieved a satisfying, deliciously cohesive, coherent effect.
P ercussionists Jennifer Wagner and Christopher Howard performed at percussion tables on the right- and left-hand sides of the auditorium, while the recorded electroacoustic tracks were played through Mackie SRS 450® powered monitors and SRS 1500® subwoofer at the front of house. Seated as I was front-and-center, the antiphonal bells and gongs and cymbals, and glass wine goblets bowed across their rims with violin bows, and hammered and brushed brass bowls, and Equilibrium® tuned-box slit-drums, and Daisy® BBs rolling on the underside of a tom-tom drum head—all of this was wonderfully ‘immersive’ with the house lights dimmed. Great sibilance of the live percussion sounds, creating a rich contrast to the electronically-filtered and distorted sampled-voice and other sound content in the digital-recording tracks. [The ‘live’ elements might be better still if yet another pair of percussionists were added, positioning them toward the rear of the auditorium/performancespace so that the entire audience could experience the intense immersive effects that we did at the front.]
T he electroacoustic recording and reproduction/sound-reinforcement EQ was expertly done by McIntire. Both of the pieces have a low-pitch ‘red-spectrum’ rumble—almost boilerroom-like, or intrauterine—that imparts a subtle but pervasive ‘interiority’ to the music, very chesty, very warm.
G etting the pre-recorded digital tracks to ‘sit’ well amongst live performers relies on the tracks having an even level, a congenial tonal and level balance, and the right reverberant ambience. McIntire does this superbly, gracefully executing minor adjustments at the workstation control-surface in response to moment-to-moment performance decisions made by Wagner and Howard. Compressor and gain automation settings were spot-on, so that the percussion sounds sat happily in-track, with none of the live percussion effects sounding too loud or too quiet or clashing with the pre-recorded sonic material and synthesizer tracks.
F or some of the voice content (e.g., DECtalk Hawking-esque recitations of NOAA National Weather Service Marine Forecasts; alpha-bravo-charlie...romeo-sierra-tango...zulu), McIntire adds density to the voice sample by upping the compression ratio to maybe around 6:1 or 8:1 and then adjusts the threshold to a couple of dB on average-level parts. This means quieter sections are left alone and anything louder is jumped-on hard, bringing it closer to the average level. The coherence or cohesiveness of these two compositions, each with its volume level and acoustic complexity ascending to a climax about two-thirds of the way through and then tapering to a quiet conclusion, is nicely enhanced by this approach.
M cIntire’s EQ and engineering are commendable as noted above, and he does not go overboard on special effects. His EQ cuts are made over quite narrow bands, and his boosting is gentle and wide. McIntire gently applies boosts in the 50-300Hz band to add warmth. He applies cuts in the 1 KHz band, to deemphasize nasal vocal sounds, and adds generous ‘presence’ with boosts between 4 KHz and 8 KHz. The magical sense of Nature and air and space involves a wide boost applied between 12 KHz and 20 KHz, and that was really beautiful up-front, seated in Row #1. With these two compositions that explore the interplay between Nature and Technology, between humankind and other species—between inanimate noisy things like water (sometimes seemingly talking to us, almost alive, almost human), and supposedly-sentient creatures (humans) who often act in hostile, destructive and uncaring ways as though they were inanimate—the musical and artistic success absolutely depends upon making these EQ choices right.
I n summary, a fantastic, powerful experience—beautifully composed, engineered, filmed, edited, and performed. Very happy!
J oan Grossman is a Brooklyn, New York-based independent media artist and producer. Her work has been screened in more than 20 countries and won numerous awards. She is currently Visiting Professor in Film & Media Arts at UMKC. Grossman was formerly a producer for NPR and Voice of America on a variety of programs, including All Things Considered, Afropop Worldwide, Kids America, and The Territory of Art. She has worked in Africa, China, Russia, and throughout Europe, has produced media for public interest organizations and NGOs, and has also worked as producer on European documentaries and feature films. Joan has a Ph.D. in Media and Philosophy from the European Graduate School and has taught film production and theory. She has worked with leading theorists and filmmakers such as Agnes Varda, Claude Lanzmann, Chantal Akerman, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Derrida. Her book, ‘Blackout: On Memory & Catastrophe’, was published in 2009 (link below).
