Profiling Leon Kirchner with an Anthology

Cover of the book being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Verdant World Productions is an institution managed by Lisa Kirchner to serve as a venue for documenting the legacy of composer Leon Kirchner. It was first encountered on this site when Verdant World Records released an album of live performances of concertante music featuring Kirchner as a conductor performing with pianist Peter Serkin. More recently it provided the platform for a book that Lisa edited about her father entitled Leon Kirchner and his Verdant World. That book was released as a paperback, which became available on an Amazon.com Web page at the beginning of this past August.

The rich breadth of content in this book recalls an old joke about an elementary school pupil having to write a review of a book about penguins, who submits a review consisting of a single sentence:

This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.

I have to confess that, simply by reading the table of contents of this Kirchner book, I was already beginning to feel overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, I jumped in feet-first, beginning with the editor’s preference and working my way, slowly but surely, through to the conclusion of the text on page 363. It did not take me long to get hooked on making the journey. Having completed it I can say that many of my thoughts about music making, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, have been productively refined and at least a few prior misconceptions have been set straight.

My personal acquaintance with Leon was more than a little modest. I met him during my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Elliott Carter was a Visiting Professor for one of the terms. As a result of his presence, I came to know Luciano Berio, who was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University at the same time, and Kirchner, who, the previous year, had succeeded Walter Piston as Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard. My acquaintance with Lisa was somewhat closer, since I was ramping up my writing skills by spending my spare time as a ballet critic at the same time that Lisa was performing in a modern dance group that had attracted my attention. (I also remember being persuaded to give my second press ticket to Lisa, so she could have a chance to see Margot Fonteyn in performance.)

At this point, in the interest of “full disclosure,” I should observe that, to supplement my research in computer music (which would follow me into graduate school), I was learning much from the composer Ezra Sims, particularly about microtonality. It turned out that the chemistry between Sims and Leon left much to be desired. It seems to have dated back to when Sims was studying with Milhaud at Mills College and then had to deal with Milhaud moving elsewhere, leaving Kirchner to serve as Sims advisor.

Nevertheless, my advisor at MIT, Marvin Minsky, and I got to know Kirchner better when he was working on his third string quartet. He arranged for us to visit New York University, where Morton Subotnick had developed an electronic music studio around a synthesizer designed and built by Don Buchla. Subotnick was “coaching” Kirchner in using this gear. My guess is that the jury will always be out when it comes to how much of the tape created for Kirchner’s quartet was due to Kirchner himself and how much was due to Subotnick.

I suppose that the most important thing about Leon Kirchner and his Verdant World is that my knowledge of Kirchner expanded generously further than anything I had retained from my student days. For the most part I felt that the expansion was for the better. Nevertheless, there were a few articles that left me wondering why I had bothered to read them in the first place. Let me elaborate on the most extreme situations at both ends of the spectrum.

On the positive side I would say that some of my strongest impressions came from the documentation of correspondence between Kirchner and Roger Sessions between 1948 and 1950. Sessions was the older of the two; so there were definitely intimations of student-teacher interactions, even if Kirchner had not been a student for many years. A topic of particular interest to me involved the composer Milton Babbitt.

Babbitt was fascinated with how Schoenberg presented his approach to twelve-tone music in terms of rules and constraints. Babbitt, who seems to have studied abstract mathematics as well as music, became obsessed with Schoenberg’s technique, demonstrating that those rules and constraints could be represented in terms of group theory. However, when he tried to elaborate on why this was a useful insight (for composers or mathematicians or both), his articles would quickly devolve into gobbledegook. Kirchner seemed to be obsessed with trying to puzzle out what Babbitt was doing, while Sessions had his own rhetorical devices for suggesting that a sanity check was in order!

The negative side shows up in the final chapter of the book, entitled Notes and Analysis. It consists of six essays, all of which had been published in scholarly journals concerned with music theory. For the most part these articles focus on teasing out details on the score pages and then trying to endow those details with significance.

Now I have to confess that, in my freshman year, when I was presented a program about twentieth-century music on the campus radio station, I ran a series of programs to account for the six string quartets of Béla Bartók; and I felt the need to provide each quartet a verbal introduction. As a result, I prepared for the broadcasts by taking each of the scores for one of the quartets and writing out a generous text description of what those scores revealed. It took many decades of my life to realize that any account of “marks on paper” was secondary to an account that involved what the performer(s) chose do to with those marks. For the most part, the Notes and Analysis essays are written by learned scholars that had not yet learned how to get their heads out of the marks on paper!

Mitropoulos and American Composers

My journey through Sony Classical’s Dimitri Mitropoulos: The Complete RCA and Columbia Album Collection concludes with an account of his performances of music composed in the United States. Note that I did not write “music by American composers.” Thanks to Adolf Hitler, the United States saw a significant influx of European composers trying to escape the Nazi juggernaut. Many of them were particularly forward-looking, and I am one that believes that our country was very fortunate enough to have Arnold Schoenberg as one of them.

I might even go as far as to say that Schoenberg was as prolific after arriving in the United States as he was before leaving Europe. Indeed, one the best examples of how he applied his twelve-tone technique is his Opus 36 violin concerto. He dedicated this concerto to his former student Anton Webern (who did not make the “transatlantic move” and suffered the consequences).

The concerto was given its world premiere by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski. The soloist was Louis Krasner, who had worked closely with Alban Berg on the composition of his violin concerto. Mitropoulos recorded this concerto with the New York Philharmonic, and Columbia released it on an album that also included the Berg concerto. Krasner was the soloist for both concertos, but the Berg concerto was performed by the Cleveland Orchestra led by Artur Rodziński. This is definitely a must-listen album for those interested in the work of Schoenberg and his students (even if Mitropoulos occupies only half of the CD).

A related composer from Schoenberg’s time in Vienna, who also made the move to the United States, is Ernst Krenek. While Krenek was never part of the “Schoenberg school,” he had his own approaches to innovation. Mitropoulos recorded his “Symphonic Elegy,” which was composed in memory of Webern’s tragic death and was scored for string orchestra. Columbia coupled this with Schoenberg’s Opus 17 “Erwartung,” which had been previously performed in Europe. Mitropoulos recorded the performance with soprano soloist Dorothy Dow, making this CD another “must listen” album.

There is also an opportunity to listen to the work of one of Schoenberg’s finest American pupils. Leon Kirchner studied with Schoenberg at the University of California in Los Angeles. After his graduate studies at the Berkeley campus, he pursued both composing and an academic career. He composed his piano concerto on a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation, and he completed it in 1953. The recording was made with support from the Naumburg Foundation. Kirchner himself performed the solo piano part with Mitropoulos and the New York Philharmonic.

