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Review: Cipher Duo’s West Coast Tour Kickoff
Cipher Duo consists of soprano Justine Aronson and violinist Sarah Goldfeather. This week, they commence their West Coast tour. I was fortunate to see their Wednesday night performance in Geiringer Hall at UC Santa Barbara. They will perform in Pasadena with gnarwhallaby on Thursday, USC on Friday, and then head north to the Bay Area on Sunday. Wherever you are in California, do not miss this concert.
Sarah Goldfeather, left, and Justine Aronson in performance as Cipher Duo
The program starts with something a little familiar. Though I did not know this piece, I am well acquainted with a variety of Kaija Saariaho works. If you haven’t listened to Saariaho, start now. Changing Light (2002) is the is the perfect introduction to Saariaho, and to the Cipher Duo. The text is an English translation from Hebrew and explores the subject of the fragility of uncertain existence. Beginning simply enough, on the line “Light and darkness,” Aronson sings chilling poetry while Goldfeather floats above on harmonics. Like many Saariaho pieces, each part has a purpose and a goal, but their paths are unclear and meandering. The fact that this concert features only 21st-century works confirms, at least to me, that Kaija Saariaho is in line for Debussy’s crown as the essential composer to bridge the century gap.
The duo then takes on another English piece, also a philosophical musing. Rebekah Driscoll was inspired to write January: Brin’s Mesa (2016) when she observed new life emerging from the ashes of a forest fire in Arizona. From page to performance, Aronson and Goldfeather breathe life into the contemplative score. Listen for the small, organic changes – one can almost hear tendrils of plant life growing and emerging.
The middle piece of the program is a crowd-pleaser for the Californians. Even if you missed the event, you know about Hopscotch (2015). Cipher Duo performs Hopscotch Tarot by Veronika Krausas. In the Hopscotch holistic performance, the audience members could only hear two or three fortunes before getting ushered into the next limo. Here, Aronson and Goldfeather perform all twelve short movements, each one a tarot card reading from Fortuna. If you wanted more insight into the plot of Hopscotch, watch Aronson’s expressions, particularly when she smirks. Each fortune has its own character and style, and Aronson captures them all exquisitely.
The fourth piece of the show comes from Goldfeather herself. Come Back (2017) showcases Goldfeather’s experience as a singer/songwriter with an indie band. Though not in a typical verse-chorus form, the rest of the key elements to an indie song are present: simple lyrics, repetitive gestures, and a distinct sonority. For the first half of the piece, Aronson sings five words on five notes. But it isn’t minimalism. Goldfeather overlaps and dovetails the motives within and between the instruments. When a verse finally arrives, it hits the audience like a bucket of water. The first time a minor chord replaces a major chord, a collective chill went down the audience’s spines. I won’t give away what happens at the ending, but I can tell you it was perfect. After so many minutes of intricate looping, layering, and rearranging of motives, Goldfeather pulls off the perfect ending.
Finally, the duo ended on their namesake. Kate Soper’s Cipher (2011) is one of the most breathtaking violin and soprano pieces I have ever heard. The duo told the audience that Cipher explores timbre. As well as exploring musical dynamics and human dynamics, it wends between music, meaning, and language. The violin and the voice become shared objects. Sometimes both performers sing, speak, or finger the violin together. At times, they even swap. Each movement features conflicting voices and temperaments, such as Wittgenstein, Freud, and Guido d’Arezzo. The conjoining line, “People can understand you when you say something,” is frequently obscured. If nothing else has convinced you to see Cipher Duo this weekend, go for this. Cipher will blow your mind.
Near Year, New Writer: Meet Cristina Lord
Close followers of New Classic LA will have seen the interviews that composer Cristina Lord conducted with musicians for Tuesdays at Monk Space, as we reprinted them here and here. We got to talking and realized that she’d be an awesome addition to our team. Here’s her bio:
Cristina Lord
Cristina Lord is a composer, pianist, and teacher based in the Los Angeles area. While primarily a composer of concert works, she also scores for media, writes and performs for artist collaborations (most frequently dancers), and creates electronic music as a solo artist. She has written for ensembles such as Gnarwhallaby, Friction Quartet, HOCKET, Veda Quartet, and the Southern California Brass Consortium. She holds degrees in composition from Cal State Long Beach (MM) and UC Santa Barbara (BA). As a human, Cristina is a tea enthusiast, amateur vegan baker, and loves admiring other people’s dogs.
While Cristina gets going writing, you can check out some of her music in the mean time at cristinalord.com.
Album Preview: Hopscotch
I’m submitting this as my review of the soon-to-be-released recording of The Industry’s Hopscotch opera project, but here’s the thing: No such thing exists. Conceived by The Industry’s Artistic Director, Yuval Sharon, Hopscotch was an opera presented in the fall of 2015 in twenty four cars driving between a number of locations scattered around Los Angeles. At the start of each performance, a few audience members would get into each of the cars along with a group of performers, and would then experience part of the opera en route to the next physical location, where they’d see another scene before being whisked away in another car. To make matters more confounding, the cars travelled along three different routes, meaning that any given audience member could only see part of the whole in any given performance. Only at the very end did all of the routes converge on a central location for the final scene.
Needless to say, this project doesn’t lend itself easily to a traditional recording. Do you present each of the car routes as a unit to approximate the experience of attending? Do you present the scenes in order to give a view of the work impossible for someone who attended it to have seen? How do you balance the inside of a limo against an open-air concrete bank of the Los Angeles River?
Difficult questions, and ones without obvious answers. Fortunately, with current technology, we can sidestep some of them. With the album released as files on a flash drive instead of tracks on a CD, you’re free to open them in any order and explore the world of this opera as you see fit. You can follow each of the car routes separately, play everything in the order of the plot, or even sort things out by individual composer or lyricist. (There were six primary composers for the project and six primary librettists, all working in a range of different styles in their respective fields.) The liner notes — in the form of a wide-ranging interview with Sharon and Josh Raab, the opera’s dramaturg — encourage this kind of self-guided exploration, though elsewhere in the booklet there are some helpful lists of which tracks to listen to to follow which routes.
Unsurprisingly, given the range of artists that contributed to this project, the tracks cover a lot of ground. “Lucha’s Quinceñera Song” (music by David Rosenboom and text by Janine Salinas Schoenberg) is a sweetly plaintive verse-chorus affair, while “Floats the Roving Nebula” (music by Ellen Reid and text by Mandy Kahn) hovers in an ecstatic crystalline stasis. “Jameson and Lucha in the Park” (music by Mark Lowenstein and text by Erin Young) presents a tightly controlled dance number coordinated with spoken dialogue, while other spoken sections feature music improvised by the contemporary performing group Gnarwhallaby. The plot is a surreally altered (but predictably heterosexual) retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, and snatches of Claudio Monteverdi’s 1607 treatment of the same myth rub up against bristlingly contemporary soundscapes. There are as many contrasts as there are tracks on the album.
