A new work of mine and eight other premieres, duets by
living composers, will be performed at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 18 at William
Paterson University’s New Music Series, on a program titled “Terrible Twos.”
The music was commissioned by Composers Concordance, a group
of longstanding currently led by Gene Pritsker and Dan Cooper that regularly
performs commissions and performs works by its members. This concert is the
first event of Composers Concordance 2017-18 season.
The program
is mostly duets, split between performers Gene Pritsker and Greg Baker,
electric guitars; Keve Wilson, oboe, and Kathleen Supové, piano; and Peter
Jarvis, multi-percussion and Michiyo Suzuki, clarinet/ bass clarinet. They’ll
be performing work by Randall Woolf, Gene Pritsker, Peter Jarvis, Greg Baker,
David Saperstein, Dan Cooper, John Clark, and myself. The concert finale will
be “a large semi-aleatoric piece” that will include all three duos performing
as a sextet.
My contribution will be in the
clarinet and percussion duets, along with new pieces by John and Peter. The
title of mine is “Lunatic,” as it was started before the recent total eclipse
that captured the attention of all of North America. The event seemed to
underscore what feels like a surreal time in American life and culture, one
where we’re wrestling with a kind of national psychological complex related to who
we were and who we are as a country and a species. The overlay of that
superficial fixation onto the underlying forces of creation, symbolized by the
eclipse, reveals a colorful, dark landscape of anxiety.
Admission
is free. The concert is in Shea Center for the Performing Arts, William Paterson
University, 300 Pompton Road, Wayne, NJ 07470. I hope everyone can come and
support both the Composers Concordance and the university’s New Music Series.
Both deserve high praise for their relentless efforts to promote new music in
high quality performances.
Reading this article from AAAS, it suddenly occurs to me that the common argument about machines vs. humans in
music is flawed. As I note in my last post about Liza Lim’s “How Forests
Think,” we naturally hear the sounds of the forests as music – it is a human
response. We turn the sound into music because we’re musical creatures that
come from the forest. That small insight, applied here, provides the key to
understanding our future role with technology and the arts. Music isn’t necessarily in the
making – deciding which notes and rhythms go together – but in the human
response to organized sound, the enjoyment and participation of in the making
and listening. That makes AI seriously less threatening. Will machines make
music equal to that of humans in creativity, complexity, even spiritual depth?
Sure! Will it matter? Nope. Because, after all, what’s the point? We ultimately will be able to teach
computers how to respond to music like we do. And they will be capable of
making music on par with a human composer or performer. But the musical experience
itself is human and the need for humans to make music and to appreciate the
music that is made, will never, ever go away. Machines are just us – an
extension of us and an extension of that musical impulse. This idea actually extends a slim
hope for the economics of music – a weakly floating board to cling to amid the
shipwreck of the music industry. As far back as Marshall McLuhan, students of
culture have noted that it is only when an object’s use becomes obsolete that
we, as a culture, begin to fully appreciate it. The value of paintings and
appreciation for the skill of the illustrator increased with the advent of the
photograph. Tape and LPs became highly prized when that had been eclipsed by
CDs and digital downloads and streaming. We are seeing a rather sudden
appreciation of the physical, printed book, separate from the books we read
online (the scores of George Crumb and the rise of the graphic novel are just
two examples that spring to mind). Once its usefulness is eclipsed, the human
achievement of the old medium becomes the thing itself, a source of admiration
and appreciation. That’s where we’re headed with the
use of live performing musicians for entertainment. Already it has become a
kind of status symbol – only the poor wedding will have no live music. Musicians
now can make a living as cover bands, some focusing on famous old acts like Led
Zeppelin and the Beatles, but some just cranking out the tunes at parties, human
juke boxes – whether imitating artists or rendering them in a more personal
style, doesn’t matter, so long as they’re not
recordings but flesh and blood, communicating the rhythm. It is common, too, to see live
performance transcriptions of works never designed for live performance, like
Frank Zappa’s “G-Spot Tornado” at the 1990s Yellow Shark concerts, or the
Beatles’ “Revolution 9” by Alarm Will Sound, or the endless MIDI scores
composed for video games performed by orchestras. The subtext there is clear:
music is better with living human
beings making the sound. Not better because humans do it
better; simply better because human. It will be no surprise when a
future sophisticated robot (like Data in “Star Trek: The Next Generation”) can
play Paganini perfectly. But because it’s no surprise, it will also be less
valuable than a human achieving the same goal. A player piano can execute
rhythms and counterpoints impossible for a human to play. The only reason to
care is because a human dreamed up those impossible compositions. Music is part of our evolution into
the creatures we are now and technology is part of that. But the connection
between our music and our biology is deep, and it exists now with or without
technological aid, offering us immediate union with one another and with the
world. We will carry that forward, come what may. Let’s admit that the Turing Test is
merely a landmark on the horizon, and that there will come a day when we
literally can’t tell the difference between humans and machines, or the part of
us that is human and the part that is machine – no matter how well we know the
hybrid. That day is a long way off, but when it comes, the confusion will be
best expressed in a song.
