Last night Eric Dudley, Artistic Director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, hosted the latest installment in the How Music is Made series. The topic was Julius Eastman’s “Gay Guerrilla,” which was given a two-piano performance by Kate Campbell and Allegra Chapman. The performance was preceded by an introductory “discussion” by the performers. The scare quotes designate that separate video recordings were made of observations by Campbell and Chapman. The results were then scrupulously edited and interleaved to provide a “unified” account that would prepare listeners for the performance that followed. The entire program, discussion and performance, lasted about 50 minutes, and the video has now been archived for viewing on the SFCMP YouTube channel.
Readers may recall that “Gay Guerrilla” was last discussed on this site at the end of last month, after it had been performed by the Del Sol String Quartet in their Old First Concerts recital. I used the following paragraph to set the context for this piece:
“Gay Guerrilla” was composed in 1979 and shows awareness of recent achievements in adventurous repertoire. Terry Riley had composed “In C” in 1964, Philip Glass’ first opera, Einstein on the Beach, had been premiered in July of 1976, and Steve Reich had advanced from working with tape loops (with Riley as a colleague at the San Francisco Tape Music Center) to instrumental compositions. In that context “Gay Guerrilla” is a lush tapestry of repetitive structures.
A portion of the score for “Gay Guerrilla” (screen shot from the video being discussed)
During the introductory observations by Campbell and Chapman, there were several images of Eastman’s score pages. The notation allowed for considerable inventive interpretation on the part of any performers, including any decisions of what instruments should be played. The first recorded performance involved four pianos. Neither Campbell nor Chapman made any reference to this recording. On the other hand, they did observe that the performance captured on video had been preceded by only two rehearsals, suggesting that they both wanted the interpretation of Eastman’s score to be a product of spontaneous invention based more on guidelines than on specification.
In many respects their account was far more compelling than the Del Sol interpretation (which had been coached by composer Luciano Chessa). Most of the suggestions on the score pages involve repeated notes or chords, and the percussive qualities of the piano sonorities evoked more urgent intensity than could be expressed by bowed strings (many of which were pre-recorded in the Del Sol performance). Mind you, where such percussive qualities are concerned, a focused command of dynamic levels is essential. Working as a team, Campbell and Chapman made it clear that the overall progression of the score was not a journey from loud to louder.
What was particularly effective was how both performers realized their interpretation as a journey through different densities. Sometimes the densities themselves would be sorted between the two keyboards. On other occasions, each individual hand realized its own characteristic density pattern. While the video production could have been a bit better, the fixed camera angle provided a reasonably thorough view of what each individual hand was doing (thorough enough that, when a hand was not visible, the ear could account for what it was playing). Thus, while the overall journey had been marked by little more than the passage of time (about half an hour), the attentive listener could apprehend an arching sense of progression over the course of the performance.
That arch is more than a convenient metaphor. The progression of textures rises to a peak, not quite at the middle of the performance, which is distinctively marked by an account of the Lutheran hymn “A Might Fortress is Our God.” After any number of imaginative approaches to repeated chords and pitches, the listener is suddenly confronted by a familiar tune, a gesture by the composer that combines a disciplined approach to structural significance with a harsh bite of irony. (It is important to remember that, when Eastman composed “Gay Guerrilla,” very few congregations were willing to admit the presence of homosexual congregants.)
Personally, I have to confess that my preferences sided with last night’s keyboard version. To be fair, however, the keyboard is my own instrument; so it is difficult to avoid bias entirely. Still, I very much appreciated the video editing involved in compiling the pre-performance observations by both Campbell and Chapman. Thanks to those observations, I suspect that I was far better prepared to listen to this music than I was when I encountered it as the concluding selection on the Del Sol program.
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