Earplay’s “Final Answer” to Ives?

The end of this month will see the conclusion of Earplay’s 41st season. At least some readers will probably recall by now that the title of the season is Answering The Unanswered Question, inspired by Charles Ives’ enigmatic orchestral composition, “The Unanswered Question.” Once again, the program will begin with an arrangement of that music by Bruce Bennett scored for flute (Tod Brody), clarinet (Peter Josheff), violin (Terrie Baune), viola (Ellen Ruth Rose), cello (Thalia Moore), and synthesizer (Margaret Halbig)

Trevor Weston, one of the composers whose music will be given its world premiere

All of the remaining works on the program were composed in the current century. These include two world premiere performances. Aida Shirazi’s “still…” was composed for flute, clarinet, and viola on an Earplay commission. The commission for Trevor Weston’s “Time Pieces” was provided by the Fromm Foundation, and its world premiere will be performed by the full ensemble conducted by Mary Chung. The other full-ensemble work on the program will be Edmund Song’s “FlareStruck,” which won Earplay’s 2025 Vibrant Shores Composers Competition. The remaining works on the program will be Elliott Carter’s string trio, composed in 2011, and “Four Score,” composed by Anthony Brandt in 2013 for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano.

This concert will take place on Monday, May 25, again beginning at 7:30 p.m. at the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street. As usual, there will be a pre-concert talk at 6:45 p.m. This will be a Groupmuse Night Out program with general admission for $15 and a $10 rate for Supermusers. Twenty tickets can be purchased through a Groupmuse Web page. All remaining tickets will be sold for $32 and $10 through a ThunderTix Web page.

SFCMP: More “American Reflections” Next Month

The San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in performance (from the City Box Office Web page) 

The first month of the New Year will conclude with the second program planned for the 2025–2026 Concert Season of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. The title of the season is American Reflections, and the title of this program will be Fire & Lightning. The featured offering on the program will be the West Coast premiere of Elliott Carter’s “Mosaic,” composed in 2004 for harp and ensemble. Harpist Amy Ahn will be the guest artist. There will also be West Coast premiere performances of “through depths and shadows,” composed by Justin Weiss in 2023 and Chen Yi’s “Fire,” completed in 2019. The opening selections on the program will be Elizabeth Ogonek’s “Lightenings” (2016) and “Electric Aroma” (2018) by Viet Cuong.

This performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Saturday, January 31. The performance will take place in the Taube Atrium Theater, located on the top (fourth) floor of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office Web page, which will also include tickets for the Sound & Wine fundraising event. This will precede the performance, beginning of 5 p.m. in the Education Studio of the Wilsey Center, which is also in the Veterans Building.

SFCMP: A Disappointing Season Conclusion

Following up on an engaging variety of programs for its 53rd concert season, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) limped its way across the finish line last night in the Mission at the Brava Theater. The title of the program was RE;voicing 2: “Worlds Apart,” those last two words being the title of a new composition by Richard Festinger that filled the second half of the program. This was a major undertaking with two SFCMP instrumentalists joined by the sixteen vocalists of the Volti chamber choir and two soloists, soprano Winnie Nieh and baritone Daniel Cilli.

As might be expected, the How Music is Made preview discussion amounted to a conversation between Artistic Director (and conductor) Eric Dudley and Festinger. Sadly, this was of little benefit when listening to the three movements of “World Apart,” each setting text by a different poet: Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Crane, and Wendell Berry. Festinger seemed more inclined to talk about the experience of making the music, rather than providing the attentive listener with any sort of guide to the music itself.

To be fair, however, I wonder whether such a guide would have been possible. The performance seemed to amble its way through the score, almost on a note-by-note basis giving a syllable-by-syllable account of each of the three poems. It almost seemed as if the composer was focused entirely on situating each note in just the right place, without any clear sense of what “place” happened to be. The result was a gathering of talented musicians determined to bring sense-making to all the marks on their score pages without a clear grasp of just what “sense” was.

The program began with Elliott Carter’s “Asko Concerto,” written late in the composer’s life. When he was younger, many listeners came away from Carter’s works perplexed with the feeling that they had experienced “all theory and no practice.” As he grew older, Carter also grew away from earlier obsessions with theory; and his resulting subjectivity could often be downright cheerful. Such high spirits can be found in “Asko Concerto,” which was given its Bay Area premiere last night. Those spirits were clearly shared by both conductor and instrumentalists, getting things off to a decidedly good start.

Sadly, that start was not continued when Volti took the stage for the remainder of the first half. Jens Ibsen’s “De Profundis” setting was followed by “Effortlessly, Love Flows” by Aaron Jay Kernis. Sadly, the program book did not provide the texts for these selections. However, since the audience had to sit in pitch darkness, printed matter would have been of little value. Fortunately, I was familiar enough with the text to negotiate Ibsen’s composition and found the rhetorical stance to be suitably engaging. On the other hand, I had absolutely no idea what Kernis was trying to do with his setting, let alone what his source was!

Hopefully, 2024–25 will take a turn for the better.

SFCMP to Conclude Season with Vocal Offerings

Soprano Winnie Nieh (courtesy of SFCMP)

At the end of this month, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will conclude its 2023–24 season with another program featuring vocal works, given the title RE:voicing 2: Worlds Apart. The instrumentalists will be joined by the Volti chamber choir, led by its founder Robert Geary, along with two vocal soloists, soprano Winnie Nieh and baritone Daniel Cilli. The featured work on the program will fill the second half of the evening, the cantata Worlds Apart, composed by Richard Festinger.

This piece was commissioned from the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard University in 2018. The plan was for the work to be given its first performance by Cantata Singers and Ensemble, based in Boston. The new work would provide the same instrumental accompaniment that Johann Sebastian Bach required for his BWV 78 cantata, Jesu, der du meine Seele. However, while BWV 78 required four vocal soloists (soprano, alto, tenor, and bass), the new work would require (as can be seen above) only a soprano and a baritone. The text for the cantata drew upon an eclectic collection of sources from Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Crane, and Wendell Berry. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the originally scheduled world premiere had to be cancelled, meaning that this month’s concert will mark the composition’s first performance.

In the first half of the program, Volti will perform “De Profundis” (out of the depths), a setting of Psalm 130 by the rising young Bay Area composer Jens Ibsen. There will also be a performance of “Effortlessly, Love Flows,” one of the movements from Aaron Jay Kernis’ Ecstatic Meditations. The text is taken from the writings of the medieval mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg.

The first half will then conclude with the only instrumental work on the program. “Asko Concerto” was one of the last pieces to be composed by Elliott Carter. It was written on a commission for the Asko Ensemble, which is based in Amsterdam. Carter wrote the score for sixteen players, drawing upon the concept of a Baroque concerto grosso. The work is in six sections, which involve different combinations of instruments.

This program will take place on Thursday, May 30, beginning at 7:30 p.m. The venue will be the Brava Theater, which is located in the Mission at 2781 24th Street. As usual, the program will be preceded at 6:30 p.m. by a How Music is Made discussion with Artistic Director Eric Dudley in conversation with Festinger. General admission will be $35 with a $40 VIP rate, and $15 for students. Tickets may be purchased online through a City Box Office event page.

Aimard’s SFP Recital: Fantasias Past and Recent

Pierre-Laurent Aimard with his piano (photograph by Marco Borggreve, courtesy of San Francisco Performances)

Last night pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard returned to Herbst Theatre for his third San Francisco Performances (SFP) appearance in a solo recital. His program was a broad survey of the fantasia genre, with the SwWV 261 “Echo” fantasia by the early Baroque Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck at one end of the time line and Elliott Carter’s “Night Fantasies,” composed between November of 1978 and April of 1980 at the other. Aimard coupled these (in chronological order) to begin his program, concluding the first half with the more familiar “Polonaise-Fantaisie”, Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 61 in the key of A-flat major.