Such stylistic diversity can make for an uneven listening experience, especially when paired with the differing qualities of the recordings. Some of the tracks are beautifully mastered studio takes, while others are invaluable field recordings from the site-specific scenes around town. Obviously, there’s room enough in the world for both of these approaches to recording, but repeatedly switching back and forth with such short notice can be a little jarring. (So perhaps another fruitful approach to organizing your listening could be to tackle all the field recordings followed by all the studio takes, or vice versa.)
These slight jars, however, feel in keeping with the nature of the project. Hopscotch the opera wasn’t a singular experience as much as it was a collection of possible experiences, and Hopscotch the album follows suit. There’s no one single recording of the work; there’s a collection of possible recordings all dizzyingly contained on a single flash drive. Elsewhere in the liner notes, Sharon describes the piece not as an opera but as a web, a series of interconnected points with many possible paths leading between them, none more inherently valid than any of the others. The more I listen to the album, the more this description feels right. This album isn’t a documentation or presentation of an artistic event that happened and is now over, it’s an invitation to enter into this world and explore it on your own terms, to find your own way through the work’s myriad winding paths, to make the piece yours as only you can. It’s an opera in twenty four cars, and you’re the one behind the wheel.
You can order the “album” at records.theindustryla.org/album/hopscotch.
The Industry is presenting two events on January 20 to celebrate the release. Details are below:
Panel discussion
Friday, January 20 (4 pm)
USC, Wallis Annenberg Hall (ANN), Room L105A
3630 Watt Way, Los Angeles
Panelists include composers Veronika Krausas and Marc Lowenstein, Yuval Sharon of The Industry, and arts journalists Mark Swed and Sasha Anawalt (moderator).
Hopscotch in Concert
Friday, January 20 (7:30 pm)
USC, Newman Recital Hall (AHF)
3616 Trousdale Parkway, Los Angeles
This special evening emceed by director Yuval Sharon will be the first live concert of songs from the opera. Six chapters from the work will be performed (one from each of its six composers), including the expansive choral finale by Andrew Norman.
Areon Flutes: “Thrive”
As a fellow Miyazawa flutist, I could hardly contain my excitement about this review. Thrive is Areon Flutes’ third full album release and innova Recordings debut. The flute chamber music ensemble upholds a dogma of revitalizing chamber music for 21st-century audiences. In May 2008, Areon Flutes was awarded the Bronze Medal at the prestigious Fischoff Chamber Music Competition in Notre Dame, Indiana, the first flute chamber music ensemble to do so in thirty-five years. In 2015 they were hailed as one of the most memorable live performers by the San Francisco Examiner. This album Thrive features compositions by Elainie Lillios, Cornelius Boots, and Mike Sempert, and performances by the core trio of Areon Flutes: Jill Heinke, Kassey Plaha, and Sasha Launer.
Lillios’s Summer Sketches, the winner of Areon’s 2014 International Composition Competition, begins with a playful, wandering flute solo. Two more flutes join in and engage in an aural game of hide-and-seek. At times the music describes an action like skipping and diving, and other times seems more onomatopoetic. The two movements, “Skating on Discs of Light” and “Dry Wind,” follow ants running past a picnic, mosquitos buzzing past your ear, spiders creeping toward their prey, and dragonflies dive-bombing the lazy river. Unorthodox tone color, hums, trills, percussive tongue and finger slaps, flutters and growls used on the whole flute family evoke these quintessential insectoid summer sounds. This broad exploration of sounds and soundscape makes sense for an electroacoustic composer flexing her flute trio muscles. Lillios gives a voice to every insect, spider, and bug. Summer Sketches evokes a 21st-century variation of Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux combined with a modernized Das Jahr (Hensel), compacted into two movements.
Cornelius Boots’s Chthonic Flute Suite, commissioned by Areon Flutes, takes the listener on a journey through the underworld. The first movement, “Root of Ether,” begins with a calm, solo meditation. About a minute in, the player exhales poignantly; upon this ‘last breath,’ the tempo picks up and the listener approaches the allegorical rabbit hole. The next movement, “Enantiodromia,” kicks off with a loud chord, and then the three flutes move in and out of sync with each other, taking turns with the melody and turning counterpoint on its head. This middle movement of Chthonic Flute Suite suggests diving down the rabbit hole and finding the underworld. ‘Enantiodromia’ is the concept that any force inevitably produces its opposite, usually towards equilibrium. This is quite possibly my favorite piece on the album for the sheer amount of fun I had listening to the twists and turns. As the name suggests, the piece moves in cycles of turning, reversing, and toppling – on an unrelated note, I just found the perfect word to describe politics. The third movement of Boots’s journey, “Void of Day” opens with a wan panpipe solo. The anemic yet cheerful tune gives way as the trio volleys melodies between each other, forming a collage of scenes from the underworld. At the midpoint, the music suddenly becomes somber and churchlike. Boots changes the mood on a dime. A great gravity overcomes the prior mystique. This does not last until the end, for as the name suggests, the void is coming! After nearly a minute of frantic chordal chuffing, the flutes arpeggiate up and…nothing. Boots saw the opportunity and took it – the void swallows the piece before it can conclude.
The last piece on this album is Uncanny Valley by Mike Sempert, commissioned by Areon Flutes. This gentle three-part counterpoint in the beginning evokes relaxing video games like Journey, Flower, and Thomas Was Alone. I choose this comparison conscientiously. The video games listed are all simple stories concerning man versus machine and are renowned for their unique (and pleasant) soundtracks. When the synthesizer enters, the piece takes on its own soul. Stumbling rhythms, harmonious electronic dance sounds and waltz-like melodies in the flutes offer a glimpse into a halting conversation between artificial intelligence and organic beings. The two halves of this multi-sided duet (organic flutes vs artificial synthesizers seek and fail to find common musical ground. The synthesizers eventually cut out, and the three flutes come together more united than before. This is a track I put on repeat and imagine a different story for each playthrough. It feels like a science fiction story put into music, and I have the pleasure of deciphering it.
Thrive easily earns a spot in my top five albums of 2016. Every track is easy to listen to, and the more you listen, the more levels of appreciation you gain. There is very little showing off, which frankly is something of a relief. So many compositions and performances are downright acrobatic nowadays. Finding a composition without virtuosity for flashy virtuosity’s sake is becoming a rare treasure. It is said that a true master makes something difficult seem easy; Areon Flutes embodies this concept and makes modern compositions for chamber ensembles accessible and pleasurable to all.
Thrive is available from Innova Music at innova.mu/albums/areon-flutes/thrive, and from iTunes, Amazon, and other music retailers.
Akhnaten: Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Resurrected at LA Opera
The daughters of Akhnaten. (Photo: Craig T. Mathew / LA Opera)
Coinciding with a period of cooler, shorter days, and political change (even upheaval), the LA Opera staged a generous month-long run of Akhnaten, by Philip Glass, chronicling the subversive pharaoh who incited a religious revolution in ancient Egypt.
Third in a series of “portrait operas,” (the operatic equivalent of the biopic), Akhnaten, followed in the footsteps of Einstein and Gandhi, though three millennia their senior.
