BMOP: Always Lots New to Say

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.

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.

• BMOP Concertos for Strings & Orchestra, Jordan Hall, Boston, 14-NOV-2008.
  
• Gil Rose website
  
• CouncilForTheArts@MIT
  
• Martin Boykan page at Brandeis Univ
  
• Robert Erikson 'in memoriam' page at UCSD
  
• Elliott Schwartz page at Bowdoin College
  
• Ken Ueno old page at UMass Dartmouth
  
• Ken Ueno new page at UC Berkeley
  
• Ueno K. Silence. GreatHoboesOfNewYork blog, 2003.
  
• Bañuelos D. Beyond the Spectrum of Music: An Exploration through Spectral Analysis of SoundColor in the Alban Berg Violin Concerto. VDM Verlag, 2008.
  
• Boykan M. Silence and Slow Time: Studies in Musical Narrative. Scarecrow, 2004.
  
• Brand J, Hailey C, eds. Constructive Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture. Univ California, 1997.
  
• Cody J. 10 + 5 = Gott: Die Macht Der Zeichen. (Tyradellis D, Friedlander M, Rossbach S, eds.) Jewish Museum Berlin, 2004.
  
• Keefe S, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto. Cambridge Univ, 2005.
  
• Kerman J. Concerto Conversations. Harvard Univ, 1999.
  
• Lindeman S. The Concerto: A Research and Information Guide. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Roeder M. A History of the Concerto. Amadeus, 2003.

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.

Violence, An Unlikely Chamber Music Trope: ¿Quién es más macho?

I   was very frightened till the guns started firing. Then you felt a bit better, for some unknown reason. It was the sitting there that was the worst part ... Naked is the way to describe it ... Just waiting for the end … waiting for it.”
  —  Michael Jackson, quoting rear-gunner Jack Marshall, in The Politics of Storytelling, p. 47.

T   he definition of psychological violence as the sudden, uncontrollable disruption of affiliative bonds ... recognizes the importance of attachment relationships and their social, emotional, and cognitive manifestations. To deny the impact of trauma over human life is to deny that we matter to one another; it is a way of dissociating ourselves from human pain.”
  —  Felicity de Zulueta, From Pain to Violence, p. 185.

The previous CMT post triggered a prompt, unexpected flurry of messages about ‘violence’ as a theme in the chamber music canon. Some emailers suggested that Fauré’s ‘Piano Trio in D minor, Op. 120’ (“The last movement … the Allegro vivo!”) is emblematic of chamber music as encompassing the gamut of human emotion and expression, including uncontrollably violent feelings and expressions.

Others mentioned Edgard Varèse and André Jolivet—the ‘Density 21.5’ and ‘Cinq Incantations,’ respectively.

Another friend emailed to say, no, that Henri Dutilleux and Pierre Boulez wrote works that were more violent by far than those.

Yet another CMT reader opined that Olivier Messiaën was, if you really understood him, more profoundly and insidiously violent. (“Oh, you can play it so that the violent intentions are covered up. But if you really understand what he was up to, why then! There is no question! Hands down!”)

Maybe we need a ‘Hamilton-Browne’ taxonomy of violence in chamber music, a classification scheme to properly categorize and compare different species of this emotion when they arise.

Two-dimensional Taxonomy of Victimization

• Single victimization (single incident, single perpetrator)
  
• Multiple victimization (single incident, multiple perpetrators)
  
• Repeated victimization (multiple incidents, single perpetrator)
  
• Re-victimization (multiple incidents, multiple perpetrators)

W ell, entonces, ¿quién es lo último? Here is my own nomination for the most explicit examination of violence: a piece composed by Gordon Fitzell, performed by eighth blackbird (three MP3 clips below). Gordon is a 40 year-old Canadian born in Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, with a Bachelor of Music degree from Brandon University, a masters from the University of Alberta, and a doctorate in composition and theory from the University of British Columbia, with Keith Hamel and John Roeder. He has contributed works to a number of festivals and workshops including Darmstadt Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Music, June in Buffalo, the Yale Summer School, the Arraymusic Young Composers Workshop, and held a residency several years ago at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He is currently a professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg where he teaches composition, electroacoustic music, conducts the New Music Ensemble and directs XIE (eXperimental Improv Ensemble).