The second half was devoted almost entirely to what Charles Rosen called “The Classical Style,” but not in chronological order. The selections were by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the K. 475 fantasia in C minor), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (the sixth piece in the Wq 59 collection), and Ludwig van Beethoven (the Opus 77 fantasia in G minor). The program concluded with the “punch line” of Charles Ives’ “The Celestial Railroad,” identified as a “Fantasy” in its subtitle.

Aimard was not shy about addressing the audience, and his introductory remarks were as engaging as they were informative. Sweelinck’s “echo” effects were conceived for separate manuals on an organ, but Aimard’s approaches to keyboard touch provided a satisfying contrast between the “source” and “echo” passages. The “classical style” selections were particularly engaging. Aimard introduced K. 475 as a “compact opera for solo piano;” and, in the plethora of themes in Beethoven’s Opus 77, I could swear that one of them had been inspired by Papageno’s aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” in Mozart’s K. 620 opera The Magic Flute. I also appreciated how Aimard cited the “musical independence” of “The Celestial Railroad.”

The only real challenge came from “Night Fantasies.” While one could appreciate that all of the other selections may have emerged from improvisatory explorations, Carter’s composition seemed to be the product of a seriously vast expanse of notes, each of which had been precisely calculated. One could almost call it pointillism in which even the slightest dot carried its own weight of significance. Carter was a Visiting Professor during my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and I put a prodigious amount of effort in trying to get my head around the music that was performed in a recital at the conclusion of his visit. Several years later I happened to hear his string quartet on the radio and realized how quickly all of those efforts had evaporated.

Ironically, I have encountered “Night Fantasies” several times over the course of my listening history. Most recently, I wrote about it when Pina Napolitano released her Tempo e Tempi album in July of 2020. For all of that exposure, the music never seems to secure a place for itself in long-term memory. Sadly, last night’s impression never rose above the level of any of my previous encounters.

(I should also add that, during one of his MIT lectures, Carter confessed that he had no idea what to make of Ives. I have had a fair exposure to much of Ives music, thanks in some part to Michael Tilson Thomas; and, for me at least, “The Celestial Railroad” was like a walk in the park, even if the park was surreal. “Night Fantasies,” on the other hand, left me figuratively grouping around in the dark!)

The reception for last night’s performance was too enthusiastic for Aimard to avoid taking an encore. He used the occasion to introduce the little known Russian composer Andrei Volkonsky to the audience. HIs Wikipedia page describes him as “a key figure in Early Music Revival in Russia,” and this description was affirmed by Aimard’s encore. He played the third and fourth movements of “Musica Stricta (fantasia ricercata),” the composer’s Opus 11, composed in 1957, which applied twelve-tone syntax to the semantics of that “Early Music” period. This was “something completely different” from the program that Aimard had prepared, but it left me curious about when I would encounter further works by this composer!

Pierre-Laurent Aimard to Continue Piano Series

Pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard (photograph by Julia Wesley, courtesy of SFP)

The end of this month will see the penultimate performance in this season’s San Francisco Performances (SFP) Piano Series. The pianist to perform will be Pierre-Laurent Aimard. If my records are correct, this will be his third SFP appearance, having given his second recital in March of 2018. Since that time, he has been no stranger to San Francisco, giving several performances in Davies Symphony Hall.

I had previously described Aimard’s SFP debut as “a program of considerable breadth.” That breadth will be found this time in the extent of the overall “time line,” while all the works will be focused on a single genre: the fantasia. At one end of the “time line,” he will perform music by the early Baroque Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, his SwWV 261 “Echo” fantasia. This will be coupled with the “other end” of the chronology with a performance of Elliott Carter’s “Night Fantasies.” Between these extremes, the Classical period will be represented by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (the H. 284 fantasy in C major), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (the K. 475 fantasy in C minor), and Ludwig van Beethoven (the Opus 77 fantasia in G minor). The only nineteenth-century composer will be Frédéric Chopin with his Opus 61 Polonaise-Fantaisie in A-flat major. This will be followed by the Carter and Sweelinck fantasies and then conclude with one more: “The Celestial Railroad,” which Charles Ives called a “Phantasy” for solo piano.

This performance will begin at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 27. The venue will be Herbst Theatre, on the first two floors of the Veterans Building at 401 Van Ness Avenue on the southwest corner of McAllister Street. Tickets are being sold for $80 for premium seating in the Orchestra, the Side Boxes, and the front and center of the Dress Circle, $70 for the center rear of the Dress Circle and the remainder of the Orchestra, and $60 for the remainder of the Dress Circle and the Balcony. They may be purchased through an SFP secure Web page or by calling 415-392-2545.

SFCA to Celebrate Both Sound and Silence

In about a month’s time San Francisco Choral Artists (SFCA) will present the next program in its 2022–2023 season. The title of the program is Sound and (not much) Silence. As can be seen below, its poster design presents a whole rest in the middle of a very active audio waveform:

Once again, the program will include world premiere performances of works by Composer-in-Residence Clark Evans and Composer-Not-in-Residence Caroline Mallonee. The more familiar composers will be (in alphabetical order) Johannes Brahms, William Byrd, Elliott Carter, David Conte, Fanny Mendelssohn, and Ralph Vaughan Williams. The repertoire will be equally diverse, including Hebrew psalms, German part songs, Renaissance motets, Ladino lullabies, thoughtful meditations, and a vigorous Zulu song of encouragement.

This program will be performed in San Francisco at 4 p.m. on Sunday, March 19. The venue will St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of the corner of Franklin Street. General admission at the door will be $35 with a $30 rate for seniors and $15 for those under the age of 30. However, SFCA has created a Web page that will enable advance reservation on a pay-what-you-will basis. Online ticket sales will close at 11 p.m. on Saturday, March 18.

The COVID policy for this event (which is, of course, subject to change) is as follows: “Proof of vaccination is not required to attend our concerts. We focus on spacing and masking to keep our audience and singers safe. Patrons are required to wear a well-fitted mask at performances. N95 masks will be available for those who need a mask or a mask upgrade. If you do not feel well, or feel that you are a transmission risk because of an exposure before a performance, please guard your health and the health of others by staying home. Refunds are gladly given in this circumstance.”

JACK Quartet Concludes Online PIVOT 2021

Yesterday afternoon San Francisco Performances (SFP) began streaming the third and last of its PIVOT 2021 programs, presented as an alternative to the four programs planned for the PIVOT Festival originally scheduled for this month. This new video is a performance by the JACK Quartet with a guest appearance by pianist Conrad Tao. The quartet members are violinists Christopher Otto and Austin Wulliman, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Jay Campbell; and they shared with Tao a “digital residency” hosted by the Library of Congress this past December. That residency resulted in the video that SFP is now screening as the latest addition to its Front Row Web site.

The JACK Quartet playing “Everything Changes, Nothing Changes …” (black-and-white videography by David Bird, from the PIVOT video being discussed)

The program for the video was, to say the least, boldly imaginative. Roughly half of the one-hour program involved the performance of Tyshawn Sorey’s “Everything Changes, Nothing Changes ….” This score for string quartet amounts to an imaginative synthesis of Philip Glass’ approach to repetitive structures and the subtle departures from repetition that one encounters in many of the late works of Morton Feldman. The JACK performance could not have been more focused, encouraging the attentive listener to seek out the subtle shifts in detail that reflect Sorey’s choice of title.