“So far I had covered science and politics. After that I was looking for a figure who influenced the religious side of society,” Glass told LA Opera.
Glass’s first opera, Einstein on the Beach (1976)—a collaboration with director Robert Wilson—was shocking in its originality, great length, and anti-narrative concept, but equally shocking in its success, effectively launching Glass’s career.
An experimental work, LA Opera revived it in 2013 for a terse single weekend run.
Akhnaten, by comparison, markets well: commanding yet vulnerable, approachable yet profound. The work hypnotizes in it visual impact, restrained musicality, spirituality, and the ring of historic authenticity.
Varieties of Minimialist Experience
Glass is counted among the foremost exponents of minimalism in music, and has been for some decades. What is surprising in Akhnaten is that an expansive genre like opera fits so spaciously in minimalist terrain, and integrates minimalist techniques continuously and convincingly.
A scene from “Akhnaten.” (Photo: Craig T. Mathew / LA Opera)
Akhnaten exemplifies minimalism in all its many forms—some often overlooked. Beyond the now trademark arpeggios and tremolos pervasive throughout the Glass output, an economy of means—musical, theatrical, and dramaturgical—guides the opera.
Vocal lines are simple and direct, with narrow tessituras, seeming to avoid any superfluous virtuosity. Texts (when comprehensible) are pithy, repetitive, and set syllabically, fostering clarity and understanding.
Scenes are few in number, and drawn out, but imbued only minimally with story-forwarding action. Atmosphere drives Akhnaten above all else. Drama is restricted by the judicious hand of a minimalist composer: Almost an anti-plot, the opera unfolds in a series of immersive vignettes that paint a portrait of the title figure and his legacy.
Arresting Stillness
Perhaps the clearest example of Akhnaten’s minimalism is its relentlessly slow, measured pace of physicality on stage. The cast moves with a ceremonious, unhurried composure, as if the characters of ancient Egyptian tomb paintings had come alive.
That stately concept of movement, traceable perhaps to Glass-collaborator Robert Wilson’s use of slow motion, distinguishes this production—by Phelim McDermott and the English National Opera—from the original, faster version of the Stuttgart State Opera.
At center, Frederick Ballentine as the High Priest of Amon in “Akhnaten.” (Photo: Craig T. Mathew / LA Opera)
The deliberate pace, which never fails to enchant, induces that present-moment awareness associated with the best of minimalist music. Intermittent juggling episodes course throughout the opera, accenting the palpably inert ambience with gravity-speed bursts of activity.
Adapting Musically
Commissioned by Stuttgart State Opera during a period of renovation, Glass was required to reduce the orchestral forces to accommodate a smaller pit. He adapted by omitting the violin section entirely, setting the highest string writing for the darkly shimmering violas, lending a fitting melancholy character to the orchestral tuttis.
Though stopping short of that classic operatic organizing principle—the leitmotif, recurring motives do provide a thread of comprehension, unifying the lengthy opera through the power of musical memory.
An exposed A natural minor scale, played as a bassoon solo, courses sedately upwards and downwards, sparsely accompanied by thin string writing and gentle woodwind chords, perhaps symbolizing the rise and fall of Akhnaten, his new capital city, and the monotheistic religion he founded centered on the Aten—the disk of the sun.
At the heart of the opera, rounding out Act II, Akhnaten sings a radiant hymn to the sun, in the warmly contrasting key of A major. The one and only aria in English, it is set syllabically to a simple melody of repeated notes and occasional, sparkling leaps.
A Dead Language Comes Alive
Librettist Sholom Goldman calls Akhnaten a form of “vocal archeology,” in the way texts were borrowed from original sources, including the Egyptian Book of the Dead, tomb inscriptions, and Akhnaten’s own poetry.
Most of the opera is sung in the Ancient Egyptian language, its resolute cadence imparting a distinguishing power that elevates text itself to a standing beyond the norm for opera. The first stanza of the choral setting which opens the opera immediately calls attention:
Anthony Roth Costanzo (center) in the title role of “Akhnaten.” (Photo: Craig T. Mathew / LA Opera)
Ankh ankh, en mitak
Yewk er heh en heh
Aha en heh
Live life, thou shalt not die
Thou shalt exist for millions
of millions of years
For millions of millions of years
The sole drawback to the textual treatment might be the use of anachronistic King’s James English translations in the “Hymn to the Sun” and the text of the Scribe (the narrator and tour guide of the whole opera), which in its distanced formality seems at odds with the otherwise contemporary, highly personal character of the opera.
A Transcendent Pharaoh
The strongest connector of audience to opera was Akhnaten himself, portrayed by countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who at once seemed exempt from the boundaries of mortality and sexuality, yet closely related to his listeners.
Akhnaten first appears descending from an elevated platform in a lengthy procession scene, fully frontally nude. His leisurely, aimless gait, and bare, shaved body and scalp impart a newborn, androgynous, angelic quality to the character that endures continuously.
Costumes by Kevin Pollard also served to reduce clarity of gender: ornate, baroquely bejeweled ceremonial regalia enveloped Akhnaten like a newborn swathed in loincloth. His ceremonial robe was imprinted with a female breast insignia, fostering a dual-gender persona.
Akhnaten’s gender is negated further—and foremost—by the use of the countertenor vocal quality, a form of falsetto vocalizing, although more resonant and capable of vibrato.
“When you write an opera, you have a very limited time to tell a complicated story,” Glass said. “Any shortcut becomes important.”
Akhnaten is silent onstage for 40 minutes, and when he finally does sing, “they are all astonished by the sound that comes out of his mouth. It is a clever way of emphasizing him as different,” elaborated Glass.
Tom Pye’s set design was always visually stunning and often surreal, featuring a brilliant, blinding sun, a moon of shifting hues—by turns white, pink, and blue—and later several giant levitating luminous orbs, all pointing to a dream realm more than any actual past.
Anthony Roth Costanzo in the title role of “Akhnaten.” (Photo: Craig T. Mathew / LA Opera)
The Welcome Akhnaten
In the end, what is most striking about Akhnaten is its relevance: That an Egyptian pharaoh separated by three millennia of history could come alive to speak to contemporary audiences so intimately, in a dead language left largely untranslated, in a rare, almost artificial vocal type—that listeners should feel a sense of welcome and belonging—is the genius of this opera and production.
Despite courtyard protests that the original Akhnaten was black but Anthony Roth Costanzo is white, there was a mood of excitement and the sense of something important happening at LA Opera. And while some of the Italian opera regulars were conspicuously absent—replaced by new faces this round—at six performances, Akhnaten is firmly established in the mainstream operatic repertoire.
Glass has made a similar observation: “I always felt there was a public that would like this music, and over time, the audiences, so small in the beginning, have only gotten larger.”
Introducing Elliott Goldkind
You might have seen Elliott Goldkind’s wonderful review of the Synchromy/HOCKET concert last week (click here for that). That was his first article for New Classic LA, but it certainly won’t be the last. I’m stoked to introduce him to everyone. Here’s the bio Elliott sent me:
Elliott Goldkind
Elliott Goldkind has composed music for diverse media, ranging from orchestral and chamber music to film, television, and commercials.