    [50-sec clip, eighth blackbird, Gordon Fitzell, ‘Violence’, 1.2MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, eighth blackbird, Gordon Fitzell, ‘Violence’, 1.2MB MP3]

    [50-sec clip, eighth blackbird, Gordon Fitzell, ‘Violence’, 1.2MB MP3]


I rest my case.

Seriously, do you have other ‘nominations’ you’d care to make, in this exotic category? What composers and which pieces? Under what circumstances would your ensemble undertake a thematic program, explicitly comprised of works that examine this ‘end of the spectrum’ of human emotions and deeds?

Do you think that the ‘intimacy’ of chamber music and currently-available chamber music programming such as it is today is too restrictive—that is to say, that the repertoire being performed today dwells more than it should on ‘pleasing’ sounds and ideas and emotions, and veers too far away from matters of political topicality and controversy? Do you feel that it is, marketingwise, suicidal to pursue these things? Yes, compose them, if you must; if you have them ‘in you’. Yes, record them, if you’re passionate about it and can convince a brave label to support it. But don’t even think of performing them live, not if you expect to ‘get away with it’?

Does edgier repertoire sell well and, if so, to what audience market segments in what venues and at what times of year? Is this sort of material only practical (i.e., ‘wise’, ‘safe’) for presenters to program as bonus ‘fringe’ material at festivals in the summertime—riskier even than mere ‘new music’? Is this sort of thing suitable for ACF and CMA and other organizations to commission more of?

If enough of you wish to offer comments on this, maybe I’ll gather them together into a proper ‘post’ on the subject. To those of you who emailed me, thank you very much for your comments!

• DSM. Just War according to Dialogos. CMT blog, 09-NOV-2008.
  
• eighth blackbird. strange imaginary animals. (Cedille, 2006.)
  
• Browne K, Hanks H, Stratton P, Hamilton-Giachritsis C, eds. Early Prediction and Prevention of Child Abuse: A Handbook. Wiley, 2002.
  
• Hamel J, ed. Gender Inclusive Treatment of Intimate Partner Abuse. Springer, 2005.
  
• Hamilton C, Browne K. The repeat victimisation of children: Should the concept be revised? Aggression and Violent Behaviour 1997; 3:47-60.
  
• Jackson M. The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity. Museum Tusculanum, 2002.
  
• McCluskey U, Hooper C-A, eds. Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear. Kingsley, 2000.
  
• de Zulueta F. From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness. 2e. Wiley, 2007.

‘Just War’ According to Dialogos: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence & Medieval Theater of Cruelty

I   f the number and variety of versions—and widespread and enduring popularity—can be any criterion of greatness, the tale of Judith, it must be conceded, is one of the great stories of the world’s literature.”
  —  Edna Purdie, The Story of Judith in German and English Literature.

The staged musical production of ‘Judith’ by Katarina Livljanić and members of the ensemble Dialogos tells the biblical tale of the beautiful enchantress, Judith, who seduces and then beheads the Assyrian general Holofernes to liberate the Hebrews. The score also includes a medieval 5-string fiddle, a lirica (Croatian traditional stringed instrument, tuned in ‘archaic’ manner), and archaic flutes. The beauty and Croatian authenticity of Livljanić’s voice, the narrative and discursive power of the instrumental parts, the elegance of the staging and lighting, and the poetics of the carefully devised, historically informed Glagolitic text (and translation that is sympathetic to the needs of the audience, as opposed to Livljanić’s fellow scholars)—all of these combine to achieve a compelling artistic result, just as with ‘Vision of Tondal’ and other of Dialogos’s productions.