Equally challenging and just as satisfying was the quartet’s account of the string quartet that Ruth Crawford Seeger composed in 1931. Seeger had briefly encountered Arnold Schoenberg during her studies in Germany, which took place shortly before she began work on the quartet. However, she clearly had her own thoughts about rejecting the need for a tonal center; and, in many respects, this quartet is one of the first American compositions to break sharply from nineteenth-century traditions. It is also worth noting that Elliott Carter was familiar with Seeger’s work, which may have influenced his own unique approaches to writing for string quartet.

On the PIVOT program, however, Carter was represented by his duo for violin and piano, performed by Wulliman and Tao. This was a brashly energetic account, an excellent source to acclimate the attentive listener to Carter’s imaginative use of variations in rhythm. The rhetorical stance that Wulliman and Tao took in interpreting Carter’s score felt almost celebratory, as if, after much study, the two of them had “discovered the music” in the many note symbols that Carter had committed to paper; and, having made that discovery, they wanted the rest of the world to know about it. At the very conclusion of the video program, Wulliman underscored that sense of discovery with a solo performance of Sorey’s “For Conrad Tao.”

All of that modernism contrasted sharply with the opening selection, the ballade “Angelorum psalat,” included in the Chantilly Codex and sometimes attributed to the fifteenth-century Spanish lutenist Rodrigo de la Guitarra. While the source may have been fifteenth-century, the music itself is a clear reflection on the origins of polyphony attributed to the Notre-Dame school, which flourished between 1160 and 1250. The music is basically a two-voice melismatic organum with Richards playing the cantus firmus and Otto playing an upper-voice melisma. Otto also added parts for both the second violin and the cello, both of which spend much of the time playing pizzicato. Ultimately, this was the “overture” for the evening, encouraging the listener to sit up and take notice of what would follow.

Elliott Carter’s Ballet Scores

At the beginning of this month, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) released its latest album. The recording is devoted to some of the earliest works of Elliott Carter, two orchestral compositions made for one-act ballets, “Pocahontas” and “The Minotaur.” Both of these scores were commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, who had been one of Carter’s fellow students at Harvard University. Kirstein would go on to become one of the first impresarios to cultivate “home-grown” ballet in the United States.

Kirstein and George Balanchine started the School of American Ballet in 1934. This would become the “training ground” for the professional company now known as the New York City Ballet (NYCB). Kirstein also founded a “training company” called Ballet Caravan, which presented the premiere of “Pocahontas” in 1939. Local readers may wish to note that the choreography was created by Lew Christensen, who would direct the San Francisco Ballet between 1952 and 1984. The production was a failure, and The New York Times particularly went after Carter, describing his music as “so thick it is hard to see the stage through it.”

A photograph of John Taras’ choreography for “The Minotaur” (from the booklet accompanying the recording being discussed)

“The Minotaur” was commissioned by Kirstein for NYCB. Carter assumed that Balanchine would create the choreography, but Balanchine went to Paris in 1947. The task of making the new ballet was turned over to his young assistant John Taras. While the resulting choreography was not particularly memorable, the music became known due to a suite that Carter published in 1956. This found its way to the “flip side” of a Mercury album of the Eastman-Rochester Symphony Orchestra conducted by Howard Hanson, which featured Colin McPhee’s Indonesian-inspired suite Tabuh-Tabuhan.

My guess is that I am far from the only purchaser of this album that was totally blown away by Tabuh-Tabuhan and had no idea what to make of the Carter suite. I might even venture that Hanson himself was in the same boat with the rest of us. As a result, this new BMOP album, conducted by Gil Rose, may be the first opportunity any of us have had to give the “Minotaur” a fair shake.

For one thing, it helps to have a track listing that provides a better account of the relation between the music and the ballet’s scenario. For another, Rose’s conducting reflects a clearer understanding of the building blocks of Carter’s thematic material and the ability to sort out a rich vocabulary of embellishment from the themes being embellished. (The score may still have the “thickness” that annoyed the Times critic, but Rose seems to have gotten beyond any problems of opacity!) Finally, I would speculate that this score offers an early account of Carter’s interest in rhythmic patterns and the techniques of unfolding those patterns through both sequencing and superposition.

From that point of view, this new album is not so much an account of “Carter before he became Carter” as it is an indicator, particularly through the score for “The Minotaur,” of how Carter would begin to establish his own voice in the Fifties.

Pina Napolitano Revisits Temporal Basics

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

One week from today, Odradek Records will release its latest solo album of Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. Ever since Odradek released her debut recording of the complete piano music of Arnold Schoenberg, I have been hooked on her imaginative approaches to repertoire and the reverberations of those approaches beyond the nuts and bolts of music into the more adventurous domain of cognitive science. When her last recording, Brahms the Progressive, was released a little more than two years ago, I found it hard to avoid donning my cognitive science hat, describing the release as an “inventive album of time-consciousness.” The title of her new album is Tempo e Tempi (time and times); and I find myself trying to pick up where I left off two years ago. As usual, the latest release is currently available for pre-order from an Amazon.com Web page.

Brahms the Progressive juxtaposed two collections of short pieces that Johannes Brahms composed late in his life, Opera 118 and 119, with early compositions by Alban Berg and Anton Webern reflecting the influences of their shared teacher, Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg had great admiration of Brahms and would subsequently deliver a radio talk after his move to the United States as part of a celebration of the centennial of Brahms’ birth. (The title of that talk was “Brahms the Progressive.”) Tempo e Tempi bridges a much wide temporal interval, with the last two solo piano sonatas of Ludwig van Beethoven (Opus 110 in A-flat major and Opus 111 in C minor) at one end and selected compositions by Elliott Carter at the other.

What I find particularly fascinating about the study of time-consciousness is the extent to which many of the fundamental principles can be found rooted in literary sources. Thus, while Augustine of Hippo may have tapped into those principles in his Confessions, those insights truly flowered when they were turned into the elegant poetry of T. S. Eliot, which I documented when writing about Brahms the Progressive:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

I was thus pleased to learn that the title of the new album is also the title of an Italian poem by Eugenio Montale, a poem that Carter used for a song cycle scored for soprano and instrumental ensemble. Montale’s phenomenology is orthogonal to Eliot’s, so there should be no surprise that it can be applied to different periods of music history.

Readers may recall that, at the end of this past May, I took a “deep dive” into how Carter’s inquiries into the nature of time led to the music he wrote, focusing my attention on his double concerto, scored for harpsichord and piano with two chamber orchestras. On that occasion my primary source was “Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter,” an article that Charles Rosen wrote for The New York Review of Books not long after Carter reached the age of 100 on December 11, 2008. As a result, when I read the accompanying booklet for Tempo e Tempi, I was pleased to see that Montale’s poem provided a delightful pithy account of what Rosen had explained over the course of several paragraphs. The English translation of the original Italian is as follows:

There is not just one time: there are

Many ribbons that, parallel, slide

Often in opposite directions and rarely

Intersect.

When I wrote about Carter’s double concerto, I emphasized that this music was not for the “casual” listener. However, a listener with the right blend of patience and attention could still be rewarded in being able to negotiate both the overall framework of the concerto and the intricate details enclosed within that framework. My “punch line” was the following summary:

Once one is comfortable within that [structural] framework [of movements and cadenzas], one can then dive into the ways in which both the soloists and the instruments in the chamber orchestras negotiate the multiplicity of tempos specified in the score; and, in all likelihood, the attentive listener will begin to appreciate Carter’s rhetoric of textures without getting too tangled by the individual threads.