Elliott’s classical/concert music has been performed throughout the United States and Western Europe. His film scoring work has led to collaborations with Jeff Buckley, David Mamet and many talented young directors.
Elliott received his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, studied at Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris and the Hochschule fur Musik in Berlin. He received his Masters and Doctorate degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His teachers include Chester Biscardi, Meyer Kupferman, Stephen Dembksi and Joel Naumann. At the UW-Madison, he helped revive the UW-Madison Contemporary Chamber Ensemble, a group that is dedicated to performing the music of Wisconsin students/composers. Elliott is a MacDowell Colony fellow and the recipient of New York University’s Langley Fellowship.
Stylistically, Elliott’s music ranges from lyrical to nails-on-blackboard. Ideally, he writes with pen and paper, leaving it up to “real musicians” to perform. However, for film and commercial applications, various electronic/digital approaches rear their ugly heads as well.
Elliott was a founding member of the not-too-legendary New York rock bands “Bones Jones and the Jones Tones,” “Hodgepodge Lodge,” and “Freak of Nature.” Like too many others, Elliott is a native New Yorker living in Los Angeles.
Welcome to the team, underwater amigo.
The Lyris Quartet at Music and Conversations
On Saturday, November 12, 2016 Music and Conversations presented the Lyris Quartet in a concert of music ranging from Bach and Mozart to Shostakovich, along with new contemporary works by Jane Brockman and Billy Childs. The Jack Rutberg Fine Arts Gallery on La Brea was the venue and an overflow crowd filled every available seat for the occasion.
Timothy Loo, cellist for the Lyris Quartet was first, performing the Prelude from Suite No. 3 in C Major, BWV 1009 by J.S. Bach. This began with a lovely deep sound in the warm lower registers followed quickly by a series of ascending scales. The detailed ornamentation and the precise articulation was especially easy to follow in the cozy acoustics of the gallery. The tempo was brisk – almost urgent at times – but the optimism and elegance inherent in Suite No. 3 never faltered while under the care of Mr. Loo.
Duo No. 1 in G, K. 423 (version for viola and cello) by Mozart followed. Timothy Loo was joined by Luke Maurer, violist for the Lyris Quartet. By way of introduction, Maurer explained that Michael Haydn had been commissioned by the Archbishop of Salzburg in the summer of 1783 to write six duos, but Haydn fell ill and had only finished four. Mozart offered to complete the remaining two for his friend, and Duo No. 1 in G is the first of these. The piece begins with light, active passages in the viola with a nice counterpoint in the cello. The tempo was brisk and the resulting texture light and frothy – textbook Mozart. Maurer and Loo maintained good coordination as the quick melody alternated with more moderate sections, and they never let the pace slacken or drag.
The Adagio movement followed providing a slower, more relaxed contrast to the opening, but even here the delicate proportions and almost weightless feel of the harmonies carries the listener effortlessly along. The intonation was rock solid. The Rondo:Allegro movement finished the piece and returned to the rapid tempo and closely intertwined rhythms. The quick passages in the viola were particularly well played and the intimate acoustics complimented the overall balance. The bright and sunny feel of this movement persisted to the conclusion, prompting the audience to enthusiastically applaud a fine effort.
The Lyris Quartet at Music and Conversations
Unrequited, the new Billy Childs string quartet was next, with violinists Shalini Vijayan and Alyssa Park joining the others on stage. Unrequited is one of four new pieces commissioned by the Lyris Quartet, all written as a commentary or reflection on String Quartet No. 2 (1928) by Leoš Janáček. Janáček was inspired by his long and close friendship with Kamila Stösslová, a married woman some 38 years younger, with whom over 700 letters were exchanged over a span of 11 years. As Mr. Childs noted in his introductory remarks, this relationship never moved to the next level, and the tragedy of love unfulfilled was uppermost in the mind of the composer while writing this piece. Unrequited begins with long, sustained chords full of wistful sadness. The harmonies are very expressive and the inner details were brought out nicely by the gallery acoustics. This piece was performed at a recent Jacaranda event in a much larger hall and the difference is striking – the interior structure of this piece is well crafted and very beautiful. At times there were faster, more complex sections that suggested a sense of tension or anxiety, but Unrequited always returns to a feeling of achingly mournful disappointment. A final melancholy chord of sad acceptance completes this remarkable work.
beneath the surface of a sea of silence by Jane Brockman followed, based on two lines from the poem Fireflies by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore:
“The world is the ever-changing foam
that floats on the surface of a sea of silence.”
This begins with high trills in the violins and an active melody that has a driving, rhythmic feel, although never overpowering. This sense of purposeful intent continues forward, with occasional hints of tension arising in the harmony. A nice series of tutti trills changes the texture to a mystical shimmering before returning to the more deliberate marcato. An elegant violin solo precedes another series of tutti trills. beneath the surface of a sea of silence proceeds in this way, with slower, more dramatic sections alternating with somewhat faster passages that move persistently ahead. All are interspersed with tutti pizzicato or trills that break into the moment and prepare the listener for the next sequence. beneath the surface of a sea of silence contains all of the mystery and restlessness of the sea, artfully capturing the contrasting relationship of contemplation and movement.
The final work of the concert was String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, Op. 110 by Dimitri Shostakovich. Written over just three days in July, 1960 it is dedicated to ‘the victims of fascism and the war’. Alyssa Park explained that rehearsals of this piece took on a cathartic dimension given recent political events here. The opening movement, Largo, begins with a solemn cello line, picked up, in turn, by the viola and violins. Soft, sustained chords add to the gloomy feel and a sad violin solo arose that was expressively played by Ms. Park. The reflective tempo abruptly ended and a series of frenetic passages of the Allegro molto movement ensued, intense and furious – almost like being under attack. The Lyris Quartet played this with resolute precision, and the close spaces of the gallery seemed barely able to contain the dynamic energy. The dance-like rhythms of the Allegretto movement relieved the tension somewhat and these were given just the right amount of airiness and lyricism. The anxiety and darkness reappeared, however, in the 4th movement with smooth, quietly powerful passages interspersed with short, rapid tutti strokes. The final Largo movement continued in this slower, dirge-like manner and the piece ended with a sad cello solo that faded quietly away. String Quartet No. 8 is a compact and impressively intense work, played with great emotion in this performance. The Lyris Quartet received a long standing ovation for their superb effort.
The next Music and Conversations concert is on March 18, 2017.
The Lyris Quartet has just released a new CD titled Intimate Letters, featuring the Billy Childs piece Unrequited.
Ted Hearne on The Source
On Thursday night I went to the LA Opera/Beth Morrison Projects production of Ted Hearne’s The Source at REDCAT. This is an incredibly important work, and one that needs to be experienced with Daniel Fish’s staging if possible. The text is drawn from documents from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars released by Chelsea Manning via wikileaks, and ways material, both textual and musical, are crosscut, are an amazing reflection not only of the subject but of the way we view subjects today – fragmented, fast, and mediated by technology in occasionally problematic (this is a good thing, in this case) ways. The show continues tonight at tomorrow, and tickets are available at laopera.org/season/16-17-season/The-Source/.