Character development in Livljanić’s version of ‘Judith’ is fuller than in the simplified accounts of the story that are familiar to us, and far more complex than in the synoptic artworks through which most of us are acquainted with it ... Klimt and Caravaggio and Reubens and so many others.

Holofernes, the general of the Babylonian King Nebuchadrezzar, whose decapitation by Judith is referenced in the Old Testament. Holofernes, the powerful general of King Nebuchadnezzar’s army. A number of provinces of the Second Jewish Commonwealth had withheld their assistance from Nebuchadnezzar and his government—had declined to join the coalition of the willing. So now comes Holofernes, the guy Nebuchadnezzar dispatches to give them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

The historical general did lay siege to Bethulia. The city was on the verge of surrendering but was saved by Judith, a beautiful Hebrew widow who preyed upon Holofernes’s huge vanity, deceived him, drank him under the table, sliced off his head in bed. Judith, she who then returned to Bethulia displaying the severed head, after which the Hebrews went on to beat Nebuchadnezzar’s now-generalless army. Morals: Be careful who you drink with, and be sure to drink responsibly.


Ensemble Dialogos

• Katarina Livljanić (voice)
  
• Albrecht Maurer (5-string fiddle)
  
• Norbert Rodenkirchen (flutes)
  
• Sanda Herzic (staging, scenography and costumes)
  
• Marie Bellot (lighting design and direction)

Livljanić’s voice—alternately, narrator/seductress/warrior/mind/spirit—leads the listener through this biblical story of Judith, transformed here into historically-informed music theatre, instantiating characters who hail from the old biblical and Croatian Glagolitic texts to become amazingly relevant to contemporary society—both in terms of gender issues, and in terms of calling into question what is ‘justified violence’ and whether or not there is such a thing as a ‘just war’. Renaissance Glagolitic chant forms the musical structure of the performance. Accompanying Livljanić’s voice, the medieval lirica and 5-string fiddle and flutes give Marko Marulić’s Glagolitic text vivid, dramatic color.

Dialogos’s Judith is essentially ‘Eros and Thanatos’ rendered using fragments of medieval Glagolitic ‘disputationes’ that alternate with the main ‘Judith and Holofernes’ story. These interpolations are a narratorly gambit to reveal the characters’ thoughts; for example, as Holofernes’ head is severed, his thoughts ‘separate’ into a dialogue between his body and his soul. Another inner dialogue—between Judith’s mind and her soul, a sort of schizoid soliloquy—occurs as she prays for God to help her kill Holofernes.

According to Livljanić’s program notes, the ancient text of Judith survives without music, and the poetic metrical structure of the text closely corresponds to the meter of archaic Glagolitic melodies used for storytelling in medieval Dalmatia. The text refers to texts sung in the liturgical offices, and these clues enabled Livljanić to reconstruct, using Dalmatian and southern Italian musical sources, melodies plausibly correlated with indications in the original Judith text. This liturgical repertoire, sung in Croatian Church Slavonic, did function in the Latin mass, and was preserved over the centuries in manuscripts written in Glagolitic in medieval Croatia.

Livljanić performs all of the roles and uses a variety of vocal effects and a few costume changes to keep the roles distinct. Surpassing the phenomenal scholarship that goes into preparing their productions, the musicianship and historically-informed performance of the members of Dialogos ensemble are iconic.