D avid McIntire is a Kansas City, Missouri-based composer who, with composer-musicologist Kyle Gann, co-directed the 2009 Second International Conference on Minimalist Music at UMKC Conservatory. In 2010, he launched Irritable Hedgehog Music, a record label focusing on minimalist and soundscape compositions. McIntire has performed with Colorblind James Experience. With pianist R. Andrew Lee he has produced a recording of Tom Johnson’s ‘Hour for Piano’ (link below).
Dark brightness’... the music of a contemporary Romanian gypsy girl... Born in Romania in 1977, Adina Spire is a classical composer of sacred music for Catholic and Orthodox liturgies. An attempt to put any interpretation on her music has to make references to the mysterious Romanian old culture and the context of recent history... The context of Adina Spire’s compositions is the 1989 the revolution of Romania against the totalitarian government and the suffering of the people during the subsequent civil war—including the Adina’s own suffering as a little girl, suddenly orphaned and displaced to the orphanage associated with a monastery near Arad. Her music dwells on a complex of interrelated themes: grief, fear, solitude, vigil, memory, nostalgia, innocence, sensuality, intolerance, protest, violence—each piece approaching this view from a different angle, insistent upon perfecting a coded way of talking about something either unmentionable or impossible to express... This is ‘rebel’ music—the protest of the soul against soullessness, of the poor and defenseless against unfeeling poverty and aggression and intolerance.” — Institutul Cultural Român, 2009.
A dina Spire’s music is brilliant—evocative, lyrical, and incisive. Intensely political. It is also ‘doctrinal’—expressing doctrines of the once-and-future displaced, disenfranchised, and disabused... each note now aspiring to live.
M any of Adina’s compositions are calibrated by Romanian tradition and informed by Orthodox liturgy or explore notions of religious practice and the Divine. But her vision is delocalized from her native Romania and draws upon materials that are pan-European and span a period from Medieval times up to the present.
T he very old ‘borrowed’ elements and the instantaneous ‘ambient’ elements mingle and give rise to a fantastical sort of ‘bricolage’ that calls into question the very concepts of time and civilization. In a manner similar to Jorge Luis Borges stories, Adina’s compositions can make you wonder whether human history—any of it—is to be trusted. This disorienting effect can be both beautiful and moving.
A dina Spire is a teacher at the conservatory in Arad, Arader Musik Conservatorium. She is also an accomplished conductor and cellist.
T he example MP3 clip above is representative of her modus operandi—generating new expressions from materials that are simultaneously familiar and exotic, archaic and radically new: her compositions are, like Kontakion, invariably novel and surprising. The execution is passionate, with deeply-felt flourishes. Adina’s music suggests Renaissance or Baroque performance practices of elaborating from the written music, and it is hard to know where Adina’s score leaves off and the performers’ ‘improvvisaziones’ begin.
A dina Spire’s ... harmonic and dynamic designs reflect a paradoxical vision of intense feeling behind a frozen and fearful facade. Thus, tempos are mostly so slow as to give the impression of motionlessness, an effect sustained, even when short note-values are in play, by the use of small and very simple progressions, tense pedal-points, and agonized suspensions.... In parallel to orthodox modulation, the composer cuts abruptly between keys or slowly dissolves one chord into another by accumulating their pitches into blurred clusters. Since the tonic at any given point in Adina Spire’s score is a disputed issue (often brusquely dictated by the orchestra, often completely absent), these arpeggio-clusters—which have their precedents in the cinematographic soundtrack genre of terror movies—also amount to significant polytonal ambiguities in themselves... At the level of general design, Adina Spire works repeatedly with extreme contrasts between moments of tonal delicacy and cataclysmic avalanches of atonal sound... Spire’s three-dimensional orchestration scores and interpretations are intrinsic to these gradual transitions, tone-colour in what amounts to a quasi-cinematographic conception of timbre as light and sound positioning as ‘viewpoint’.” — Institutul Cultural Român, 2009.