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) performs “How Forests Think,” 7:30 p.m. Monday, August 14 at Merkin Concert Hall, Lincoln Center.
The program – part of Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart summer festival – takes it’s name from a work for 10 musicians by composer Liza Lim. (Perhaps coincidentally, this is also the title of an interesting book about interconnected rhythms of life experienced by Amazon forest natives.) In addition to Lim’s music, the program includes Pauline Oliveros’s “Earth Ears,” and Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Aequilibria.” The ensemble will be conducted by Baldur Brönnimann and musician Wu Wei will perform on the sheng, a Chinese mouth-blown reed organ.
The thread of the program, obviously, is the connection between music and nature, something that is very much on my mind as I prepare for the course, Music and the Natural World, that I teach each Fall for freshman at The College of New Jersey. The topic runs deep and crosses all lines of human investigation, including biological and physical sciences, philosophy, religion, politics, the visual arts, dance, psychology and sociology.
The reason for this blurring of lines is the root of music is deep in prehistory – it prefigures and shapes many aspects of human activity that reason would typically try to parse into separate channels for analysis. Music doesn't parse. Any part of it interconnects to any other part. (Try defining harmony, for instance, without talking about pitch, time and esthetic impressions.) Music organizes people like . On the one hand it lifts individuality and makes us conscious of time; on the other, it submerges our individual identities into the pool of the communal response, which holds all of the past, present and future in one bowl.
Those realizations are apparent with very little investigation – just an open set of ears and a heart tuned to an old song. Lim's composition uses for its model the life of the forest itself, the activity, growth and structures that define it. We hear forest sounds as music – is that because an ancestral association of good emotions with the sound of the forest? Or are we anthropomorphizing those sounds, turning them into human-style communication, reflecting our humanness back onto the non-human forest? Or is it because our understanding of music emanates from there, so we are ourselves manifestations of the forest? (Answer: yes. Mark this spot on the map in your brain: this is the approximate place where words stop, while the landscape of music keeps right on going.)
Sō Percussion’s Summer Institute begins Sunday, July 16 in Princeton and continues through the end of the month. The group (shown above in a press photo from its website) has eight performances scheduled at various venues on and around Princeton University campus, including a 7:30 p.m. Thursday appearance at Small World Coffee – a typically crowded Witherspoon Street hangout where singer/songwriters and other small ensembles perform.
In particular, the Princeton Composer Concert, 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 22, at Matthews Acting Studio, Lewis Center for the Arts, 185 Nassau St., Princeton, will feature the work of seven graduate student composers. The Composers Guild of New Jersey – where I am a board member – has commissioned works by composers selected by Sō Percussion Summer Institute, with the goal of encouraging young New Jersey composers. CGNJ also donated money for other expenses related to the performance, including videotaping.
Donations of nonperishable food, toiletries, and diapers for the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) will be collected at specific Summer Institute concerts, including the July 22 performance. Audience members may place their donations in the designated boxes outside the performance space.
