SFTMF Off to a Delightfully Diverse Start

Last night in the Victoria Theatre, the San Francisco Tape Music Festival (SFTMF) presented the first in its annual schedule of four concerts. For those unfamiliar with the institution, this is still the only festival in the country devoted to the performance of synthesized audio compositions. The word “tape” reflects back on the early days when synthesis involved capturing sounds on audio tape, using technology to transform those recordings, and creating compositions through processes of editing and playback. All of the music on SFTMF programs is now in digital form, manipulated by hardware and software to project each composition onto an array of 24 high-end loudspeakers through real-time analog and digital control.

The earliest composer on the program was Pierre Schaeffer, who first began experimenting with the manipulation and transformation of recorded tapes while working as an engineer for Radiodiffusion Française, now expanded to Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (French radio and television broadcasting, RTF). SFTMF presented one of Schaeffer’s earliest compositions in what would later be known as the “musique concrète” (concrete music) movement. The program included “Étude pathétique,” the last of five études to be broadcast on October 5, 1948 under the title Concert de bruits (concert of noises). The piece was created from recordings of sauce pans, canal boats, singing, speech, harmonica, and piano; and, because of the first of these sources, it also became known as the “Étude aux casseroles.” This was originally a monophonic recording, whose SFTMF projection guided the attentive listener through both the sources and the transformations that constituted Schaeffer’s pioneering work.

The other contribution from the twentieth century was Pauline Oliveros’ 1992 “Poem of Change.” This amounted to her own spoken reflections about sexuality punctuated by “concrete” recordings. Her use of such sources served as a reflection of earlier years, when she served as the first director of the Mills College Tape Music Center. Nevertheless, this was a creation in which the tape music was there to provide a context for Oliveros’ narration of her highly personal prose-poem.

Two of the Azur trains in the Montreal subway system (photograph by Mtlfiredude, from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Given the richness of content, I chose to stay for only the first half of last night’s program in the hope that memory would not be overloaded by the diversity of the offerings. The remaining three compositions I experienced were all recent works. The most extensive of these was Robert Normandeau’s “Tunnel azur,” commissioned for the 50th anniversary of the Montreal Azur metro system. This system is distinguished by having cars that run on rubber wheels. Nevertheless, Normandeau managed to collect a wide diversity of noises by wandering the tunnels of the system when the cars were out of service. Those noises were then supplemented by the low tones of an octobass, basically a double bass on steroids first created in Paris in 1850. Normandeau called his composition (which he revised in 2018) “a cinema for the ear;” and the intensity of its dynamics made listening a deeply-moving experience. There was similar impact in Maggi Payne’s 2018 “Heat Shield,” which was created on four distinct channels. The intensity of her dynamics provided a reflection (pun intended) of the extreme temperature levels that had to be endured by experimental satellites sent out to collect information about the sun.

In a lighter vein Sangwon Lee’s “Torturing Piano” amounted to a satirical reflection on those extended techniques that require a pianist to play the instrument from the inside. Lee’s stereo tape amounted to a guided tour of those techniques both juxtaposed and superposed. He also inserted a few measures of a Chopin performance to add a sly wink to the seriousness that most pianists bring to their execution of those extended techniques. This was the opening selection on the program, and it allowed listeners to settle into the basic projection technique of the performances before the intensity of the following selections got under way.

Listening to Tape Music

As a result of giving myself the assignment of reviewing the first concert in this year’s San Francisco Tape Music Festival for Examiner.com, I found myself following a path of introspection leading back to one of my first refereed journal publications.  I felt it necessary to provide some background material on the process of making tape music, observing that the process “demands a radical shift in how a composer thinks about such matters as grammar, logic, and rhetoric.”  Needless to say, I did not elaborate at great length about the nature of that shift, concentrating instead on trying to make sure that each work on the program received a fair descriptive account (trying, as always to do justice to Plato’s use of “λόγος” in “Theaetetus”);  but, between my efforts to understand better the nature of my own listening experiences and my attempt to identify the role of symbolic forms in those experiences, I realized that I was venturing into territory that had occupied my doctoral research.

Like many who emerge from such research with their degree in hand, I saw my thesis work as a foundation for building up my publication record.  (In retrospect I have to say that I am moderately horrified at the number of people I encountered who seemed to have made a life’s career out of rewriting their initial thesis;  but how I departed from that path is another story.)  Freed from the pressure of completing my thesis and getting it accepted, I gave myself the time to devote a fair chunk of my attention Noam Chomsky’s Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and with the efforts of others in my field to find an analog for his framework of syntax, semantics, and phonology in the structures of music, particularly in the repertoire of electronic music that was forcing that shift in thinking about grammar, logic, and rhetoric.