Curiously, there is only one other American-born composer that seems to have attracted much of Mitropoulos’ attention. That is Morton Gould, who composed the music for Agnes de Mille’s ballet about Lizzie Borden, which was entitled “Fall River Legend” and was first performed by American Ballet Theatre in April of 1948. Gould extracted a suite from his score, which Mitropoulos recorded with the New York Philharmonic. Mitropoulos also recorded two “singles” of Gould’s music. “Philharmonic Waltzes,” which (obviously) was performed by the New York Philharmonic, was also composed in 1948. (The CD couples this with Roger Sessions’ second symphony and Elie Siegmeister’s suite Ozark Set.) However, there is also an earlier (1946) Gould composition entitled “Minstrel Show,” which Mitropoulos recorded during his tenure in Minneapolis.

The other American-born composer of significance is Samuel Barber. Mitropoulos conducted the premiere of Barber’s Opus 32 four-act opera Vanessa, which was performed by the Metropolitan Opera. This opera has enjoyed several revivals, one of which I remember seeing on television. Still, this “original cast” recording remains refreshing with Eleanor Steber in the title role and Nicolai Gedda as Anatol.

Finally, it is worth noting that Mitropoulos shared an album with Gunther Schuller entitled Music for Brass. The selections on this album were performed by The Brass Ensemble of the Jazz and Classical Music Society, reflecting Schuller’s interest in a synthesis of the two genres. Mitropoulos contributed to the album by conducted Schuller’s “Symphony for Brass and Percussion.” The result was not particularly jazzy, but the production of the album provided a platform for forward-looking jazz players such as Miles Davis and J. J. Johnson.

The Juilliard and “Modern American Music”

Yesterday Sony Classical released its latest anthology of historically significant recordings. The title of the collection, however, is slightly deceptive: Juilliard String Quartet: The Early Columbia Recordings 1949–56. While Juilliard performances can be found on each of the sixteen CDs, the quartet “shares space” with other performers, including one entirely different string quartet. The reason for this is that the Juilliard was a significant participant in an ambitious Columbia project entitled Modern American Music Series.

This project was launched in the early Fifties with a recording of William Masselos playing Charles Ives’ first piano sonata, a decidedly bold “first step.” Indeed, the effort was significant enough to draw the attention of the academic community; and the composer Vincent Persichetti wrote an article about the entire project, which appeared in the July, 1954 issue of The Musical Quarterly. By that time twelve albums had been released in the series, and the project was still going strong.

Four of the twelve albums discussed in Persichetti’s article can be found in the new Sony Classical release. However, only one of them consists entirely of Juilliard performances, the most recent of the four, which couples Peter Mennin’s second quartet with Andrew Imbrie’s first. The Sony collection also includes three additional albums that were released after Persichetti had completed his article; and the Juilliard “shares space” on each of them.

I have mixed feelings about the fact that this new collection is not devoted exclusively to the earliest recordings of the Juilliard. I am also a bit curious about why 1956 was selected as the cutoff point. The first fifteen CDs all account for the founding members of the ensemble: violinists Robert Mann and Robert Koff, violist Raphael Hillyer, and cellist Arthur Winograd. However, Claus Adam replaced Winograd in 1955, meaning that he can be found on the final CD in the collection.

More disquieting is how little staying power can be found in the overall Modern American Music Series repertoire. Going all the way back to the project’s origins, I have to confess that, while I have had several satisfying encounters with recital performances of Ives’ second (“Concord”) sonata, I know the first only through the few recordings of it I have acquired. Indeed, the only composition in the Modern American Music Series CDs in this Sony release that I have heard in performance is Leon Kirchner’s first string quartet (thanks to the Telegraph Quartet); and in the Sony collection it is performed by the American Art Quartet of violinists Eudice Shapiro and Robert Sushel, violist Virginia Majewski, and cellist Victor Gottlieb!

I suppose the “punch line” of the Modern American Music Series and the role of the Juilliard String Quartet in the release of those recordings is: “Modernism is not what it used to be.” However, the fact is that it never was! What may be more interesting is that Telegraph brought a freshness to Kirchner’s music that never really “found its voice” in the Hollywood studio where the American Art Quartet made its recording for Columbia. Perhaps Columbia was more interested in establishing itself as a source of “highbrow content” without giving much thought to whether the “final product” was found satisfying by the composer and/or the performers.

Mind you, the Fifties was the decade in which I first embarked on “serious listening.” However, it was also a decade in which my tastes were pathetically narrow. I would like to think that there are new generations of listeners that are more open to diversity than I was at that early age. Will they be drawn to the Modern American Music Series recordings, or will their tastes turn to visions of modernism that have left the Fifties back in the dust?

Schoenberg and Americans he Influenced

Album design in which Arnold Schoenberg is the “cornerstone” with Leon Kirchner above and Roger Sessions to the left (courtesy of Naxos of America)

One week from today, Albany Records will release the album Transformations. This recording was conceived by violinist Elizabeth Chang as a reflection on profound teacher/student relationships from her artistic heritage. The earliest of the teachers is Arnold Schoenberg, born in 1874 and a leading pioneer in exploring alternatives to the harmonic progressions of tonal music. Roger Sessions was born about two decades later in 1896. Sessions’ primary teachers were Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch; but he formed a friendship with Schoenberg when both of them were in California (Schoenberg in Los Angeles and Sessions in Berkeley). Leon Kirchner, born in 1919, would study with both of them and would go on to teach Chang at Harvard University. As usual, Amazon.com is taking pre-orders for this new release.

Curiously, the three composers on this album are presented in reverse chronological order. Thus, the album begins with Kirchner’s second duo for violin and piano, with Chang performing with pianist Steven Beck. Kirchner wrote this piece late in life, in 2002 at the age of 82.

For the better part of the twentieth century, too many of the compositions that pursued Schoenberg’s desire to depart from the need for a tonal center tended to constitute what might be called “agenda music.” That agenda might be distilled to the motto, “I don’t care if you like it, this is how things should be!” By 2002 Kirchner no longer had to worry about having an agenda.

The duo was composed as a tribute to the violinist Felix Galimir, whom he had first met at the Marlboro Music Festival. Galimir had been a close personal friend of Berg, and in 1936 his string quartet recorded Berg’s Lyric Suite. He joined the Marlboro faculty in 1954 and remained at that post until his death in 1999. In many respects the Lyric Suite is distinguished by the way in which the composer honors both tonal traditions and the new ambitions of his teacher, Schoenberg. To some extent there is a sense that Kirchner was reflecting on that balance in composing his 2002 duo.

