Dresher, Schick, and “Crew” Return to Z Space

Last night Paul Dresher and Steven Schick returned to Z Space for the first in another round of four performances of Schick Machine. The composition is as much an innovative score by Dresher as it is an imaginative approach to theater, directed by Rinde Eckert, who also provided the script. Schick thus faces a dual challenge of pursuing Eckert’s narrative while rising to the challenges of Dresher’s composition, performing on a stage filled with elaborate (and occasionally intimidating) invented instruments created by both Dresher and Daniel Schmidt.

In Eckert’s script Schick takes the role of Lazlo Klangfarben. Those who know their history of twentieth century music are probably aware of the idea of a Klangfarbenmelodie (a German word that translates as “sound-color melody”). In his early years (prior to pursuing his twelve-tone technique), Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern created compositions that Schoenberg called “timbre structure,” adding a new approach to complement polyphonic thematic lines and chord progressions. Thus, through his assumed name, Schick executes a “sound-color composition” in which the palette of colors is provided by a diversity of percussion instruments, many of which were created explicitly for this performance.

Eckert was reading the stories in the Labyrinths anthology of short stories and essays by Jorge Luis Borges. In Borges’ labyrinthine spirit, Eckert created the Klangfarben character or, as he put it in his program note, “Steve Schick as a man unable to remember Steve Schick who has named himself Lazlo Klangfarben, but still has all of Steve Schick’s memories.” This provides the foundation for what can loosely be called a plot:

Klangfarben, as opposed to Steve Schick, is an inventor. His latest brainchild is something he calls the Schick Machine, named after a percussionist he dimly recalls.

Steven Schick holding his hoop in front of the multi-key Peacock (photograph by Chi Wang, courtesy of the Paul Dresher Ensemble)

So it is that Schick-the-performer negotiates his way around a stage that is packed to the gills with invented instruments (many of which are ordinary objects, such as a hoop, that can be put to use as a musical instrument). As Schick perambulates from one sound-source to another, we come to recognize that every sound he makes evokes some aspect of his personality traits. In this respect we can view his script as an act of “talking back” to Borges.

Those familiar with Borges probably recognize the dispassionate quality of his rhetoric. It is almost as if he had decided to write as a journalist to document fictional characters and events. Schick-the-performer, on the other hand, is far from dispassionate. As we follow his journey through that stage filled with sonorous objects, we realize that even the slightest sound is sufficient to trigger an intense emotional reaction. One might say that Schick-the-performer is complemented by Schick-the-actor, where the latter evokes profound emotional reactions to every sound created by the former. One might also say that all the instrument-objects on the stage constitute a labyrinth in the Borges spirit, but Schick is anything but dispassionate in his performance of both a percussionist and an acutely sensitive listener.

Lest some readers may feel that the performance, as a whole, is a “deep dive” that might be approached reluctantly, it is important to observe that there is a crystalline clarity to the relationship between the actions we see and the sounds we hear. We may be puzzled by the character traits of Schick-Klangfarben, but there is nothing puzzling about the rich diversity of auditory experiences. Given the current time of the year for these performances, the essay by John Cage entitled “Happy New Ears” comes to mind. My own ears were more than happy with each of Schick’s encounters with a “sound object;” and I can think of no better attitude for greeting the New Year.

DiRubbo’s Tenth Release Not Terribly Engaging

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Bandcamp Web page)

This coming Friday Truth Revolution Records will release Inner Light, alto saxophonist Mike DiRubbo’s tenth album as a leader. He has assembled a new quartet for the occasion, performing with Brian Charette on a Hammond B3 Organ, guitarist Andrew Renfroe, and drummer Jongkuk Kim. As is frequently the case, Bandcamp has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders of either the compact disc album or an MP3 download. Two of the eleven tracks, “Love the Same” and “Inner Light” are currently available for “preview listening.”

The album’s relatively brief liner notes (which, sadly, have not been included on the Bandcamp Web page) refer to the quartet’s tracks as constituting “an hour of storytelling, where new facets of their music-making are revealed and shared life experiences … are celebrated.” Having spent considerable time during my “last life” investigating relationships between narratology and communication in the workplace, I fear that I have to raise my “Spock eyebrow” whenever I encounter the noun “storytelling.” I would say that all of the tracks fall short of narrative as we know it; but, on a broader scale, DiRubbo could not be more generous in allowing all of the players solo riffs which reveal different aspects of their personalities.

Nevertheless, from a personal point of view, I prefer listening to music with sharper edges, so to speak. I am sure there are any number of listeners that prefer affability. However, much of what I learned through listening to jazz involved hard bop at its hardest; and, as a result, I seldom listen to jazz when I want to be soothed.

Schick Returning to Z Space for Music Theater

Poster for the revival of Schick Machine with a photograph taken from the 2016 performance (courtesy of Paul Dresher)

In a little over one month’s time, percussion virtuoso Steven Schick will return to Z Space for a second round of four performances of Schick Machine, which was last performed on September 23, 2016. The music for this production was composed by Paul Dresher; and the script was written by Rinde Eckert, who will again serve as Director. As can seen in the above poster for this revival, Schick is required to play an astonishingly large number of musical instruments invented by Dresher and/or Daniel Schmidt, as well as mechanical sound sculptures created by Matt Heckert.

The narrative for this production was inspired by Labyrinths, the New Directions anthology of both stories and poems by Jorge Luis Borges. Those familiar with these stories know that they are brief; but, no matter how short they are, they abound with twists and turns. As Eckert put it in his program notes for the 2016 performance, Borges inspired the character of Lazlo Klangfarben, “or rather Steve Schick as a man unable to remember Steve Schick who has named himself Lazlo Klangfarben, but still has all of Steve Schick’s memories. Klangfarben, as opposed to Steve Schick, is an inventor. His latest brainchild is something he calls the Schick Machine, after a percussionist whose name he dimly recalls.” Borges himself could not have delivered a better description!

Some readers may worry that Eckert has dug a very deep rabbit hole, and anyone that tries to make sense of those last few quoted sentences may end up getting pushed down that hole. However, when I attended that first performance in 2016, I quickly realized how easy it was to just “go with the flow” (as they used to say in my student days). I think one of the reasons that Schick Machine is not as intimidating as it may seem is that the music guides the listener through the eccentricities of the words, and there are so many imaginatively invented sonorities that there is no difficulty allowing the music to get the upper hand over the words.

The four performances of this revival production will be at 8 p.m. on Friday, December 15, and Saturday, December 16, and at 3 p.m. on Saturday, December 16, and Sunday, December 17. They will take place on the Main Stage at Z Space, whose open design will be conducive to constructing the elaborate environment in which Klangfarben’s quest takes place. Adult tickets for the evening performances will be $25 and $20 for the matinee performances. The senior rate will be $20 for the evening performances and $15 for the matinees. The student rate is $12.50 in the evening and $10 at the matinees. Tickets for all performances may be purchased through hyperlinks on the calendar on a Z Space Web page. Assistance in ordering tickets may be obtained by calling the Box Office at 415-626-0453, and the Box Office also has an email address.

Another Musical Response to Coma

Those with a taste for particularly adventurous jazz musicians probably know about My Coma Dreams. This was a staged narrative conceived by Fred Hersch as a reflection on the medically induced coma he sustained in 2008 when he was hospitalized after losing the ability to get out of his own bathtub. A performance of that narrative was captured on video, and there is now a YouTube page where the entire 90-minute production can be viewed. The script for this production was written by Herschel Garfein, and was definitely not for the faint of heart.

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

When I first began to listen to Adam Palma’s Second Life, composed after sustaining a long coma, it was impossible to keep both Hersch’s experience and the transformation of that experience into music out of my head. However, there is nothing as clinical as Garfein’s script behind any of the thirteen tracks on Palma’s album. Instead, there are thirteen tracks of Palma playing acoustic guitar accompanied by the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio conducted by Agnieszka Duczmal.

Five of those tracks present original compositions by Palma orchestrated by Krzesimir Dębski. The overall rhetoric is one of self-indulgent schmalz, which, given Palma’s skillful finger-work, probably has more to do with his arrangements than with the music itself. Indeed, those arrangements not only jeopardize Palma’s expressiveness but they also make a gooey mess out of three tracks based on compositions by Frederick Chopin.

