November 3, 2009: Order and stasis

I wrote my review of the first concert of the 39th season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) under the title "The composer as listener."  This prompted a presumably sarcastic comment from reader "duh" about how unlikely it would be that composers listened to the music of others, which then reminded me of Milton Babbitt having published an article entitled "Who Cares If You Listen?"  At last night's SFCMP concert I found myself wondering less about whether or not the composers on the program listened to the music of others and more about whether they listened to their own work.

Perhaps by virtue of that "Babbitt connection," I also found myself reflecting on the pedagogical practices of the Princeton composer Chou Wen-Chung.  A friend of mine once told me about his experience of sitting in on one of Chou's classes.  The man could be a devastating critic.  A student would start to play a new composition, and Chou would interrupt him after only a few minutes.  He would then say something like:

That's enough.  I know where the rest of it will go.  I'm an old man.  I don't have time to listen to any more of it!

I don't want to play the "old man" card;  but I found myself thinking along these lines for three of the four works on the program.  They were all between fifteen and twenty minutes in duration;  but I came away with the impression that each of those works said what it had to say within the first few minutes and then labored under some unspoken obligation to fill a more respectable duration.

Perhaps the title of the evening, Made to Order, was an omen of this listening experience.  It referred to the fact that all of the works on the program came from commissions from SFCMP or, in one case, an SFCMP performer (the guitarist David Tanenbaum);  and it also carried the connotation that composition was a matter of bringing order to one's resources.  One of the composers, Ken Ueno, even harped on the metaphor of "pushing notes around" during the pre-concert discussion.  The problem is that pushing all those notes into some kind of order carries the connotation that the result is a static object, which, in turn, suggests that the dynamics of performance are secondary.  "Who cares if you listen?" has now transmogrified into "Who care if you perform?"

This is not to say that SFCMP was negligent in its performance practices.  It was clear that all the performers, as well as conductor Sara Jobin, took their work very seriously.  However, among my other personal reflections, I recalled going to Kronos Quartet concerts where I would sit behind David Harrington and could see the music on his stand.  There were always pieces (fortunately not all of them) during which I became focused on Harrington turning his pages;  I kept trying to figure out when I was looking at the last page!  From my vantage point last night I could see Jobin's scores, and I realized that I was having exactly the same experience.  Everyone on stage clearly had a sense of beginning and end in each composition being performed, and in some cases there may even have been a sense of middle.  However, on the listener's side that metaphorical sense of musical performance being a journey just did not connect.

Under such circumstances I feel it is unfair to belabor the details of the three compositions that sustained these problems.  The reader can find a PDF version of the program notes on the SFCMP Web site.  I prefer to accentuate the positive and dwell on the Five Pieces for Guitar and Electronics, which was composed by Ronald Bruce Smith on a commission from Tanenbaum.  This was a suite of short pieces, two of which, "Lachrymal" and "Saudade," reflected on past traditions of music for the guitar and its ancestors.  The others came off more as impressions of the composer's own listening experiences, reinforcing the proposition that composers can benefit from being good listeners.  Most important, however, was the smooth integration of the guitar with the digital equipment responsible for both sampling and transforming sounds from Tanenbaum's performance.  The work constituted a perfect example of why the "marriage" of art and technology does not have to be dominated by the technology.  The fact that Smith could make his point in five short pieces, rather than some magnum opus, made his achievement all the more impressive;  and the suite, taken as a whole, provided the most secure anchor point for serious listening in the course of the entire evening.

October 6, 2009: The composer as listener

Perhaps the most important lesson from the Gustav Mahler:  Origins and Legacies programs that Michael Tilson Thomas prepared with the San Francisco Symphony involved the significant role that listening experiences can play in the act of composition.  Thus, when confronted with "new music," such as the works that the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players prepared for their first concert of the season last night, we need to remember that none of these composers has ever worked in a vacuum.  A composer is as much a listener when composing as (s)he is when performing;  and this involves not only listening to what is being composed but also listening to one's memories.  Contrary to what Harold Bloom proposed, influence is less a cause for anxiety and more a trigger for reflection from which one's thoughts begin to emerge.  The serious listener may, as a result, try to approach a new composition by taking into account the context in which that composition came to be.