I've posted the recording below on Facebook and Twitter already, but I'm putting it here as well. This is the June 2 premiere of my second String Quartet, completed in 2016 and performed by the Locrian Chamber Players at Riverside Church in NYC. (The group's photo, above, is borrowed from its Facebook page. You can also follow @LocrianPlayers on Twitter.)
The Locrian performs only music of the last 10 years and the group has been around for over 20 years. Since pretty much everything they do is new, they've developed an unusual sensitivity to the interpretation of never-before-performed works. Like mine. I am deeply grateful to the players for their insightful, skilled and disciplined approach:
The four movements are in a single soundfile, with brief silences in between, recorded live.
1. Circle Dance
2. Fantasy
3. Churchyard
4. Drum
All four movements play with materials from folk music, pentatonic scales in particular. The Locrian hand out program notes only after the concert – a practice I fully support. The note on this quartet from the concert:
The four movements are intended as songs of a sort – simple structures, direct language, concise material. Like a dance suite, they are rooted in physical movement. The titles were added long after the quartet was complete. In hindsight, I would say the music reflects an awareness of the way communities express themselves in individual lives, and the way individuals act together. The circle dance could be at a wedding. The fantasy is like a county fair, with doses of joy, sorrow, confusion and weirdness. The churchyard is a stroll among the headstones, the lives lost beneath the grass. The last movement is inspired by a Native American drum team at a pow-wow: the team sits around a large drum, each member has a beater and they keep time together as they sing.
The rest of the program featured similarly wonderful performances. I have to shy away from a proper review, since it would be impossible for me to be impartial. I love everything on the program. But as a composer, with my own work on the same program, there were two pieces that stood out as my favorites. The first was "The Gates of Sleep" – a gemstone setting of short text by Virgil by Locrian co-founder David Macdonald, which opened the evening. Unpretentious, meditative, concise and powerful – I heard it once and I wanted to hear it again immediately. I just loved it.
The other was the 2007 string quartet "Blossoming" by Toshio Hosokawa. It's a dramatic, far-sighted piece that develops materials less from the traditions of classical music and more from the sounds of the natural world, exploiting a tendency that has been present in Japanese traditional music for centuries. Glissando-ing trills that enter gently, like the whispers of birds in flight over and around the listener, are one hallmark – a stunning performance of an important piece. I need to get the score.
Michael Gordon also had a really interesting string quartet on the program, "Clouded Yellow" (2010). Guitarist Stanley Alexandrowicz (who had a recital in Ewing, NJ, recently which I wrote about in my previous blog post) opened the second half with Brian Fennelly's "Prelude and Maverick Tango" (2014); and mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek and pianist Jonathan Faiman played George Crumb's "The Yellow Moon of Andalusia" (2012). The performance of the Crumb had all the dizzying colors, dissolving-into-silence drama and serious whimsy that you expect from him; the score is reminiscent of, but perhaps not equal to, "Ancient Voices of Children." In addition to having a great voice, Jacqueline's acting skills stitched the invisible threads of Crumb's music into a fine carpet.
Here's the complete program.
Love the Locrian Chamber Players – next concert, 8 p.m. August 25, featuring work by Steve Reich, John Luther Adams, Adrienne Albert, Aaron Alter and others.
Thursday night (July 6) I had the great pleasure of attending a recital by a friend of mine, classical guitarist StanleyAlexandrowicz, at the 1867 Sanctuary, a de-commissioned Presbyterian church in Ewing.
To be accurate, I only heard half of the recital. A family obligation meant I couldn’t get there until 9 p.m. and it started at 8. The bit I missed was some rarely heard 19th century repertoire – when I walked in, Stanley was just finishing up the pieces at the end of the first half.
Composer Kendall Kennison has written a few pieces for guitar and Stanley played two of them on the second half of the program. Kendall is a friend from my Rutgers days when we were both students of Robert Moevs and has for many years now been a professor at Goucher College. He was there with his wife Debbie, also a good friend and a former piano student of mine, and they were celebrating Debbie’s birthday.