That “rhetoric of textures” can also guide the listener through the two Carter compositions on Tempo e Tempi, “Night Fantasies” (which Carter himself associated with the “narrative suites” composed for solo piano by Robert Schumann) and the “mini-suite,” Two Thoughts about the Piano, whose movements are entitled “Intermittences” and “Caténaires.” Each of these two pieces is then complemented by a Beethoven sonata, played in the order in which they were composed.

In fairness to listeners willing to undertake this journey into Carter’s solo piano music, I should note that the double concerto was composed in 1961. Napolitano’s selections are much later. “Night Fantasies” was composed in 1980; and the Two Thoughts were composed between 2005 and 2006. To some extent, the concerto is the most accessible of these pieces, not only because Carter was in an earlier stage of building up his skill set but also because those “individual threads” were distributed across both the solo and chamber orchestra parts. In the solo piano music everything has been distilled down to ten fingers on a single keyboard. Mind you, there are still techniques for distinguishing the “threads,” just as there are in the polyphonic writing found in those Schumann suites.

Nevertheless, I suspect there are skeptical readers out there wondering, “Will we ever get used to the many complexities in Carter’s scores?” Such readers should recall that, in the middle of the nineteenth century, listeners were still struggling to “get used to” those late Beethoven piano sonatas (not to mention the late string quartets). These days it is difficult to find a pianist that does not include the late sonatas in his/her repertoire. We can’t escape them in the concert hall the way our ancestors could over a century ago! The problem with Carter is that, while he had many sympathetic pianists during his lifetime (including Rosen), I am not sure how many “fellow travelers” Napolitano has in her effort to champion his music. However, if we cannot get to know Carter’s music better in the recital hall, at least we can do it at home by listening to Tempo e Tempi.

Sony’s Fromm Collection: Carter and Kirchner

Elliott Carter and Leon Kirchner on the original cover of the recording being discussed

Among the recordings in the Twentieth Century Composers Series produced by the Fromm Music Foundation that were part of the library of the campus radio station for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the one that most attracted my attention coupled Elliott Carter’s double concerto, scored for harpsichord and piano with two chamber orchestras, with Leon Kirchner’s concerto for violin and cello, accompanied by ten winds and percussion. That recording has been reproduced as the eighth CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD anthology of that series. My personal interest was due, in part, to the visiting appointment that brought Carter to MIT during my senior year; and it was through Carter’s visit that I met Kirchner for the first time.

Ironically, most of the classes that Carter taught and the public lectures that he delivered were devoted to music other than his own. That did not prevent me from broadcasting recordings of his music over the course of his visit; and, from my vantage point as a presenter, the high points of those broadcasts involved his second string quartet and the double concerto. The other thing I remember most vividly at that time was a generous amount of talk about “metric modulation,” associating that term with Carter.

Mind you, I never heard Carter invoke that term. However, it can be found in “Happy Birthday, Elliott Carter!,” which Charles Rosen wrote for The New York Review of Books not long after Carter reached the age of 100 on December 11, 2008 and was as actively engaged in composing as he had ever been. Rosen describes the phrase as the “method of superimposing one pulse over another,” which is not particularly consistent with other interpretations of the term “modulation,” associated much more often with harmonic progression.

Rosen was the pianist on the double concerto album, joined by Ralph Kirkpatrick at the harpsichord. It would thus be fair to say that, until his death on December 9, 2012, he was one of the foremost authorities on Carter’s music that could account for both theory and practice. Fortunately (at least for those of us trying to find our way through the many complexities in Carter’s scores), he wrote a much more informative account of Carter’s approach to time and rhythm in a later New York Review article that appeared in the February 9, 2012 issue (sadly behind the Web site’s paywall).

Here is the opening text of Rosen’s article:

A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.

In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact.

Needless to say, it tends to be the case that even the most attentive listeners run into the same problems that confront the performers. Fortunately, Carter frequently could draw upon the services of performers willing to adapt their techniques for both execution and listening to serve the his objectives.

All this should make it clear that the double concerto is not for the “casual” listener. The advantage of a recording is that one can revisit a specific “document of performance” several times. Initially, one should be content with establishing basic orientation around the concerto’s seven sections, all of which are played without intervening pauses. Fortunately, two of those sections are cadenzas, one for harpsichord in the second section and the other for piano in the penultimate section. We thus have a symmetrical framework in which the first cadenza follows the Introduction, while the second one precedes the Coda. Between those cadenzas are three sections identified by familiar tempo markings: Allegro scherzando, Adagio, and Presto. Once one is comfortable within that framework, one can then dive into the ways in which both the soloists and the instruments in the chamber orchestras negotiate the multiplicity of tempos specified in the score; and, in all likelihood, the attentive listener will begin to appreciate Carter’s rhetoric of textures without getting too tangled by the individual threads.

Mind you, that level of awareness is more likely achieved when one can also enjoy the physical presence of the performers. (I lost track of how many hours I spent with the Juilliard Quartet recording of Carter’s second string quartet before encountering it in a recital.) Sadly, where pieces like the double concerto are concerned, the opportunities for a concert performance are precious few. (I have never had that opportunity for the double concerto itself. For that matter, unless I am mistaken, my last concert encounter with Carter came when students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music prepared his second quartet; and that was over a decade ago!) Nevertheless, when it comes to wanting what you have, the Kirkpatrick-Rosen recording can definitely provide satisfying listening experiences for those willing to give the piece the attention it deserves.

This CD also includes a “bonus selection” that was not on the original vinyl release. The final two tracks are devoted to Carter’s 1946 piano sonata, also recorded by Rosen. The attentive listener will probably find this piece more familiar, particularly in the expressiveness of its rhetoric. The architecture is a bit distinctive, since the sonata consists of only two movements, an opening Maestoso followed by an Andante. However, Ludwig van Beethoven was already tinkering with sonata architectures towards the end of his life; so one can hardly expect traditions from the past to impede listening to this early Carter effort.

That said, the Kirchner concerto feels a bit like a breath of fresh air between the intense rhetoric of the two Carter selections. Mind you, the music has its own inventive devices of complexity. However, perhaps because the accompanying ensemble consists of winds and percussion, there are elements of joyfulness in that rhetoric, if not a bit of slapstick coming from the percussion. Given the high “information content” of the entire album, I would say that this particular CD does not really lend itself start-to-finish listening; but those that do decide to listen that way will probably find Kirchner’s concerto a welcome “change of scene” following the Carter concerto.

Horszowski Trio to Visit Noe Valley Chamber Music

Jesse Mills, Rieko Aizawa, and Raman Ramakrishnan (courtesy of NVCM)

This month Noe Valley Chamber Music (NVCM) will host this season’s only performance in San Francisco by the Horszowski Trio, which is based in New York. The trio takes its name from Mieczysław Horszowski, who was not only one of the most important pianists of the twentieth century but also one of the most influential teachers at the Curtis Institute of Music, where his students included Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, and Peter Serkin (whose father, Rudolf, was an equally influential force at Curtis). The trio is named in Horszowski’s memory because pianist Rieko Aizawa was his last pupil at Curtis. She joined with violinist Jesse Mills and cellist Raman Ramakrishnan to form that trio.