I n the case of this example, ‘Kontakion’ (Greek: κοντάκιον) is a kind of hymn that has for many centuries been performed in the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Greek word is ‘kontax’ (κόνταξ), a ‘pole’—specifically the pole around which a sacred scroll text is coiled. The term describes the way in which the words on a scroll unfurl as the scroll is read in worship. The word ‘kontakion’ originally referred to a Byzantine poetic form, whose origins date back as far as the 6th century CE or probably earlier. Based in Syriac hymnographical traditions that underwent mutations in Greek-speaking Byzantium, it’s really a “sermon in verse accompanied by music”. The meter and music accentuate the rhetorical beauty of the speaker’s meditation.
A Kontakion is fundamentally a ‘funerary’ form—usually comprised of 18 to 24 metrically identical stanzas called oikoi (“houses”), each preceded by a short prelude (in a different meter), called a koukoulion (“cowl”). If the ‘cowl’ is, say, in a duple meter, then the ‘house’ may be in triple meter. The first letters of each of the stanzas form an acrostic, which frequently includes the name of the poet... not unlike, say, J.S. Bach and his fascination with numerology and acrostics (e.g., incipits that spell out B-A-C-H). The last line of a Kontakion prelude introduces a refrain, which is repeated at the end of all the stanzas. The stanzas are not unlike Baroque chaconne or passacaglia or ‘folia’ forms, with their dozens of variations that obsess upon a theme until the point of ecstasy or emotional transcendence.
T his Kontakion by Adina Spire has reverential yet aggressive aspects to it. It is contemplative, brooding—as is fitting for a ‘Hymn for the Dead’ or requiem. But it’s also punctuated with explosive electroacoustic effects. Listen carefully. Are some of these recorded segments played backwards, reversed tracks? Maybe so. What we have is a delirious mix of ambient-aleatoric material with Baroque variations. (I pull my copy of Robin Stowell’s book from the shelf, look at p. 140.)
I n the midst of the ambient-aleatoric edifice that’s going up, we hear... the cello playing a version of ... ‘La Folia’? The ‘La Folia’ meter is either in 1 [4+2] or 3, depending on what era you're speaking of and depending on whether the ‘La Folia’ performance was a vernacular music of common people or was instead a co-opted, stately dance of the aristocracy. Its chord progression is the ubiquitous/eternal i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI]-V / i-V-i-VII / III-VII-[i or VI7]-IV[4-3sus]-i.
R encontre entre la tradition de la basse obstinée du 17e siècle et le jazz, sur fond d’improvisation et de plaisir pur?
F olia’ is pronounced “foh-LEE-ah,” conventionally thought to mean ‘crazy’ or ‘empty-headed’ or ‘revelrous’. But is this correct? Well, no, not really. It seems to have been uncritically repeated in the musicology literature, by non-Iberians who neither know Portuguese nor have any deep understanding of the politics of 16th-Century Iberians who likely were the originators of ‘La Folia’.
I t’s a sort of hemipedalian waltz that carries the feeling of lament with a slow, percussion-marked processional feeling—not a jolly dance, really; more like a reckless PTSD dance of refugees and casualties from a war—like Adina. Yes, the ‘folia’ was a musical framework used during the Baroque period for songs, dances and sets of variations. But the early versions embody, I think, a valedictory spirit ... of the Portuguese who were busy fighting and eventually defeating the Moors? It is an aesthetic that acknowledges the real possibility of premature, sudden death—the unpredictability of troubled times. It is ‘mannerist’ and ‘historical materialist’ in outlook.
I n other words, ‘La Folia’ bears the same aesthetic ‘marks’ as the epic and autumnal ‘Tarantella’—furious, ecstatic dancing in defiance of fate and death. Its rollicking is not orgiastic but reckless in its psychological regressiveness. I could die tomorrow, as could you... as did he.
I n 1611, Sebastiàn de Covarrubias (Tesoro de la lengua castellana) described the folia as a Portuguese dance, very noisy, performed with tambourines and other instruments by disguised street-porters carrying young men dressed in women’s clothing on their shoulder. He said nothing about moroseness... it is a defiantly celebratory requiem dance. Have a look at the books by Hauser and Maniates.