Mind you, it would be unfair to expect that Palma should reflect on his experience the same way that Hersch did. However, where Hersch has always found the “sweet spot” between musical rhetoric and an intense personal experience, Palma seems content to just evoke his skills as a guitarist for the sake of thematic material that never really excites what Hercule Poirot liked to call the “little grey cells.” Palma deserves a better platform for his guitar-playing.

Reflecting on the Oppenheimer Narrative

At this late period in my life, I realize that I have begun to lose count of the number of narratives I have encountered based on the biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. These have included at least one television series, performances of Doctor Atomic by both the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera, and the documentary The Day After Trinity. Yesterday I allowed my curiosity to get the better of me, and I went over to AMC Metreon 16 to see the IMAX projection of Oppenheimer.

First impressions: Most of the film involves the ways in which those associated with the creation of the atom bomb engaged among each other, mostly in small groups for the sake of problem-solving and testing. Such encounters, along with those involving the title character’s love life and family life, were not well served by the enormity of the IMAX screen. That format was selected to provide a more realistic account of the Trinity detonation of the first atomic bomb, and there was no faulting the efficacy of the projection when it came to both sight and sound. This accounted for a relatively small fraction of the entire narrative, but the experience was such that one might be willing to forgive the tail wagging the dog.

Nevertheless, that is a pretty strong “might.” Ultimately, the film delves into the complexity of Oppenheimer’s personality that is far more extensive than any previous account of the narrative. Furthermore, unlike most of the previous accounts, the narrative does not end with the Trinity detonation. Having documented Oppenheimer’s rise and triumph, the film continues into his fall into contentious encounters with the Washington bureaucracy, which ultimately led to the loss of his security clearance on grounds that he was a threat to the defense of the United States.

In that context it would be fair to say that Oppenheimer actually consists of two “origin” narratives. The first is the more familiar: how we “got the bomb” before any other country did. The second is about the emergence of the Cold War and the impact it had throughout the culture of our country, with particular attention to the academic world. Those of my generation saw the end of the Cold War as a promise for a better life on a global scale, rather than just in the United States. Instead, we now have to deal with conditions that seem to be even more sinister and on a broader global scale.

Thus, I found that, while watching Oppenheimer I tried to keep my spirits up by focusing on the little things. There is one post-Trinity episode that may have affected me far more dearly than any other part of the film. In the narrative of the film, it was the last episode involving Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein. It took place when Einstein was walking home from the Institute for Advanced Study. He was always joined on those walks by Kurt Gödel, who may be the most accomplished individual in the discipline of mathematical logic. Sure enough, Gödel was there in the cast listing (even if his back was to the camera for the entire scene). If he was addressed by name, it was an instant that went by like lightning.

Nevertheless, it reawakened an old memory of Einstein’s life. It concerned two researchers at the Bell Telephone Laboratory in Murray Hill, who had gotten stuck on a thorny problem. They were able to arrange a meeting with Einstein to address this issue, since it involved only driving from Murray Hill to Princeton. The meeting lasting an entire afternoon. As it grew dark, the Bell researchers offered to drive Einstein to his home. Einstein replied, “No thank you. I always walk home with Kurt Gödel. You know, he is the only man I know that can give a logical reason why Eisenhower should be President!”

The screen may have been enormous, but it was all the little things that sustained my attention throughout the Oppenheimer narrative.

Narratological Thoughts About Opera

This morning, with the conclusion of the Centennial Season of the San Francisco Opera, I found myself reflecting on the fact that I had used this site to document thoughts about narratology (also known as “narrative theory”) long before I redirected my attention to music. It struck me that each of the three operas that were performed between June 3 and July 1 had taken its own unique approach to narrative, sometimes through the staging of the libretto, rather than through the text of the libretto itself. This tempted me to revisit each of the three productions by distilling the narrative foundations out of the usual approach based on the interplay of the words with the music.

It struck me that Amon Miyamoto’s staging of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly was the best place to begin, since I came away concerned that the direction had “muddled” the opera’s narrative. The source of that “muddle” involved adding the adult Trouble, a mimed role performed by John Charles Quimpo, to the story as it had originally been told in the libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Narratology teaches us that a narrative is not simply a chain of events involving a collection of characters. Rather, narrative requires a narrator; and Miyamoto’s approach basically took that “narrator’s job” away from Illica and Giacosa and “recast” it by turning it over to the character that spends the least time on stage (at least as defined by the libretto).

Mind you, I am still dissatisfied with how the production was staged. However, I would not say that the presence of an adult Trouble muddled the narrative. Rather, I think that Miyamoto may have overlooked the fact that any good narrative deserves a good narrator. Thus, while we could appreciate the presence of the adult Trouble, the staging never really allowed him to play a convincing role, either as narrator or as a character incorporated into the narration. By the end of the opera, it seemed as if Miyamoto could never make anything more of the adult Trouble than a perplexed observer. Had Miyamoto paid more attention to what we expect of a narrator, his staging would probably have been significantly more convincing, possibly to a point of presenting the audience with a deeper sense of all of the characters conceived by Illica and Giacosa.

Making sense of all of the characters was even more critical in the staging of Richard Strauss’ Die Frau ohne Schatten. This opera was given only five performances, only one (the first) of which was a matinee. I make this observation because my own attention tends to be sharper in the afternoon than it is in the evening. (I should note, however, that my first encounter with this opera took place during an evening performance at the Metropolitan Opera; but I made it a point to fortify myself with coffee at both intermissions!)

This was a performance in which neither the original director, John Cox, or the director for this production, Roy Rallo, had “muddled” the narrative. Nevertheless, I came away observing that the “narrative path” of the libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal was not “particularly well-defined.” Nevertheless, that staging provided a clear account of the “parallel lives” of the principal characters, while the music tended to highlight the individuality of those characters through “signature” motifs (very much in the spirit of the motifs that identify the characters in Richard Wagner’s four operas for his Der Ring des Nibelungen (the ring of the Nibelung). In other words the music guides the attentive listener in ways that Hofmannsthal’s words may fall short of the goal. We should remember that Strauss composed many tone poems with clearly defined narratives, so he knew full well how to allow music to guide the listener’s way through a complex opera libretto!

The final opera of the season, Gabriela Lena Frank’s El último sueño de Frida y Diego (the last dream of Frida [Kahlo] and Diego [Rivera]) is “something completely different” when compared with both Madama Butterfly and Die Frau ohne Schatten. It amounts to a superposition of two decidedly different narratives, one historical and the other fiction dating back to Greek mythology. The former distills the plot down to a single date, November 2, 1957. This is the year of Diego Rivera’s death, and the date itself is the Day of the Dead.

A page from the pre-Columbian Codex Borgia serving as a map of the northern hemisphere of Mictlān (author unknown, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

The narrative begins with Rivera at Kahlo’s grave. That is the “historical perspective.” However, in Aztec mythology, it is the day on which La Catrina, Keeper of the Dead, allows a selected number of souls to revisit the living; and so it is that Kahlo and Rivera experience together their “last dream.” One might mistake this as an alternative version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice; but the underworld domain of Hades is a far cry from that of Mictlān. As I previously observed, it is significantly more bureaucratic; and, while Mictlāntēcutli may rule over the dead, Catrina is the chief bureaucrat that gets things done (such as enabling the dead to make a return visit to the living).

More important is that, without Kahlo, Rivera has lost his primary source of inspiration for his paintings and murals. One of the most intense moments of the opera comes when the curtain rises on the second act and we see Rivera confronted by a blank wall, unable to decide where and how to begin. Thus, in contrast to Greek mythology, the narrative of the opera is resolved when Catrina allows Rivera to follow Kahlo as she returns to Mictlantecutli. The result is a narrative that differs significantly from not only the mythological world of Die Frau ohne Schatten but also the “historical” world of Madama Butterfly. Fortunately, the libretto by Nilo Cruz was conceived in such a way that one did not need to be immersed in Aztec culture in order to follow the plot line.

To be fair, this is not the sort of narrative that one experiences by sitting back and letting the plot events run their course. One might say that the “social logic” behind Cruz’ libretto entails a cerebral disposition far more elaborate than the content of the Orpheus myth (with Die Frau ohne Schatten situated somewhere between these two extremes). Nevertheless, anyone learned in narratology would probably have no trouble situating both Hofmannsthal and Cruz in the same league of both vivid imagination and sophistication than one encounters in the far more mundane libretto that Illica and Giacosa prepared for Madama Butterfly. The latter may be a high-ranking favorite among many (most?) opera buffs; but both Die Frau ohne Schatten and El último sueño de Frida y Diego are likely to appeal to those seeking more than a sit-back-and-listen experience.