Horszowski was just a month short of his 101st birthday when he died on May 22, 1993. With the conviction that honoring one centenarian deserves honoring another, the program will include selections from Epigrams, that last work completed by Elliot Carter before his death at the age of 103 on November 5, 2012. The program will begin with Robert Schumann’s Opus 63 trio in D minor. Schumann figured significantly in Horszowski’s solo recitals; and, since he often performed at the Marlboro Festival, it is likely that all three of Schumann’s trios were also part of his repertoire. The program will conclude with Dmitri Shostakovich’s Opus 67 piano trio in E minor, one of the more harrowing instances of that composer’s efforts to document his impressions of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.

This program will be presented at 4 p.m. on Sunday, November 17. Tickets are $40 at the door with a $35 rate for seniors and a $10 rate for students aged thirteen or older. NVCM has created a Web page for online purchase. Tickets may also be purchased in advance by calling NVCM at 415-648-5236.

SFCMP: From Elliott Carter to the Present

1989 photograph of Elliott Carter with one of his scores (photograph by Jacques M. Chenet, courtesy of SFCMP)

Last night in the Taube Atrium Theater, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) launched its 48th season with an on STAGE Series concert entitled Carter and Beyond: Invention and Inspiration. The program was framed by three compositions by Elliott Carter, beginning with two short pieces for solo instrument and concluding with “Penthode,” a 25-minute composition, requiring twenty players organized into five quartets. Within this framework SFCMP presented the world premiere of a woodwind quintet by Asher Tobin Chodos entitled “Big Show” and “Shy Garden,” one of the pieces in Sabrina Schroeder’s Bone Games collection of pieces based on alternative approaches to playing instruments based on electronic transducers and physical techniques involving breath and/or sensitive touch.

Throughout his extensive lifetime (from December 11, 1908 to November 5, 2012) Carter never allowed himself to settle into some “characteristic voice” through which his music would be recognized. One might say that such a “voice” was unnecessary, since there were so few opportunities to encounter his music either in performance or on recording. In my student days he was “all about” a technique called “metric modulation;” but he was just as interested in working with pitch classes that would depart from the conventions of tonality without necessarily following in the footsteps of Arnold Schoenberg. While he has had some powerful advocates (Daniel Barenboim is always the first to come to my own mind), I realize that, whenever I set out to write about his music, my writing always involves pieces I have heard for the first time. (The only exception I can recall is when students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music played his second string quartet, which I had previously encountered at a concert during my student days.)

Nevertheless, my experiences have covered enough ground for me to appreciate the interest that Carter took in writing for a single instrument. The earlier of the two pieces played last night was actually written for guitar on the occasion of his own 75th birthday in 1983. The piece is less than ten minutes in duration and is entitled simply “Changes.”

There is a very strong sense that Carter wished to explore the full extent of sonorities that could be produced by an unamplified guitar. At the same time he seemed to be scrupulously avoiding anything that might be taken as a guitar-like idiom. The result is practically a study in pointillism, where each point seems to have its own characteristic sonority. Only towards the end of the piece does Carter allow the performer to indulge in a bit of strumming (which felt, at least to this listener, like a breath of fresh air)! In last night’s performance David Tanenbaum clearly seemed to have mastered the full extent of sonorities that Carter was exploring, and Tanenbaum’s approach to performance turned those explorations into a journey well worth taking.

The other solo composition also left the impression of a journey of exploration. This was “A 6 Letter Letter,” composed for cor anglais and played by Kyle Bruckmann. Carter composed the piece in 1996 for the 90th birthday of Paul Sacher, the Swiss conductor responsible for commissioning an almost overwhelming number of twentieth-century compositions. The six letters were those of Sacher’s name, each of which could be translated into a different pitch class. The result amounted to a highly lyrical monologue, based on pitch classes that steered clear of past tonal conventions. Even without a tonal center, however, one could appreciate the wistfulness of the rhetoric as the honoree entering his nineties was honored by a composer with less than two years to go before finishing his eighties.

The final work on the program, “Penthode,” was composed about two years after “Changes” and is different in just about every possible way. What was fascinating (and perhaps a bit ironic) about the massive resources required to play “Penthode” was how transparent it all was. With Eric Dudley, the new SFCMP Artistic Director, conducting, it seemed as if every note from every instrument had its own unique clarity.

Think again of a study in pointillism, this time on a very large canvas on which none of the points are that close to each other. The ear can “step back from it all” and gradually become aware of how individual notes are juxtaposed even when their respective instruments are distant from each other. Only towards the conclusion does the score seem to home in on an “ensemble sound” (rather the same as the way in which “Changes” falls back on conventional “guitar sounds” near its conclusion).

As a composer, Chodos was quoted in the program book as expressing appreciation for Carter’s approaches to polyphony. This made “Big Show” an appropriate “partner piece” for “Penthode,” even if the two pieces were not played consecutively last night. Indeed, “Big Show” deserved to stand on its own, because it was the one piece in the program with a raucous sense of humor.

Some of that humor went into naming the three movements after clichés about the American West. However, the deepest impression on me came at the very beginning when I realized that bassoonist Shawn Jones had been drafted into the task of providing a basso continuo. While the other four wind players frolicked, Jones plugged away at a four-square bass line that seemed to owe more to Baroque tradition than to the walking bass behind a big band arrangement.

“Shy Garden,” on the other hand, involved gently escorting the attentive listener to the threshold of audibility. Every sound involved some subtle quality, whether it was the resonant vibration of a large drum head or the barely audible sound of a bow being drawn across the body, rather than the string, of a viola. On the basis of what I could learn through a Google search (which, sadly, was not much), I came away from the impression that Bone Games was a cycle of pieces involved with taking sounds normally associated with the background and bringing them to the foreground. Here, again, Dudley was in top form as conductor, leading the ten players with such attentiveness than the willing listener could relish each moment in its own splendid isolation. Perhaps a future season will provide an opportunity to listen to the cycle in its entirety.

Inna Faliks: Pianist More Important than Story

from Amazon.com

Not too long ago the mail brought me a Delos CD entitled Polonaise-fantaisie: The Story of a Pianist. This amounts to an audio document of a recital-monologue conceived by the Odessa-born pianist Inna Faliks. The monologue itself was autobiographical, with selections of solo piano music serving to separate the episodes of the narrative. On the recording Faliks only plays the piano, and the text is narrated by the actress Rebecca Mozo, currently based in Los Angeles.

I have to confess that I am skeptical about musicians who choose to talk about themselves. I suspect that my proclivities date all the way back to the eve of my high school graduation, when I cancelled all other plans in order to stay home to watch the CBS broadcast of the ballet “The Flood,” choreographed by George Balanchine to an original score by Igor Stravinsky. It was the first time I ever heard Stravinsky speak. My guess is that anyone who saw that broadcast still remembers what he said:

I don’t want to tell you more; I only want to play you more.

Decades (and no end of unkind biographical accounts) later, I still feel that the only way a musician (composer or performer) can express himself/herself is through making music.

To be fair, the Amazon.com Web page of Faliks’ album bears the “Amazon’s Choice” seal of approval. My guess is that this acknowledgement comes from having received only five-star customer reviews. Unfortunately, glowing as those reviews were, they came from only five customers! Even a college freshman squeaking by with a “gentleman’s C” in statistics would probably recognize the lack of mathematical significance in this evaluation.

Normally, I would just let an album like this slide, falling back on that classic quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln:

People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.

Nevertheless, listening to this album left me with another one of those Stravinsky moments: I really wish she had played more and told less. This was because the playing on the album included Elliot Carter’s “Retrouvailles” and two short pieces by Harrison Birtwistle, “Ookooing Bird” and “Living with Music” (the former, unfortunately, consigned to the background behind Mozo’s narration). There is even a creditable account of George Gershwin’s three piano preludes.