I was able to talk to composer Ted Hearne ahead of the show, so some of the questions below reflect the fact that I hadn’t seen it yet, but deal with subjects that come up again and again in Ted’s work. He’s incredibly thoughtful and transparent in his approaches, and though this is a long read, what he considers and begs all of us to consider is absolutely worth your attention.
Ted Hearne, composer of The Source. Photo: Nathan Lee Bush.
Though The Source is an LA Opera project, you call the work an oratorio. What can listeners expect?
There are four singers who sing the piece entirely while embedded in the audience, and four giant screens surrounding the space playing video throughout (designed by Jim Findlay and Daniel Fish). None of the singers are traditional opera singers, and about half of the songs use live a type of live electronic vocal processing akin to auto-tune. The libretto is entirely primary-source material, drawn mostly from the 400,000+ Dept of Defense cables released by WikiLeaks and their media partners in 2010 (now known as the Iraq War Logs and Afghan War Diary) and from the “Chat Logs” between Adrian Lamo and Chelsea Manning, the US Army Private responsible for releasing those documents to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. There are no characters, no stage and the singers don’t move. (If any of those things disqualify the piece as being called an ‘opera’ than I guess it’s not an opera, but I like the idea that LA Opera is unfazed.)
I read in the LA Times that you began with a plot or narrative of sorts, and moved toward the oratorio/more open ended nature of the work as the libretto progressed. Could you talk about that a bit? Do you feel anything was lost in the process? What did the work gain by going in that direction?
We didn’t start with a plot or traditional narrative per se, just a completely different focus. I started working on the piece in early 2010 — back then I was interested in finding ways to explore the differences between (often sensationalized) media narratives surrounding the leaks. After working with Daniel Fish (director) and Mark Doten (librettist), the focus really shifted toward self-reflection, and asking questions about how we engage with the content of the leaks themselves.
I’m still interested in the idea of music that represents or confronts our current media culture, but in this context it felt like portraying the media hysteria wasn’t saying anything meaningful about it, but merely adding to the noise. We did end up keeping one media-centric piece in The Source, a movement called “Julian in a Nutshell” which sets a list of questions asked to Julian Assange by journalists in December 2010 (but none of his answers). Anne Lanzilotti wrote of this movement on her blog the other day, getting into ways genre/style signifiers are used to musically depict a narrative about the media.
About “plot” — David Shields writes this in his literary manifesto Reality Hunger (Actually this passage is an appropriation of writing by E.M. Cioran. Like all passages in Reality Hunger, Shields appropriated it from outside sources and weaved it into his book.):
There’s only one thing worse than boredom—the fear of boredom—and it’s this fear I experience every time I open a novel. I have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it. The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object. The character is dying out; the plot, too. It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens…
I tend to feel the same way about musical forms, especially opera. A traditional narrative/plot structure tends to keep me at a distance from the material instead of ushering me into it.
The REDCAT staging is, with audience members facing each other and unable to see all of the screens, supposed to reflect the fragmented nature of the The Source. Is this to highlight, for listeners, that their own judgements of the material are unique? Or is there a particular view of the topic that you hope to encourage?
It’s true that The Source is a patchwork of fragments, made up of shards of text (sometimes very small little pieces, sometimes larger passages that have been filtered through one arbitrary lens or another) and various sundry types of musical material. That comes in many ways from a desire to reflect the way we receive information now, or the structure of the information itself, and I also wanted to create unexpected overlays and juxtapositions and adjacencies that could help loosen text from our relationship to its original context.
Daniel Fish’s staging does reflect the fragmented and sometimes ambiguous nature of the text-setting in that there is a 4-channel video installation surrounding the audience, and of course nobody can see 360 degrees around them at one time, so some information will always be missed. However, I find the way he organizes and presents his visual material to be super different (spare at times, almost minimalist, economical and focused) than way I was thinking about organizing the music. And I love the way Daniel set up the audience in the space, sitting there manages to feel incredibly solitary and incredibly communal at the same time.
This certainly isn’t the first time you’ve engaged with sociopolitical issues, particularly systemic injustice, in your work. What you’re doing is absolutely admirable, and important, and clearly done with care and sensitivity. But it does beg a tricky question, one that I’ve also dealt with (perhaps unsuccessfully) as a composer. In some sense, what qualifies you to speak on behalf of the experiences of others? I don’t mean this in at all an accusatory way, but just this morning I was reading Ta Nehisi Coates’ account of growing up in Baltimore and realizing that, as much of an ally as I can be, I have absolutely no experience to relate to that kind of hardship. I’m thinking more of your Katrina Songs here – and don’t know exactly where in Chicago you are from – but do you ever worry about appropriation in your music? Or that you may misrepresent a group? Or is it more about drawing attention to issues?
You’re right, the question is both huge and tricky. And yes, I think about the ins and outs of appropriation all the time. (It would be irresponsible not to, since I use it so often as a creative strategy.) Responsible, attributed appropriation — be it from Chelsea Manning’s chat logs or the oral arguments to Citizens United or Kanye West’s diatribe on the NBC Katrina relief telethon — can be an incredibly honest vehicle for expression, pointing not only at how we process and reflect someone else’s words, but also at the impact of our current media landscape, which is one of decontextualization, fragmentation and sampling.
Katrina Ballads, a piece I wrote nine years ago, is a collection of songs, about an hour long, that sets primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina in 2005, all of which were heard on national media, the words of public figures (Barbara Bush, Anderson Cooper, Kanye West) as well as, in two cases, residents of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast who were interviewed about their experience. (One of them, Hardy Jackson, was interviewed the morning after the storm and had just lost his wife. Another, Ashley Nelson, was trapped in the Lafitte Projects in Treme, New Orleans for several days and spoke about her experience a few days later to an NPR reporter.)
One implication of your question, it seems, is that setting someone else’s words to music is the same thing as attempting to “speak on behalf” of them. That’s not always the case, and was never my intention in writing Katrina Ballads. Rather, the intention was to honor all the circumstances surrounding the origination of the text by never pretending to embody or characterize the speakers themselves, always respecting (and pointing to) that distance. When we put together productions of the piece in 2008 and 2010 we made sure to preserve and respect the identities of the singers too: I wanted to make it clear we were presenting a collection of songs where musicians who lived in Chicago, New York City and Charleston, SC were repeating and aestheticizing words spoken by other Americans in completely different circumstances. The tension between those two perspectives is integral to the piece.
That being said, there is one movement of Katrina Ballads that gnaws at me, which is the one that sets Hardy Jackson’s words. I know I would set those words differently now — actually I would probably choose not to set them — not necessarily because his circumstances are so much different from mine (they are) but because those words were spoken just as he had undergone a terrible life tragedy and he didn’t even really choose to sit for an interview (there just happened to be a roving reporter there). In some contexts – for instance, when the piece is being presented at a music school – the aestheticizing of his trauma seems immoral. Does this movement really bring that assembled audience closer to an understanding of the power and destruction of the storm that couldn’t be achieved with less invasive appropriation? Probably not. If I had been a more mature composer then, if I had been disciplined enough to ask myself some harder questions while writing the piece, I probably would have made different choices.
