August 15, 2009: Music: the next generation

The last time I wrote about Frederick Rzewski was when Carlos Avila concluded his Noontime Concerts™ recital at Old St. Mary's Cathedral with "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" two months ago.  Last night Rzewski was again selected to conclude a program, this time an evening of chamber music at the Old First Concerts series, at the Old First Church;  but the context was significantly different.  While Avila chose Rzewski to complete a three-century traversal of the piano repertoire, Rzewski's "Coming Together" was the oldest work on the Old First program.  Indeed, Rzewski was very much the "grand old man" of the evening, more than a dozen years older than Paul Dresher (whose "Blue Diamonds" concluded the first half of the program) and almost 45 years younger than composer Max Stoffregen, whose "the delicate flow of vines" was performed and who was one of the performers of "Coming Together."  If, as the title of the program suggested, the theme of the evening was "the next generation" of music, then it might be fair to acknowledge Rzewski as a progenitor of that generation.

Were that to be the case, however, Rzewski's "lineage" would be defined more through its new approach to musical rhetoric than to the "utterances" delivered through that rhetoric.  Avila's recital provided me with my first opportunity to sink my writing chops into Rzewski;  and I did so by comparing his "agitprop" and "folk" styles.  Avila had chosen to present the "folk Rzewski;"  "Coming Together" offers an excellent example of the "agitprop Rzewski."  It was written in response to the 1971 Attica Prison riot, providing a musical setting for the narration of the text of a letter by prisoner Sam Melville:

I think the combination of age and a greater coming together is responsible for the speed of the passing time.  It's six months now, and I can tell you truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly.  I am in excellent physical and emotional health.  There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready.  As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis so am I dealing with my environment.  In the indifferent brutality, the incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning.  I am deliberate, sometimes even calculating, seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others.  I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life.

This text captures both an enumeration of motives and a definition of the means for declaring the riot.  When the declaration came, it was far from a "subtle" surprise;  nor was there anything subtle about the brutal reaction directed by New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller.  Rzewski decided to use music to create a sense of the tension that was building around Melville when he wrote this letter.

Rhetorically, Rzewski developed his own approach to what Philip Glass has called "music with repetitive structures."  There is a single melodic line in eighth notes based on a core of motivic fragments deployed through different iterations and permutations.  This melody begins with a single instrument, while the rest of the ensemble provides a background of overlapping sustained tones;  but, as the composition progresses, these accompanying instruments abandon their respective parts and join the melodic line, thus embodying in musical terms the "greater coming together" of Melville's text.  One thus experiences the coming to a boil of the spirit behind the Attica riot;  and Rzewski then restrains from representing the boil-over of the riot itself.

"Coming Together" is composed for "speaker, bass instruments, and ensemble."  At this performance the speaker was Michael Mohammed and the instruments were two bass clarinets (Jonathan Russell and Jeff Anderle), violin (Alisa Rose), electric guitar (Brian Dowdy), piano (Matthew McCright), and Moog synthesizer (Max Stoffregen).  I first heard this work on a Hungaroton recording of the Group 180 ensemble (having learned about them from a lecture given by Steve Reich), on which the work was performed by thirteen musicians;  and "Coming Together" is one of several works for which Rzewski is flexible about instrumentation.  What matters most is that "coming together" effect.  While the recording prepared me for the overall experience, nothing could prepare me for the physicality of the effect itself in "live" performance;  and this ensemble, apparently organized by Russell and McCright, delivered that effect with all the compulsion it deserved.

McCright also performed the Dresher "Blue Diamonds" piano solo, an extended single-movement work lasting almost one-third of an hour.  Like some of Dresher's other works, this reflects an Asian influence;  but this is due primarily to the predominance of pentatonic passages.  For all I know the real influence may have been Joseph Yasser, who believed that the diatonic major scale was basically a pentatonic scale with two "chromatic" pitches added, the first step in an "evolutionary" path that culminated in the full chromatic scale.  In this case the rhetoric relies heavily on rhythm, particularly through the interplay of polyrhythms.  In his introductory remarks Dresher spoke of a connection to Frédéric Chopin, although I found my own orientation more from the "Pagodes" (which are actually Indonesian stupas) of Claude Debussy.  Whether or not this had to do with the score itself or with the Debussy-like touch that McCright brought to this performance, I cannot tell.  This is a work that deserves more than one listening, and nothing would please me more than opportunities to hear other pianists add this work to their repertoires.

Indeed, little can be said about the most recent works on the program (by Ryan Brown, Nigel Westlake, Max Stoffregen Luciano Chessa, and Russell himself), simply because these were all "first tastes."  I might say that some left more of a taste for subsequent performance than others;  but "first appearances" in the concert repertoire are easily deceiving.  Nevertheless, Russell and McCright did a great service by providing opportunity for these "first tastes."  At the very least I now have some names that will register with me the next time I see a program announced on which they appear.