Faliks deserves more time devoted to listening her be a pianist, and those interested in her background would probably be just as satisfied with a printed version of her text.

Music for Food Fundraiser Tonight

This week’s Bleeding Edge column will be postponed for a day due to an overriding last-minute announcement. In 2010 GRAMMY award-winning violist Kim Kashkashian initiated the Music for Food program in Boston. This was conceived as a musician-led initiative for local hunger release. All concerts are given to raise resources and awareness in the fight against hunger, empowering all musicians wishing to use their artistry to further social justice. Since its inception, the program has spread across the United States to the benefit of food pantries not only in greater Boston are but also in such cities as Washington, Gaithersburg (in Maryland), New York, Philadelphia, and San Diego. At all of these venues, 100% of audience donations have done to support a local pantry.

Tonight the program will give its inaugural concert in San Francisco. The performers will be both faculty and students from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The program will consist entirely of strings-only chamber music, beginning with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 515 quintet in C major and concluding with Johannes Brahms’ Opus 18 sextet in B-flat major. Between these two major classics, there will be a solo cello performance of Elliott Carter’s 1994 “Figment.” Performers will be as follows:

• violin: Ian Swensen, Maria van der Sloot, Alexandros Petrin, Samuel Weiser
• viola: Dimitri Murrath, Linda Numagami, Carly Scene
• cello: Bonnie Hampton, Peter Myers, Evan Kahn

This performance will begin tonight (Monday, December 11) at 7:30 p.m. The venue will be the McRoskey Mattress Company at 1687 Market Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. The suggested donation amount is $30 or at least $10 from students and seniors. All proceeds will benefit the dining room in the Tenderloin run by the St. Anthony Foundation.

Ondine’s Release of Elliott Carter’s “Late” Works

For many (most?) listeners, American composer Elliott Carter is probably better known for his longevity than for his music. Born on December 11, 1908, he died on November 5, 2012, a little over a month before his 104th birthday. Age seemed to have had no effect on his productivity, and over twenty of his compositions were completed after his 100th birthday.

The other attribute that is almost always associated with Carter is complexity. He is often associated with efforts towards using the modulation of rhythmic patterns as a structural marker similar to harmonic modulation in tonal music. Carter’s efforts basically involved polyrhythms that would enable a gradual shift in tempo. This device is not particularly easy for the ear to follow and may be even more difficult should one turn to the published score for guidance.

Nevertheless, he has had several champions among conductors, many of whom have been capable of bringing clarity to concert performances without drowning attentive listeners in technical details. This is probably because, while Carter could develop both logic and syntax to a painstaking level of detail, he never downplayed the extent to which rhetoric would seize and hold the attention of the listener, regardless of how well the listener was aware of those details.

courtesy of Naxos of America

This past August Ondine released an album of Carter’s music entitled simply Late Works, whose cover is shown above. The selections include the premiere recording of “Epigrams,” the composer’s final piece. Scored for piano trio, the work consists of twelve movements, each with a brevity that would resonate well with those listeners who enjoy the music of Anton Webern. The trio performers for this recording are pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, violinist Isabelle Faust, and cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras. Like the best Webern interpreters, they are probably well guided by an understanding of the underlying structural details; but their interpretation is all about an intense rhetoric that urges the attentive listener from one gestural piece to the next.

Four other compositions also received premiere recordings on this album. The oldest of these is “Soundings,” completed in 2005 for a commission from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In chronological order the next is “Interventions,” completed in 2007 and scored for piano and orchestra. “Dialogues II” was completed in 2010. Written for piano and chamber orchestra, it was composed to honor Daniel Barenboim’s 70th birthday. Finally, Two Controversies and a Conversation achieved its final form in 2011 in response to suggestions from conductor Oliver Knussen. It is scored for piano, percussion, and chamber orchestra. The remaining selections on the album are the 2003 “Dialogues,” also for piano and chamber orchestra, and “Instances,” completed in 2012 for chamber orchestra.

Knussen is the conductor for all of these works except for the “Epigrams” trio. He leads the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the selections for full orchestra, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group is his chamber orchestra. Like the members of the trio, he has a clear understanding of the extent to which rhetoric is the key driver behind any act of serious listening; but he always knows how to shape his rhetoric around his own attentiveness to Carter’s wealth of technical details.

It is therefore to Knussen’s credit that any newcomer to Carter’s music may first be attracted by the almost uncanny diversity of sonorities. So much attention has been paid to the logic behind Carter’s approach to the notation of pitch and rhythm that his approach to instrumentation is often all but entirely overlooked. The fact is that, when Carter engages titles like “Dialogues,” “Interventions,” or “Controversies,” he has very specific ideas about human interaction in mind; and, more often than not, those ideas are realized through the ways in which his instruments assert their individuality and those individualities then confront one another. Far from abstract, this is highly dramatic music, even if the nature of the narrative being dramatized is not always crystal clear.

Ensemble InterContemporain Considers New York on its Latest Alpha CD

This past Friday the Alpha recording label released its third album featuring Ensemble InterContemporain and its current Artistic Director and conductor Matthias Pintscher. The title of the recording is New York, and it is the first album in the series to focus on American music. Over the course of two CDs, the package offers a profile of some of the more “bleeding edge” examples of music created by composers living in New York.

The first of those composers, Edgard Varèse is not, strictly speaking a New Yorker. However, he is represented by “Intégrales,” which is one of the pieces he composed while living in New York. The “New York School” is represented by its two members that could definitely be counted as New Yorkers, John Cage (even though he was born in Los Angeles) and Morton Feldman. Similarly, Elliott Carter was very much a New Yorker; and some of Cage’s writings even cite what it was like having Carter and his wife as neighbors. The generation subjected to influences from both Cage and Carter is represented by Steve Reich. Finally, there are two composers of roughly the same age, who may be regarded as representative of the current generation of New Yorkers, Sean Shepherd and David Fulmer.

Beyond any geographical base of operations, the seven compositions in this collection have one thing in common. None of them were intended for “casual” listening. This seems entirely appropriate, since casual listening was probably the last thing on Pierre Boulez’ mind when he created Ensemble InterContemporain. While this makes the album a valuable document of creative practices emerging from New York over the last 100 years, it also poses a cognitive challenge that should not be disregarded. Each of these seven pieces has its own unique point of view, and that point of view is not necessarily reinforced by listening to any one of these works before or after another track on the album.

Nevertheless, the juxtapositions of the track arrangement occasionally bring some interesting insights to the surface. The first CD begins with “Intégrales;” and, while I would like to say that this piece has been around long enough that we can sit back and enjoy it as much as, say, one of the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, the truth is that this just ain’t so. Scored for eleven winds and enough percussion to require four players, “Intégrales” is as spiky as ever. However, after one accepts the spikes for what they are, the music offers up a visceral experience that feels as if it will never be dated; and Ensemble InterContemporain has no trouble keeping those spikes as sharp as ever.

In the track ordering “Intégrales” is followed by Carter’s clarinet concerto. Now it turns out that Carter was a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute Institute of Technology during my senior year there. What this meant in reality was that he would come by once a week to give a somewhat rambling seminar on whatever topic happened to interest him at the time. On one of those occasions the topic of Varèse arose, but all Carter wanted to talk about was the friction between Varèse and Nadia Boulanger. There was a faint subtext in his approach to Varèse that sounded a bit like, “I paid my dues; why didn’t he pay his?”

