Monday, December 28, 2015

December 12, 2009: Haydn variations

Last night Marino Formenti performed the second of his two Aspects of the Divine recitals for San Francisco Performances at St. Mark's Lutheran Church in San Francisco.  The title of this second part was Seven Last Words;  and the central work, performed after the intermission, was a piano transcription (presumably Formenti's own) of Joseph Haydn's oratorio, The Seven Last Words of Our Savior on the Cross.  This was preceded before the intermission by a single work, the United States premiere of Bernhard Lang's Monadologie V—7 Last Words of Hasan.

In a statement reproduced in the program book, Lang described his Monadologie compositions as follows:
Perhaps the Mondadologies can best be characterized in the following points:  they utilize tiny introductory modules, which are used to generate the entire musical fabric.  These introductory elements are for the most part "samples" from existing musical material.  The scores are created through cellular automatons [sic];  in other words, they are created mechanically and themselves represent mechanical abstractions in the Deleuzian sense.  The cells pass through discrete states as complex differentials, appearing as constant mutations.
In Monadologie V the "existing musical material" comes from Haydn's oratorio and Formenti's own comments in the program book reflect on the relationship between Lang and Haydn:
His [Lang's] way of obsessively dissecting and reassembling (and therefore obsessively questioning) models and modules, based here as in his other works on "historical" material, would also recreate an authentic, partly violently true "anti-music."
The concept of "seven last words" also undergoes transformation in Lang's reworking of Haydn.  In Haydn's case, the "words" are actually seven phrases from the Gospels that Jesus uttered from the Cross.  Haydn's oratorio was written for a Good Friday service in the Cathedral of Cádiz in Spain to provide music for meditation by the congregation after each of these phrases was pronounced during the ritual.  Lang has transformed Jesus into Hasan-i Sabbah, first known by the West through the tales of Marco Polo.  Hasan himself was not a martyr;  but he led the cult of Shiite Arab Hashshashins (the Assassins), all of whom embraced martyrdom as part of their cause.  The legend is that, on his deathbed in 1124, Hasan whispered seven words just before dying:
Remember, nothing is true;  everything is permitted.
To the extent that cellular automata have provided a fundamental mathematical abstraction in an area of research known as "artificial life," Hasan's words have striking relevance:  The world of abstraction transcends the concept of truth.  The question of whether or not anything is true is replaced by the question of whether or not all the propositions of the abstraction are consistent among themselves.  Truth no longer matters;  and, while everything is not permitted, the constraints of internal consistency allow for a generous approximation to everything!

Thus, as had been the case with the music of Olivier Messiaen at the first Aspects of the Divine recital last Saturday, Formenti presented a program of music based on a considerable theoretical infrastructure.  However, as was the case on Saturday, it was clear that he approached his performance with more attention to practice than to theory.  From this point of view, he seemed to take that comment about "partly violently true 'anti-music'" (perhaps in response to Hasan's dying conviction that nothing is true) as a point of departure.  There was definitely an outburst of violence in the flood of notes that began Monadologie V, pounded out with such spontaneity that Formenti began playing as he was taking his seat on the piano bench;  but, for all of that violence, I am not sure I would call Lang's music contrarian.

What was fascinating about the organization of the program is that Haydn's oratorio is not a particularly familiar work, even in his revision of the music as a string quartet (sometimes performed by a string ensemble).  Thus, one could not count on extensive recognition of the modules behind this particular compositional process.  One was simply aware that, in the midst of an onslaught of violent dissonance (the earthquake of the coda to Haydn's oratorio?), fragments of eighteenth-century rhetoric would emerge, swept away by the dissonances almost before they could be recognized.  Yet I suspect that Formenti anticipated that those fragments would register, even if subliminally;  so they would be recognized when they emerged after the intermission in the Haydn source text.

Since I have heard several performances of the oratorio (all recorded, unfortunately), I had the advantage of recognizing those fragments when Lang revealed them.  However, as I listened to Formenti's piano transcription of the Haydn, I realized that another bond had formed between the two compositions on the program.  Lang's "discrete states" were realized through an intensely driving pulse;  and that pulse figures significantly in Haydn's rhetoric.  In Haydn, as one might imagine, the pulse serves primarily as a background element, which adds emotional tension to the foreground melodic line and the poignancy of the text being sung.  Thus, much of Lang's own architecture arises from the way in which he has taken background material from Haydn and moved it into the foreground.  In Lang's music the emotional tension is still there;  but it is now revealed with far sharper edges, providing Formenti with a basis for that "violent truth."  However, by performing his transcription of Haydn after Lang's mutations, Haydn's pulses no longer receded to that background for which they had probably been intended.  In other words the context of Lang's music had disrupted the usual conventions of foreground and background that we would apply to listening to Haydn;  and Formenti's performance seemed designed to let that disruption run its course, providing an "aspect" of Haydn more revolutionary than what one would gather from most accounts of his work.

The whole evening was thus thoroughly alien to the usual traditions of the piano recital, even in the ways in which Haydn was presented.  Nevertheless, the conception of the program was certainly true to its overarching theme.  After all, just about any "aspect of the Divine" must, by its very nature, be alien to mere mortality.  Those aspects of the Divine that Formenti addressed through Messiaen last Saturday were presented as sources of awe and wonder.  Haydn's music may have been intended for silent meditation;  but Lang's transformations restored those impressions of awe and wonder, thus shaping any meditations that occupied our minds when Formenti allowed Haydn's voice to speak through his transcription.  Meditating on the Crucifixion during Advent may have put time a bit out of joint, but meditating on aspects of the Divine is suitable for any period in the religious calendar.

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