This strategy works particularly well with Morton Feldman, composer of the earliest (1972) work on last night's program, part I of The Viola in My Life.  (The decision to print this title in lower case in the program is inconsistent with all the sources I consulted in preparing the preview piece I wrote on Sunday.)  As a member of the New York School, Feldman shared John Cage's acute awareness of the significance of every sound;  and this particular composition comes from a time when he worked almost entirely in soft dynamics and the stillness of isolated moments.  What emerges is a conversation as intimate as we can encounter in the overall legacy of chamber music that we are easily seduced into following, even if the novelty of logic, grammar, and rhetoric in that conversation leave us puzzled over what has actually been said.

The next work in the chronological ordering of the program selections was Steve Reich's "Vermont Counterpoint" (1982), commissioned by flutist Ransom Wilson and dedicated to Betty Freeman.  Here is Reich's own description of the work:

It is scored for three alto flutes, three flutes, three piccolos and one solo part all pre-recorded on tape, plus a live solo part.  The live soloists plays alto flute, flute and piccolo and participates in the ongoing counterpoint as well as more extended melodies.  The piece could be performed by eleven flutists but is intended primarily as a solo with tape.

I had the good fortune to hear Wilson play this in concert with ten other flutists;  but in this performance Tod Brody was the only flutist, playing against the tape.  The work is very much a logical consequence of Reich's earlier compositions in which thick contrapuntal textures were achieved through experiments in phase-shifting.  As is the case with any complex contrapuntal structure, the ear can detect different melodic patterns in the interplay of the voices;  and Reich's "Violin Phase" (1967) required the solo violinist to do just that, creating a solo by enhancing fragments from the texture that were perceived as particularly salient.  By the time of "Vermont Counterpoint," Reich had taken over responsibility for all decisions of choice;  but the earlier spirit is still present.  The flute soloist guides the ear through the thick texture, pointing out melodic passages latent in that texture, somewhat in the spirit of Thomas' recent metaphor of discovering unknown flora on a previously unknown island.

Charles Wuorinen's "Trombone Trio" (1985) was an entirely different matter.  This is a work for tenor trombone, piano, and xylophone and marimba performed by a single percussionist.  (The xylophone is placed behind and slightly above the marimba, creating the effect of a single instrument rather like a double-manual harpsichord.)  The account of Wuroninen's career in the program book was rich with influences, but it also seemed rich with a preoccupation with theory in preference to practice.  Thus, the influences seemed to have more to do with marks on paper than with the different approaches to listening that could be found in Feldman and Reich (not to mention Mahler).  This may well be a work in which each listener must find his/her own way and will only find it through the sort of repeated exposure that most concert series cannot provide.

The remaining works on the program were products of our "new century."  John Harbison's The Seven Ages, a cycle of six song settings of poems by Louise Glück, was composed in the summer of 2008 at the Aspen and Tanglewood Music Festivals.  Harbison is very much a performer with a rich repertoire.  His diversity runs the gamut from preparing regular performances of Johann Sebastian Bach with Emmanuel Music through chamber music in a Wisconsin barn that he refurbished with his wife (as in the above photograph) into jazz gigs with "friends."  However, as was evident in the pre-concert interview, he is also intensely intellectual, attributing his appreciation of jazz to a relatively obscure German critic's analysis of chord progressions.

The Seven Ages was the longest work of the evening, taking almost half an hour while all the other works ran about ten minutes.  Unfortunately, it also felt long.  This may have had much to do with the texts that tended to be long-winded (to a point that would challenge mere recitation) with a tendency for self-indulgence:

Why not?  Why not?  Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
in not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Say what?  By all rights Harbison should have had the performer's chops to make this work.  Bach's tastes in poetry were never particularly distinguished;  and Bach also had a talent for moving his settings along through paths of both instrumental and melodic diversity.  Unfortunately, like Wuroinen, Harbison seems to have been consumed with questions of theory when his intuitions for practice could have done with a few hints from older (as less theoretically inclined) masters.