Sessions is also represented by a duo composed late in life. In this case the violin was paired with a cello (performed by Alberto Parrini); and the duo itself was Sessions’ last piece of chamber music, written at the age of 82. This composition is stricter about avoiding a tonal center than Kirchner’s duo would later be.

However, Virgil Thomson once wrote that, for all of Schoenberg’s efforts to transcend tonality, the rhythms of his music always seemed to revert to the late nineteenth-century traditions of Vienna. While Sessions was not subjected to a similar influence, the attentive listener will quickly recognize that it is through his command of rhythmic patterns that this duo charts a well-defined course from beginning to end. This piece is preceded by an earlier (1953) solo violin sonata, in which Sessions adapted Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique to his own purposes; but this is another piece in which the listener is best guided by the rhetorical development of rhythms.

The album then concludes with the one Schoenberg selection, his Opus 47 “Phantasy” for violin and piano, composed in Los Angeles in 1949. I have to confess that I have a strong personal attachment to this music. In the late Eighties, when my wife and I were living in Los Angeles, we would make annual trips to Santa Fe every summer to see the opera performances. The summers were also devoted to a chamber music festival, which used to have rehearsals open to the public during the day. As a result, I had the good fortune to listen to violinist György Pauk and pianist Ursula Oppens prepare this “Phantasy.” I also had the chutzpah to ask Oppens if she wanted a page-turner, because I really wanted to follow the score while listening to them; and she was kind enough to allow me up on stage.

Needless to say, reading the score well enough to turn the pages at the right time was no easy matter; but I managed to do all that was required of me without fumbling. Unfortunately, seeing what both musicians were playing did little to penetrate an overall sense of opacity. However, towards the end of the piece, Pauk said (very audibly) “Now we dance!” This rehearsal took place decades before I had encountered Thomson’s observation about Schoenberg. However, thanks to Pauk, this was the first time I began to appreciate how to get caught up into Schoenberg’s rhetorical command of rhythm! As a result, I could not listen to the recording of Chang and Beck without thinking of Pauk and Oppens; and, even without having the score pages to follow, that sense of rhythm unfolding into dance made for a thoroughly enjoyable listening experience.

Sony’s Fromm Collection: “Bonus” CD of Fleisher

Photograph of Leon Fleisher made around the time that the recordings on the album being discussed were made (photograph by Bender included in a Seattle Symphony Orchestra brochure, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The last of the ten CDs in the Sony Classical box set that reproduces the content of all of the recordings released under support by the Fromm Foundation between 1956 and 1963 is explicitly labeled as a “bonus.” Neither Paul Fromm himself nor his Foundation had a hand in its production. The album presents pianist Leon Fleisher playing twentieth-century compositions. Three of the composers were closely affiliated with Fromm: Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, and Leon Kirchner. The final composer on the album is Ned Rorem.

Taken as a whole, the album amounts to a survey of solo piano music composed during the first half of the twentieth century by Americans. This was a time when American composers were just beginning to come into their own; and, as might be expected, all four of them stood on European shoulders in one way or another. Copland was one of the first students to enjoy the benefits of the Fontainebleau School of Music and Nadia Boulanger. Sessions’ primary European influence came from Ernest Bloch, with whom he studied at Yale University; and he developed a friendship with Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles during the time he was teaching at the University of California at Berkeley. As has already been observed, Kirchner studied with Schoenberg at the University of California at Los Angeles. Rorem studied at both the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, both rich with European influences; but his more direct influences came from the relationships he established with working musicians and other artists while living in Paris after his studies.

While each of these composers established his own unique voice, the “program” of Fleisher’s album suggests at least signs of a shared rhetoric. They key element of that rhetoric is assertiveness. It is the sort of assertiveness that one encounter’s in the essay that Henry Miller wrote about Edgard Varèse included in The Air-Conditioned Nightmare:

No one asks you to throw Mozart out the window. Keep Mozart. Cherish him. Keep Moses too, and Buddha and Laotse and Christ. Keep them in your heart. But make room for the others, the coming ones, the ones who are already scratching on the window-panes.

The compositions by Copland, Sessions, and Kirchner are never shy about scratching at those window-panes with the conviction that there is more to musical life than the past mapped out by the likes of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Frédéric Chopin. There is even a strong sense of determination in the three barcarolles by Rorem that conclude the album, however lyrical the thematic material may be.

From our current vantage point, however, it seems as if that assertiveness did not register as strongly as Fleisher (or the composers he had selected) would have hoped. Over the course of my own listening experience, I have encountered only one of those four pieces in recital, the Copland sonata; and my most recent listening experience was on Conrad Tao’s American Rage album, which I discussed this past November. It is thus likely that this “bonus” offering will, for most listeners, be as much a journey of discovery as were the other nine albums in the Fromm collection.

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.

Sony Reissues Fromm’s Recorded Legacy

During my student days the Fromm Music Foundation served somewhat as a pole star to guide those of us that wished to learn more about contemporary composers. It was all very well and good to have access to recordings of the music of composers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, and Paul Hindemith, as well as “pioneering” American composers such as Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions. However, during the middle of the twentieth century, a new generation of composers was emerging, whose work deserved not only performance but also documentation of those performances through readily available recordings. To that end the Fromm Foundation made arrangements with Columbia Records for the production of recordings under the rubric Twentieth Century Composers Series, to be released on Columbia’s subsidiary label, Epic Records.

Today Sony Classical released a ten-CD box set that reproduces the content of all of the recordings released under that series supported by the Fromm Foundation between 1956 and 1963. This accounts for eight of the CDs. There is also a CD of compositions by Lukas Foss, which was not released until after Paul Fromm terminated his series but included works commissioned by the Fromm Foundation. Finally, there is a CD of solo piano music performed by Leon Fleisher. Fleisher plays works by three composers closely affiliated with Fromm, Leon Kirchner, Copland, and Sessions, along with a selection by Ned Rorem.

I first became aware of Fromm and his Foundation through the sponsorship of the Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies. The papers delivered at that seminar were published in The Musical Quarterly, and in 1962 they were all reproduced in a book published by W. W. Norton & Company entitled Problems of Modern Music. This became one of my “bibles” during my undergraduate years, even though one of my fellow students scribbled on the title page, right under the title itself, “Mainly, it doesn’t sound good!”