The half of the program I heard was worth the trip. Stanley is a excellent player and a thoughtful interpreter of music of all styles. He uses a guitar modeled after 19th century types that uses additional bass strings over a second, unfretted neck. These come in handy in both period music and some contemporary pieces written specifically to take advantage of the extra low notes. Guitar builder Tom Sommerville of Hamilton was also in attendance. [see correction at the end]
Kendall’s music (we heard the difficult Sonata No. 1 and the short romp, “Backanally”) has a jewel-like geometry – Stanley said some people have heard a darkness and unsettled quality, but I don’t hear that. I hear a kind of logical love – a fluid, sparking architecture.
Carlton Wilkinson, Stanley Alexandrowicz and Kendall Kennison.
Photo courtesy Stanley Alexandrowicz
Also in attendance was composer and conductor Robert Butts, director of the Baroque Orchestra of New Jersey [http://baroqueorchestra.org]. Stanley played his “Early Morning Suite.” The style here is so conservative as to verge into historic homage (in styles ranging from Ralph Vaughan Williams to J.S. Bach), yet Butt’s music remains surprising and engaging, robust and beautiful.
The 1867 Sanctuary is a newer space and the managers are trying to increase the audience for it, to make the venue an active, vital community center for the arts. Operating costs are roughly $25,000/year, most of which is insurance, putting pressure on the group that now runs it, Preservation New Jersey, to ramp its activities and its visibility as a statewide arts attraction.
For me – who spent nearly 20 years in Trenton, moving away from there about 20 years ago – coming to the former church was the completion of a full circle: we held both my mother’s and her sister’s memorial services there when they died. My Mom went first, way back in 1982. My aunt, who was held in a kind of saintly esteem by the members of my family and her extensive community of friends, died much later, in 2007. My aunt learned the flute late in life, and got a lot of joy from it, turning it, as she did everything else, into an opportunity to make new friends and explore new horizons. I think she (and my mom) would be thrilled to see the church being developed as an arts venue.
It was great to catch up with my friends, if only for a few minutes at intermission and after the concert, sitting on benches in the old cemetery. I look forward to attending other concerts in the space.
--C.
7/8/17
theandofone.blogspot.com
CORRECTION: This post originally said Stanley's guitar "was built by Tom Sommerville of Hamilton." That was incorrect and my misunderstanding. See Stanley's note in the comments of this post.
--C. 7/8/17
NOTE: This post was originally published midday July 4, 2009. —C. 7/4/17
Apart from the context, Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangle Banner" is completely straightforward, a cinch to interpret. The context alone is what gives it its emotional and social complexity. That complexity also gives the piece more power than it already has, and it has quite a bit.
Although his is an instrumental version, Hendrix's interpretation remains tied directly to the lyrics. The music divides into large sections, the first being a virtuosic but faithful rendition of the melody for the opening four lines:
Oh say can you see, by the dawn's early light
what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming
Whose broad stripes and bright stars, through the perilous fight
o'er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming
Each pair of lines forms a complete musical phrase in the anthem. In these first two phrases, not much happens in Hendrix's playing in a pictorial sense. The occasional feedback and shifts of timbre, together with Mitch Mitchell's free-form drumming far in the background, feed into the creation of a "perilous" atmosphere, a sense of danger permeates the moment, offering a hint of what's to come.
I need to point out here that the constantly shifting timbre of the guitar is a hallmark of Hendrix's style. In addition to coaxing feedback--particularly as a kind of punctuation at the ends of musical phrases--he also makes near-constant use of the wah-wah pedal and the tone switch and level controls on the face of the Stratocaster guitar, any of which can instantly or slowly change the sound from a spitting bright sound to a half-swallowed dark sound and everything in between. The so-called "whammy bar", which allows him to loosen or tighten all of the strings at once with a single hand motion, adds to this effect by allowing him a wild vibrato, pitch bends and other effects.
Hendrix's virtuosic style is also marked by his ability to be anywhere on the neck of the guitar instantaneously. This is a technique that originates with the old Delta blues players, who would have a bass line going on the low frets alternating with a melody on the high frets, leaping back and forth fast enough to make both sound continuous. Hendrix uses this to give his playing a wild character, a sense both of fullness in the arrangement and a sense that you never know where the next sound is going to come from.