Azica Releases New Jerod Tate Album

courtesy of Naxos of America

In 2008 Azica Records released an album of two compositions by Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate, “Tracing Mississippi,” a four-movement concerto for flute and orchestra and “Iholba’,” a two-movement piece for solo flute, orchestra, and chorus. These works were performed by the San Francisco Symphony led by Edwin Outwater. Christine Bailey Davis was the flute soloist for “Tracing Mississippi;” and the flutist for “Iholba’” was Thomas Robertello. The San Francisco Symphony Chorus was prepared by its Director Ragnar Bohlin.

Yesterday Azica released its second Tate album. The title of the album is Winter Moons, which is also the title of the first selection, the score for a ballet choreographed by the composer’s mother, Patricia Tate. This is followed by the five-movement suite Spirit Chief Names the Animal People. Between these two releases, Tate prepared “Chokfi’” for one of the CURRENTS programs streamed by SFSymphony+ during the pandemic. One Found Sound then created a “LIVE film experience” for its performance of “Chokfi’” in October of 2021, and Volti performed his “Visions of a Child” in their first post-pandemic performance before an audience this past June.

In the midst of all this attention that Tate has received in San Francisco, I am a bit embarrassed to confess that Winter Moons was my “first contact” with his music. The ensemble performing both selections on the album is the Winter Moons Orchestra, suggesting that the group was assembled explicitly for recording the works on the album. The conductor is Frank J. Toth. Patricia Tate provided the booklet with a synopsis of the “Winter Moons” tales that inspired her choreography, each of which is associated with a different American Indian tribe. (The Tates seem to prefer that terminology. even if others find it controversial.) The four movements of the score account for the choreographed tales as follows:

1. “Winter Moon” (Osage); “Puberty Blessing Songs” (Lakota)
2. “The Indian Spirit at Mesa Falls” (Shoshone)
3. “Red Plume and the Medicine Wheel” (Crow); “The Origin of Bitterroot” (Bitterroot Salish - Pend d’Oreilles)
4. “She Runs With the Wind” (poem by Scot Shuman); “Finale”

Given my personal interest in both classical ballet and modern dance, I tend to find it difficult to account for “narrative” music without being able to see how the narrative has been staged. As a result, I found myself more partial to Spirit Chief Names the Animal People, whose narrative resides strictly in the music, rather than the partnership of music with choreography. It would be easy to try to compare this music to the representation of the animals in Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf;” but that would be a mistake.

The title of Tate’s composition is also the title of an Okanagan tale, which involves the relationship between the Spirit Chief and the selfish Coyote. Those familiar with Coyote tales will probably appreciate Tate’s prankish use of the bassoon to represent that character, while the Spirit Chief is represented by the full ensemble. As might be guessed, Coyote’s bassoon returns at the very end of the musical representation of this narrative.

Aucoin’s Rethinking of Orpheus Myth

Readers may recall that this past Thursday I used my xfinity service to view a saved copy of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice (Orpheus and Eurydice) presented by the Lyric Opera of Chicago on a Great Performances broadcast. This was intended as “homework” before viewing my saved copy of Matthew Aucoin’s Eurydice opera, composed on a joint commission by the Metropolitan Opera and the Los Angeles Opera. What made the Chicago Gluck performance interesting was that the casting included the Joffrey Ballet with John Neumeier serving as both director and choreographer.

Aucoin’s undertaking also departed from convention, beginning with the decision to prioritize Eurydice. In fact the libretto was prepared by Sarah Ruhl, using her Eurydice play as a point of departure. Furthermore, the production was staged by Mary Zimmerman, who won a 2002 Tony Award for Best Direction of her own play, an adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In other words this was a production that had “Greek mythology power team” written all over it.

Unfortunately, the result might be described as all power without any team. Both Ruhl and Zimmerman had their own agendas about Eurydice, and it seemed as if both the libretto and the staging kept bumping into each in squirm-inducing ways. My only previous knowledge of Aucoin was his New York Review of Books article about the book Music Lessons, documenting lectures delivered at the Collège de France by Pierre Boulez. That article was probably the most devastating attack I had encountered in my many years of reading the New York Review. While I welcomed his alternative perspective on Boulez, I have to say that his own efforts at composition left me as annoyed with him as he seemed to be annoyed with Boulez.

I suspect that the primary problem was that there were too many inventive perspectives that kept bumping into each other. The primary casualty was a well-defined approach to narrative. Perhaps that approach was neglected under the assumption that everyone already knew the story. However, this was not the case, since I am pretty sure that not everyone was familiar with the past achievements of either Ruhl or Zimmerman. Indeed, if Aucoin’s music came out sounding as if it was doing little more than following the words, it may have been because he was in the uncomfortable position of a servant of two masters.

Sadly, this left me in a position in which I find that I have almost no recollection of any of the Metropolitan Opera vocalists, let alone their conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It takes a lot of power to distract attention from the high-quality musicians that contributed to this production. This was particularly disappointing when considering that at least two of those distractions did not seem to know very much about opera.

Whose Narrative is it Anyway?

The latest issue of The New York Review has an article entitled “Once Upon a Time There Was a Big Bubble.” Written by Cass R. Sunstein, the text is a review of Robert J. Shiller’s latest book, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events. The idea of representing the structure of rich media content in terms of narrative occupied my thinking during the Nineties. I spent much of the first half of that decade at a research laboratory in Singapore, running a project concerned with developing techniques for indexing video content, including video that was primarily narrative in nature, such as commercial films and episodes of television series. When, in 1995, I returned to the United States to lead a Multimedia group at the Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory, I shifted my focus to hypermedia authoring; and, thanks to Seymour Chatman, a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, I found myself introduced to the discipline known as narratology.

Thanks to Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature, it did not take me long to verify that the noun “narratology” never shows up in Schiller’s book, nor does it appear in Sunstein’s review. Rather, the book is concerned with how stories may be used as examples that, at best, may lead to hypothesis creation. Since a story can never be anything other than an example, Schiller makes it clear that stories cannot validate such hypotheses. At best they can help invalidate a hypothesis by providing a counterexample.

Narratology teaches us that narrative is a complex structure unto itself. In his book Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Chatman explains how a narrative text is the product of an elaborate process. First, there is the simple division between what is recounted by a story and the discourse techniques involved in the recounting process. The story itself can then be structured into events and “existents.” The events are divided into actions willfully taken by agents and “happenings,” events that occur independent of agent activities. Those agents constitute one of the two subclasses of the existents, the other being the setting in which both actions and happenings occur.

One may say that Shiller’s book presents the reader with examples of stories and why they may influence the course of economic events. However, any understanding of how stories come to be or how they are interpreted by those to whom a story is told is left as an exercise for the reader. In the course of my efforts to link Chatman’s theoretical writings to the technical machinery of hypermedia, I learned about Deirdre McClosky, currently Distinguished Professor of Economics, History, English, and Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I discovered that McClosky had written a book entitled The Rhetoric of Economics as early as 1985, which saw a second edition in 1998. This was followed by The Writing of Economics in 1987 (reprinted as Economical Writing in 2000), The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric in 1988, and If You’re So Smart: The Narrative of Economic Expertise in 1990. More recently, she wrote The Economic Conversation in 2008 with Arjo Klamer and Stephen Ziliak.

As my research progressed, I discovered that narrative had become a popular bandwagon for those that liked to call themselves “futurists.” It did not take me long to realize that I did not want to explore their paths. One of them had proposed a “digital campfire” for exchanging stories, which turned out to be nothing more than a display of a virtual burning fire around which “real people” could gather! Snake-oil was easy to find during the second half of the Nineties.

Mind you, I have too much respect for other writings by Schiller to accuse him of pedaling snake-oil. Nevertheless, Sunstein’s review left me with the impression that Schiller’s book served up a generous platter of “what” without necessary venturing into the “why” behind all that “what.” It is, of course, important that stories often figure significantly when invoked as part of the logic of decision making or forecasting. Ultimately, however, those stories are “soft” data, which persuade through rhetorical disposition, rather than abstract logic. They may be valuable when brainstorming, but inferences based on mere hypotheses are never sound. We need safeguards to avoid rushing to conclusions that cannot be validated by hard logic. Put another way, we must be careful that “stories that drive major economic events” do not lead us over the edge of a very high cliff!