Kidding aside, the Princeton Seminar served as a reminder that “new music” was trying to negotiate a delicate balance between cerebral approaches to invention and expressiveness that would make for a compelling performance. Fromm himself seems to have appreciated the risks involved in getting that balance right. Nevertheless, he maintained his advocacy, reinforcing it with what amounted to his own manifesto:

For the earnest listener, perhaps nothing is more gratifying than to become familiar with a work that is new to him – to sense its message and to get to know its gestures as he knows the gestures of a friend.

In retrospect I would say that much of what I have been writing aligns with that manifesto, although I feel that my choice of the adjective “attentive,” rather than “earnest,” may have involved a bit of push-back against what I have long felt was a shadow of elitism cast by Fromm’s achievements.

That said, it is worth acknowledging that giving this collection its fair share of attentive listening is best approached on a disc-by-disc basis. There is considerable individuality on each recording, and attention requires a willingness to get to know each instance of that individuality on its own terms. To choose an example not included in this collection, I found that I had to “deep-end” my attention to Elliot Carter’s second string quartet by listening to a recording many times in close succession before I could come even close to recognizing those “gestures of a friend.”

Leon Kirchner at the piano on the original cover of the recording being discussed

Given all of that context, in this article I shall “begin at the beginning” with the first CD in the collection. This presents two chamber music compositions by Leon Kirchner, both involving violin and piano. Kirchner himself plays the piano part in both of those selections. The first is his first piano trio in two movements, composed in 1954, in which he is joined by violinist Nathan Rubin and cellist George Neikrug. This is followed by his 1952 “Sonata concertante,” in which he accompanies violinist Eudice Shapiro.

Kirchner studied with Arnold Schoenberg as an undergraduate at the University of California at Los Angeles. He was drawn to Schoenberg’s “twelve-tone” techniques as an effort to get beyond structures built on the foundation of the centuries-old dominant-tonic (V-I) cadence. After many years of listening to performances of Schoenberg’s music, I finally realized that the expressiveness of his compositions resided in his rhythmic gestures, rather than in how he chose to lay out his pitches in both sequences and simultaneities. As a result, while I had not previously listened to either of the compositions on this Fromm CD, it did not take me long to recognize that each had its own individual rhetorical plan that was revealed through the underlying rhythmic patterns.

I have no idea how Kirchner rehearsed these two pieces. Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine that, from his own position behind the keyboard, he could lead the other instrumentalists down paths, each of which had its own sense of “rhetorical direction.” Awareness of those directions might easily elude the casual listener. However, that awareness reveals itself to a level of attention consistent with what would be granted to a piano trio or sonata by Johannes Brahms. Put another way, the expressiveness of Kirchner behind the piano keyboard is consistent with the expressiveness he would later bring to conducting the music of both Ludwig van Beethoven and Alban Berg for a recording discussed on this site almost exactly a month ago.

In the immortal words of Duke Ellington, “It’s all music!”

San Francisco Nonagenarian Makes SFP Debut

Pianist Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928. Last night San Francisco Performances (SFP) celebrated his nonagenarian status by hosting his very first appearance under that organization’s auspices. He was joined by one of his students at the Curtis Institute of Music, Jonathan Biss, making his eleventh SFP appearance. In addition, his program included the latest in an impressive series of efforts to perform concertos with chamber music accompaniment. The chamber musicians for the occasion were the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw), along with bassist Charles Chandler. This was Telegraph’s third SFP appearance and probably Chandler’s first.

 Telegraph Quartet members Jeremiah Shaw, Joseph Maile, Pei-Ling Lin, and Eric Chin (from their San Francisco Performances event page from earlier this season)

My own encounters with Fleisher always seemed to involve the intense seriousness of his demeanor. Much of that seriousness may have resulted from his battle with focal dystonia, through which he lost the use of his right hand in 1964. However, during the Nineties he gradually recovered the use of that hand through combined therapies of Botox injections and Rolfing; and only one of last night’s selections was played by his left hand alone. At the same time his personality seems to have mellowed, particularly when it came to recalling his past in San Francisco, which involved his working with two conductors associated with the San Francisco Symphony, Alfred Hertz and Pierre Monteux.

He used his reminiscing to build up audience support for his announcement of a program change. Fleisher had just given a splendid account of “L.H.” (the standard abbreviation “left hand” in piano scores), which Leon Kirchner composed for Fleisher in 1995 and may be one of the best examples of how thoroughly dazzling virtuosity does not have to depend on a tonal center. After that demanding undertaking, Fleisher felt a need to beg off from his commitment to follow the Kirchner selection with Johannes Brahms’ left-hand arrangement of the concluding Chaconne movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 partita for solo violin in D minor. (Both of these pieces constituted the first two tracks of Fleisher’s All the Things You Are album, but with the Bach arrangement leading off the album.) The program change involved replacing Brahms with two Debussy selections (“La puerta del Vino” from the second book of Claude Debussy’s preludes for solo piano and “Clair de lune” from Suite bergamasque) and one by Frédéric Chopin (the D-flat major nocturne, Opus 27, Number 2).

Fleisher’s other solo offering took place at the very beginning of the program, Egon Petri’s arrangement of “Sheep may safely graze,” the soprano aria (“Schafe können sicher weiden”) from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart's desire). This was followed by Jonathan Biss’ first solo offering on the program, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 109 piano sonata in E major. I have to confess that this juxtaposition had a strong personal impact on my listening dispositions. It is almost impossible to enumerate the available recordings of Opus 109, and I can barely keep track of the ones in my personal collection. However, among all of those alternatives, the one that has remained by favorite for many years has been a 1954 recording, probably made from a recital in Berkeley presenting Beethoven’s last three sonatas, featuring the pianist (as some may have guessed by now) Egon Petri!

Before explaining my disappointment with Biss’ account, I would like to evoke one of my own personal memories of Fleisher. It involves a Piano Master Class that he gave at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM) in October of 2008. As might be guessed, Fleisher had acute perception through which he could call a student’s attention to the most subtle of details. However, on this particular occasion, his insights regarding “micro-level” details were complemented with the need to take on the “macro-level.” He asked one of the students to look at the wall of the performing space beyond the piano. He then asked the student to imagine that the wall on the side of the performing space was covered with all the pages of the sheet music. (As I recall, he made a joke about not trying this with a Wagner opera.)