T he musical design of a 16th or an early 17th-century folia consists of an upper melodic framework (although the precise melody varies) and a lower staff that yields a simple continuo accompaniment. The opening two beats of anacrusis are sometimes omitted, but in any case the first accent always falls on the V chord. The stroke pattern continually emphasizes 3/4 meter, but both the melody and the harmonic changes often oscillate between 3/2 and 6/4—as seems to be the case in Adina Spire’s ‘Kontakion’.
T hen in the 1670s the ‘folia’ was co-opted by the aristocracy and was mutated into a slow and stately dance, akin to a sarabande. All second beats still were dotted... the prominent secondary ‘folia’-type accent.
W hat is so special about this tune? Why has it been borrowed so extensively, by many western composers over the past 500 years?
Does its appeal derive from its satisfying human beings’ love of rhythmic ‘balance’ and harmonic ‘parity’ among multiple parts? The fact that ‘folia’ form has a high degree of symmetry and equitable harmonic layering suggests that this might be so.
Does ‘folia’ embody some hard-wired pattern that our brains have evolved to prefer? It even sounds familiar when you have never heard the piece before.
Is its perennial popularity a consequence of a peculiarly wide latitude that the ‘folia’ chord progression affords for textural adaptation and variations? La Folia form provides lots of freedom because there are no fixed numbers of variations to complete nor has there to be any structure between the variations. Vamp away!
Is ‘folia’ popularity driven by politics? Consider the social phenomenon that the ‘folia’ had its roots in popular ‘rebel’ culture and developed into a stately court dance but, more than this, a vehicle for courtly flirtation. Consider, too, that in some cultures it was a funerary piece or requiem but in other cultures was primarily a fertility dance for the people. The ambiguities enable all sorts of interpretations, all sorts of transgressions.
Is ‘folia’ popularity a Richard Dawkins-like ‘selfish gene’, popularity that begets more popularity and repetition/borrowing? A tune that we grow up with, and that each composer grows up with—strongly associated with culture and personal memories—and this is what invites yet more borrowing?
T he performer needs to be aware of the transformations of the basic four-note subject. Not only does the subject repeat almost relentlessly, but it’s restated and transformed in successive variations, in sixteenth and eighth notes. These segments divide the music into discrete sentences/statements. This approach generates ‘micro-pieces’ played one after the other. Kaleidoscopic!
L ike a chaconne or passacaglia or romanesca, the ‘folia’ form involves a short subject (usually four measures) that’s relentlessly repeated and varied... Symmetric thematic transformations of transposition, inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion. These are normally supplemented with diminution, augmentation, interpolation, fragmentation, octave displacements, and elision operations. The relentlessness of it is, I think, what lends the funereal aspect to what is otherwise (or can be) a pretty vigorous dance.
W hat we have here amounts to a kind of ‘multiple-encryption’. From the elements of a supposedly Orthodox liturgy, Adina Spire’s incorporation of symbolic components of secular origin enables her to protest recent political events and cultural trends. Conversely, from the notation of a supposedly ‘secular’ music Bach and other Renaissance and Baroque composers who ‘borrowed’ ‘La Folia’ encrypted texts of the Latin liturgy, we get [Bach's] customary incorporation of symbolically numbers of biblical origin that were significant in [Lutheran] doctrine (for example, Bach's multiform signatures, B-A-C-H, etc.). Hidden chorale citations embedded in the developing variations.
B ach used antithesis, conceit and paradox to ‘instruct and familiarize the reader with basic concepts of faith in highly condensed form’. Also called paradoxa, a typical epigram included juxtapositions of passages such as ‘God wills that all men should be saved’ with ‘Few are chosen’ (1 Timothy 2:4 and Matthew 22:14)... With enigmatical notations such as ‘mi contra fa, concordia discors’, ‘cross/crown’, and ‘beginning/ending’, Bach associates his canons with a peculiarly Lutheran dialectic in which antithesis (what Augustine called ‘antinomy’) is a symbol for the cross of Christ.” — Eric Chafe, Symbolum, p. 14.