The most recent work on the program, composed by Edmund Campion for the 2009 Festival Presence in Merz, France, might best be described as anti-theoretical.  Having been commissioned by Radio France, the work was given a French title:  "600 Seconds dans le vieux modèle."  This translates to "600 Seconds in the worn-out model."  The "worn-out model" is the one Campion acquired in his studies, particularly his doctoral research at Columbia University under Mario Davidovsky at a time when it was difficult to distinguish serial composition from research in the abstractions of higher mathematics (particularly, thanks to Milton Babbitt, the study of permutation groups).  Campion thus had to contend with a lot of "influence" in his baggage;  and he chose to relieve the anxiety of that influence through satire.  He thus dished out his own slightly jaundiced impressions of rhetorical idioms that remain as opaque as they were when launched by the theoretical birth-agonies of composers like Pierre Boulez;  but he served up his own version with that "cheery disposition" to which Cage attributed his own success.  If Campion is a harbinger of where music may be going, then the century may be off to a good start!

October 4, 2009: The viola in Morton Feldman's life

I was glad to see that the Sunday Datebook Section in today's San Francisco Chronicle included a featured announcement of tomorrow night's performance by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at Herbst Theatre.  The announcement included a photograph of John Harbison and focused on the inclusion in the program of the commissioned work, "The Seven Ages," a setting of poetry by Louise Glück.  One had to look to the left of Harbison's photograph to discover that he would also be participating in the Contemporary Insights:  Music and Conversation event at 4:30 this afternoon at the ODC Dance Commons.  Unfortunately, limitations of space seem to have prevented saying much else about the program other than "with music by Edmund Campion ["600 Secondes dans le vieux modèle," a United States premiere], Morton Feldman [Part I of The Viola in My Life], Steve Reich ["Vermont Counterpoint"] and Charles Wuorinen ["Trombone Trio"]."  (Content in square brackets was not included in the Chronicle text and is my own.)  In addition to this afternoon's event, tomorrow's performance will be preceded by a talk at 7:15 PM.

Since Feldman died in 1987, he will not be able to speak for himself tomorrow evening.  Therefore, I thought it would be fitting to offer some of his remarks about The Viola in My Life, which Walter Zimmermann included in his anthology of essays by and about Feldman, published by Beginner Press in 1985:

"The Viola in My Life" (dedicated to the Pierrot Players) was begun in Honolulu in July, 1970 and completed after my return home to New York in late August.

Scored for flute, viola, cello, percussion and piano, the compositional format is quite simple.  Unlike most of my music the tempo is quite precise.  I needed the exact time proportion underlying the gradual and slight crescendo characteristic of all the sounds the viola plays.  The rest of the ensemble remains constantly soft throughout.

Since 1958 (not unlike an aspect of minimal painting) the surface of my music was quite "flat".  The viola's crescendos are a return to a preoccupation with a musical perspective which is not determined by an interaction of corresponding musical ideas – but rather like a bird trying to soar in a confined landscape.

Given the focus on subtle changes in dynamics, this is a composition that can make for an intense listening experience.  Feldman is another composer who has chosen to focus on what I have called "the nature of sound itself," taking an approach that transcends "the usual syntactic relationships of melody, harmony, and counterpoint."  Chronologically, The Viola in My Life is situated between Giacinto Scelsi (whose "Hymnos" was just performed by the San Francisco Symphony), of whom Feldman was probably unaware, and Kaija Saariaho, who, in all probability, has been exposed to Feldman's work.  On my Cri American Masters CD, the performance of Part I of The Viola in My Life takes slightly more than twelve minutes;  and, given the extreme durations of many of subsequent works (back in 2007 I used my blog to document my efforts at learning to play "Piano"), this should be taken as accommodating to the listener and preparation for much of Feldman's subsequent repertoire.  Also helpful to listeners getting a first taste of Feldman is a review of the ECM recording of all four Parts of The Viola in My Life on the British Boomkat Web site, which refers to how the music presents "the lead string instrument in a kind of solemnly gradual game of call and response with chords laid down by an ensemble."

Feldman received relatively little attention in his lifetime;  and, with the exception of observations made by John Cage, much of that attention was derisive.  I met him in the early Seventies and expressed great interest in writing an extended piece about him.  He replied that he would prefer that I direct my efforts towards his fellow New York School composer, Christian Wolff.  Whether he had become defensive about what he feared I might write or whether he was genuinely modest, I shall never know.  However, I heard him talk at the Arnold Schoenberg Institute at the University of Southern California about fifteen years later (not long before his death);  and that event pretty much confirmed my modesty hypothesis.  I regret have had so few opportunities to listen to Feldman's music in performance, rather than on recording;  and I welcome the opportunity to hear a "real" performance of a work that, until now, I have known only through its recordings.