An Encounter with Thomas Clifton’s Text

Reading James Tenney’s review of Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology, I came away curious about what it would be like to read one of Clifton’s texts. On the basis of Tenney’s account, I decided that I would not try to take on the book he had reviewed without some sense of what sort of a writer Clifton was. As a result, I turned to an article that Tenney had cited entitled “Some Comparisons between Intuitive and Scientific Descriptions of Music.” After all, this site has, for all intents and purposes, served as my “field notes” in exploring how one describes the performance of music; and, every now and then, I turn my attention to how musicians themselves approach the task of description. One of my favorite examples of that latter case has been György Ligeti’s approach to describing Pierre Boulez’ “Structure Ia,” which turned out to be an engaging exercise in the relationship between pure logic and the rhetoric of expression.

Clifton’s paper was published in the Spring, 1975 (Volume 19, Number 1) issue of the Journal of Music Theory. It involved a quest for an approach to description that would serve as a viable alternative to the rigor of scientific description, in which the description itself amounts to an assertion (albeit a large and complex one) whose consistency can be validated through the tools of formal logic. Having once encountered a doctoral thesis that used formal logic to validate compositions by Arnold Schoenberg based on his twelve-tone technique, I could appreciate Clifton’s objective. However, formal logic is basically a tool for analysis of symbol structures; and the only symbol structures in music are the marks on the score pages. I have previously cited Jonathan Biss for observing that the music resides not in the marks on paper but on how those marks are realized through performance.

Unfortunately, reading Clifton turned out of be a rather frustrating experience. This was probably due, in no small part, to his invoking the term “intuitive” as a dialectical opposition to “scientific.” There are probably about as many different ways to interpret what “intuitive” means as there are disciplines that invoke the adjective. As one reads through Clifton’s paper, one realizes that he is weaving his way in and around all of those disciplines; and it is not difficult for the reader to feel that (s)he is getting lost in the midst of all that weaving. Not only is this understandable, but I came away with the distinct impression that Clifton himself had gotten just as lost and had not been able to find his way to a satisfying conclusion at the end of this article.

The good news is that he tries to make his case through musical examples, rather than resorting entirely to prose-based argumentation. Sadly, the insights that emerge from those examples seldom have much impact on the “mission statement” embodied in the paper’s title. The examples amount to Clifton saying, “Here is an imaginative way to describe this particular musical excerpt,” to which I would reply, “I agree that it is imaginative, but what point is it making?” By the time I reached the end of the paper, I felt that Clifton had led me into a dark forest in which I could not figure out which path would lead me back to daylight.

In many respects the concept of “intuition” seems to have led Clifton away from his goal, rather than toward it. Thus, he has the same predicament that Tenney has encountered in his work with computers, in which he had to use programming languages that allowed the evaluation of complex numerical forms but not the manipulation of symbolic structures. Rather than focus on “intuition” and what the many different schools of thought have to say about it, Clifton would have done better to go “back to the basics” of description itself. Specifically, description should be approached as a text type through which individuals can communicate with each other.

There is a discipline in literary theory concerned with the nature of text types. What is relevant in this case is that the text type of argumentation, which is basically the text type behind “scientific” reasoning, is distinctly different from that of description. The other two text types are exposition, found in topic-based essays, and narrative. Note that narrative is the only time-dependent text type, suggesting that discourse about “music as heard” probably requires a synthesis of description and narrative, amounting to the use of narrative for means other than storytelling.

Most likely we are now swimming in waters that were unknown to Clifton when he was working on the paper that would appear in the Journal of Music Theory. Indeed, those waters become known to me only during the final decade of the twentieth century; and I still cannot claim that I have come to terms with them. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that Clifton’s own swimming took him into a considerable amount of turbulence. My own thoughts about these matters are also contending with that turbulence; but I am hoping that, with enough persistence, I shall eventually be able to chart and pursue a more viable course that I can swim!

SFO’s Imaginative Integration of “Cav” and “Pag”

Yesterday afternoon San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the third of its seven performances of the opening production of its 96th season, the Cav/Pag double bill of Pietro Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana” (rustic chivalry) and Ruggero Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” (clowns). Combining these two one-act operas in a single production is a long-standing tradition; and SFO has paired them fifteen times since its founding, the earliest having been in 1927. Nevertheless, this season’s production is distinctively unique through the efforts of José Cura to stage the two of them in a single set of his own design.

If Cura’s name is familiar, it is because he made his SFO debut in 1996 as a tenor, singing the role of Don José in Georges Bizet’s Carmen. In addition to establishing himself as both director and stage designer, Cura has studied both composition and conducting and has maintained a regular career as a conductor throughout Europe since 1999. Born in Rosario, Argentina, he first conceived of transplanting an Italian verismo narrative to Buenos Aires when, in 2007, he reconceived “Pagliacci” in a production entitled “La Commedia è finita” (the show is over, the final text in the “Pagliacci” libretto). This then evolved into the synthesis of a continuous narrative beginning with “Cav” and proceeding smoothly into “Pag.” This version was staged for the Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège and first performed in Liège in 2012. The current production is being directed by Jose Maria Condemi.

At the core of the synthesis is a unit set depicting La Boca, the working-class barrio in Buenos Aries that hosted a community of Italian immigrants. The setting is so specific as to identify one of the streets in La Boca, “Caminito” (which basically translates as “little street”). Indeed, the street is so significant to Cura that it takes precedence over the music. Before one hears the first bars of Mascagni’s score, the setting is established with a recording of Carlos Gardel singing the 1926 “Caminito” song, composed by Juan de Dios Filiberto to a text by Gabino Coria Peñaloza. (The text bears the dedication: “Thanks to the woman’s love that I will never have.”) The sense of place is further established by a reproduction of the grotesquely surreal Mural Escenográfico, completed by Omar Gasparini in 1999 and recreated in 2012 after the original wall was demolished.

Having established place, Cura then allowed characters from its “population” to migrate across operatic boundaries, so to speak. Thus, “Cav” begins with Silvio opening up a bar on Caminito. He is putting up posters for the production to be played out during the second act of “Pag;” and he is already hooked on the image of Nedda. Similarly, “Pag” begins with a funeral procession of Turiddu, whose death marks the end of “Cav.” Not all of the transitions are smooth. “Cav” is set on Easter Sunday, while the church is celebrating the Feast for the Assumption of Mary, roughly half a year later. That is a long time for Turiddu’s body to be waiting for burial! On the other hand Santuzza’s pregnancy only becomes noticeable when we see her at the end of “Pagliacci.”

On the whole, however, Cura’s “synthetic” approach is effectively true to the verismo foundations of both operas. Both narratives involve illicit love, jealousy, and violent death. The very idea that the those events in “Pag” can be seen in the context of their unfolding in “Cav” is all the more chilling through the premise that they both unfold in the same place and community.

Yesterday afternoon all of that dramatic intensity was solidly reinforced by the musical account unfolding both on stage and in the orchestra pit. With this production Daniele Callegari is making his SFO debut as conductor, and he is definitely a talent worth watching. “Cav” is particularly challenging because, in Cura’s staging, it involves much of the singing taking place offstage. Callegari was impeccable in his sense of balance, always matching the audibility of vocalists (soloists and chorus) to the instrumental resources. Similarly, he always found just the right pace to match the unfolding of the narrative.

Most importantly, however, he was always there to support the soloists. Both operas impose significant demands on the realization of character through vocal work, and the consistency with which those demands were satisfied could not have been more impressive. In “Cav” mezzo Ekaterina Semenchuk delivered an intense account of Santuzzua’s plight, never descending into the trivialities of the “abandoned woman” cliché. The humanity of her exchanges with mezzo Jill Gove’s Mamma Lucia served to amplify the brutality of the two men at the core of the narrative, Turiddu (tenor Roberto Aronica), who abandoned her, and Alfio (baritone Dimitri Platanias), husband of Lola (mezzo Laura Krumm), whom Turridu really loves. “Pag” similarly opposes the frustrations of a woman, Nedda (soprano Lianna Haroutounian), against the brutality of men, this time both her husband Canio (tenor Marco Berti) and stage manager Tonio (Platanias again). She hopes for a more loving relationship with Silvio (baritone David Pershall); but neither of them survive to the end of the opera.

