October 11, 2009: Illusions and realities of the twentieth century

According to the cover of their program book, the mission of the BluePrint Project at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music is "building new music for the city."  This should not be construed strictly in terms of building up a repertoire, but also a cultivation of the performing and listening practices necessitated by that repertoire.  The theme of this year's BluePrint season is Crosscurrents … where arts converge.  Artistic Director Nicole Paiement explained this in her Welcome statement:

We have chosen to cross the currents of art through collaborations with actors, dancers, stage directors, media artists, and even puppeteers.  We open with an homage to the art of illusion with works by Allen Strange, John Adams, Darius Milhaud, and Ronald Caltabiano.

Paiement has experimented with bringing additional media to past BluePrint concerts, even in subtle ways such as choosing lighting appropriate for the music being performed.  Nevertheless, at last night's opening concert in the Conservatory Concert Hall, the relationship of her program selections to that "art of illusion" was not always easily apprehended.

It was at its most explicit in the opining work, Strange's "King of Handcuffs (Ragtime for Harry)," composed in 2001.  The "Harry" in the title is Harry Houdini;  and Strange described the composition as "a continuous set of dances with texts taken from various police testimonials regarding the handcuff and jail cell escapes of Harry Houdini."  The texts are delivered, some spoken others sung, by a single tenor, who works with minimal props and costumes.  In many ways this was a conception similar to some of the music/theater creations of Harry Partch but with more traditional instruments;  so it was no surprise that Partch was one of Strange's composition teachers.  Even without Partch's unconventional tuning system, the interplay between voice and pitched percussion was delivered with a rhetoric very much in the spirit of Partch's "hobo cantata," "Barstow."  Like "Barstow," "King of Handcuffs" is an evocation of another age, whose construction of reality was significantly different from our own.  As such it was an excellent selection to launch Paiement's "mission."

This was followed by Caltabiano's "Concertini" that, in his words, "comprises a series of short movements and features the alternation of solo and tutti sections."  It was originally commissioned for the San Francisco Symphony, which performed it in 1991;  but Caltabiano also prepared a version for fifteen instruments:  flute doubling piccolo, B-flat clarinet doubling E-flat clarinet, oboe, bassoon, two horns, trumpet, trombone, piano, percussion (vibraphone, marimba, and timpani), and string quartet.  Whether or not this was a work of illusion, it was definitely another evocation of past times, those being the times before the virtuoso concerto had displaced the concerto grosso genre.  It was also another example, in the spirit of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players performance at the beginning of the week, of a composer who is very much a listener.  Each of the ten movements of "Concertini" was dedicated to a twentieth-century composer who had positively influenced Caltabiano;  and that influence was particularly evident in at least some of those movements, one of the most striking being the brass homage to Peter Maxwell Davies.  There also appeared to be some acknowledgement of Gustav Mahler;  but that may have been an "illusion" induced by last month's Mahler Festival at the San Francisco Symphony!

On the other hand it was hard to recognize any sense of illusion in Milhaud's cantata, "La mort d'un tyran."  One sentence from David Bernstein's note for this work says it all:

It portrays the terrifying response of a people subjected to the reign of a cruel and capricious dictator.

The "people" are a mixed chorus, alternating between singing and rhythmic declamation (as they had done in Milhaud's opera Les Choéphores), accompanied by six percussionists, piccolo, clarinet, and tuba.  As the instrumentation suggests, this is very much a work of extremes, first performed, ironically enough, only months after Adolf Hitler's rise to power in Germany.  In the spirit of Giambattista Vico's "poetic wisdom," this work draws upon artistic conventions of both the ancient and modern worlds to disclose a horrifying reality at its starkest.

The evening concluded with John Adams' "Gnarly Buttons" for clarinet and chamber orchestra.  This returns us to the world of illusion, as Adams explains in his own notes for the work, reproduced in the program book:

The three movements are each based on a "forgery" or imagined musical model.  The idea for this goes back to the imagined "foxtrot" of my 1986 piece, The Chairman Dances, music to which Madame and Chairman Mao dance and make love, believing my foxtrot to be the genuine article.

In "Gnarly Buttons" the illusion of "the genuine article" is enhanced by sampled sounds, which include not only instruments but also a cow (the "Mad Cow" of the second "Hoe-down" movement).  As the program notes make clear, this is very much a personal memory piece, in which memory blurs the boundary between the forged and the genuine (as it always does).  However, like many of Adams' other compositions, it is also a work of wit;  and Paiement's ensemble captured the wit as effectively as the interplay of illusion and reality.