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.
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