FitzGibbon and Peláez dancing in front of the reproduction of Gasparini’s mural (photograph by Cory Weaver, courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

If both operas are “about” sensitive women trying to get beyond the brutality of men, the idealized relationship they seek was distilled into choreography by Lawrence Pech during the musical interlude in “Cav.” His pas de deux for Alexandra FitzGibbon and Jekyns Peláez found just the right way to balance the sensitivity of love against the raw qualities of the erotic. Pech’s staging recalled many of the sinuous moves for which Roland Petit (who created a ballet version of Carmen) was so well known during the middle of the twentieth century. There is nothing more satisfying that seeing ballet in an opera production that rises above the superfluous, and Pech definitely found the right lever to elevate his work.

David McVicar at the Metropolitan Opera

An early twentieth-century (historically sensitive?) Metropolitan Opera performance of Tosca (photograph by Boyer, from Wikipedia, public domain)

For several months I have set up my xfinity box to record all new PBS broadcasts of performances by the Metropolitan Opera. Since the San Francisco Chronicle tends not to be the best source for either the time or the channel of these broadcasts, I decided that I would be better off with Comcast technology. Nevertheless, I have to confess that these recordings have been building up at a rate faster than I can work them into my viewing schedule.

Nevertheless, those who know about my current condition can appreciate that I am not in shape to attend concerts these days; so catching up on accumulated recordings seems like a good way to keep my head (and writing skills) in the game. As a result, over the course of the last few weeks, I have watched two of these recordings; and, curiously, both of them are productions created by Stage Director David McVicar, Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma, which opened the Met’s 2017–18 season, and Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, which was given its first performance this past New Year’s Eve. McVicar is no stranger to the San Francisco Opera (SFO); and his productions here tend to resonate with impressions of strong opinions strongly held.

The strength of those opinions were displayed unabashedly at the first SFO Insight Panel of the 2016–17, when McVicar was invited to discuss his approach to Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier. One of the first questions he fielded was whether his approach to this opera about the French Revolution would depart from fidelity to the period, as had been the case when he staged Hector Berlioz’ Les Troyens with pyrotechnics that seemed to owe more to the Marvel Cinematic Universe than to the Homeric bards. This provoked a series of rants over the course of the evening, beginning with the disdainful observation that any opera based on history must be true to the historical setting and that Les Troyens was not such an opera, because it was based on myth.

Whether or not McVicar’s precept is a valid one (and I, for one, do not accept it), it is interesting to consider the extent to which both Norma and Tosca can count as “historical.” They are certainly not mythical, since neither involves supernatural intervention and the only role taken by any deity involves providing grounds for a sacred rite. On the other hand each opera raises its own questions about how a musical drama can take a valid stand with respect to a historical context.

In the case of Norma that context is the Roman invasion of Britain; and the obvious question is “Whose history?” We know at least some of the names of historians that chronicled the age of the Roman Empire, but we also know enough to assume that none of them were writing with any disciplined sense of historiography in mind. Under the Roman Empire a historian had two major priorities: fiscal reward and staying alive. Having their texts is useful; but unraveling those texts to establish “the story behind the story” is a task that has occupied only the most recent generations of historians.

Nevertheless, “history,” whatever it may be, really does not signify in Norma. There is a community of Druids and a battalion of Romans tasked with subduing them. For narrative purposes they could just as easily be Montagues and Capulets, particularly when we learn that the title character, the high-priestess of the Druids, has had twin sons by the Roman proconsul Pollione. Furthermore, to shift the context from Romeo and Juliet to Medea, while Norma has been caring for the children in secret, Pollione has shifted his attention to falling in love with another priestess, Adalgisa. In other words whether or not the opera is “historical” signifies less than its reliance of earlier (and familiar) dramatic narratives.

Ultimately, the weak underbelly of Norma has nothing to do with history and everything to do with the weaknesses of the text provided by Bellini’s librettist Felice Romani. To be blunt, over the course of this two-act opera, Romani’s narrative is beginning to run out of steam by the time of the second scene of the second act; and McVicar appeared to be at a loss when it came to compensating for Romani’s shortcomings. If anything, he seemed inclined to prolong every episode leading up to the climax, when Pollione joins Norma in being burned alive on a pyre. This is when McVicar succumbs to the urge to revive his pyrotechnical tricks from Les Troyens, lighting up the entire stage with images of fire as if Norma and Pollione had ascended to Brünnhilde’s Rock to be consumed by the flames that Wotan ordered Loge to light.

Nevertheless, it is important to remember that Norma is a bel canto opera. As I wrote on my Examiner.com site when Norma was was given its most recent SFO performances, presentation is all about “beautiful vocal sonorities (bel canto), usually to the exclusion of attaching very much significance to matters of logic, structure, and rhetoric that arise in either the music or the narrative of the libretto.” Thus, what matters most is that McVicar did not get in the way of the display of those “beautiful vocal sonorities.”

Indeed, one of the sources of that beauty was the same one I had enjoyed at SFO, the title role sung by soprano Sondra Radvanovsky, perfectly matched with mezzo Joyce DiDonato as Adalgisa. Both vocalists impressed not only through a thorough command of the text but also a stunning capacity to work a wide dynamic range. This was bel canto in which stillness on the threshold of silence carried just as much impact as a bold fortissimo, if not more so. Furthermore, if their talents as soloists were stunning, then their approach to the rich amount of duo work that Bellini had written was downright transcendent.

To be fair, however, this was a performance that was not entirely about the beautiful vocal work. There was more to the overall show, even if it was not due to McVicar. The other hero of this production was Carlo Rizzi, who was as sensitive to every instrument in the orchestra pit as he was to how the libretto was being sung on stage. Rizzi was able to call attention to subtle mixtures of instrumental coloration in the overture that tend to pass unnoticed while everyone is waiting for the curtain to rise; and those rich sonorities served the singers on the stage as well as they served the instrumentalists in the pit. Rizzi almost (but not quite) made the case that Norma might do better in a concert setting!

Where McVicar may have been closer to his own mark was in his approach to Tosca. The libretto by Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa is firmly routed in Napoleon’s invasion of Italy and the impact of that invasion on governance in Rome. McVicar seems to have grasped the role of this context in establishing the character of Baron Scarpia, and the execution of that role by baritone Željko Lučić was definitely the high point of the production. Unfortunately, the remaining characterizations ran the gamut from woefully overwrought (both soprano Sonya Yoncheva as Tosca and tenor Vittorio Grigolo as Cavaradossi) to annoyingly fussy (baritone Patrick Carfizzi as the sacristan). Even when “history matters,” a compelling opera production demands attention paid to more fundamental qualities of stagecraft.

Bardic Tradition Meets the Written Word

As I write this, it is exactly a week since I was in surgery at San Francisco General Hospital to pin a fracture in my upper right femur. The paramedics had taken me there because my “first contact” would be with the Trauma Center; and I was informed that Trauma Center operations were much more advanced than anything I would encounter at any other hospital. Looking back, I have no reason to dispute that claim. I was admitted early on Wednesday afternoon, and my surgery would have taken place on the same day had the surgery schedule not been fully booked.

I have had only a few hospital experiences, all of which have helped me cultivate a certain degree of patience for the fact that most of the time there is spent waiting for one thing or another. From that point of view, I was impressed at how San Francisco General helped me through a lot of that wait time. After I came through the surgery, my wife was there with my MacBook Pro; and even the act of catching up on mail and feeds did much to stave off the onset of tedium. (I still do not like the laptop’s keyboard, which turned out to be another lesson in exercising patience!) My guess is that Mark Zuckerberg had something to do with the high-quality wireless signal in my room; and, for me at least, that was money well spent.

From a more passive point of view, however, my best diversion came from a television box that provided a rather rich library of movies, all free, as well as the “standard cable” channels. This gave me a chance to indulge heavily in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), taking the advantage of seeing films that had not yet emerged from pay status on my xfinity service. It also allowed me to revisit films I had previously seen but for which I had only the roughest of memories.

As a result, by the time I was discharged I had a rich appreciation of the interleaving of narratives across the different MCU films. I was reminded of those impressions this morning while reading a SYFY Wire article about the role that Venom will play in that interleaving process. Further reflection resurrected memories of The Role of the Reader, a collection of English translations of essays by Umberto Eco that I was reading when I was doing research on the impact of hypertext and hypermedia on our practices of reading and writing.

That collection included an essay on the concept of the “open work.” This was proposed as the opposite of the sorts of “closed” texts that we are used to encountering in most of the novels and short stories that we read. Unfortunately, I found Eco’s approach to “open” to be little more than fumbling around with relatively arcane concepts, almost as if he was thumbing his nose at the novice reader to say, “I know more about this than you will ever know.”