On the other hand, I have been present at forums where people really hadn’t grasped the impact of Katrina on actual humans, or the need for assistance that never came. There were performances for almost entirely affluent white audiences in Houston, and also for schoolchildren of all backgrounds, and for both of those groups I think the Hardy Jackson movement especially did actually provide a mix of decontextualization and documentation that served an educational function. (And of course for the most part today’s schoolchildren really know nothing about Katrina and its aftermath). And the ensuing conversations (even this one) are also in a way part of the point — who am I to appropriate that man’s words? How sick is it that we’re sitting here receiving this bourgie art piece that steals the words of people living such vastly different lives? Does the music highlight or gloss over those differences?
The implication you took from my question there about setting other people’s words – I’d like to talk a little more about that. This is something I’ve struggled with as a composer. I’ve always had trouble setting other peoples’ texts, because – without their explicit collaboration – I often feel that I’m adding something to the text that the author or speaker might not have intended. I’ve always had an interest in socially conscious music, and certainly love the written word, but this often stops me writing pieces that I might otherwise like to. Unless, of course, I can do something with the text so far from the original that there’s no way a listener might mistake it for the speaker’s intention. Perhaps this is too dogmatic of a question, are there any guiding principles you follow in your use of text? How do you make it clear that you’re not writing on behalf of the original speaker?
Well, if text is attributed, there shouldn’t be any confusion that it originated from another person, right? And it should be obvious that the composer is setting the text, not speaking it. So for me the question about using text is the really same as using any other musical material: are you as a composer using them in a particularly evocative way?
One question I’m interested in asking now: Can you get closer to understanding the difference between yourself and someone else by repeating their words in your own voice?
Last year I wrote a piece for Roomful of Teeth that was related to that idea. I set (among other things) two small chunks of text from Zora Neale Hurston’s classic essay How it feels to be colored me. The idea was not to pretend to any authoritative take on her perspective, but rather to a) understand it better by speaking it and b) understand my own perspective — my own relationship to whiteness and the construct of race in America — by studying and reinterpreting the words that describe hers.
One of the chunks was:
[The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult.]
No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat.
No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed.
[The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.]
I only set the middle two sentences but include the outer ones in program notes for context. I realized that if it were me writing/speaking these words, their meaning might be completely the opposite to Hurston’s; it would be a denial of my white privilege, perhaps a defensive one. I tried to set the words so the specter existed in the music even as the words denied their existence.
I also set the words of another section, in which Hurston tells the story of sitting next to a white person while hearing a performance by jazz musicians in an otherwise all-black club. After describing an ecstatic experience with the music itself, she says:
I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.
“Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
For whatever reason, the gulf of understanding Hurston described made me think of my relationship with my father, in the distance that grew between us and which continues to grow, provoked by conversations surrounding racism and politics and art. I started to see my experience alongside the one she was describing, totally different but also totally real. I called the piece “Letter to My Father,” and reformatted the text so the words would stay in the same sequence but each line would begin and end with a pronoun:
Him. He
He has only heard what I
I felt. He
He is far away but I
I see him.
Him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us.
Us. He
He is so pale with his whiteness then and I
I am so colored.
Music. The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him.
He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.
I don’t know what it means exactly, and the more specific I try to get with an explanation the less sense it makes, but setting this text in this way did help me connect with it strongly. And I don’t think it disrespects the text or the author at all to apply changes as long as the identity and context of the original is clear.
Also I just wanna say: I think it’s OK, even preferable, for art to be problematic. We live in a problematic world. Artists should own that. It’s the loose ends and unanswered questions, and even the misfires and unintended consequences, that provoke the best questions about what art is doing in the first place.
Yes! This is actually something that bothers me quite a bit about certain traditional classical concerts: it seems like there is very little risk. When a performer has studied a piece for their whole life, rehearsed it to “perfection,” and will be playing it in a hall with great sound, I often ask myself why I’d drive and pay money to hear that when awesome recordings are available, though I’m lucky to have a great set of speakers and a comfy couch. With other genres, or even other sociomusical situations, sometimes things go wrong. With new music, you might not know how it’s going to go, and that, to me, makes the live experience so much more thrilling. Is there a way, that you as a composer (and now fellow concert series producer), can encourage artistic question-asking like this?
Well I don’t have any problem with musicians rehearsing a lot if they think it’ll make their performance better!
Personally, I start asking a lot of questions when similar musical gestures or ideas are used in super different musical contexts, or when very different musics exist on top of each other or next to each other in the same framework. Basically, looking to difference as much as possible. Endlessly inspired by this Audre Lorde quote: “Difference must not be merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which creativity can spark like a dialectic.”
How does that make it into your musical material? I once heard you use the phrase “genre counterpoint” in passing, and always wanted to hear more about it.
I don’t remember using that phrase but I like it and am going to steal it from you starting now.
I’m pretty sure it’s yours, so certainly feel free! It’s a kind of rad term. I’d heard rumors you were shaking things up at USC and trying to reduce the amount of traditional counterpoint composers had to take. I think – and this was after a show and beer was involved – I asked something like “isn’t that actually kind of important?” and you said something like “yes, but maybe we should use those semesters to teach other approaches to counterpoint, what might genre counterpoint be…”
I wrote a little essay about my feelings re: genre and “craft” which I put on my website a few months ago. I don’t know if ‘genre counterpoint’ makes any sense but I do think that when musical signifiers are used outside of their expected context a sometimes-interesting counterpoint of ideas and expectations occurs. There are some people for whom it seems that the inclusion of nonclassical stylistic elements (e.g. a drumset player hitting the snare drum a certain way, or a singer accessing an R&B vocal tradition) in a classical/concert-music context automatically constitutes an impurity, or pandering, or an example of inauthentic cultural appropriation. This type of thinking is pretty weak because it avoids dealing with lots of potential complexities, and it tends to keep the field pretty segregated.
Ted’s work certainly helps to fight segregation in our field. Hear it for yourself at REDCAT tonight and tomorrow, of via bandcamp at https://tedhearne.bandcamp.com/album/The-Source.
Review: wasteLAnd’s “Tout Orgeuil” at ArtShare LA
WasteLAnd continues to impress audiences with a program of new music, most of it from LA-based composers. Each performer has their respective claim to fame in LA and is closely associated with wasteLAnd, and each composer is a long-time favorite of wasteLAnd’s. New to the scene, however, is Allison Carter, a poet whose words found their way into Deyoe’s new piece. Her work made quite the stir among the audience members, and I have a feeling we will begin to hear her name more in the future.