D id ‘La Folia’ arise out of the valedictory spirit in Portugal, during and after the conflicts with the Moors in 1500s? Is this music a product of the same milieu that prompted Camões to write the epic ‘Os Lusíadas’? I find tidbits of evidence, for and against. I am unsatisfied with the facile accounts given and repeated uncritically in the musicology literature [which trivialize the history of ‘La Folia’ as ‘mad revelry’... as either a peasant dance or courtly dance], but I have not found (yet) anything definitive to support my conjecture of more serious origins of the tune--involving, say, political/aesthetic correspondences between ‘Os Lusíadas’ and ‘La Folia’.
T his beautiful ambient, aleatoric ‘Kontakion’ is wholly compatible with the epic, ecstatic, improvisatory, protestful, funerary idiom of ‘La Folia’. Adina’s decision to incorporate it here is, I think, brilliant.
T he compass of Adina Spire’s music cannot be adequately grasped in one reading. I have ‘read’ it and admire it and am excited about it to want to write about it here. I recognize that I have only so far scratched its surface, but I hope the ideas above may excite you to explore her work. Adina’s music is playful. It manages to be intensely political without being angry. Expect to read it with an attitude that questions the status quo—or even, say, the notion of ‘reverence.’ Discover ‘sacred’ music that respects reverential postures but asks you to critically reevaluate your reverential stance and the moral implication that reverence has for us as individuals and as societies. Very cool.
T o prepare for [a friend’s funeral] service, I had been practicing the Chaconne every day — fussing over individual phrases, searching for better ways to string them together, and wondering about the very nature of the piece, at its core an old dance form that had been around for centuries. After the many times I had heard and played the Chaconne, I had hoped it would fall relatively easily into place by now, but it appeared to be taunting me. The more I worked, the more I saw; the more I saw, the further away it drifted from my grasp. Perhaps that is in the nature of every masterpiece. But more than that, the Chaconne seemed to exude shadows over its grandeur and artful design. Exactly what was hidden there I could not say, but I would lose myself for long stretches of time exploring the work’s repeating four-bar phrases, which rose and fell and marched solemnly forward in ever-changing patterns.” — Arnold Steinhardt, Violin Dreams.
B esides his composerly skill, Rzewski is—] a granitically overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument.” — Nicolas Slonimsky, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians.
T hose who have been criticizing contemporary music for lacking true melodic lines, may be consoled to learn that some composers now are very much concerned with melody. I don’t mean that they are writing romantic melodies, or popular melodies, or any other familiar kind of melodies, but they are certainly writing melodies. I heard two very good new pieces of this sort last week. One was Frederic Rzewski’s ‘Coming Together’.” — Tom Johnson, Village Voice, 13-APR-1972.
T he piano music of Frederic Rzewski kept me company during the wee hours this morning.
[50-sec clip, David Jalbert, Fred Rzewski, ‘North American Ballads, No. 2, Which Side Are You On’, 1.6MB MP3]
F red’s music... often exhibits a chromatic background that intercalates with a diatonic contrapuntal background. Chromatic events are initiated by dyadic conflicts in the foreground—the interactions of chromatic and diatonic species. In his piano works he often manipulates a single pitch-class so as to bring about large-scale harmonic motions. Henry Burnett’s and Roy Nitzberg’s analyses resonate deeply, based on the evidence in Rzewski's writing. Which leads me to wonder whether Fred would feel that Henry’s and Roy's characterization of the compositional process rings true. My guess is yes.
I do not have the score (yet), so I rock the MP3 of Jalbert’s recording back and forth and pick off the notes, transcribe some of the figures...
H0 + Tt I H0 = A, for some t
where the hexachord H has a subscript denoting the order number associated with the hexachord’s first element, I is the inversion (permutation) operator, and T is the transposition operator with subscript t denoting the transposition number, any odd integer.
L acking 2s and 6s (whole-tones and tritones), the ‘6-20’ hexachord has a high degree of symmetry—and Rzewski resorts to it, maybe in part because of its mathematical/structural beauty and diverse possibilities. It [‘6-20’] is paradoxically ‘malleable/slippery’ and ‘crystalline/interlocked/solid’ at the same time. According to John Rahn’s calculations, ‘6-20’ maps into itself 3 times under transposition and 3 times under inversion: the prime form (0 1 4 5 8 9) duplicates itself under transposition at 0, 4, and 8; under inversion at 1, 4, and 9. In pitch-class content, there are only 4 distinct forms of ‘6-20’; only the whole-tone hexachord ‘6-35’ is more redundant. Under transposition or inversion it yields sets that are either completely identical or nonidentical—whence comes the slippery crystallinity of it.