Ironically, Eco was so preoccupied with his own navel as to overlook the American Nobel laureate who, through practice, understood the concept in practice better than Eco could express through theory. That author was William Faulkner, whose novels and short stories were almost entirely embedded in the history of a fictional county in Mississippi and a few of the families living in that county. The interleaving of Faulkner’s narratives was so rich that, when Malcolm Cowley compiled The Portable Faulkner for Viking, he opted for a chronological ordering of the Faulkner texts he had selected for the volume, rather than one based on when those texts were written or published.

This is not to suggest that either Stan Lee or the key developers of the MCU were big on Faulkner (although there are any number of gestures dropped in just about every film that suggest that those developers are very well-read). On the other hand it strikes me that MCU projects are following in the footsteps of pre-literate bardic practices, whether they involve those “singers of tales” whose accounts eventually found their way into the more epic accounts of Iliad and Odyssey, or those further north, who sang of the Volsungs and the Nibelungs. Such bards were part of a rich “open” social structure, in which listeners were often as active as singers.

Source of the phrase “singers of tales” (from Amazon.com)

That social structure was one in which familiarity was the mother of invention. The bard might begin singing about Achilles and Hector, only to have a listener pipe up:

We all know what caused Achilles to leave his tent and enter the battle; but why was he waiting so long in his tent in the first place?

Every tale raises questions, and those questions are answered by other tales. So it is with MCU narratives, particularly when one encounters a character in one film before another film pursues that character’s “origin story.”

Of course any single film takes on far more content that one would probably have encountered in a single bardic tale. On the other hand the MCU was never conceived as an oral tradition. Bringing writing in the picture leads to new rules, and Faulkner himself was probably experimenting with which of those rules worked and which did not. At the same time, however, the shift from printed text to cinema also necessitates a change in rules; and it is probably not out of the question to view the MCU as a sort of workshop for testing those rules. After all, any truly inventive act of creation must, of necessity, be experimental; and, if you are too locked into the results you want to get, you have no business experimenting in the first place!

The good news is that MCU has a vigorously supportive fan base. My guess is that such support is more tolerant of experiments that go off in unexpected directions than one tends to encounter in other fan bases. This makes for a producer-consumer relationship that can be called “productively healthy.” These days it is hard to find other instances of that relationship. I just hope that those who steer the MCU “ship of state” realize what a good thing they have and continue to foster its virtues!

Richard Strauss’ “Orchestra Action” Complements the Staging

Those who follow my opera performance articles regularly know that I try, whenever possible, to arrange for at least one occasion when I have a good vantage point for the action in the orchestra pit. This turned out to be a particularly informative situation for the current performance of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra” by the San Francisco Opera. As has already been observed, 95 players constitute the ensemble conducted by Henrik Nánási; and the score demands that he be as attentive to the “action in the pit” as he is to shaping the efforts of the vocalists up on stage.

Most important is another previous observation made in comparing this production with that of Giacomo Puccini’s Turandot, which is currently alternating with “Elektra.” “Elektra” may require more musicians; but, as I observed, Turandot is the offering that is “unabashedly loud” (and not in any negative way). What is most impressive about Strauss is how he covers the full breadth of dynamic range, even to the point at which the attentive listener can be aware of the solo string passages. Thus, having already praised Nánási for his attentiveness to “every last detail of instrumental activity,” I should add that each of those details had its own dynamic level to establish its rhetorical significance.

In addition Nánási’s interpretation suggested that Strauss had some very clear spatial effects in mind. These do not register when one cannot see the musicians. However, as is the case at an orchestra concert, “visual input” provides an opportunity to observe how thematic material can perambulate through the ensemble. Indeed, Strauss seemed to be particularly skilled at creating the auditory equivalent of a movie “dissolve” effect, in which thematic movement involves the gradual departure of one set of instruments matched by the gradual arrival of another.

All of this must then coexist with all of the activities on stage conceived by Keith Warner and realized for these performances in San Francisco by Anja Kühnhold. Warner’s museum setting suggests a coexistence of the immediate present with a past that is at least legendary and possibly totally mythical. Beyond the tales of the House of Atreus conceived by the Homeric bards, Aeschylus, Sophocles and the impact of those sources on Hugo von Hofmannsthal (and possibly Jean-Paul Sartre), Warner unfolds a narrative that suggests that an ordinary woman’s understanding of herself is emerging from her understanding of Elektra and her pivotal role in the broader Atreus tragedy.

Thus, while Strauss is exploring “dissolves” of his thematic material across his instrumental resources, Warner provides us with similar dissolves between the hear-and-now present and a mythic past. Furthermore, Warner is courageous enough to lead us through Hofmannsthal’s libretto as a journey of self-knowledge and then bring us to a conclusion that suggests that his present-day protagonist may not have advanced very much, if at all. It is almost as if Warner’s resolution of the staging may be looking not only at the Ancient Greeks but also at the final stanza of “Little Gidding,” the last of the four poems that T. S. Eliot published as Four Quartets:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Having followed Elektra through her convoluted confrontations with a series of murders (one from the recent past and two taking place over the course of the opera), Warner is suggesting that she now knows her “place” in the House of Atreus for the first time. If Warner’s present-day protagonist has followed this journey, then Warner’s journey comes back to the museum where it started; but he leaves it to us to resolve just how that protagonist now knows that “place for the first time.”

Back at the museum with Elektra (Christine Georke stretched out on the floor), Chrysothemis (Adrienne Pieczonka), and Orest (Alfred Walker, standing), photograph by Cory Weaver (courtesy of the San Francisco Opera)

Perhaps Warner intended to subject those of us on audience side to a deliberately disorienting journey at the end of which we are the ones arriving “where we started,” confronted with knowing “the place for the first time.” That would clearly make for much more than a sit-back-and-follow-the-story experience. Still, if you were fortunate enough to experience this performance as part of a group, Warner has created the sort of situation in which you really want to talk about what happened with the others. In other words there is a “social dimension” to this production that sets it apart from the vast majority of opera-going experiences; and my guess is that it will be far more memorable than most past such experiences.

CMC will Get Adventurous this Month

September marks the beginning of the new school year at the Community Music Center (CMC); but music lessons have always been supplemented with a generous offering of concerts and master classes. One of the first of the concert offerings for this season promises to be particularly adventurous, bringing together two groups that readers are more like to encounter in this site’s Bleeding Edge dispatches. Whether this event will be a standard two-set evening or the groups will join forces remains to be seen; but in either case we can expect an adventurous synthesis of composition and improvisation that departs significantly from the beaten path.

The first of the two groups is likely to be the more familiar. The Rova Saxophone Quartet consists of Jon Raskin, Bruce Ackley, Larry Ochs, and Steve Adams playing all different sizes of member of the saxophone family:

Rova Saxophone Quartet (from their CMC event page)

The group formed in 1977, and Adams replaced founding member Andrew Voigt in 1988. Music has been written for them by major contemporary composers, and they are equally adept at collective improvisation. [updated 9/9, 11:25 a.m.: The program for this concert will preview their new CD. There will be a piece by each of the four members: Raskin (The Time Being Suite), Ackley (Oxygen), Adams (Dark Forest Suite), and Ochs (Hidden in Ochre).]

The second group, Ghost in the House, may be less familiar to many; but some readers may recall an article on this site about their second album, Second Sight, which appeared this past July. Their CMC offering will feature music from this album. The group was conceived by David Michalak, who plays lap steel guitar but whose approach to music-making draws upon the narrative techniques he has engaged as a filmmaker. The other players are Kyle Bruckman on double reeds, Karen Stackpole on percussion (with particular attention to different sizes and types of gongs), Tom Nunn on his own invented instruments, Polly Moller on bass flute, and John Ingle on saxophones. Dean Santomieri, who served as narrator on the recording, will also perform, along with dancers Cindy Webster and Kinji Hayashi.

This performance will begin at 8 p.m. on Sunday, September 17; and it will be held in the CMC Concert Hall. CMC is located in the Mission at 544 Capp Street, between Mission Street and South Van Ness Avenue and between 20th Street and 21st Street. Tickets will be sold at the door at prices of $15 for adults and $10 for students and seniors. Those wishing further information may call 415-826-2765.