Before I review the concert itself, I find something worth mentioning: the gender representation. It was an even split. In my day job, I currently have my students writing a paper on 19th century gender roles and women composers in the Romantic era, so this has been on my mind a lot. One hundred years ago, women could not vote in the United States, and it was nearly impossible to earn respect as a composer or performer. Nowadays, female representation in the music scene is gaining. It is not yet even, but progress is happening. WasteLAnd’s October concert featured six composers; three were women and two were men (Erik Ulman had two pieces, so the ratio of compositions is 3:3). There were seven performers (including Allison Carter reading aloud), and four were women. The best part was that I didn’t notice until afterwards. I have come to recognize that gender equality is already quite common in the LA new music scene. So much so that this is the first time I put it together. I looked back over some old programs I’ve reviewed, and every concert has women as composers, performers, directors or all three.
Ok. Feminist aside complete. Moving on, because there is so much good about this concert to discuss.
The night opened with Kaija Saariaho’s Folia, performed by Scott Worthington on double bass and electronics. Like many compositions from the end of the 20th century, this piece focuses on dynamics and timbre over pitch and harmony. Sometimes the bass whistles like an icy wind, other times it rumbles like an earthquake, putting palpable pressure on your ears. Scott saws out some kind of textural melody, phrases build and climax and fade – textural intensity carries the musical line. The electronic aspect augments and echoes the timbres. It overlays overtones, resulting in both a more ‘open’-sounding composition and greater complexity overall.
Next on the docket was the duet Tout Orgeuil… by Erik Ulman. Stephanie Aston and Elise Roy are always an amazing team, and their performance on this piece was no exception. It begins with a piccolo solo, and Roy gradually descended down the flute family to alto flute. Aston sang sleepily about pride smoking in the night. Given that the text is from a Stephan Mallarmé poem, my mind turned to Debussy. Ulman is no Impressionist, but I feel Debussy would have approved of the modern counterpoint and expressive extended techniques. The pitches bent down, down, down into sleep, and the flutes became larger and the words grew heavier. Erik captured the good sinking feeling, the kind you feel in a cozy armchair while drifting to sleep.
Third up was Matt Barbier on trombone and electronics performing puddles and crumbs by Katherine Young. For me, this piece created a very specific soundscape: I, the listener, am a koi in the pond on a rainy day and the daily miracle of food raining from heaven is happening. Three of the major elements that contribute to this soundscape are 1. Sharply sucking air through the trombone, 2. Sharp plosives into the mouthpiece that are amplified by the electronics, 3. Dynamic tempi. Matt’s deep breathing combined with the electronic influence reminded me of snorkeling, the plosive pops like rain on water’s surface when I swim underwater. These are instinctive memories, of course, and it may be a coincidence that they play so well together. Now you understand my watery theme. The push and pull of the tempo took me a while to incorporate into my soundscape idea. At first I thought it felt like seasickness, but I eventually concluded it was more like watching fish dart in a pond. They sprint only a few inches or feet, depending on the size of the fish, and then hesitate. The tempo seemed to do exactly that. And then it all became clear, that the soundscape was from the point of view of a koi in a pond in the rain during feeding time. I’m sure many will disagree, whether they had another idea or didn’t find it so blatantly programmatic at all; one of the wonders of music is how everyone experiences things differently. For what it’s worth, I did come up with a secondary interpretation that involves heavy breathing, plosive pops, and sprinting-and-stopping: Darth Vader playing basketball. So really it’s all relative. Regardless of the loftiness or pop art-iness of my personal experience, Barbier proved yet again that the trombone is more than just a brass instrument in a marching band. He played every color in the palette, and demonstrated rigorous control over his body and his instrument to perform such a demanding piece.
Fittingly the 100th piece wasteLAnd has programmed, Erik Ulman’s this until is a flute solo, and Elise Roy absolutely nailed it. I’ve said before that she has superhuman control of her instrument, and she proved it again with this piece. She made her flute sing, speak, howl, wail and whisper. Though a solo composition, I could sometimes here a ghost of counterpoint when she effected heavy harmonics. I honestly couldn’t say if that was Ulman’s intention or Roy’s execution, but every so often a particularly turgid note would quietly sound the octave or fourth below, creating a beautiful, haunting harmony. this until was the only solo acoustic musical composition of the night and it was right in the middle of the program; Elise managed to keep up the energy on her own, and carried us into the final pieces of the evening.
The program ends with a sort of binary piece. First, Allison Carter read her Poems from A Fixed, Formal Arrangement; Nicholas Deyoe used the text for his piece Finally, the cylindrical voids tapping along, a line from the poem. I can’t say I have ever attended another concert that had the poet read their work first before the musical product, and I wish this would become the norm everywhere. As a general rule, increased understanding leads to increased appreciation, so knowing the text ahead of time (and from the author herself, no less) helped Deyoe’s work succeed. The instrumentation sounded like speech slowed down by a factor of ten. The melodies felt like they wanted to resolve up to a tonic, but they kept bending downwards, defying expectations. One thing I love about Deyoe’s style is that it’s always interesting and it never fulfills your expectations. Once you think you have it figured out, he changes it again. This piece feels like your mind wandering and getting lost – when it’s 4am and you have to wake up in two hours but you’re caught up in the twilight zone that is four in the morning. Knowing composers, that is probably the mindset he was in while writing. Also, knowing composers, that is a hard composition to pull off. I commend Nicholas Deyoe for a well-constructed and evocative ensemble composition.
WasteLAnd concerts are on the first Friday of every month at ArtShare. Check out Weights and Measures on November 4.
Editor’s note: WasteLAnd is currently running their annual fundraiser. Take a minute to support them at https://squareup.com/store/wasteland/
Kallay Highlights Spirit of Times in Piano Spheres Recital
Aron Kallay performing Ian Dicke’s Counterpundit
Pianist Aron Kallay offered a well-rounded program of innovative, politically charged music, including three world premieres, to open the Piano Spheres 2016-17 season. This, the 23rd season, is dedicated to Piano Spheres founder, Leonard Stein–born 100 years ago December–whose memory will inform each concert even more than usual.
“I did not know Leonard Stein personally,” stated Kallay in a preconcert talk, “but his impact on new music is clear, and makes its way into this program.”
Stein conceived of Piano Spheres, with a mission statement to champion “broader spheres of piano repertoire.” He performed an annual recital in the series, alternating with the four other pianists he selected.
Following his demise in 2004, Stein was never replaced. His spot in the series was left open for a guest artist, of which Kallay was this season’s choice.
Kallay programmed an exciting assortment of new works with an eye to Stein’s preferred repertoire, as well as the upcoming Presidential election and its implications for social justice. True to himself, Kallay–a director of People Inside Electronics and Microfest–performed several pieces involving electronics, though Stein generally played acoustic piano alone.
The REDCAT stage, decorated with political signs, came to life with the first notes of Monroe Golden‘s microtonal composition for retuned and remapped digital piano, I’m Worried Now, after the perennial blues standard “Worried Man Blues,” on a text about penal servitude.