From the perspective of those style characteristics, it's remarkable how plain these two quatrains are. The first is merely the melody, without any decoration other than feedback and the pulsing of what sounds like a stereo vibrato effect. In the second, Hendrix elaborates the melody by sustaining a few notes and by adding some others in a kind of mimicry of a classical music approach. The elaborations add a flamboyant, swelling grandeur that probably has to be interpreted as at least slightly mocking. I say that reluctantly because I don't think Hendrix's version is in any way a satirical rendition. Its heartfelt and of the moment. But the moment included poking a little fun at conventions of the "squares".
But now, in the second section: this is where the thing really begins to fly.
And the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there
In the video, you can see Hendrix powering into this section. In the first verse, he's fussing with the tuning keys and the knobs of his guitar, idly watching his fingers or looking out over the audience. Clearly, this kind of playing he doesn't have to think too much about. As he gets close to this verse however, his whole posture changes: suddenly he races up to his pedals, his neck and spine bend forward slightly and he begins to radiate a raw physicality. From this point on, his hands barely leave the guitar, his facial expressions vary from meditative to intensely expressive. The guitar itself now travels up and down, elegantly changing position relative to the player as if partners in a pas de deux.
Using all the stylistic traits I mentioned above – the whammy bar, feedback, the effects pedals and covering the full expanse of the neck of the guitar – he creates bursts of sound after each half of the first line of this couplet. Repeatedly, he slides up from the bottom of the neck on the low strings, to get a swooping sound, and the open strings of the guitar, to get a smashing dissonant chord. After the second line in particularly he gets momentarily caught up in tightening the whammy bar and letting it out slowly, ending the fall with a crash of open strings.
These aren't the simple elaborations of the first verse but instead form a full-blown, well-balanced collage, divided in half by the playing of the melody for "the bombs bursting in air." The sounds here describe the text with imitations of the sounds of war: Bombs dropping, searing explosions of various types. Scraps of the earlier melody appear as well, altered but recognizable, as if not to let us forget that where we are is a violent nightmare version of where we came from.
For the fourth line of this quatrain, Hendrix simply reasserts the melody, immediately resuming his slightly distracted, almost bored physical poster. But before moving on, he pauses to salute the flag with an excerpt from the military bugle call, Taps. Hendrix served in the army and understood that Taps signals the close of day and, as such, is played at funerals to honor the service of the deceased, now at rest. The inserted melody serves as a stark transition into the final couplet.
Oh say does that Star-Spangled Banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.
In the first of these two lines, he uses a mandolin style plucking as a kind of drum roll version of the melody, echoed by an actual drum roll from Mitchell. He also uses this section to reflect back a little on the feedback and collage of the middle section. With a dramatic pause, he launches into the last line, given an appropriate grandeur with some elaboration reminiscent of the earlier section, including a final bomb-drop whammy bar and crash. Three chords then form a dramatic final cadence, a grand ceremonial gesture.
The complexity of the context is easily apparent to anyone who lived through the era. Hendrix could be both proud and critical of his country at the same time. Many of us were. He could also be using protest as a marketing gimmick, playing to his young hippie audience. All of that at once is probably true. For those who don't get it, I'll try to explain a little in a later post.
--C.
UPDATE 2 ON VIDEO CLIP: I updated the link in the body copy so that it works right now. This clip too, could go away, and if it does, see the instruction in last year's update, below. --C. 7/4/17
UPDATE 1 ON VIDEO CLIP: The video I had originally embedded involved one of the camera angles used in the opening composite of shots shown in the final version of the film "Woodstock," by Martin Scorcese. It was a YouTube video which was, unfortunately, subsequently removed, probably for copyright concerns. The link above is the same clip on Vimeo. If you want, you can still find this alternate camera angle through various sources, including the DVD of Hendrix at Woodstock: it offers a view of the performance from in front of the performer and from his right side, clearly showing the body language I described below. --C. 7/4/16