S everal segments are F# minor, the Dominant of home key B minor. Patterns of transposition levels are generated either 2 semitones or multiples of 2 semitones apart—except for one, I think. The transposition levels convolve as modulo-2 multiples of semitones, in contrary motion within octaves. The distance between each transposition becomes smaller and smaller until it meets the middle of the octave, the tritone.
J albert’s account of the ‘North American Ballads’ adheres nicely to the political agenda set forth by Fred—not ‘Leftist’ so much as ‘Ethical-Humanist-Concerned-with-Justice’.
W hich side are you on’ is basically asking ‘Are you for war or against it?’ There are minimalist idioms in the middle section, with obsessive repetitions of the rhythms with slowly proliferating deviations/convergences, noted above. These reinforce the obstinacy of the political question, which demands to be answered. It won’t go away by ignoring it. But the majority of the piece is melodic, wry, playful, lyrical Rzewski.
O f course, besides these ‘North American Ballads’ (1978-9) many of Rzewski’s works over the years have been inspired by social and political themes—for example, ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated!’; ‘Coming Together’, a setting of the letters of an inmate who was murdered at the State Prison at Attica at the time of the riots in 1971; ‘The Price of Oil’ and its questions about the legitimacy of societies’ priorities; ‘Les Moutons de Panurge’, about aggression and mutual destruction; ‘Antigone-Legend’, a meditation on principled opposition to the policies of the State; ‘Struggle’, whose text is taken from a letter written by Frederic Douglass in 1849, about the constant struggle necessary to achieve social reforms.
S tudied at Phillips Academy, Harvard and Princeton. Studied under Randall Thompson, Roger Sessions, Walter Piston, Milton Babbitt, and Luigi Dallapiccola. Professor of Composition at the Conservatoire Royal de Musique in Liège, Belgium, since 1977. Politically active always; honest as a matter of conscience and constitution. Belovèd in Boston and everywhere. Delightful sense of humor and irony, humane, wonderful teacher. I learn quite a lot before dawn, taking his music apart, putting it back together.
Wason R. Tonality and atonality in Frederic Rzewski’s variations on ‘The People United Will Never Be Defeated’. Perspect New Music 1988; 26:108-43. [Forte’s set-class ‘6-20’ hexachord]
I have seen and endured the sufferings... and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust... I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting troops are being sacrificed.” — Siegfried Sassoon, Statement against the War, 1917.
T his is maybe the best, most eloquent and moving, most beautiful anti-war music I have ever heard. It is also a work that vividly illustrates the powerful narrativity that chamber music can embody. And I am not just referring to the concrete textuality of the poems and excerpts of private correspondence that engage in dialogues with the instrumental parts; I am referring also to the ways that David Behrman treats the vocal parts as instruments per se, and the ways that the composition reveals the inherent narrativity of the instrumental parts.
My Dear Siegfried (2003 and 2005)
Statement against the War, London, 1917
My Father’s Grocery Store, Worcester, MA, 1902
Watercress Well, Kent, England, 1902
Letter from Samuel Behrman (to Siegfried Sassoon), 22-AUG-1939
Letter from Siegried Sassoon (to Samuel Behrman), 01-SEP-1939
Everyone Sang (Siegfried Sassoon) 1919
T hese ‘movements’ are performed by Thomas Buckner, Eric Barsness, Meria Ludovici, vocalists; Ralph Samuelson, shakuhachi; Peter Zummo, trombone; David Behrman, keyboard, electronics; and Tom Hamilton, engineering, special effects.
S tatement against the War’ (6:42) has a punctate bass line, sometimes processed to increase the unison-width. Like a piano, to change the timbre or color of the sound, a piano tuner introduces small tuning differences between the three strings struck by the hammer. The unison width, that is, the difference between the lowest and the highest frequency produced by the three strings of a single note is usually narrow, but, in the case of ‘honky-tonk’ piano, may be very wide. Here the plucked bass is digitally post-processed and fed back, to impart a pretty big pitch dispersion to each note.