In that personal historical context I found myself struck by the extent to which the dissonances in Carter’s concerto were not only as spiky as Varèse’s but could almost be taken as downright reminiscent of them. Mind you, Carter wrote this concerto over 30 years after Varèse’s death. (He wrote it for the twentieth anniversary of Ensemble InterContemporain, which makes it a particularly appropriate selection for this album.) Thus, one of my own reactions to listening to this recording was one of revelation, musing over whether Carter had come to a stage in his personal sense of aesthetics at which he could admit (and even leverage) the idea that Varèse may have been up to something with consideration!

Those wishing to start their listening experiences with something more “accessible” would probably do well to select the second CD in this collection and turn to Reich’s “WTC 9/11.” This piece was scored for string quartet and tape and written for the Kronos Quartet. In many respects it complements “Different Trains,” which was also introduced in both concerts and recording by Kronos. Both pieces explore the potential for melodic contours in spoken text; and, of course, both are unabashedly political. “Different Trains” was basically reflections on the Holocaust by a Jew who escaped that catastrophe by having been fortunate enough to be born in the United States. “WTC 9/11,” on the other hand, was about a catastrophe that took place in the composer’s “home town” (a town whose environment he had previously celebrated in “City Life”). Curiously, this is not the first time that “WTC 9/11” has been recorded by a European ensemble, since there is also a recording made by Quatuor Tana. On this recording the performers are violinists Jeanne-Marie Conquer and Diego Tosi, violist Grégoire Simon, and cellist Eric-Maria Couturier; and they certainly know how to bring clarity to what Reich had in mind in creating this piece.

The most surprising selection in the collection is probably Cage’s “Music for Wind Instruments.” Composed in 1938, this was a piece in which Cage used the twelve-tone technique to provide him with a systematic approach to pitch selection. He was equally systematic in determining how silences were added to the overall structure. The piece is in three movements, the first a trio (for flute, clarinet, and bassoon), the second a duo (for oboe and horn), and the last a quintet for all five instruments. Given Cage’s “bad boy” reputation (which is probably as fresh today as it was 75 years ago), the music is surprisingly affable, thus offering a striking contrast to the dissonances of Varèse and Carter. Considering the level of rhetorical intensity in this album’s perspective on New York, it is nice to know that Cage’s “sunny disposition” (his choice of words) provides the listener with a chance to enjoy a smile or two. The two younger composers that contributed to this album might make a note of how effective Cage could be in that regard!

GENUIN classics Presents Elisabeth Kufferath on Violin and Viola

At the beginning of this month GENUIN classics released its first solo album of Elisabeth Kufferath. Entitled Libero, fragile (free, fragile), Kufferath performs the music of Luciano Berio, Elliot Carter, György Kurtág, and Jan Müller-Wieland without accompaniment. However, Kufferath’s performances see her alternating between violin and viola. Each of these composers is represented by music for each of these instruments. Both of the Müller-Wieland tracks are world premiere recordings; and the viola selection, “Himmelfahrt” (ascension to heaven), was dedicated to Kufferath.

The longest tracks on the album are devoted to Berio. Kufferath plays the two pieces in his Sequenza (sequence) series for solo violin (the eighth) and solo viola (the sixth). These were composed in 1976 and 1967, respectively; and the whole collection of fourteen pieces was composed over the course of Berio’s life, beginning with the first (for flute) in 1958 and concluding with the fourteenth (for cello) in 2002. In each of these compositions, Berio was interested in exploring the instrument’s potential for a wide scope of sonorities, often involving non-standard techniques for their creation. One may thus regard each as an étude; but it is as much an étude for the listener (broadening expectations of how one listens to each of the instruments) as it is for the performer learning how to master the necessary techniques for execution.

All of the remaining tracks are relatively brief. Most of them are pieces that Kurtág collected under the title Jelek, játékok és üzenetek (signs, games and messages). All of these are solo works; and he has composed them for violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, oboe, clarinet, and bassoon between 1984 and 2008. (Since Kurtág is still alive, he may well be writing more of these pieces.) Each is a miniaturist study, and most involve an aphoristic reflection on some particular topic. Many of them are memorial in nature. Kufferath performs selections from both the violin and viola collections.

Like Müller-Wieland, Carter is represented by two short pieces, “Mnemosyné” for the violin and “Figment IV” for the viola. Like Sequenza, Figment is a title for a series of six pieces, each for a single instrument. However, the collection is neither as extensive nor as systematic as Berio’s. The first two were composed for cello; and the remaining three were composed for bass, marimba, and oboe.

Taken as a whole, the album presents a useful survey of modernist techniques during the twentieth century. Because the tracks are short, the survey is more accessible than what one might encounter during a two-hour “new music” concert or, for that matter, an album with fewer but longer selections, particularly one that focuses on a single composer. I must confess that I have had an ongoing fascination with Kurtág’s music ever since my first encounter with his Játékok pieces for solo piano, when I heard them performed by Marino Formenti back in April of 2007. I also first became acquainted with some of the Jelek, játékok és üzenetek viola pieces through a recording that Kim Kashkashian made for ECM in 2012 that coupled Kurtág with György Ligeti.

My interest in Berio, on the other hand, has tended to be more “academic.” I share his interest in diversity of sonorities and the idea that sonority itself can be as “legitimate” an element in composition as are melody, harmony, and counterpoint. As a result I have felt a certain frustration over how few of the Sequenza compositions I have managed to encounter for serious listening.

Nevertheless, I have been struck by a shared approach to performance at the few occasions I have experienced. Because the technical demands are so great, page-turning tends to be impractical, if not impossible. As a result, the soloist will set up a row of music stands and spread the score pages across them. This requires playing while standing, rather than seated; and it entails movement from (the performer’s) left to right as the performance advances. However, for the listener this physical layout provides a sense of the entirety in a single glance, so to speak; and the performance amounts to a journey along a well-defined path that is as literal as it is metaphorical. I have come to expect this as part of the listening experience when I attend a recital that includes one of the Sequenza pieces; and, clearly, that component is absent when one is listening to a compact disc recording.

To be fair, I have no idea whether Berio knew of musicians playing these pieces this way during his lifetime. However, once a score has been published, the composer has to accept the fact that is no longer entirely in his hands. There is clearly a systematic approach to how Berio explores his diversity of sonorities. However, in the absence of those visual cues, those explorations run the risk of feeling like little more than one thing after another. On the other hand, because these pieces are performed so seldom, having recordings like these does much to prepare the listener for the diversity of sonorities that will ensue.

Andrew Cyrille Makes his ECM Leader Debut

This past Friday ECM released a new recording on which jazz drummer Andrew Cyrille appeared as leader for the first time. The other members of the group, known collectively as the Andrew Cyrille Quartet (what else?) are Bill Frisell on guitar, Ben Street on bass, and Richard Teitelbaum on both synthesizer and piano. The title of the album is The Declaration of Musical Independence, which seems to be justified by Street’s booklet notes.

Street’s essay begins with the following sentence:

As the 21st century began, Elliott Carter strongly indicted the musical world of the 20th, pointing out that we had become enmeshed completely and needlessly in steady, even time signatures deriving from military applications, to the exclusion of any other understanding of musical flow.

With all due respect to a composer whose innovative contributions to the concert repertoire cannot be overestimated, I must express a certain amount of regret that Carter never pried himself out of those concert halls to check out some of “farthest-out” jazz clubs in Manhattan. To choose just one example that is particularly relevant to this new recording, I find it impossible to believe that Carter would have made such a sweeping generalization had he put some time into listening to Cecil Taylor.