F   rom the standpoint of the history of rhetoric, the presence of dramatic elements in discussions of torture presents a tremendous predicament for scholars, who have long been troubled by Aristotle’s casual inclusion of torture as one of the factual, ‘inartificial’, or extrinsic proofs to be discovered by orators during the inventional process... Inartificial proofs are those which ‘have not been furnished by ourselves but were already in existence, such as witnesses...’ What is so striking about the evidence ... is that, during rhetorical ‘inventio’, the ostensibly extrinsic proof that torture represents functions as an avowedly unreliable intrinsic proof. The rhetorician theorizes the inventional proof of torture as a verisimilar process that causes torture to appear to be an unshakable extrinsic proof, when in reality it is just as ‘intrinsic’, just as ‘creative’, just as fictional, just as ‘dramatic’ as other modes of rhetorical invention... Its ‘facts’ are evaluated on the basis of their potential persuasiveness as fashioned probabilities and then, in a process of reaffirmation, judged as factual on the basis of their verisimilitude. At issue, then, is less the truth of the law or the historical occurrence than the spectacular probabilities of the rhetorical presentation, which is born of materials extracted through punishment... Torture enters the scenario with its own role to play in the transformation of hypothesis into fact.”
  —  Jody Enders, Medieval Theater of Cruelty, p. 28.

Let’s do something I alluded to in the previous CMT post: illuminate this musical performance by drawing parallels between it and several works of art. Most of us know the story of Judith primarily through the famous representations of ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’ in paintings.

The Christian church fathers embraced Judith, but went to extra trouble to ensure that the story was cast in a certain light that was favorable to the Church. When the Church hierarchy commissioned paintings and sculptures of Judith, the artists were compelled to make Judith into not so much an allegory of faith as an allegory of Christian virtue writ large—especially that prototypical virtue that most fascinates priests, chastity (as in the Cranach the Elder painting above). And then came Artemisia Gentileschi. Artemisia, without the strings of any Church commission attached. Artemisia, who had herself been raped. Artemisia Gentileschi did not make ‘nicey-nicey’.

Artemisia Gentileschi in 1620 was the first to paint a ‘feminist’ Judith. Her father Orazio had also painted Judith—a conventional Judith. Michelangelo, Botticelli and Caravaggio had painted Judith. Donatello had sculpted Judith. Gentileschi’s painting is dark, darker and more dramatic than Caravaggio’s and others’ Judiths. A theatrical spotlight is trained on the action, on the struggling limbs. The shadows on Judith’s arms force us to acknowledge the sawing, crunching, ‘why-is-this-neck-gristle-and-bone-so-tough?’ sword action she uses to get his head off. The extent of the blood splayed around the scene gives us a pretty clear idea that Gentileschci believes this was not a quick death, nor should it have been. Nor was this murder a workmanly job ineptly done. No, there is a realist’s quality of gratuitous suffering; of ‘extraordinary rendition’ as they say; of cold-blooded torture. The feminist righteous violence of Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting(s) is very close to the moral quality that Livljanić projects in the Dialogos production of Judith. Livljanić’s text has Holofernes’s dying going on and on...


As portrayed by Gentileschi and by Livljanić, Judith’s violence is righteous—premeditated but justified—vigorously justified ex-post facto by Judith. But not some pious, patriotic perp intent upon pleasing the patriarchs. This is cool, calculated, cathartic revenge by a woman who has been raped. ‘You, Asshole, are not f’ing getting away. You are f’ing going to die, right here, right now.’ And, naturally, heroic, cathartic righteous horror is invariably exciting. After all, ‘bloodied virtuosity’ is titillating, as American (and other—) filmmakers seem to know so well. The ‘pride goes before the fall’ tragic position of Holofernes’s arrogance and hubris just seems not to have many ‘takers’ these days. Nobody views the character and deeds of Judith as subversive and offensive anymore. Nobody thinks of Holofernes. We are all self-vindicating terrorists now. We are all Judiths or would-be Judiths if given the chance. Just not as chaste as a Church father or an Imam might prefer...


Gustav Klimt’s Judith paintings have instead a wasted, absinthe-debauched, sybaritically-bedecked golden Judith-the-Ho tucking the still-astonished dead head of Holofernes under her arm as if it were a handbag. The dramatic lighting is completely lacks the excitement and action of Gentileschi. Judith is here quiet and sated, as though she were a tiger or other predator? “Or the Hillbilly of Wasilla, Sarah Palin,” as one of the commenters in the discussion group that preceded the Kansas City Dialogos performance last night said. “What?! What are you looking at! I did not order these clothes from Neiman Marcus! No, siree! They’re goin’ back. Givin’ ‘em to charity.” Palin’s face and hair even look quite a lot like the Klimt Judith... Yikes.)

