Profiling Leon Kirchner with an Anthology

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

Verdant World Productions is an institution managed by Lisa Kirchner to serve as a venue for documenting the legacy of composer Leon Kirchner. It was first encountered on this site when Verdant World Records released an album of live performances of concertante music featuring Kirchner as a conductor performing with pianist Peter Serkin. More recently it provided the platform for a book that Lisa edited about her father entitled Leon Kirchner and his Verdant World. That book was released as a paperback, which became available on an Amazon.com Web page at the beginning of this past August.

The rich breadth of content in this book recalls an old joke about an elementary school pupil having to write a review of a book about penguins, who submits a review consisting of a single sentence:

This book told me more about penguins than I would ever want to know.

I have to confess that, simply by reading the table of contents of this Kirchner book, I was already beginning to feel overwhelmed.

Nevertheless, I jumped in feet-first, beginning with the editor’s preference and working my way, slowly but surely, through to the conclusion of the text on page 363. It did not take me long to get hooked on making the journey. Having completed it I can say that many of my thoughts about music making, particularly during the second half of the twentieth century, have been productively refined and at least a few prior misconceptions have been set straight.

My personal acquaintance with Leon was more than a little modest. I met him during my senior year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Elliott Carter was a Visiting Professor for one of the terms. As a result of his presence, I came to know Luciano Berio, who was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University at the same time, and Kirchner, who, the previous year, had succeeded Walter Piston as Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music at Harvard. My acquaintance with Lisa was somewhat closer, since I was ramping up my writing skills by spending my spare time as a ballet critic at the same time that Lisa was performing in a modern dance group that had attracted my attention. (I also remember being persuaded to give my second press ticket to Lisa, so she could have a chance to see Margot Fonteyn in performance.)

At this point, in the interest of “full disclosure,” I should observe that, to supplement my research in computer music (which would follow me into graduate school), I was learning much from the composer Ezra Sims, particularly about microtonality. It turned out that the chemistry between Sims and Leon left much to be desired. It seems to have dated back to when Sims was studying with Milhaud at Mills College and then had to deal with Milhaud moving elsewhere, leaving Kirchner to serve as Sims advisor.

Nevertheless, my advisor at MIT, Marvin Minsky, and I got to know Kirchner better when he was working on his third string quartet. He arranged for us to visit New York University, where Morton Subotnick had developed an electronic music studio around a synthesizer designed and built by Don Buchla. Subotnick was “coaching” Kirchner in using this gear. My guess is that the jury will always be out when it comes to how much of the tape created for Kirchner’s quartet was due to Kirchner himself and how much was due to Subotnick.

I suppose that the most important thing about Leon Kirchner and his Verdant World is that my knowledge of Kirchner expanded generously further than anything I had retained from my student days. For the most part I felt that the expansion was for the better. Nevertheless, there were a few articles that left me wondering why I had bothered to read them in the first place. Let me elaborate on the most extreme situations at both ends of the spectrum.

On the positive side I would say that some of my strongest impressions came from the documentation of correspondence between Kirchner and Roger Sessions between 1948 and 1950. Sessions was the older of the two; so there were definitely intimations of student-teacher interactions, even if Kirchner had not been a student for many years. A topic of particular interest to me involved the composer Milton Babbitt.

Babbitt was fascinated with how Schoenberg presented his approach to twelve-tone music in terms of rules and constraints. Babbitt, who seems to have studied abstract mathematics as well as music, became obsessed with Schoenberg’s technique, demonstrating that those rules and constraints could be represented in terms of group theory. However, when he tried to elaborate on why this was a useful insight (for composers or mathematicians or both), his articles would quickly devolve into gobbledegook. Kirchner seemed to be obsessed with trying to puzzle out what Babbitt was doing, while Sessions had his own rhetorical devices for suggesting that a sanity check was in order!

The negative side shows up in the final chapter of the book, entitled Notes and Analysis. It consists of six essays, all of which had been published in scholarly journals concerned with music theory. For the most part these articles focus on teasing out details on the score pages and then trying to endow those details with significance.

Now I have to confess that, in my freshman year, when I was presented a program about twentieth-century music on the campus radio station, I ran a series of programs to account for the six string quartets of Béla Bartók; and I felt the need to provide each quartet a verbal introduction. As a result, I prepared for the broadcasts by taking each of the scores for one of the quartets and writing out a generous text description of what those scores revealed. It took many decades of my life to realize that any account of “marks on paper” was secondary to an account that involved what the performer(s) chose do to with those marks. For the most part, the Notes and Analysis essays are written by learned scholars that had not yet learned how to get their heads out of the marks on paper!