I first came to recognize Cyrille’s name through his work with Taylor; and, since the beginning of this decade, I have been following with great interest his contributions to the Trio 3 collective, in which he performs with Oliver Lake on saxophone and Reggie Workman on bass. Come to think of it, I would guess that Carter was not aware of at least one other member of Cyrille’s new quartet. Had he been bold enough to expose himself to the world of live electronic music that was brewing back in the Sixties, he might have encountered Musica Elettronica Viva, which Teitelbaum co-founded along with Alvin Curran and Frederic Rzewski. Teitelbaum was also a sideman for some of the pioneering recordings that Anthony Braxton made on the Arista label, where Teitelbaum himself pioneered the practice of jamming on a Moog synthesizer, rather than using it to make tape music. These diverse backgrounds all add up to the proposition that, if the title of the album refers to independence from the “even time signatures” that Carter cited, then independence had already been declared about half a century before this new album was released!

Mind you, such an extensive historical legacy does not, in any way, detract from the experience of listening to this new album. If anything, it enhances it. Just as Anton Webern lectured on how the “new music” that he was making, as well as that of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, could be traced back to past music-making practices, the music-making practices captured on The Declaration of Musical Independence can be traced back for even more than half a century, at least as far back as the sources that were influencing Thelonious Monk, many of whom are given generous discussion in Robin D. G. Kelly’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original.

In all fairness it should be observed that all four members of the quartet participated in the composition of one or more of eight of the nine tracks on this recording. The opening track, “Coltrane Time,” is described by Cyrille as “a piece written by John Coltrane that he never recorded.” However, Coltrane’s drummer Rashied Ali learned it and taught it to Milton Graves, who shared it with Cyrille when they recorded the Dialogue of the Drums album. This is a perfect example of what can happen when a drummer has the courage to depart from a steady beat; and, because Coltrane died in 1967, we really are talking about Carter having missed out on things about half a century before he put his discontent into words!

Nevertheless, the title “Coltrane Time” may confuse some serious jazz mavens. Coltrane Time is actually the name of a United Artists Records Coltrane album that was originally issued under Taylor’s name as Hard Driving Jazz in mono and Stereo Drive in stereo. There is now a Hard Driving Jazz CD with the four tracks that Coltrane recorded with Taylor’s quartet (before Cyrille was playing with Taylor), along with six “bonus” tracks. Coltrane is not credited as having composed any of those four tracks. Two are standards, one is by Kenny Dorham, and one is by Chuck Israels. However, the “Coltrane Time” that Cyrille performs has more to do with Coltrane’s interest in the complex rhythms of Indian music than with the “free” rhythms that Taylor was exploring.

One of the compositions that is overlooked by the booklet notes deserves some attention, Bill Frisell’s “Kaddish.” This is based on a major multimedia interpretation of Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name, which I saw at the SFJAZZ Center in April of 2013. By all rights this counts as chamber music for which Frisell conducted an ensemble consisting of Ron Miles on trumpet, Curtis Fowlkes on trombone, Doug Wieselman on clarinet and bass clarinet, Jenny Scheinman on violin, Hank Roberts on cello, Kenny Wollensen on drums, and Robin Holcomb on piano, doubling as vocalist. There were also two actors, Hal Willner as “Ginsberg’s voice” and Chloe Webb reading quoted passages of Ginsberg’s dying mother Naomi.

This piece probably has the steadiest rhythm of the album. It is basically a guitar solo that, like the Kaddish prayer itself, amounts to an incantation of mourning. Street provides what (in the spirit of the original chamber music conception of the composition) amounts to a continuo; and, as the piece progresses, Teitelbaum uses a synthesizer to color the texture, but only slightly so. Cyrille is present only in a few low rumblings. This basically works as a highly distilled recollection of what had initially been a far grander musical conception. While that distillation does little to evoke Ginsberg’s poetry, it is almost painfully effective as an “alternative incantation” of the Kaddish prayer.

Using Hypermedia to Write about Music Performances

This morning I found myself allowed to observe an exchange between a colleague and one of his readers. The reader had expressed a desire that my colleague could have augmented his text with sound files, which is a question dear to my own heart. How can any of us do a satisfactory job of writing about a listening experience without providing the reader with appropriate listening matter?

To be fair, technology is not on the side of those of us doing the writing. The authoring tool I had at my disposal when I was writing for Examiner.com basically allowed me to incorporate one image and embed one video from YouTube. These would be placed at the top of the article, and that was that. The tool I use to write this particular article is a bit better. I can embed both images and video at the most appropriate location in the text, but the only way I can incorporate audio is if it happens to be the soundtrack of a video.

Charles Rosen was in a somewhat more advantageous position when he was writing for The New York Review of Books. The editors created what amounted to a blogging site for their authors; and on December 28, 2011, Rosen contributed an article entitled “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time.” This amounted to a review of a recital given in honor of Carter’s 103rd birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Rosen embedded four audio excerpts from the concert into this article. However, he could only do this because the 92nd Street Y had opened an account of SoundCloud, where audio files may be shared in a manner similar to the sharing of video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks that Rosen created for his article no longer work (although there is a link to an MP3 file taken from another recital at the very end of the article, which, as of this writing, is still functional). The good news, however, is that the Web page of the excerpts that Rosen cited are still on the SoundCloud site. Thus, while this is a step in the right direction, it also demonstrates that we have a long way to go in using real-time media to make a case when writing about a performance.

Most important is the question of intellectual property. The resource that Rosen used had been created by the producers of the recital, which reinforces the announcement most of us know by heart prior to any concert, making it clear that we should not be using our personal devices to capture any portion of the performance. (I rather like the kind explanation that Kathy Barr gives before every Old First Concerts recital, in which she explains that holding up a video capture device blocks the view of others.) The fact is that those of us charged with writing about a performance do not have the right to create examples with media capture technology, nor should we. After all, time spent fussing with equipment takes away from paying attention to the performance!

However, even when a third party provides “authorized” media, there are still problems in how those media can be used effectively. Once again I must raise the issue that what we are doing as writers is tightly coupled to an experience that depends heavily, if not entirely, on the flow of time; and what we commit to any document can never be anything but static. The best way to appreciate this distinction is to consider what happens when the static medium is not present. Having had to sit through more lectures about music than I can enumerate, first in classrooms and later at conferences, I am struck by how often it is the case that the lecturer will play a recording and then talk over it, saying things like “Now!” just before the particular moment in which (s)he wants us to pay attention to that recording. (Even with all that support, there will still be cases in which listener may not be sure what was brought to his/her attention.)

The point is that capture and reproduction will never be enough. If one wishes to explain a time-based experience, then one must do it by creating another time-based experience. This means that we have to stop typing at our keyboards and learn the craft of audio and video editing suites. Writing as an old dog that is willing to learn new tricks, I must still confess that all this turns the effort of documenting into a substantial project, My work habits are such that I want to do my writing about an experience while that experience is still fresh in my mind. If I spend too much time assembling my media support, that freshness may wear off; and I may find myself losing my grip on the argument I wished to make in the first place.

This leads to the conclusion that, flawed as they may be, words are still the preferred medium, even when we are charged with accounting for a time-based experience. There is no “method” that serves all of us. After all, there is as much diversity in the “experiencing” as there is in the experience itself. The bottom line is that our own memories are the most valuable resource when it comes to documenting a time-based experience. For my own part I have my own techniques for trying to “reconstruct the past” before I begin writing; but I have no reason to assume that any of my colleagues have techniques that are even remotely similar to my own. Nevertheless, we all do what we can, always well aware that some of those experiences are much harder to document than others!