The SFCM Opera and Musical Theatre Program Presents Britten at his Best

Last night in the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), the Opera and Musical Theatre Program presented the first of two performances of Benjamin Britten’s Opus 54 The Turn of the Screw. Structured as a prologue and two acts, the opera is an “interpretative account” of Henry James’ novella of the same name. The scare quotes are intended to suggest that the source text is no simple tale; and, indeed, the way in which it is framed within the discovery of an old manuscript previously kept hidden in a locked desk indicates that the very authority of authorship (a pun that appealed to Michel Foucault) could come into question. Britten chose to respect that framing by having a solo tenor (sung last night by Taylor Rawley), identified only as “The Prologue,” explain the manuscript source before the two acts of the opera unfold its context. (On the other hand, Britten chose not to explain the title, which is a phrase used by the man who introduces the manuscript in James’ introduction.)

The production was staged by Heather Mathews, Associate Director and Production Manager of the Opera and Musical Theatre Program. Britten scored the opera for a chamber orchestra, which was conducted by Musical and Managing Director of Opera Curt Pajer. I should observe, by way of personal context, that this was my second encounter with Mathews staging of this opera, having seen a production at Fort Mason by one of the regional opera companies, probably about ten years ago. Mathews clearly appreciated the rich ambiguities of James original text; and, as a result, last night’s interpretation differed significantly from the last one I had seen. Most of those ambiguities found their way from the source text into the libretto that Myfanwy Piper prepared for Britten. (There is even a new ambiguity of authorship that takes place at the beginning of the second act, when Piper slyly shifts her source from James to W. B. Yeats.) They, in turn, were reinforced by a set design that suggested that the very loci of the actions might not have been situated in the physical world but only in the imagination of the author of that mysterious manuscript (who may or may not have been one of the characters in the story).

If the transformation of narrative from James’ source to Piper’s libretto to Mathews’ staging was not enough to fill the mind with twists of uncertainty, Britten’s approach to the score was as cerebrally engaging as it was rhetorically intense. The score is structured as a theme (the opening scene following the prologue) followed by fifteen variations for each of the fifteen remaining scenes. In addition there is a “screw “ motif in which the pitches wind around each other and define a twelve-tone row. (This screw-like contour was illustrated in the program notes provided by Stev Täal, class of ’18.) Throughout the entire performance, Pajer led both instrumentalists and vocalists in a clear account of all of the rich content that Britten had packed into his score, enabling the attentive listener to appreciate just how much the composer could weave from a relatively spare set of basic materials.

When so much is packed into a single composition, there is the risk that even the most sympathetic listener will be overwhelmed. However, Mathews’ approach to staging the narrative was as clear in its presentation as was Pajer’s interpretation of the score. This was achieved not only through meticulous attention to establishing each of the six characters but also in her manipulation of the set, whose transformations of context reflected the psychological transformations that unfold as the story is revealed.

Note that I have tried to avoid being specific as to just what that narrative is. Those who know their James know it already, just as those already familiar with the opera. However, the production will be given a second performance tomorrow; and because Mathews was so successful in staging this work as a journey of discovery, it would be a bit of a shame to reveal any spoilers to those who have not yet experienced those discoveries.

This second performance will take place, with an entirely different second cast of vocalists, at 2 p.m. on Sunday, December 11. SFCM is located at 50 Oak Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. There will be no charge for admission. While all reservations have been taken, the Box Office will have a window set up for a Wait List; so some admission will be possible if seats are available due to those who failed to show up to use their respective reservations.

Paul Dresher’s “Schick Machine” Begins its Run at Z Space

Last night Z Space hosted the first of four performances of Schick Machine, a music theater production that, while only about an hour in duration, is awe-inspiring in both its concept and the realization of that concept. A synthesis of monodrama and recital, the piece was created for percussion virtuoso Steven Schick under commissions from Stanford Lively Arts and Meyer Sound Labs. The creative team involved Schick collaborating with composer and artistic director Paul Dresher, writer and stage director Rinde Eckert, instrument inventor Daniel Schmidt, mechanical sound artist Matt Heckert, and lighting and visual designer Tom Ontiveros.

Eckert’s note for the program book suggests that the narrative behind the monodrama was inspired by Labyrinths, the New Directions anthology of both stories and poems by Jorge Luis Borges. The stories have uncanny brevity. In a few pages Borges could summon up a logical paradox or absurdity, play with it, and then pull the rug out from under the reader, often through a self-mocking conclusion. New Directions probably chose the title because Borges could pack innumerable twists and turns into even his shortest tales.

Such twists and turns became an inspiration for Eckert. As he put it, reading Borges was “when Lazlo Klangfarben came to mind, or rather Steve Schick as a man unable to remember Steve Schick who has named himself Lazlo Klangfarben, but still has all of Steve Schick’s memories. Klangfarben, as opposed to Steve Schick, is an inventor. His latest brainchild is something he calls the Schick Machine, after a percussionist whose name he dimly recalls.”

Over many years of collaboration with Dresher, Eckert has created a variety of characters with fragile, and often frightening, mental states. Schick Machine is probably his most convoluted creation to date. The “machine” is not so much a moving device created for some work process. Rather, it is an entire environment that fills the Z Space stage with a panoply of objects capable of producing sounds when struck, rubbed, pushed, or simply allowed to resonate. Indeed, to go back to Eckert’s inspiration, the stage itself is a labyrinth of such objects within which Schick, the percussionist dimly recalled by Klangfarben, engages his music-making practices, probably involving a combination of “scored” activities and improvised ones. Off to the side of this environment, Dresher sits at a table with a laptop running Max/MSP software, primarily to capture samples of Schick’s performances and direct them to the Meyer speakers mounted above the stage, thus creating an environment in which Schick is playing with the accompaniment of his own memories.

The visual impact of the stage is as stunning as the percussion performance. Size matters, whether in the form of an enormous colored circle of organ pipes (orange for C natural, yellow for the “white keys,” and brown for the “black keys”), a koto whose length takes half the stage, or a four-foot spinning disc mounted off-center and looking as if it will fly off its axle at any moment. There are also many metallic and wood ranks of organ pipes, provided courtesy of the Sonoma Community Center; they are played by a rotating metal cylinder with bolts sticking out of it, a latter-day version of how the mechanical organs of Mozart's day were programmed. Then, there are the more familiar objects, such as hoops and a tea kettle that whistles when the water boils. Finally, there are a variety of metal and wood items that look as if they would not be out of place in an orchestral percussion setting.

Steven Schick in performance (image courtesy of the Paul Dresher Ensemble)

Within this rich environment Schick ambles around, occasionally checking blueprints and frequently looking as if he is haunted by some sense of foreboding or malaise. At least that is the way he appears until he starts being a percussionist. Then everything converges into a highly focused personality whose sharp sense of rhythm enables intricate exercise of the dual semantics of “play,” both musical and ludic. The “message” (scare quotes added for caution) seems to be that, however plagued a mental state may be, identity may still be found in the act of making music.

Schick Machine will be given three more performances at Z Space. They will take place today both in the afternoon and the evening and tomorrow (Sunday) in the afternoon. Following each performance the audience is invited to the stage for closer inspection of the instruments. Tickets may be purchased online from an OvationTix event page.

East Meets West at San Francisco Opera

Yesterday afternoon in the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco Opera (SFO) presented the third of six performances of the world premiere production of Bright Sheng’s Dream of the Red Chamber. Sheng was born in Shanghai in 1955 and only came to live in the United States in 1982. That means that he lived through the entirety of the Cultural Revolution. Once in the United States, Sheng was mentored by Leonard Bernstein; and another one of his teachers was Chou Wen-Chung, a protégé of Edgard Varèse and still a leading authority on the performance of Varèse’s music.

While Sheng’s recent influences have been Western, Dream of the Red Chamber is based on one of what are called the Four Great Classical Novels of China. It was written in the eighteenth century during the Qing Dynasty. Its author, Cao Xueqin, did not live to complete it, having died after completing 80 chapters. At this stage the book was already one of the longest novels in world literature; and it was completed when the publisher Gao E worked with Cheng Weiyuan to add another 40 chapters.

One of the most interesting aspects of the novel is its dual nature. On the surface it is a realistic account of how a well-to-do family tries to maintain and then loses its social status and wealth. The Red Chamber is that portion of a large mansion in which only women are allowed. On the other hand the first word of the title suggests a metaphysical dimension, questioning whether the management and loss of wealth may, in the grander scheme of things, be nothing more than a passing illusion.