Clearly, this thought-experiment had to contend with unrealistic powers of visual acuity. Nevertheless, this was Fleisher’s way of reminding the student that, no matter how much attention is given to every last detail, one must always have one’s own clear thoughts about how each of those details contributes to the whole. Biss’ Beethoven performance last night never seemed to grasp that sense of the whole. He had clearly mastered the details with impressive precision; but the relations of parts to the whole were hopelessly obscured, if they existed at all. This observation was particularly critical, since Fleisher’s own account of “L.H.” left a deep impression on the macro-level that exquisitely complemented all of the rich micro-level embellishing passages (all this taking place, I must repeat, in the absence of any strong tonal center). Biss’ own account of Kirchner, “Interlude II,” was somewhat more satisfying; but the piece itself was on a much shorter durational scale.

The program concluded with the concerto offering, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 414 in A major. As had been the case last month, when the Calidore String Quartet provided the “orchestral accompaniment” for Inon Barnatan’s performance of keyboard concertos by Bach, the spirit of a collegium musicum was alive and well in last night’s Mozart offering. These were performers that were clearly enjoying each other’s company in the process of appreciating what made this concerto tick, even in the absence of the requisite oboes and horn. (The bassoon parts were optional.) That appreciation then spilled off the stage and into the audience area, gently persuading the attentive listeners that, as had been the case with Fleisher’s coaching at SFCM, music always “works its magic” at both the “micro-level” and the “macro-level.”

SFP to Celebrate Leon Fleisher’s 90th Birthday

Celebrant and celebrator: pianists Leon Fleisher and Jonathan Biss (from the SFP event page for this concert)

As was initially announced last summer, San Francisco Performances (SFP) planned two “anniversary-based” programs for its 2018–2019 season. The first of these took place as part of the annual gala, which was held at the end of this past September and acknowledged the centennial of the first performance of Igor Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat (the soldier’s tale) on September 28, 1918. The second was the planned celebration of the 90th birthday of pianist Leon Fleisher, who was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928. That celebration will take place next month; and, if it seems a bit belated, that tardiness will be compensated with some impressive programming.

Many may know that Fleisher lost the use of his right hand in 1964 through focal dystonia. However, for about two decades he has been able to lessen his symptoms through Botox injections. Following his 85th birthday he began a series of recording sessions in the Gould Recital Hall of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. The results were released by Bridge Records in July of 2014 on the album entitled All the Things You Are, which consisted of seven compositions, one of which required Fleisher using both of his hands. Two of the left-hand compositions were composed specifically for Fleisher.

The SFP celebratory concert will present performances by both Fleisher and Jonathan Biss. For one selection Fleisher will be joined by the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw), along with bassist Charles Chandler. That selection will be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s K. 414 piano concerto in A major with the five string players providing the instrumental accompaniment.

Fleisher will also play two of the selections from his All the Things You Are album, Johannes Brahms’ left-hand arrangement of the concluding Chaconne movement from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 partita for solo violin in D minor and “L.H.,” which Leon Kirchner composed for Fleisher in 1995. With both hands Fleisher will play Egon Petri’s four-hand arrangement of the soprano aria “Sheep may safely graze” from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 secular cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart’s desire). Biss will contribute two additional selections to the program, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 109 sonata in E major and Kirchner’s “Interlude II.”

This recital will be held in Herbst Theatre, beginning at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 12. Ticket prices will be $75, $60, and $45. As of this writing, seats are still available in all price categories. They may be purchased in advance online through a City Box Office event page.

BMOP’s Survey of Kirchner’s Orchestral Music

courtesy of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project

At the end of last September, BMOP/sound, the “house label” for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), celebrated its 60th release with an album consisting entirely of orchestra music by Leon Kirchner. Prepared by conductor Gil Rose, the “program” of the album consists of five of Kirchner’s orchestral compositions presented in chronological order. Since the earliest of these, a sinfonia in two parts played without interruption, was composed in 1951, while the latest, the orchestral version of “The Forbidden,” was premiered on October 16, 2008, the recording, taken as a whole, accounts for over 50 years of Kirchner’s life and approaches to composition.

Appointed in 1961 to succeed Walter Piston, Kirchner was on the faculty at Harvard University during the entire interval of time I spent as both undergraduate and graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). I interacted with him on only a few occasions during the period when Elliott Carter had a Visiting Professor appointment at MIT; and I was probably responsible for introducing Kirchner to my thesis advisor, Marvin Minsky, who is cited as an influence in Joel Fan’s essay for the booklet accompanying the BMOP album. Indeed, it was through Kirchner that both Minsky and I had our first contact with a Buchla synthesizer, being used by Morton Subotnick to prepare the “electronic accompaniment” for Kirchner’s third string quartet.

Nevertheless, my awareness of Kirchner’s music was pathetically limited during my student days and even weaker over the course of the decades to follow. Indeed, while I wrote about an album of his chamber music, planned by Fan, for Examiner.com in January of 2013, Kirchner’s music never really registered on my radar until the Telegraph Quartet began to perform his first string quartet regularly in their recitals, eventually including it on their first album. Since then I have dropped hints on several occasions suggesting that covering the full canon of Kirchner’s quartets would be an admirable project.

All this should explain why I was totally unfamiliar with all of the selections on the recent BMOP album. From a listener’s point of view, these selections make for a listening experience entirely different from that of Kirchner’s chamber music. If there are those who felt that Kirchner’s first string quartet could be taken for Béla Bartók’s seventh, the two orchestral works from the Fifties, the sinfonia (1951) and a toccata scored for strings, solo winds, and percussion (1955), seem, at least to my ears, to tweak memories of the rich full-orchestra writing encountered in the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Those associations are, of course, little more than tweaks; but they still provide a framework in which the uniqueness of Kirchner’s voice can be appreciated.

However, Kirchner himself was never one to let his anchor rest in a single place. As a result I must confess that I am still working to orient myself when listening to the two pieces on this album both called “Music for Orchestra.” For that matter, Fan’s performance of the original solo piano version of “The Forbidden” has not yet made a deep enough impression for me to comprehend at any significant depth how it relates to the orchestral version on this new album.

In other words there is no legitimate way in which Kirchner’s music can, or should be, taken for background music. This is not for listening while comfortably stretched out on the couch or sitting in your favorite armchair. Indeed, the attentiveness I cultivated for listening to the first quartet came primarily from several recital experiences, rather than from the recently released recording. So, to bring this matter of informed listening closer to home, I would like to observe that the 1955 toccata was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) on February 16, 1956, back when Kirchner was teaching at Mills College and Enrique Jordá was SFS Music Director. After that, it looks like Kirchner’s music was put on hold until Michael Tilson Thomas conducted his 1969 “Music for Orchestra” piece in May of 1998.