Klimt’s Judith gazes off beyond us; she has no regard for us. She appears to be daydreaming, and it is not likely that she is dreaming of murdering generals to save her people or build an actual oil pipeline. She is detached from the damage she has wrought. Klimt shows us not only Judith-the-Ho but also Judith-the-Psychopath and Judith-the-Jihadist. Klimt’s Judith ‘had’ to do what she did, just as Anthony Perkins ‘had’ to kill Janet Leigh’s character in ‘Psycho’, complete with her schizophrenic interior dialogue and ‘disputationes’.


By contrast, Caravaggio’s Judith is a tentative, horrified, ‘how-can-I-manage-to-finish-this?’ withdrawing, backward-staggering, agast Judith. Not a ‘psycho’ at all. And totally not ‘ho’. She stands back from Holofernes, disgusted—as much by her apprehension of her moral ‘dirtiness’ in the situation as by the physical horror of it. Whereas Gentileschi’s and Klimt’s Judiths are entirely self-assured—self-possessed with feminist and psychotic conviction, respectively; righteously unafraid—Caravaggio’s Judith comprehends that no one comes home ‘clean’. Righteous though your cause may have been, well-intentioned or not as you may have been before embarking on your project, your act has inscribed you now, marked you for life. You will never again be the same. You can never roll back the clock. The deed was morally dirty; ‘just war’ was an elusive myth, not a black-and-white certainty as you might have thought before. Livljanić manages to import some of this feeling into the Dialogos Judith performance. Various reviewers use words like ‘metamorphosis’ or ‘transformation’ or other literary expressions to describe it. Me, I don’t buy it. To me, Livljanić is a realist, one who considers that the historical Judith was—and all of us today are—complex, highly spontaneous ... concurrently ebbing and flowing with various motives and reasons and conflicts. Our confusion and messiness and internal conflicts in general don’t tend to resolve in transformative ways. We’re perpetually ‘becoming’ but we seldom transform or metamorphose. We just extemporize; we just act; we just live then with the consequences. As one of the ‘disputationes’ between Judith’s mind and her soul tells us, our abstract souls and embodied minds are old and not likely to change or suddenly become un-confused:

W   hy are you confusing me, my soul? And her soul answered: Oh, how greatly you confused my heart … I have been given to the body to live with it, and the body cheated me… The mind responded: My soul, your excuse is not good, because your body is made of earth, and you are made of wisdom… Therefore, [you must] overcome your body. The soul said: Woe to me that I hoped to receive from you a consolation, and instead I receive even bigger sadness. You know I have been living on this world for many years… I cannot overcome my body. It is older, cannot move, and cannot do any good...”
  —  ‘Disputatione’ (‘Agony’; a schizoid Glagolitic soliloquy between Judith’s ‘soul’ and her incarnate ‘mind’), ‘Judith’, text by Marko Marulić, adapted and extended by Katarina Livljanić.

W hat more can we make of this—in attempting to understand this production through parallels we can find in other works of art? Well, Livljanić’s rendering of Judith is not a ‘play’. It is instead an act of political-activist remembrance, just as Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings are acts of protest and activist remembrance. It is an 80-minute meditation on ‘wars of choice’ and ill-conceived pre-emptive wars, as contrasted with necessary wars and ‘just’ morally-defensible wars. Livljanić’s vivid exhortations are not mere scholarly play-acting for us to ‘admire’ for their aesthetic value. No. They are powerful admonishments for us to engage in Shoah-like ‘remembering-so-as-never-to-forget’.

