Jerome Kitzke’s Narrative Approach to Music

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

At the end of last year, New World Records released the latest album of compositions by Jerome Kitzke. The title of the album is The Redness of Blood, which is also the title of the last of the four works included in the playlist. Since this was my first encounter with the composer, who has now been recorded on an impressive number of different labels, I benefitted from the background material on the Amazon.com Web page more than I usually do.

It therefore seems appropriate to begin by citing the opening sentences under the “Product Description” heading:

Jerome Kitzke (b. 1955) has described himself as being as much a storyteller as a composer, and that description makes sense. Throughout his music there is a strong dramatic, narrative, theatrical component. Performers shout, sing, move and dance, often as though possessed by the music.

One appreciates this description with the very first track, “Bringing Roses With Her Words.” completed in 2009. This is a solo performance by Lisa Moore with “resources” listed as follows: piano, speaking, vocals, whistling, percussion. The third track presents an earlier (2008) composition with the same resources, this time with Sarah Cahill as the performer. In this case, however, vocalization is interleaved with recitation of texts by Walt Whitman and Rumi.

The other two tracks require moderately-sized chamber ensembles. The last of these is the title track. Since it was completed in 1995, it is also the earliest work on the album. The second track is entitled “For Pte Tokahewin Ska.” It incorporates texts by Charlotte Black Elk of the Oglala Lakota Katela tribe. “Pte Tokahewin Ska” is the poet’s Lakota name. Kitzke lived with her and her family in 1988, when he was planning to create a work commemorating the centennial of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which had taken place on December 29, 1890. The composition that resulted from Kitzke’s experiences emerged almost more as a sense of ritual than one of concert performance.

While all four of these compositions amount to imaginative undertakings, I have serious doubts that any of them have been well served by recording. Going back to that Amazon description, the elements of drama, narrative, and theater are so strong that recording technology tends to undermine their power. For someone that had been in the presence of the performance of any of these pieces, listening to a recording would probably trigger memories of the experience. The rest of us may be able to appreciate the diversity of sonorities, if not the auditory suggestions of physical performance; but I came away from this album fearing that even well-directed video might not do sufficient justice to the immediacy of the dramatic behind each of Kitzke’s compositions.