The result was a paper entitled “Music Programs:  An Approach to Music Theory through Computational Linguistics,” which appeared in 1976 in one of the Volume 20 issues of the Journal of Music Theory.  Much of the paper involved a response to research at a Dutch laboratory called the Institute of Sonology.  I tried to puzzle out how “sonology” would serve as a viable analog for the role of phonology in linguistics.  By taking on how one could represent “sonological data,” I had my first brush with the question of how we might invent symbolic forms to deal with communicating about phenomena that our discourse had not previously needed to address. In my paper I tried to explore the extent to which Music V, the fifth generation of one of the earliest programming languages for composing electronic music (developed at the old Bell Telephone Laboratories), could provide a system of symbolic forms that would facilitate both thinking about and communicating about such music.

In hindsight I would say that my proposal amounted to trying to identify a “phonetic symbol system” that would address electronic music the way phonetic symbols captured subtle differences in speaking practices.  I was struggling with problems that occupied not only the Dutch laboratory but also Pierre Schaeffer in his work on his Traité des Objets Musicaux.  In retrospect I would say that none of us got very far because we were ignoring what musicians actually did by limiting our vision to those artifacts that were products of their efforts (such as scores and recordings).  These days I am more inclined to believe that one cannot provide a satisfactory account of the artifacts without also accounting for the actions behind them.

I have a high level of confidence that those actions are facilitated by our working with some repertoire of symbolic forms.  I am not sure I am any closer to understanding what those forms are than I was in my student days;  but at least I have a better sense of where I want to go, perhaps even attenuated by some intuitions of how I can get there.  Listening to tape music last night, however, turned out to be an important reminder that I should not try to ground any of my theories in familiar intuitions about conventional music notation;  and, having now completed this particular “rehearsal” experience, I realize how much I needed that reminder!

Eastern European Wonders

I do not know if this was an accident of the timings of the individual works on the program or a deliberate act to prompt our approach to listening; but the program for the final "official" concert by the San Francisco Symphony at Davies Symphony Hall (before the Summer in the City series gets under way) was presented in reverse chronological order. When I wrote about Johannes Brahms during the "Festival" series of concerts that Michael Tilson Thomas had arranged last month, I explored the extent to which Brahms had to contend with "the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven" and suggested that we needed to apply a listening strategy to Brahms that was "both retrospective and prospective at the same time." In many respects this week's program challenged us to apply that strategy on a broader geographical scale, which encompassed one recently deceased composer from Poland (Witold Lutosławski) and two from Czechoslovakia (Leoš Janáček and Antonín Dvořák).

I am actually not sure it is fair to place these three composers in a common category. Beyond the boundaries of geography, Lutosławski is separated from the other two by not only the Second World War but also influences that are about as remote from the Czechs as one might imagine. Indeed, by Lutosławski's own account, his two primary sources of influence are, themselves, radically different: On the one hand there is the influence of the Second Viennese School, which grew out of Arnold Schoenberg and his two primary students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern; and this is the influence that usually comes to mind when we hear performances of Lutosławski's music. However, he was also influenced by Claude Debussy; and we became more aware of that influence in his final years of composition. In his notes in the program book for "Mi-Parti," the Lutosławski composition that began the Symphony program, Scott Foglesong wrote about these influences in terms of an opposition between technical logic (Schoenberg) and expressiveness (Debussy); and, while Foglesong never invokes the noun "dialectic," "Mi-Parti" may best be heard as a resolution of this opposition through synthesis.

Actually, my own first impression of "Mi-Parti" involves a composer whom Foglesong never mentions: Igor Stravinsky. From a rhetorical point of view, the first of this composition's three sections follows the familiar path of a gradual emergence of "signs of life" from some initial sparse gestures to the near-chaos of an entire ecosystem. Stravinsky broke the mold for this rhetorical strategy in the "Introduction" to his Rite of Spring. However, where Stravinsky's gestures were all melodic, Lutosławski distilled the "raw material" for his approach to this strategy to little more than basic sounds (or, as musique concrète pioneer, Pierre Schaeffer, called them, "sonorous objects"). In addition there is an aleatory element to the "ecosystem" that emerges, in which performers play rapid passages based on a pre-specified selection of notes but with the freedom to choose the order in which those notes are played.