W   hy is it more important to remember acts of genocide than simply to learn about them? If literary works are truly the bearers of ontology, then what must be our conduct toward them?”
  —  Amy Hungerford, Holocaust of Texts.

In other words, this is not a docudrama that enables us merely to learn about an historically-explicit, militarily important act of dudicide by some hot chick in ancient Bethulia in the mavericky Second Jewish Commonwealth. No, this historically-informed artwork comes fully armed, locked-and-loaded as a bearer of political ontology: Livljanić is ballistically instructing us about what our conduct ought to be toward our ontology of justice—and about how we ought to be maintaining that ontology (and that justice) in a coherent, continent way. This is not art-as-entertainment or scholarly historiography tarted up as elite musical theater. It is beautiful and diverting, yes. But, more than that, it is art that advances specific and important political, moral, and ontological viewpoints—ones that Livljanić and her colleagues want audiences to take to heart and act upon. It is Art with an Agenda. It is a powerful essay on feminism through the ages, directly relevant to contemporary issues having to do with ‘just war’ as an abstract concept, and with specific unjust wars in-progress today, and with civil society and the problem of terrorism (terrorism that is sponsored by governments, like Nebuchadnezzar’s government or other ones in modern times; terrorism that is undertaken by groups other than the State; or terrorism that is undertaken by individuals, psychotic/psychopathic or otherwise). If you have an opportunity to attend one of Dialogos’s performances, do not miss it!

D   id an on-stage execution really take place in 1549 in the city of Tournai? According to somewhat questionable evidence about the production of Judith and Holofernes in that city, the actor playing Judith actually beheaded a convicted murderer who assumed (ever so briefly——) the role of Holofernes, just long enough to be killed during the play, to thunderous applause.”
  —  Jody Enders, Medieval Theater of Cruelty, p. 202.

• Katarina Livljanić’s ‘Judith’ at Friends of Chamber Music
  
• Croatia.org
  
• Baraz D. Medieval Cruelty: Changing Perceptions, Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period. Cornell Univ, 2003.
  
• Barry J. The Sword of Justice: Ethics and Coercion in International Politics. Praeger, 1998.
  
• Bellamy A. Just Wars: From Cicero to Iraq. Polity, 2006.
  
• Brough M, Lango J, van der Linden H, eds. Rethinking the Just War Tradition. SUNY, 2007.
  
• Caney S. Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory. Oxford Univ, 2006.
  
• Conley K. Claude Cahun’s Iconic Heads: From ‘The Sadistic Judith’ to ‘Human Frontier’. Papers of Surrealism 2004; 2:1-23. [1MB pdf]
  
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C   ahun also questions Judith’s response to the applause she receives when she emerges from Holofernes’s tent holding his head—horrified at having killed the man she loves and at their response, which she experiences at first like ‘a child whom one mistreats.’ ‘People!,’ she exclaims without much heroism, ‘What do we have in common? Who allowed you to invade my private life? To judge my acts and find them beautiful? To burden me—I who am so weak and weary, eternally hunted—with your infernal [God-sappy] glory?’ How can we know for certain, Cahun seems to be asking, what Judith’s motivations and desires were—the only person in her town willing to enter Holofernes’s tent? How can we know that Judith lost interest in sex once she was widowed, and that she became pious and chaste and shared her townspeople’s dislike and disdain for the enemy commander? Are not these assumptions based on clichés tied to sexuality? In Cahun’s telling of the Judith story, Holofernes is bestialized before he is dismembered. Judith is portrayed as ‘terrible,’ although Cahun sees her also as ‘abject’. Leiris later admiringly labels her a ‘patriot prostitute,’ but Cahun sees neither patriotism nor prostitution in Judith’s desire.”
  —  Kate Conley, From Sadistic Judith to Human Frontier, 2004.