I am not sure I am up for waiting out another interval of 42 years before the next opportunity arises. However, if that is what it takes, then the best I can do is hold up my side of the bargain by living a healthy life! Fortunately, I can use the time to cultivate a richer familiarity with Kirchner’s music as performed by BMOP.

Telegraph’s Debut Album Profiles Modernism

courtesy of Jensen Artists

Yesterday I promised that I would examine two of the many recordings scheduled for release this coming Friday, one from the eighteenth century and the other from the twentieth. I began yesterday with the earlier album, a stimulating survey of rarely-encountered chamber music by Antonio Vivaldi. The twentieth-century offering is the debut album of the Telegraph Quartet, an ensemble based here in the Bay Area that was formed in 2013 and has been presenting consistently satisfying and adventurous programs to local audiences since then. The two violinists, Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, share responsibility for leading; and they are joined by violist Pei-Ling Lin and cellist Jeremiah Shaw.

The title of the album is Into the Light. In a collective statement, the quartet members explain their choice of title in the very first paragraph of the accompanying booklet:

With these three brief works for string quartet, we wanted to share with all of you our passion for possibility. We chose these particular works because there is so much to be found emotionally in each of them and because they reveal musical landscapes not nearly as often explored as others in the world of quartets. These landscapes are certainly not fallow ground—there have been other musicians blazing these trails before we came along—but we love the idea of bringing these works further into the light, bringing them out of the shadows of the more often celebrated, albeit totally justified, string quartet favorites.

The “three brief works” are, in order of appearance, Leon Kirchner’s first string quartet (1949), the five short pieces of Anton Webern’s Opus 5 collection (1905), and Benjamin Britten’s 1936 collection of three “divertimenti.” All three of these pieces were represented when Telegraph gave its first performance in Herbst Theatre, in February of 2017, under the auspices of San Francisco Performances at the annual concert that showcases winners of the Walter W. Naumburg Chamber Music Award. The program included both the Webern and Kirchner selections, and the encore was the second movement of the Britten collection. As usual, this recording is currently available for pre-order from Amazon.com.

The composition that most deserves being brought “into the light” is the very first selection, the Kirchner quartet. It was written about 45 years after Webern’s Opus 5; and, like Webern, Kirchner had studied with Arnold Schoenberg, at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), rather than in Vienna. However, Kirchner’s influences also include Ernest Bloch at the University of California at Berkeley and Roger Sessions in New York. On the basis of the chronologies available through the Wikipedia pages for both Sessions and Kirchner, it may well be that the exploration of composing without a tonal “center of gravity” (more familiarly known as “atonality”) was being investigated for the first time by both master and student. (One of the valuable insights from The Doctor Faustus Dossier, discussed on this site at the beginning of this week, is that Schoenberg’s classes at both UCLA and the University of Southern California focused entirely on tonal music.)

Nevertheless, the “pedigree” of Kirchner’s first quartet owes more to Béla Bartók than to any of the Second Viennese School composers. Indeed, the booklet includes the anecdote of an unnamed listener declaring Kirchner’s first quartet to be Bartók’s seventh! Presumably, this was meant as a compliment; and it may also acknowledge an interesting approach to the similarity. While there have been academic efforts to explore atonality in Bartók’s music, it would be fairer to say that Bartók had found ways to avoid the “gravitational pull” of the dominant-tonic cadence without abandoning a similar “pull” from individual pitches.

The more I listen to Kirchner’s quartet, the more inclined I am to believe that he may have been exploring how to take that strategy in new directions. However, it goes without saying that such thoughts would not have been possible were it not for the clear account that Telegraph has provided to Kirchner’s score, first in their recitals and subsequently on this recording. This is a reading that has established its own ideas of foreground and background as they apply to phrase structure and often to individual notes. Given how little attention Kirchner’s music has received since his death in 2009, Telegraph clearly has the potential for giving all four of his string quartets well-considered accounts (and that includes the third quartet, which requires an obbligato tape of synthesized electronic music).

Into the Light reverses the ordering of Kirchner and Webern from that of Telegraph’s Naumburg recital. In 1908 Webern “graduated” from his studies with Schoenberg with the completion of his Opus 1, a passacaglia based on a clearly tonal theme. After that Webern, along with Alban Berg, became one of Schoenberg’s closest colleagues. By 1909 both Schoenberg and Webern were finding their own ways to get beyond that “gravitational pull” of tonality. Webern’s Opus 5 consists of five pieces, only one of which (the last) is longer than three minutes in duration. (The shortest lasts less than a minute.)

One might say that each individual piece serves up its own strategy for avoiding the dominant-tonic cadence. Techniques include sharply angular motifs in which none of the notes is “secondary” to the others, strong dependence on changes in dynamic levels to establish a sense of how the music “flows” from beginning to end, and highly adventurous approaches to sonority as a new technique for highlighting those beginning-to-end journeys. Each of the pieces is almost like an intricately designed mosaic in which both individual tiles and their overall combination are overflowing with structural details. Nevertheless, listening cannot be an experience of merely cataloging that plethora of details; and Telegraph’s command of the score emerges in their ability to endow each piece with its own characteristic discourse strategy that attracts and then maintains the attention of the committed listener.

Given the intensity of both the Kirchner and Webern offerings, the selection of Britten as an encore for the Naumburg recital came like a breath of fresh air; and it serves a similar function on the Into the Light album. There is a tendency to think of Britten as a deadly serious composer, but there is no shortage of wit that can be harvested from many of his early compositions. His string quartet divertimenti were first written in 1933 (the year in which Britten turned twenty), revised in 1936, and never assigned an opus number. By 1936 Britten had already established his playful side with his Opus 4 “Simple Symphony” (1934) and his frolicsome arrangements of short pieces by Gioachino Rossini (the so-called “sins” of his old age) in the Opus 9 suite Soirées musicales (1936). The equally playful Opus 10 set of variations on a theme by Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge would appear the following year.

As in both Opus 4 and Opus 10, each of the three divertimenti takes a familiar form and runs it through a gauntlet of unorthodox paces. The humor tends to be deadpan in nature. Telegraph’s encore selection was the second of these pieces, a waltz that I had described at the time as “both lighthearted and wistful.” My personal favorite, however, is the opening march, whose martial pretensions become an object of mockery, perhaps reflecting the composer’s pacifist convictions that emerged when he first encountered the use of corporal punishment in his early school years. (That same mockery resurfaces in the march variation in the Opus 10 variations.)