March 31, 2009: A matter of context

For all of the opportunities to become acquainted with the music performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Forum last night, even the most sympathetic listener was faced with major challenges.  Harold Bloom may have been "anxious" over poets who were influenced by other poets;  but where music is concerned, whether in composition or performance, influence is more often the fertile soil from which new ideas emerge.  In the case of listening, influence can actually be a two-way street.  Thus Ludwig van Beethoven's dedication of his Opus 2 piano sonatas to Joseph Haydn is, at least in part, an acknowledgement of influence;  but, by the same count, if we are familiar with the Beethoven sonatas, we can hear Haydn's 1790 E flat major sonata (H. XVI/49) as a source of that influence.  The practice of music weaves a thick and extensive social network;  and, more often than not, the "shock of the new" is a matter of getting one's bearings within that network.

As Alessandro Solbiati and François Paris discussed their work (both laboring under difficulties with the English language) prior to last night's concert, there was considerable allusion to the influence of the "spectral music" school of thought but little by way of expository introduction.  To be fair this approach, practiced primarily in Europe since the 1970s, has been well represented in past performances by the Contemporary Music Players;  and one of its pioneers, Gérard Grisey, who died in 1998, taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1982 through 1986.  Such facts do little for the disoriented unwashed (like myself), however.  While it was clear that the works of both Solbiati and Paris (as well as the contribution of Philippe Hurel to last night's program) reflected Grisey's influence, there was not enough "working knowledge" of what that influence was to benefit the hapless newcomer.  If all one needed to know about "spectral music" had to do with working with acoustic spectra as a musical medium, then techniques such as Solbiati's scordatura assignment of the twelve chromatic pitches to the open strings of a cello, viola, and violin in his "Sestetto à Gérard" came across as a rather blunt instrument for manipulating spectral properties.  The same could be said of Paris' use of quarter tones in his "À propos de Nice."  In his remarks Paris said that he wanted to get beyond the "compromises" of traditional tuning systems;  but, if his objective was a tuning system with fewer "compromises" to the natural harmonics, there is a relatively simple mathematical demonstration that quarter tones do not function as well as, for example, third tones.  (The "bottom line" is that the quarter tone tuning helps you get a far more "natural" tritone;  but the other "natural" intervals are not as well served.)  Finally, Hurel's "Loops IV" was composed for solo marimba, whose spectral properties are relatively rigid and thus afford few opportunities for acoustic manipulation.

The other composer represented on the program was Tristan Murail, who, like Grisey, was a member of  the Groupe de l'Itinéraire and shares Grisey's status as a "pioneer" of spectral music.  Murail was represented by two short piano pieces, "Cloches d'adieu, et un sourire …" (Bells of farewell, and a smile) and "La Mandragore" (The Mandrake).  Orientation to Murail's piano music is facilitated by familiarity with the solo piano music of Olivier Messiaen, an excellent case in point being his Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus.  In these twenty short compositions, the very sound of the piano itself is always a key element;  but Messiaen arrives at those sounds not through spectral manipulation but through meticulous instructions to the pianist.  Given the extent to which "Cloches" acknowledges Messiaen's influence, my guess is that Murail took the same approach in both of these works.

Whatever the listening challenges may be, the approach of the Contemporary Music Players is to be as faithful as possible to the intentions of the composer and let the music speak for itself.  (I have called this the "stare decisis approach" in some of my past writing about Messiaen.)  There is no questioning the sincerity of their performances, and their institutional relationship with the composers they perform suggests that their authenticity is also unquestionable.  In the long run listeners can only be served by more exposure to such music.  However, between the rehearsal time required to "let the music speak for itself" and the expense associated with performances like this one, increasing the "exposure level" is neither physically easy nor economically feasible.  So the best thing we can do is take what we can get.  Orientation will come.  I know.  I have been there with other "disorienting" instances of "new music," which would later become "old friends!"