Last night at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble presented the San Francisco performance of a program entitled Bay Area Spotlight. The spotlight was directed primarily at violist Kurt Rohde and his ten-year project called Kurt Rohde’s Farewell Tour. The entire project will result in six programs to be performed over the course of ten years, with each program focusing on new works commissioned to provide a platform for underrepresented composers that deserve a wider audience.
Last night’s offering was the second of those six programs. Three new works were presented, all of which involved real-time interaction between the viola part and electronic gear. The commissioned composers were Tina Tallon (“excision no. 2 - they didn’t know we were seeds”), Peter Van Zandt Lane (“Décalcomanie No. 2”), and Elainie Lillios (“Liquid | Crystal | Vapor”). All three were on hand to provide commentary augmenting the statements in the program book while filling the time during which the equipment was configured.
Kurt Rohde playing “Décalcomanie No. 2” with electronic gear and video projection (photograph by Zach Miley, courtesy of Left Coast Chamber Ensemble)
In accounting for this portion of last night’s program, I am obliged to show my age. The early history of electronic music took place in settings that basically amalgamated the artistic concept of a studio with the scientific concept of a laboratory. Such workplaces emerged across Europe during the Fifties, and a few took root on the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, due in no small part to the proximity of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey to both Princeton University, also in New Jersey, and Columbia University, in Manhattan. The products of these environments were, for the most part, what we now call “tape music,” recorded artifacts for which performance involved playing the recording before an audience.
1967 saw the publication of the first issue of Source: music of the avant garde. This journal published scores, reports about performances, and theoretical speculations at a time when the concept of “live electronic music” was first beginning to emerge. This was the product of schools of thought that expected more from electronics that turning something on, sitting still to listen, and then turning it off. Source was invaluable in tracking concert experiences that involved a more active approach to performance.
In many respects the very idea of new music migrating from the laboratory to the performance arena owed much to the close relationship between composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. At the time that Source first appeared, performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company were accompanied by Cage and David Tudor, soon to be joined by Gordon Mumma, in the orchestra pit operating control modules for a wide diversity of sound-generating electronic components. (Making music for Cunningham’s choreography predated the invention and production of the first modular synthesizers.) At that time I was building up my writing chops by reviewing dance concerts, and what impressed me the most about any Cunningham experience was that the diversity of sounds coming from the musicians was as stimulating as the diversity of choreographic ideas up on stage. (I would later learn that, almost always, dance and music took place in parallel; any impression of a causal relationship between one and the other resided entirely in the mind of the observer.)
Cage was a great admirer of Buckminster Fuller. I once listened to Fuller talk, and the focus of his speech was how he had devoted his life and career to “making more and more with less and less.” I suspect Cage was well aware of Fuller’s self-evaluation. He spent years making more and more music for Cunningham drawing upon limited available resources.
When we fast-forward to the present, we see that limiting resources is almost unimaginable. With the rise of digital technology, the materials from which things can be made has skyrocketed, whether it involves configuring modules or using software like Max to build and perform sonic structures working from the ground up. The extent to which technology has now cultivated an anything-is-possible mentality reflects back on a talk that composer Roger Sessions gave to the 1960 Princeton Seminar in Advanced Musical Studies (whose papers were published by Norton under the title Problems of Modern Music).
Toward the end of his talk, Sessions disclosed his own bemused impressions about technology:
The dilemma of electronic musical media is a little like that of the psychologist who is reputed once to have said to one of his friends, “Well, I have got my boy to the point where I can condition him for anything I want. What shall I condition him for?”
In a world in which software empowers anything, it seems as if composers are making less and less with more and more.
This was the primary impression left by the three pieces that Rohde had commissioned. Yes, the basic materials of each piece differed, as did the logic behind the composition as expressed by the composer. This could also be said of the technical skills that Rohde had to muster for each piece. Nevertheless, when those three pieces were marched out one after the other, it was hard to get beyond an overall sense of sameness. The Devil was not in the details. It was in the lack of any distinctive expressive motivation behind those details; and that impact was, to say the least, disconcerting.
This tempts me to refer to the two sonatas that were performed before and after this set of three electronic compositions as the “real music” of the evening. That would be an unfair exaggeration, given that Rohde had to bring considerable technical skill to his performances of the works he had commissioned. However, the music is never only about the technique; and, as a result, I came away feeling that those “good old-fashioned sonatas” had much more to bring to last night’s table.
Those scare quotes should indicate, however, that calling either sonata “old-fashioned” was unfair. It certainly did not apply to David Conte, whose clarinet sonata was completed in 2017. The framework may have been traditional, and the same could even be said of some of the idioms. Nevertheless, clarinetist Jerome Simas brought a freshness to Conte’s rhetoric that attracted attention from the opening measures and sustained it through the final coda.
As seems to be the case so often, pianist Eric Zivian tended to overplay his part through much of the three-movement composition. (To paraphrase Will Rogers, Zivian never met a climax he couldn’t exaggerate.) However, Simas had what could be called a “natural” ability to rise above it all.
As has been observed in the past, the clarinet discloses a wide variety of different sonorities, each of which arises from a rich balance of natural overtones. Those overtone spectra allow the instrument to cut through just about any sonic environment, usually without the performer having to force those notes into the context. As a result, the performance yielded a satisfying balance of solo and accompanying music, along with the sense that this was a piece that deserves more listening experiences.
The sonata that concluded the program predated the opening section by almost a century. Rebecca Clarke’s viola sonata was composed in 1919 and submitted to a competition. That competition was decided through a “blind” review process with the judges having no idea of who any of the composers were. After a decision had been reached, the committee refused to accept that one of the leading competitors was a woman, a confusion that was only resolved by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, who had sponsored the competition.
Sadly, there were a few missteps in the broad strokes with which Rohde introduced the first movement. Fortunately, he found his footing quickly and homed in on an approach to expressiveness that was as clear as it was intense. This time, however, the same could not be said of Zivian. There were too many episodes that sounded as if he was beating his piano into submission, leaving Rohde doing his best to pick up after Clarke in the wake of it all. Yes, Clarke was capable of summoning up passionate rhetoric; but she was definitely up there with William Shakespeare in avoiding the dangers of out-Heroding Herod!
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