Giving Art Song the Combo Treatment

from Amazon.com

I first started writing about Lisa Kirchner during my Examiner.com days in the summer of 2012. I had known about her as a member of the James Waring Dance Company, about which I wrote with great enthusiasm as a way of taking a break from working on my doctoral thesis. Until I encountered her album Charleston for You through my connection to Naxos of America, I had not known that she had become a jazz singer. This led to my getting back in touch with her, which led to writing more about not only her own work but also that of her father, the composer Leon Kirchner.

Recently I had an opportunity to listen to one of Lisa’s earlier albums, Something to Sing About. This turned out to explore a fascinating synthesis of “art song,” as it had developed over the course of the twentieth century, with contemporary jazz practices that tend to be informed by classical training in both composition and performance. Thus, all of the eighteen songs on this recording, whether composed by Charles Ives or adapted from a film score by Paul Chihara, are performed by Kirchner in a combo setting with a rhythm section of piano, bass, guitar, and drums. (There is also an accordion played by one of the song composers, William Schimmel, that shows up on ten of the tracks.) On the treble side Sherman Irby, who is a member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, plays alto saxophone on nine tracks and flute on two.

What is striking is how Lisa’s stylizations establish such a “comfortable” setting that well suits her selections of both Ives and Aaron Copland. Her father’s music is also included, as well as that of three of his colleagues, Ned Rorem, David Del Tredici, and John Harbison, and one of his students, John Adams. I would even be so bold as to suggest that one of the settings may even be an improvement over the original.

That would be “Under the Willow Tree,” which is inserted as a “folk song” in the second act of Samuel Barber’s Vanessa. (Full disclaimer: My only opportunity to see this opera performed was provided by PBS, and I have never heard any of the music from Vanessa in a concert setting.) “Under the Willow Tree” struck me as a bit of a distraction from the opera’s plot development; but it stands very well on its own. Kirchner and her piano accompanist for this selection, Joel Fan, clearly appreciated how Barber inserted striking rhythmic eccentricities into an otherwise familiar waltz rhythm. (Fan is a significant advocate for Leon Kirchner’s piano music.)

Taken as a whole, this album reinforces a belief I have long nurtured that those who make jazz tend to know more about classical practices than the other way around. This is music that deserves to be taken on a tour with special attention to conservatories, particularly those that have not yet really figured out how to deal with jazz in the curriculum. However, since Something to Sing About was released in 2011, it is unlikely that such a tour will take place; and conservatories will probably continue to puzzle over “the jazz question!”

Telegraph Quartet Makes its Herbst Debut with Passionate Romanticism

Last night the Telegraph Quartet of violinists Eric Chin and Joseph Maile, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw gave its first performance in Herbst Theatre under the auspices of San Francisco Performances (SFP). The occasion was the annual concert SFP organizes to present the winner of the international competition for soloists and chamber ensembles sponsored by the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation through a concert offered free of charge to SFP subscribers. This concert was distinguished, however, by the facts that the ensemble is based here in the Bay Area and that the group had performed for SFP a year ago this month at one of Salons at the Hotel Rex recitals.

They prepared a program that was neatly balanced between two twentieth-century composers in the first half and a major nineteenth-century composer in the second. That latter composer was Franz Schubert, and Maile observed in his brief remarks that Schubert’s intense expressiveness strongly influenced their approach to twentieth-century modernism. Thus, it was no surprise that Schubert was represented by one of his most passionate string quartets, D. 810 in D minor, known as “Death and the Maiden,” since the second movement is a set of variations on the D. 521 song of the same name.

As the program notes by Eric Bromberger observed, death was definitely on Schubert’s mind while working on this quartet. Schubert had his first brush with debilitating illness (probably due to syphilis) in the fall of 1822; and his health suffered irreversible damage throughout 1823. He was only able to get back to work in 1824, and D. 810 was one of his first efforts. It would be no surprise that the D. 521 song, which he had composed in 1817, would have been back on his mind. The resulting composition was given its first performance exactly 191 years ago today (February 1, 1826) at the home of Josef Barth in Vienna. It would not be performed in public until almost five years after Schubert’s death.

Telegraph’s approach to this music provided just the right balance between the emotional darkness that pervades all four movements of this quartet and Schubert’s meticulous attention to structural detail, particularly through his imaginative capacity for prolongation. Because this is Schubert’s best-known quartet, it tends to get a generous amount of exposure. In an audience consisting heavily of the “SFP faithful,” it would have been familiar to many. Thus, it was important that Telegraph could cultivate their own unique voice for this piece, endowing it with that in-the-moment spontaneity that endows the whole chamber music genre with such a powerful potential for listener impact. Indeed, one could experience the immediacy of Telegraph’s interpretation not only through the listening experience itself but also by observing the rich use of body language that maintained “broadband communication” among the four players from beginning to end.

That physical approach to performance was equally informative during the less familiar offerings of the first half of the program. Telegraph made a bold move in choosing to begin with Anton Webern’s Opus 5 set of five short pieces. Each of these is a miniaturist study with an infrastructure so intricate that it continues to fascinate music theorists. However, while Webern is often classified as the most abstract among the abstractionists, Telegraph had no trouble bringing to the surface all of the intense passions lurking behind Webern’s abstract structures.

This is not as challenging a task as one might think. By the ninth measure of the first piece in the set, Webern has already settled into lush parallel thirds and sixths for the two violin parts, almost as if to smooth the feathers ruffled by the preceding eight measures. Similarly, while the fourth of the pieces provided a “mother lode” for exploration by the mathematically inclined, its mere thirteen measures divide almost perfectly in half, with each part ending with the rising sigh of the second violin part. Telegraph clearly appreciated these dramatic gestures and many others like them, presenting them to the attentive listener with equal measures of clarity and passion.

The Webern was followed by Leon Kirchner’s quartet, written about 40 years after Webern’s Opus 5. Kirchner’s studies included Arnold Schoenberg at UCLA, Ernest Bloch at the University of California at Berkeley, and Roger Sessions in New York. He clearly appreciated how composers such as Schoenberg had tried to depart from the conventions of tonal harmony, but he had his own ideas when it came to maintaining the attention of the sympathetic listener. Those ideas included some of the same dramatic effects that had served Webern so well, along with other tropes that had established themselves in modernist practices during the first half of the twentieth century. (My own ear tends to pick up snatches of Béla Bartók from time to time.)

Those who had attended the Rex Salon may recall that Telegraph had played Kirchner’s quartet on that occasion. My own background includes a few more Telegraph performances of this piece, and it is definitely music that grows with increased familiarity. Last night the group illustrated how one particularly passionate theme migrates across all four movements of the quartet. Judging from audience response, the piece encouraged many to follow Telegraph on their journey through those four movements, eager to offer a warm reception at journey’s end. Perhaps the recognition that this music continues to resonate will encourage Telegraph to look into the other three quartets that Kirchner composed over the course of his lifetime.