T he honky-tonk timbre of the bass part enables it to serve in a dour narrator’s role through this piece. It may seem like it is not doing much, but in reality it is an important, essential contribution to the overall storytelling that happens.
I went to study with Stockhausen because I was a fan of some of his music, especially ‘Gesang der Juenglinge’, a wonderful tape-music piece made in the mid-Fifties—taped boys’ voices. La Monte Young and I were both in his composition class at Darmstadt in the summer of 1959; Cornelius Cardew and David Tudor were there as advisers. Stockhausen’s course was an eye-opening experience for me—in part because of his intense devotion to new music; in part because he encouraged my efforts; and in part because it was at that course that a long-lasting friendship with David Tudor began. It seems far in the past now, but there was a kind of optimistic feeling there, as though a new, good society was emerging from the horrors of the recent past.” — David Behrman, interview with Jason Gross Furious, AUG-1997.
T he bass trombone here is sometimes straight acoustic trombone and sometimes vocoder-distorted or comb-filter processed to create eerie, macabre effects that are deeply disturbing—appropriate to the anti-war thematic intent. ‘My Dear Siegfried’ was commissioned by MutableMusic for baritone Thomas Buckner.
M y Father’s Grocery Store’ (11:27) has the narrator’s sprechstimme overlain with liquid synth glisses, skulking and pugilistic. The narrative is an account from David Behrman’s father’s (Samuel Behrman’s) early 20th-Century experiences growing up in a Jewish neighborhood in Worcester, Mass—a tale of broken eyeglasses; tampering with cigarette packages in the store, in order to filch the promotional photos of prize-fighters that the packages contained; the not-so-innocent acquisitiveness of children; the consequences of being caught red-handed by the parent; the existential agony and rupture of trust within the family that this precipitates; the irony of this minor trauma on the eve of WWI. Had only the pictures been ones of Maimonides and Spinoza instead of prize-fighters who kill for money, the sin of the theft of pictures would not have been so great.
I n ‘Letter from S.N. Behrman’ (9:50) we have irregularly-irregular atrial-fibrillatory, asynchronous dubbing of a woman’s voice in the foreground and an electronically-distorted man’s voice, comb-filtered and heavily reverbed, in the background. Spooky, spectral words, foreshadowing the horrific events of 1939 and beyond. Discursive, bubbling synth and reedy, muted trumpet. The relevance of this dusty 70-year-old letter to our contemporary situation is uncanny—and the poetical/composerly beauty and pungency of David Behrman’s incorporation of this old text into his musical polemic opposing the Iraq War are shattering, iconic. Chamber music as voiced cardiac arrhythmia. This effort will be a tough act to follow... and cardioversion may not succeed, or may not last.
I n ‘Letter from Siegfried Sassoon’ (11:41), even the pulse of the narration and the instrumental parts is moribund, clinically depressed. Composer Nic Collins says in the liner-notes (p. 22) that Behrman’s writing embodies a ‘talmudic, self-referential’ critic’s stance in this composition.
E veryone Sang’ (6:20) is Behrman’s setting of Sassoon’s 1919 poem commemorating the end of WWI, replete with ambient thunder, birds chirping and trilling, breathy trombone obviously exhausted and grieving but glad to have survived, and other-worldly organ synth patch intoning chords from the netherworld. Devastating in 1919 and devastating once again in this 2005 Behrman reincarnation.
E veryone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight as prisoned birds must find in freedom— winging wildly across the white orchards and dark green fields; on; on; out of sight. Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted, and beauty came like the setting sun. My heart was shaken with tears, and horror drifted away... O, but every one Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing ... will never be done.” — Siegfried Sassoon.
