Amy Yang’s Album of Aggravating Misconceptions

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

I still have a few days left to catch up on recordings from last year before my concert-going commitments seriously get under way. Every now and then my activities leave me wondering whether I should have included an article about the worst encounters with recordings of the year; but, on the whole, I prefer to keep a positive spin on my retrospective writing. In that context, it is probably just as well that I deferred listening to Amy Yang’s Resonance album, released by MSR Classics this past summer, until I had dispensed with my retrospective thoughts of 2019.

Given that Yang has impressive teaching positions at the Curtis Institute of Music (where she is an alumna), the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College, I am more than a little surprised that my reaction to Resonance is as negative as it was. There is certainly no arguing with the repertoire. The album opens with Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 828 keyboard partita in D major and concludes with Robert Schumann’s Opus 6 “Davidsbündlertänze” (dances of the League of David) collection of eighteen short pieces. Between these “bookends” is the world premiere recording of Caroline Shaw’s “Gustave Le Gray,” which Yang premiered in concert on April 24, 2012.

However, my discontent lies in the uneasy feeling that each of these performances is missing the point of making the music in the first place. Furthermore, where “Gustave Le Gray” is concerned, there may be enough misconception around to be shared by composer and performer. Where Bach is concerned, there is certainly no indication of Yang knowing just what a partita is or why Bach was so interested in writing them (not only for keyboard). The author of the Wikipedia page for the partita wastes little time in getting to the point: Bach used the noun “partita” as a synonym for a suite of dances, often extended with the addition of an introductory movement that is not a dance form and serves as a sort of overture.

In this context I continue to think back on a master class that violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. While coaching one of the solo violin partitas, Blumenstock reminded the student that Bach “knew his dances.” In other words an allemande (to chose an example) is not just a pattern of steps structured around a pattern of beats. It also embodies a particular approach to dancing that reflects some characteristic emotional disposition (just as, in later centuries, the waltz would reflect erotic connotations).

Unfortunately, Yang’s approach to BWV 828 is so preoccupied with seeking out new approaches to phrasing that any sense of any kind of a dance (let alone the connotations of the dance form) has been dispatched to oblivion. Of course performance always involves establishing a meeting ground between what the music wants to say and how the performer decides to say it. However, I hold to what may now be an obsolete perspective that assumes that performance is a balance between composer and performer, rather than a platform upon which the performer reigns supreme over all.

It should therefore be no surprise that Yang shows as little respect for Schumann’s dances as she does for Bach’s. Granted, Schumann’s movements are not organized around conventional dances as are Bach’s. Nevertheless, the point of departure for Opus 6 is a mazurka that was composed by Clara Wieck, and Schumann told Clara that the composition itself amounted to thoughts about how their relationship would ultimately lead to marriage. In other words the movements reflect a wedding party where there may be plenty of dancing, but the dances are distorted by prevailing raucous behavior. One might say that both the introspective Eusebius and the manic Florestan are both attending this imagined wedding. None of this seems to register with Yang, who is content to introduce the selection by writing, “The music is so beautiful, one aches in playing it.”

Where Shaw is concerned, I have no trouble confessing that tuning in to the music she makes has often been a problematic affair. My last encounter with her music came this past October, when the Calidore String Quartet played one of the three “essays” she had composed for them. At that time I suggested that Shaw, as a reader, had become so wrapped up in the concept of an essay that she sought to translate her thoughts into musical terms. This was a noble undertaking; but I concluded that “even the most attentive listener had to contend with three exercises in trying to make sense out of what was little more than wistful rambling.”

On the other hand, earlier that same month I had my third listening encounter with “Entr’acte,” another Shaw composition for string quartet. This was also an “ideas” composition; but, in this case, it involved a deconstruction of music from the string quartets of Joseph Haydn. As this music was performed (by the New Esterházy Quartet), I realized for the first time that there was an underlying sense of humor. As I put it at the time, Shaw’s act of deconstruction amounted to playing a trick on a master trickster. For the first time I experienced a sincerely visceral reaction of Shaw’s music in which my emotional dispositions ran the gamut from subtle grins to the occasional belly-laugh.

In “Gustave Le Gray” Shaw shifts her attention from Haydn to Frédéric Chopin. Le Gray himself was a leading pioneer of photography in the nineteenth century. Shaw seems to have been inspired by his technique of combination printing, in which an image is created to exposing multiple negatives. (The booklet accompanying the album includes an example of this technique.) Her composition thus includes the “exposure” of the fourth (in the key of A minor) of Chopin’s Opus 17 collection of mazurkas; and that “image” is situated in a context based almost entirely on the reverberations of repeated notes.

This is another example of Shaw’s capacity for coming up with intriguing ideas, but Yang never seems to find a rhetorical delivery on the marks on the score pages that first seizes and then holds the attention of the curious listener. To be sure, “things happen” as Yang works her way through the score; but no sense of import behind what is happening ever manages to emerge. Perhaps, as is the case with “Entr’acte,” this is music whose impact is best grasped when one experiences it being made in performance.