[added 2/3, 12:50 p.m.: It was only after reading the account of this concert in the San Francisco Chronicle that I realized that I had not said anything about the encore! On the one hand this was a bit embarrassing, since the encore composer was one of my favorites, Benjamin Britten. Furthermore, it was very early Britten, composed in 1936 and never assigned an opus number. It was the second piece in a collection that Britten called Three Divertimenti, a waltz that was both lighthearted and wistful at the same time. In retrospect, I would conjecture that it was the very lightness of the music that led to my neglecting it, simply because my own thoughts were so thoroughly wrapped up in the intense expressiveness of all of the works on the program. By all rights the encore should have served to lift some of that weight, and I suspect that it did not for many in the audience. For better or worse, however, I was not yet willing to let go of that weight; and, when it came to writing about the event, my preoccupations got the better of me!]

Conversing with the Dead

It is very seldom that a truly personal blog post resonates with me. I figure that the blogger is writing it for the same reason that I write such things: Writing is a way of trying to bring some order to unkempt thoughts, usually on the premise that they may achieve a more secure place in memory once they have been ordered. (These days, I am not sure I can vouch for my memory; but I have a fair amount of confidence that those thoughts, now ordered by the process of writing, will soon be within the grasp of at least one of the search engines I use!)

I say all this as prologue to Jeremy Denk's blog post about Leon Kirchner this morning. It followed a path of free association that began with Kirchner "jokingly" comparing Denk to Walt Whitman, continuing with Denk finding (and purchasing) a copy of Leaves of Grass in Grand Central Station, being transformed by the text, and ultimately receiving the news of Kirchner's death. For me, however, the punch line hit me after that transformation:

Am back at home, looking at a giant writing project on the Goldberg Variations which I am supposed to finish, f&*(). How I wish I could ask Leon about them right now.

This struck me in a bizarre way, not so much because of my own sporadic encounters with Kirchner as much as a failure to appreciate conversations with a mentor until it is too late.

My first doctoral thesis advisor was Gian-Carlo Rota. It was an inevitable commitment after all the time I had taken transcribing his lectures on combinatorial analysis into printed notes (which was probably just as valuable on my path to becoming a better writer as any of my projects involving writing about dance or music). That commitment had the unintended consequence of reorienting the target of my research passions, resulting in my changing advisors. It was Rota who had been responsible for my being at the University of Colorado in Boulder during that fateful summer of 1968, when my life was changed by my encounters with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and the members of the Cunningham Dance Company. Rota had a visiting appointment at the University of Colorado that summer, and he lured me to join him to continue my scribal duties while he lectured on a new approach to Pólya's Theorem. When I arrived, having given my Volvo is first serious road trip on the Interstate system between Boston and Boulder, Rota informed me that he had decided to lecture on category theory instead; and every day become an adventure of a stranger in a strange land (for me, if not for Rota). Going on mushroom hunts with Cage was the perfect way to clear my head while trying to make sense of each day's lecture.

I think Rota realized that I was more passionate about music than about pure mathematics; and, while he was never sympathetic to the agenda of artificial intelligence, I also think he realized that Marvin Minsky would serve me better as an advisor, even if it was just a matter of giving me a freer rein until I found my way. However, while Rota and I went separate paths where my doctorate was concerned, we stayed in touch sporadically. Thus, when I was teaching at the Technion in Haifa, I wrote to let him know that I had given a series of lectures on combinatorics that owed more to the notes I had taken in his lectures than to any of the current textbooks. I also mentioned that I had written up those lectures for the benefit of the students who did not follow my English very well, and Rota almost immediately wrote back to request a copy of what I had written! (Old habits die hard.)

Less than a decade later, when I was doing military research in Santa Barbara, I had a visitor one day who noticed a copy of José Ortega y Gasset's Phenomenology and Art on my shelf and asked, "Did you get that from Rota?" I doubt that he knew more about me than my MIT background; but through him I discovered that, having securely established his position in mathematics, Rota was now lecturing on phenomenology. It took almost another ten years for our paths to cross: I was now doing research at the Information Sciences Institute at the University of Southern California (USC); and Rota was spending chunks of his winter time in the USC Mathematics Department, primarily because of the preferable weather. By this time my struggles with Ortega had evolved into struggles with Ludwig Wittgenstein. We had lots to talk about, and I remember bringing him home to meet my wife and have dinner with us. He seemed particularly interested in my decision to view Wittgenstein as straddling a borderline between philosophy and poetry, seeking out a poet's approach to expression when the language of philosophy failed him. (These days I wonder how much of that was actually Wittgenstein and how much came from those who faithfully transcribed his lectures!)

We had only one encounter after that. This was when I was working in Singapore, and I was part of a task force considering an invitation for membership in the MIT Media Lab. Rota was both tactful and cautionary in his choice of words about the Media Lab. I could tell this was more than his usual skepticism about Minsky; and some of that skepticism wore off on me during the nuts-and-bolts discussion of whether or not the Media Lab's invitation would be accepted.

Throughout all these events, my reading continued to follow paths similar to those Rota had chosen in his excursions away from mathematics. News of his death came to me from one of my Xerox colleagues while I was working in Palo Alto. Ever since then I find that I cannot read a text by Edmund Husserl (or, for that matter, Jacques Derrida writing about Husserl) without having the same reaction that Denk articulated about Kirchner. My jaw would drop in amazement at some passage I had just read, and I would immediately have this urge to share it with Rota and probably ask him something about it.

Rota never understood what it was about Cage that appealed to me. He used to ask me to explain Cage to him back when I was still his student. (He also made the request concerning Charles Ives, who, ironically, now holds such a strong place in Denk's repertoire.) He would then add that he would only accept an explanation grounded in the aesthetic theory of Benedetto Croce. I am now reading The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General for a second time in conjunction with my ongoing efforts to understand the nature of musical performance; and, damn it all, I can give that explanation now! However, rather than feeling frustration over Rota no longer being around to hear it, I realize that he would have been more concerned about whether or not I could provide that explanation to myself than with how I would deliver it to him. My guess is that Denk will come to a similar conclusion, coming to grips with the "Goldberg Variations" by finding the right way to converse with himself now that Kirchner can no longer participate. The flesh of the dead may no longer be with us, but we can still converse with them in spirit. We do that through our gift for being able to hold conversations with ourselves.