O n disc No. 2 of the set, we have QSRL (1998), performed by Jon Gibson; Viewfinder (2002) , and A New Team Takes Over (1969) on the occasion of Richard Nixon’s inauguration, both performed by Behrman; Touch Tones (1979), performed by Frankie Mann with Arthur Stidfole; and Pools of Phase Locked Loops (1972), performed by Katherine Morton and David Behrman. In the first two of these, we have sensors detecting ambient activity in the installation space, and software algorithms automatically implementing changes in the synths’ pitches and harmonic and rhythmic structures based on the events and velocities and masses detected by the sensors. In this situation/configuration, the ‘chamber’ is the instrument, and the ‘performers’ are the random, ambient people who enter the chamber: throw-down chamber music.
B y contrast to conventional jazz where the sound palette and riff possibilities for improvisation are pretty well known to the performers in advance, Behrman’s installation-art scenarios feature on-the-fly discovery of improvisational tools by inadvertent, happenstantial ‘performers’. Deliberation is consequent upon discovery—discovery of one’s performerhood, and discovery of the tools that are at your disposal. Very cool. Deeply revelatory of what it means to be human (at least it is so if the ‘performers’ who enter the chamber are cooperative, emotionally engaged, curious/creative souls).
Collins: Knowing your work as being primarily non-lyric-based, non-text-based, ... how is human voice and the text aspect different from working with other instruments? What happens to your work?
Behrman: It becomes an ‘amalgam’ of the two things: the music and the spoken text. It’s a wider dispersion of the idea of music. If you think of sound-art as encompassing anything that comes into the ears, it can include spoken or whispered or sung language, as well as noise, pitched sound, or environmental sound. I’ve been a great admirer of Robert Ashley’s use of linear narrative text in his music since the 1960s. Of course, our styles are very different. But in a sense his work served as a model for the ‘Siegfried’ piece. Also, I’ve gotten interested recently in enhancing and transforming the voice with the help of newly-available techniques, both in live performance and recording.” — David Behrman interview with Nicholas Collins, AUG-2004, ‘My Dear Siegfried’ linernotes, p. 19.
P ool of Phase-Locked Loops’ (13:56) is, as chance would have it, the famous 1972 piece that caused me to buy this CD. I was not looking for Siegfried or any of the wonderful things that are on these discs; I was working with PWGL and I needed a ‘benchmark’ for my exploring PLL algorithmic control of a piece of a score I was working on. I had never heard ‘Pool of PLLs’ before, and the Siegfried recording was a source where ‘Pool’ could be found. Throbbing sixteenth-note mm = 200 phase-interference and phase-modulation constitute the predominant pulse and rhythmic structure in this hypnotic, minimalist adventure, revealing and obfuscating many different layers/voices/narrators. But, regardless how this CD came to be in my possession, I am deeply grateful for and inspired by the political content of ‘Siegfried’. There is much to learn here: Behrman’s consummate skill as a storyteller-composer-poet expands the bounds of chamber music. ‘Epistolary’ chamber music, in the novelistic style of ‘Clarissa’? ‘Polemical’ chamber music, in the idiom of itinerant troubadours?
[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Statement against the War, 1917’, 1.6MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘My Father’s Grocery Store’, 1.6MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Watercress Well’, 1.6MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘QSRL’, 1.6MB MP3]
[50-sec clip, Behrman et al., My Dear Siegfried, ‘Pools of Phase-Locked Loops’, 1.6MB MP3]
D avid Behrman was born Salzburg, Austria, in 1937. Since the 1960s has made sound and multimedia installations for art galleries, as well as works for performance in conventional concert venues. He worked with John Cage, Christian Wolff, David Tudor, and Merce Cunningham in the 1960s and 1970s and, with Robert Ashley and others, was a founding member of the (now defunct) Sonic Arts Union. Among Behrman’s works for soloists and chamber ensembles are Unforeseen Events, My Dear Siegfried, Leapday Night, On the Other Ocean, Homemade Synthesizer Music with Sliding Pitches, Useful Information and Protests 1917–2004, and Interspecies Smalltalk. Among Behrman’s sound and multimedia installations are Cloud Music, Pen Light (2002), and Viewfinder (2005). Recordings of his works appear on the XI, Lovely Music, Alga Marghen, Classic Masters and Ellipsis Arts labels. He has collaborated with Veenfabriek in the Netherlands on music for a (revived) Futurists’ Orchestra. Behrman is based in New York and is a member of the faculty at the Avery Graduate Arts Program at Bard College.