The impact on the ear is nothing less than dazzling. While, even in Stravinsky, there is traditionally a sense of an integrated ensemble following a "direction" set by the conductor, Lutosławski's effect comes far closer to that sense of a "primal nature" than anything Stravinsky invoked. As in a rainforest, one is first struck only by how much activity there is; but, as the ears become acclimated to the environment, one begins to be able to extract specific activities from the overall texture. This is not always easy to achieve in a performance, particularly when dealing with an ensemble as large as the one Lutosławski has specified. However, visiting conductor David Robertson did an excellent job of find the right path between leading the Symphony when they needed to be led and allowing them "freedom of choice" when this was what the score required. The result was that, while it was clear that technical logic played an extremely strong role in the conception of this music, not to mention preparation for performance, it was the expressiveness that emerged "at the other end" for the benefit of those of us in the audience.

Janáček preceded Lutosławski by approximately half a century; but he, too, commanded a strong sense of music as a structuring of "sonorous objects." Within Janáček's frame of reference, however, this conception could be approached through the devices of orchestration. The down-side of such an approach is that the underlying "vocabulary" he invoked for melody, harmony, and counterpoint is relatively limited; so, without the narrative thread that runs through his operas, a full evening of his music might end up sounding a bit repetitious. However, any one of his works, taken on its own terms, usually turns out to be a real gem; and, indeed, each of the three movements of his Taras Bulba "rhapsody" (as he called it) is a gem unto itself.

For those unfamiliar with the novella by Nikolai Gogol (or, for that matter, the Yul Brynner movie) that provides the underlying narrative for this rhapsody, the story concerns a Cossack warrior (of the title) and his two sons, Ostap and Andrei. In the context of my argument that the opera Das Rheingold may best be understood as a story of three thefts, Janáček seemed to have regarded Gogol's novella as an account of three deaths (and I would share that point of view). Ultimately, it is the saga of a father who witnesses (and, in the case of Andrei, the younger son, brings about) the deaths of his two sons. (Ostap is executed by the Poles, and Taras finds himself witness.) Leading the Cossacks across Poland to avenge Ostap's death, Taras is ultimately taken prisoner and burned at the stake, but not before going out with one last defiant call to arms to his fellow Cossacks. Janáček's rhapsody depicts each of these deaths in the order in which they occur in Gogol's narrative.

The result is that each movement is, more than anything else, a character study. If his thematic vocabulary was limited, he compensated with rich orchestration and, particularly for Ostap, a keen sense of gesture, which, in many ways, provides a "transition point" between the use of melodic motif employed by so much of the music that had preceded Janáček and that more fundamental concept of "basic sound" that lay at the heart of Lutosławski's musical language. Thus, the order of the program may have served Janáček best of the three composers by providing the opportunity to hear his music both retrospectively and prospectively.

The evening concluded with Dvořák's Opus 104 cello concerto. Like Taras Bulba, this was a relatively late work; but it preceded the Janáček rhapsody by almost a quarter century. Dvořák only wrote three concertos, and this was the last of them. Furthermore, the level of expressiveness he achieved in writing for the cello tends to make this far more popular that the two preceding concertos for piano and violin, respectively. However, that expressiveness had already emerged in his chamber music; so it is no surprise that, towards the end of the concerto's final movement, the cello engages in a dialog with a violin (usually played by the concertmaster) which may have, itself, involved a retrospective view of his compositions for piano trio. Cello soloist Alisa Weilerstein had little trouble homing in on these expressive qualities and meeting the double challenge of holding her own against the entire orchestra while maintaining the intimacy of her brief "conversation" with Associate Concertmaster Nadya Tichman. (Concertmaster Alexander Barantschik had exercised his solo chops during Taras Bulba; so it was nice to see the way "division of labor" was applied to this program!)

Finally, it is interesting to note a somewhat shorter-range view of retrospection and prospection surrounding this concerto. According to the program notes, Dvořák began working on it on November 8, 1894; but his inspiration seems to have originated in the spring of that year. This was when he heard the principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera play his own second cello concerto in a concert (in Brooklyn, probably at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). That cellist was Victor Herbert, barely remembered today and not for his symphonic music but for a string of operettas that became part of the early history of movies with music! Had it not been for Herbert, Dvořák might not have begun his project; and that makes for one great "sweet mystery of life!"