In his remarks introducing the first performance of Giacinto Scelsi's
"Hymnos" by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall last
night, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas, reflecting on the unfavorable
mail he had received following previous performances of Scelsi's music
("Aion" in 1997 and "Konx-Om-Pax" in 2000) invoked metaphor. His
response to those who had been unreceptive to Scelsi was ask them to
imagine being on a cruise and seeing, in the distance, a previously
unknown island, which, when viewed through binoculars, revealed equally
unknown flora and fauna. This metaphor of excursion and discovery is
certainly apposite where Scelsi is concerned; but it applies just as
well to the conclusion of the Mahler Festival '09, which left the strong
impression that Gustav Mahler's entire life had been one of excursion
and discovery.
Among those who remember the earlier Scelsi performances, the prevailing impression seems to be that his music was loud; but those performances preceded Benjamin Shwartz' presentation in June of 2008 of "The Torino Scale," the first movement of Mark-Anthony Turnage's Three Asteroids,
which set the bar to a new level for the semantics of "loud." It was
never Scelsi's intention to compete over decibels. Rather, his priority
was with the nature of sound itself and the extent to which one could
approach composition in terms of properties of acoustic spectra, rather
than the usual syntactic relationships of melody, harmony, and
counterpoint. Towards the end of his life, he was "discovered and
adopted" by the "spectral music" school (which has received generous
exposure here thanks to the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players);
but his efforts to work with a full symphony orchestra as if it were
some sort of "wetware synthesizer" remain both unique and astonishing.
One
way to appreciate Scelsi's rhetoric, particularly in a composition like
"Hymnos," is to think of him examining a single note under a very
powerful magnifying glass. He begins with the fundamental pitch being
explored by different instruments, after which other pitches are
gradually introduced, some of which are "natural overtones" while others
add "non-harmonic" coloration. These individual pitches come and go
according to scrupulous control of the attack and decay amplitude
envelopes of every note played by every instrument. In the case of
"Hymnos," the instruments are divided into two orchestras facing each
other; so the control of amplitude is further enhanced by the spatial
disposition of the sound sources. Against the canvas of gradually
changing timbres, Scelsi has deployed a rich percussion section to
punctuate the continuous flow of sound, allowing the ear to recognize
coherent segments in the overall flow of the sound.
Ironically,
this particular effort, composed in 1963, arrives a goal that,
throughout the Fifties, Karlheinz Stockhausen had been trying to achieve
with his laboratory full of sine-wave generators. I have suggested
that Stockhausen was probably influenced by the "Farben" movement of
Arnold Schoenberg's five Opus 16 orchestral pieces; and there is every
reason to believe that Scelsi fell under the same influence. However,
Scelsi followed Schoenberg in seeking the control of acoustic coloration
through new ways to use the orchestra, rather than resorting to the
abstractions of electronic equipment. As that ear-mind coupling
begins to find orientation among the sounds that Scelsi can summon, the
discovery of the excursion becomes the sort of experience that make one
wish that the adjective "awesome" had not been so devalued by popular
speech!
In this final week of the Mahler Festival, we no longer
need to be convinced of Mahler's capacity for inspiring awe. However,
in matters of excursion and discovery, the fifth (C-sharp minor)
symphony made for excellent pairing with "Hymnos." True to Mahler's own
characteristic rhetoric, this is a composition rich in
cross-references, both external and internal. This is clear from the
very first gesture, a fanfare first used to introduce the recapitulation
section in the first movement of the fourth symphony, all the way
through to the final movement, which begins by recalling one of the Wunderhorn songs (possibly the last of so many Wunderhorn
references in the overall cycle of symphonies) and culminates in the
same chorale that had concluded the second movement. However, the
funeral marches that dominate the first two movements, have now returned
in the guise of a downright manic two-step that has also thoroughly
recast the mood of one of the sublime melodies of the Adagietto movement.
(As the leader of a New Orleans funeral band said to a tourist who had
stopped to listen to the dirge that followed the coffin to the cemetery,
"You should hear us on the way back!") If, as I remarked last week,
Mahler's music is a tightly-knit fabric of memory threads, then the
fifth symphony almost succeeds in collapsing that entire fabric into the
scale of one single composition.
Thomas is now familiar enough with this symphony to conduct it without a score. His
"ear-mind coupling" now commands a conception of both the big picture
and the details from which that picture emerges. His interpretation is
thus a significant asset where our own listening experiences are
concerned. Having made the excursion and having encountered the
discoveries, he now leads us as a well-informed tour guide. Our
internalization of the result may never be as comprehensive as his, but
our capacity for listening has definitely been broadened by having made
the trip.
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