Brothers Selling Dreams: Ax & Bronfman Piano Duo

M   any years ago, my wife Joan Morris and I got to know the once-very-famous William Saroyan [Armenian-American writer and playwright]. Many people just ‘blank’ on Saroyan’s name today. We once took Saroyan to dinner in Paris. Afterwards, we went to a friend’s house where I played some of our recorded music for him. He listened respectfully. As he was leaving us he said, ‘Art is what is irresistible.’ I’m still chewing on that all these years later. I think it means that if something of mine isn’t irresistible, it won’t last because it won't be needed by us. Knowing that I can’t be around to see if my stuff lasts has given me such a huge sense of relief. No lobbying or politicking for my own work will make it any more or less irresistible. In the end, it’s the performers who decide what they want to perform, and in the long run they will play what they really want to hear.”
  —  William Bolcom, interview with Christopher Wright, 2005.

The Harriman-Jewell Series hosted pianists Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman in a brilliant duo recital last night in Kansas City.

• Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn
  
• Bolcom: Recuerdos (Three Traditional Latin-American Dances) for Two Pianos
  
• Mozart: Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448
  
• Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances

The Bolcom piece was particularly interesting….


    [50-sec clip, Elizabeth & Marcel Bergmann, William Bolcom, ‘Recuerdos: III. Valse Venezolano - a la memoire de Ramón Delgado Palacios’, 1.6MB MP3]

Clearly, the ‘perform a duo together’ gig is a different dynamic than to play in larger ensembles and very different, too, than solo performance. The intimacy and the intensity of the shared goals in ‘duo’ are exceedingly great. The project is infused with the historically-situated political pre-suppositions of both of the duo members, including the aim together to embody something true and enduring and universal and memorable. The dynamic of the exchanges between Ax and Bronfman was fascinating—in a word, ‘brotherly’.

And the Bolcom piece was a perfect vehicle for displaying their brotherly wit and ‘Oh, yeah? Well, how about this?!’ irony. The third movement (MP3 clip above) is an especially appealing tale, I would say—‘recalled’ ... Los ‘recuerdos’ fueron recordadas por Manny de forma diferente que Fima ... in progressively escalating, boastful paragraphs by two young boys, each of whom hopes you will deem his ‘version’ of the story to be the better, more amusing one. Classic Bolcom tonality and punchy, confabulating rhythms, in the service of tag-team storytelling. Bolcom’s chordal orientation and boy-like ‘neo-tonal vs. post-tonal’ mocking of both tonal and atonal devices. All of that! In that regard, Jonathan Bernard has observed [not about Bolcom or this piece, but broadly speaking] that “the so-called ‘return to harmony’ or even ‘return to tonality,’ much remarked upon by critics, is really an appropriation of harmony for purposes that are essentially new and not so well understood. To assume that composers, by retrieving such familiar sonorities as triads and major-minor seventh chords, have also taken on, whether intending to or not, the ‘hierarchical’ nature of common-practice tonality (if not its specific structures) may be assuming far too much.”

Bernard’s distinction between what he calls the third and fourth “Stages” in “the story of what happened after [the] initial establishment of minimalism” makes the point clear. In ‘Stage 3’, “pieces began sounding more explicitly ‘harmonic’, that is, chordally oriented, though not, at this point, necessarily ‘tonal’ in any sense.” In ‘Stage 4’, “harmony of an ever more tonal (or neo-tonal, or quasi-tonal) aspect assumed primary control, leaving minimalist devices pushed into the background, where they became stylistic objects” [see the Bernard link below, p. 114].

It was also Bernard who about 10 years ago came up with a useful gambit for analyzing compositions: compare a minimalist piece of music with examples of minimalism in the fine arts, where discussion is, as Bernard puts it, “less bound-up with exactitudes… Regions that alternate regularly between relative sparseness and relative density, very much like the alternating stretches of rhythmic synchrony and rhythmically out-of-phase transition...” In other words, very much like the features of these ‘Recuerdos’ by Bolcom [even though they are by no means ‘minimalist’ and are maybe beyond ‘post-minimalist’ even, heh!].