Sheng’s opera, whose two acts require somewhat less than three hours of performance time (including an intermission), has a libretto (which Sheng wrote with David Henry Hwang) that clearly distills a single basic plot line from the vast scope of the original text. However, that narrative is framed by a Prologue and coda that honor the metaphysical perspective. This is no mean feat, but both the synopsis printed in the SFO program book and the projected titles provide a clear account of a narrative that abounds with passions and deceptions. Compared to the sorts of convoluted plots one finds in both bel canto and Wagnerian operas, there is a remarkable level of effectively basic storytelling in Sheng’s opera.

Given that the libretto itself was written in English, one might ask fairly whether this is an American opera or a Chinese opera. Sheng has said (several times in my personal experience) that he likes to regard himself as 100% American and 100% Chinese. That is actually a characteristically Oriental perspective. Back when I worked at a research laboratory funded by Fuji Xerox, one of my Japanese colleagues explained that there are Asian systems of logic that reject Aristotle’s law of the excluded middle. This is the principle that any assertion must be either true or false; and there is no “in between” (middle). My colleague explained that there were Asian logics in which an assertion could be true, false, both true and false, or neither true nor false. In those non-Aristotelian terms, one can, indeed, be both 100% American and 100% Chinese; so Sheng was most likely interested in more than simply turning a clever phrase.

From a musical point of view, however, his score is very much a product of Western influences. While some of its grander sonorities may show signs of Bernstein’s mentorship, Sheng’s approaches to counterpoint involve far more elaborate textures; and the superposition of his pitches are rife with dissonant ambiguities when considered in terms of tonal harmony. Bernstein never got close to those unknown regions; but, by the same count, no one would mistake Sheng’s ambiguities from the approaches to dissonance taken by either Varese or Chou. On the other hand the acute listener would be forgiven for recognizing suggestions of other works of twentieth-century modernism that seem to pop up in Sheng’s rich textures. Possible examples may well be excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Nightingale (which is also set in China) and some of the ideas of harmonic progression that Alban Berg deployed in his Lulu opera.

Beyond matters of overall texture, Sheng also confronts both performers and listeners with highly demanding vocal lines that have a strong preference for both very high registers and wide intervallic leaps. Most impressive in taking on these vocal demands was soprano Pureum Jo, making her SFO debut in the leading female role of Dai Yu, the flower transformed into a human form to consummate her 3000-year relationship with the stone that sustained her with water, brought to mortal life in the form of Bao Yu (tenor Yijie Shi, also making his SFO debut). Indeed, all the vocalists tended to be uniformly secure in negotiating Sheng’s highly elegant atonal arabesques, often conveying more through the music than they could to the phrases of text that, occasionally, would be distorted by musical phrasing that disrupted the semantic flow.

To be fair, however, much of the text amounts to little more than relatively flat prose. This is surprisingly effective, however, perhaps because, beneath all the exorbitant trappings of the wealthy family at the heart of the opera’s narrative, there rests little more than the shallow banality of day-to-day matters. It might then be fair to say that the heart of this opera lies in the tension between the opulence of the setting, embodied as much in the orchestral writing as in the elaborate sets designed by Tim Yip, and the ordinariness of the mere mortals that play out the core narrative. Stan Lai appeared to appreciate this contrast in his approach to staging, while George Manahan, conducting the SFO Orchestra, was always there to match his musical resources to the visual splendor.

The result is that there is more than enough to enjoy in this intricate interplay of both musical and visual elements with a narrative that, itself, involves the interplay of the supernatural with the ordinariness of life on earth. Unlike some of the European “epic” operas, this is an experience that is likely to leave new impressions with each subsequent encounter. Six is a modest, but still reasonable, number of performances of this new work for a single season; but, on the longer scale of time, this is an opera that is likely to benefit as much (if not more) from subsequent reflection as from the immediacy of “first contact.”

Paul Hersh Presents a Piano Recital for One, Three, and Four Hands

This afternoon in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), Paul Hersh presented the first Faculty Artist Series recital of the 2016–17 season. This was originally announced as a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 988 set of (“Goldberg”) variations on an Aria theme; but Hersh changed the programming to a selection of piano compositions for one, three, and four hands. Each of these selections was preceded by some highly informative commentary, a feature that continues to make Hersh’s performances some of the most fascinating SFCM offerings. Additional hands were provided by Hersh’s former student Hye Yeong Min (’09).

The commentary was structured around three major topics, narratives, the “sense of an ending” (a phrase Hersh may have explicitly borrowed from either literary theorist Frank Kermode or the novelist Julian Barnes, who probably lifted it from Kermode), and cooperation. The program began with the last of five piano studies that Johannes Brahms composed, a transcription of the final Chaconne movement from Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor to be played by the left hand alone. After explaining that, while myriad transcriptions of this movement had been composed for different combinations of instruments (including the one by Ferruccio Busoni for “two-hand” piano), Brahms’ version came closest to the original Bach version (since about the only thing that Brahms added were dynamic markings), Hersh wasted no time getting into narrative.

He began by explaining the overall plan of the variations on the four-measure theme. 32 variations in D minor are followed by 20 in D major, after which the music returns to D minor for another 10 variations. Hersh suggested that this was a narrative of human life, beginning with the vigorous energy of youth, maturing into a more refined middle age, and then accepting the quietude of finality. (Note that this was how that “sense of an ending” would first rear its head.)

As the Italians like to say, this may not be true; but it is a good story. That remark is not meant to be either frivolous or pejorative. As this site has already observed, the very act of listening to music must, of necessity, take the flow of time into account; and among the various categories of texts (which narrative theorists tend to call “text types”), narrative is the one category that is explicitly time-sensitive (hence the need to talk about that “sense of an ending”). Thus, while Bach’s priority may have been primarily pedagogical, even to the point of balancing the number of variations, identifying a narrative framework can be a very useful way through which the attentive listener can not only experience but also appreciate the flow of time as having an underlying logic.

This afternoon the result of suggesting a narrative framework resulted in one of the most coherent accounts of Bach’s chaconne provided by any performer or ensemble, regardless of instrumentation. Hersh had clearly established his own logic for both the flow of time and the termination of that flow. By sharing that logic through his introductory remarks, the listener was better equipped to negotiate that flow and thus was confronted with just how much considered and attentive performance can bring to music that is far more than marks on paper with staff lines.

At this point Hersh departed from the printed program sheet to include a short addition, “Evening Song,” the last work in Robert Schumann’s Opus 85 set of twelve four-hand piano compositions “for young and old children.” Because the upper part has only a single melodic line, this was the “three-hand” portion of the program. Hersh may have chosen this piece as another example of intense dramatism that reaches far beyond the notational representation of brief and simple gestures. Curiously enough, the sensitivity that both Hersh and Min (providing the “third hand”) brought to this almost microscopic composition conveyed one of the most difficult of dramatic effects, making time stand still. (This “temporal illusion” can be encountered frequently in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven. Schumann has several of these moments, but not as many.) Thus, “Evening Song” is almost an “anti-narrative,” suspending the listener’s sense of time passing, even if only briefly.

This short piece provided a transition to the far more extensive four-hand fantasia in F minor (D. 940), which Franz Schubert composed during the first four months of 1828, the last year of his life. This was where the theme of the program shifted from narrative to cooperation. This is music in which the two pianists must be aware of each other, with respect to not only the music they are playing but also the physical challenge of sharing the keyboard and the pedals. It is also music whose overall structure involves the recurrence of the material that is presented at the very beginning, but not in a manner that can easily be classified as rondo form. As Hersh put it, D. 940 has a “form unto itself,” which has more to do with evolving transformations (my phrase, not Hersh’s) than with sections that can be neatly labeled with capital letters.

Most interesting was how Hersh’s introductory remarks involved calling out structural properties on both small and large scales. This need to keep track of those properties on multiple scales requires that both pianists need to be of “multiple minds” about what they are doing; but they also have to establish what amounts to a shared consciousness. Hersh also observed that, even though it was not a four-hand transcription of music composed for orchestra or string quartet, D. 940 was probably intended as music for a personal living room, rather than a concert hall. Nevertheless, the piece is definitely a serious challenge; and it is only through the performance of skilled musicians that one can appreciate just how much Schubert managed to pack into a composition whose intentions may have been “domestic.” Hersh and Min were definitely such musicians, providing an enlightening and stirring account of how productive Schubert was in his final year.