How does it help understand Bolcom’s music better—to know that it resembles a painting as Bernard is fond of suggesting—or, in my case, to know that it has certain features that are like the dynamic between two competitive 10-year-old brothers, each trying to tell the more successful, irresistible version of a story—[or to know that it is mathematically measurable, and has a distinct rhythmic density or a time-varying power-spectrum or (as in the previous CMT post on Gubaidulina) a Shannon entropy that varies over time]? Do analyses like these—both the ones without any discernible exactitude, plus the ones with some intermediate [e.g., literary-theory] level of exactitude, and the ones with precise mathematical exactitude—help?

W ell, the art comparisons are evocative enough. Lots and lots of people have been to enough art museums to have the contextual knowledge so that comparing a piece of well-known art to a piece of music can be broadly accessible and understandable and helpful. And literary comparisons are also pretty accessible and evocative in stimulating critical discussion among people. The only question, I guess, is how helpful mathematics can be, given the current state of ‘numeracy’ around the world. Can the mathematical features in a piece for two pianos help the performers play it or the listeners listen to it more insightfully and profitably? I firmly believe the answer is ‘Yes.’ You just have to have a decent level of ‘numeracy’, and you have to be in the mood for it. Based on several emails I’ve received on the maths in some of the CMT posts, it looks like the math music geeks are an underserved market in music criticism and music journalism. Maybe in a future CMT post, I will look at the math of Bolcom compositions...

At any rate, with Ax and Bronfman in-charge, we find ourselves in the mood to buy any dream they want to sell us, consider any fabulous tale they want to recount for us, see any neo-tonal/post-everything art they want to show us ... go anywhere acoustically and expressively they want to take us. They make us this irresistible offer that’s ‘aspirational’—and it invariably embodies things that we aspire to have, to be, to do, to experience, to feel. Attractive in the extreme. An irresistible offer—one that has a return-on-investment (ROI) that’s big and immediately recognizable and believable. ‘Irresistible’ in that it is not a one-time ‘special offer’—it offers assurances of dependability and reliable ongoing presence—it’s safe to depend on it being there. It is not compulsive, ‘over-the-top’ novelty—it is comfortable, credible. As an ‘investment’ it has a beta that is not too high, with liquidity and financial ratios that denote tolerable risk.

In short, at the Ax-Bronfman recital last night I was (we were) ‘sold’. Their brotherly sales pitch was irresistible. And as I reflect on the Bolcom quote at the top, I think it was nice, too, that these pieces—and the colors and ideas that they contain—are what Fima and Manny like to perform together. Their choice of these pieces says a great deal about their affection for each other, and about their optimism and enduring/endearing enthusiasm for life.

• Emanuel Ax website
  
• Yefim Bronfman website
  
• Harriman-Jewell Series
  
• Opus 3 Artists Inc (agents for Yefim Bronfman and Emanuel Ax)
  
• William Bolcom’s (and Joan Morris’s) website
  
• Bergmann E, Bergmann M. Bolcom: Music for Two Pianos. (Naxos, 2004.)
  
• IlluminatingBolcom.org
  
• Bernard J. Minimalism, postminimalism, and the resurgence of tonality in recent American music. American Music 2003; 21;112-33.
  
• Eagleton T. Literary Theory. 3e. Univ Minnesota, 2008.
  
• Fink R. Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Univ California, 2005.
  
• Gaut B, Lopes D, eds. The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. 2e. Routledge, 2005.
  
• Kerka S. Not just a number: Critical numeracy for adults. ERIC Digest, FEB-1996.
  
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• Shaffer L. Timing in solo and duet piano performances. Quarterly J Exper Psychol 1984; 36:577-95.
  
• Sloboda J. Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function. Oxford Univ, 2005.
  
• Wright C. The unrepentant eclectic: An interview with American composer William Bolcom. AdventuresInMusic, 2005.
  
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• St. Olaf Numeracy Quotes
  
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