Golden’s piece, a microtonal reinterpretation of twelve-bar blues, set the tone for the Kallay’s program, entitled “I’m worried now…but I won’t be worried long.” Most of the works explored troubling topics in recent history, and pointed to the uncertainty surrounding the upcoming election, although ended on an optimistic note.
Microtonal music, with its expanded pitch vocabulary, enjoys heightened capacity for emotional expression. Monroe Golden relied on the technique of extended just intonation, retuning the digital keyboard to the pitches of the overtone series out to the 96th partial, to express the atrocities of penal servitude in the 20th century South most directly.
“‘Worried Man Blues’ is a piece I’ve known all my life,” stated Golden in a post concert interview. “The practice discussed in the text primarily affected the poor….I wanted to use microtonality to express the pain the compelled prisoners must have felt.”
Beyond the arresting, microtonal twang, which reinforced the blues song’s original message, viewers were treated to a surreal cognitive dissonance as far right keys sounded low in pitch and far left keys sounded high, defying expectations of any keyboardists present.
In a nod to Leonard Stein, Kallay offered a crystal clear rendition of Dallapiccola’s Quaderno Musicale di Annalibera (“Musical Sketchbook for Annalibera”), a suite of eleven miniature movements for piano solo dedicated to the composer’s daughter (the work’s namesake), on the occasion of her 8th birthday.
Beyond the scope of most children’s abilities, the work is more about childhood, in its whimsical playfulness, than for children per se.
“This is one of my favorite pieces for piano solo of the twentieth century, and I know Leonard Stein admired it and performed it,” stated Kallay.
A major twelve tone composition, Quaderno, would be known to Stein, who was Schoenberg’s assistant and graded assignments by Schoenberg’s pupils at UCLA. The brand of twelve-tonality utilized by Dallapiccola was closer to Berg’s than Schoenberg’s however, integrating tonal references, such as thirds and sevenths, for a gentle lyricism throughout.
The work also earned a place on the program due to Dallapiccola’s staunch support of the anti-fascist movement in mid-twentieth century Europe, which Kallay deemed apt in view of the imminent shift in Executive leadership and the risks entailed.
“I hope you like wrestling…,” signaled Kallay wryly, as a screen lit up and attendees sat up, evidently striving to process what was in store.
Kallay co-funded the next work, a world premiere Piano Spheres commission by composer Ian Dicke—wrestling aficionado, political activist, and accomplished music technologist—a volatile combination, ideally suited to Piano Spheres and the REDCAT stage.
Dicke’s Counterpundit features a montage of classic wrestle-mania footage (names like Hulk Hogan and Sgt. Slaughter), looped into additive phrases, somewhat like a Stravinsky ballet. Dicke created a computer application combining live electronic processing of piano input with the video media. Kallay, opening the work as a soloist, eventually shifted roles into chamber musician, integrating piano music with the oddly hypnotic footage and layers of electronic sound in this Gesamtkunstwerk.
Heavily camp-laden Counterpundit compares the buffoonery of wrestle-maniacs to the political media pundits that influence perception in critical times such as these.
“I would have written something about this even if Aron hadn’t asked me to, as I consider myself a politically engaged composer.”
Traditional musical language, from Satie to Prokofieff (the latter quoted at one point), works with Dicke’s own harmonic concept as a convincing partner to the footage. The rhythmic play between instrumental forces attained to virtuoso levels, Kallay wizardly synchronizing with the media at several turns.
If Kallay is any example, it is clear that today’s pianist must go beyond piano playing. Kallay creates themed concerts, discovers existing repertoire to support a thesis, finds composers to commission, and constructs a verbal narrative to contextualize the program for attendees.
In the course of such research, he discovered Karen Walwyn, pianist and composer from Washington D.C., who provided the next work—another world premiere—“June 17th,” a movement from her suite Mother Emanuel: Charleston 2015, after the shooting in Charleston on that day.
“As much as I love this piece, I struggled with whether to program it because of its extraordinary gravity,” noted Kallay, “but thought it was important and should be heard.”
The work opens with a simple statement of classic hymn “Amazing Grace,” which breaks off abruptly, interrupted by terse, tense figuration. The hymn is reharmonized in surprising ways, fleshed with angry virtuoso writing until breaking off once more in a sharp, unanswered conclusion.
Pianist Genevieve Feiwen Lee took the stage along with Kallay, to perform the next work, by Canadian composer Ives Daoust, Impromptu, for piano, synthesizer, and tape.
Pianist Aron Kallay is joined at REDCAT by Genevieve Feiwen Lee
“Impromptu is a cry expressing the tortures of the soul that plague contemporary human beings,” writes Daoust, and indeed the musique concrète effects of the recorded media—sirens, traffic, and other elements of the urban soundscape—infuse the piece with a sense of angst, supporting the theme of social upheaval.
The Impromptu is a genre associate with the Romantic era, when friends would gather to generate their own music, largely by improvising. Daoust offered a modern, fully worked out Impromptu, every nuance preformulated and accounted for, but still expressing humanity’s key questions.
“I think people are as tortured by existential questions as they were during the Romantic period,” notes Daoust.
Preserving a link to the Romantic Impromptu tradition, Daoust quotes the haunting B section melody of Chopin’s Fantasy-Impromptu, (used also by Crumb in his piano work Makrokosmos).
Lee, playing the Steinway model D, brought a melting lyricism to the singing melodies, while angular lines emerged from out of the recording and duo ensemble.
In a strongly topical inclusion to the program, Laura Karpman’s Shrill, a work of “disposable music,” as Kallay introduced it, is overtly centered on the 2016 presidential election. Whether the work will endure as a humorous and surprisingly musical snapshot of current events, or fade away as quickly as the losing candidate, only time will tell.
Shrill, commissioned by Kallay and Piano Spheres, is Karpman’s answer to a critique of Hillary Clinton. Detractors call her voice shrill, “but it is Donald Trump who is truly shrill,” so notes Karpman.
The work is scored for “solo piano and Trump,” which reads like a typo at first glance. Cast in the perennial melodrama genre—spoken word accompanied by music—the verbal content is complimented by music reinforcements, yet unfolds with clarity.
Soundbites of Trump’s especially polarizing statements are presented in catchy rhythms, looped for effect, both musical and political. Kallay served once again as accompanist to the media, interspersing Trump’s charged remarks with a sardonic, biting musical language reminiscent of Satie’s funniest moments. Stereophonic effects abound, imparting a sophistication that lifts the work well beyond its prosaic central topic.
Fortuitously, Trump’s voice and locution is highly musical, so it turns out. Who knew he sang melodies such as descending broken minor triads, and perfect fifths while on the campaign trail. He may have missed a calling as vocalist.
Kallay concluded by stating, “I am actually not sure I won’t be worried long….”
The future remains uncertain, but the Jewish hymn “Shalom Chaverim,” arranged into a set of eight variations for piano solo by American composer Adolphus Hailstork, rounded out the program on a friendly, hopeful note.
Hailstork’s reinterpretation of the traditional Jewish theme, sung by children on holidays throughout the Jewish calendar, utilized modern harmonies, including quartalism and expanded tonality, and warm textures that express the original text implicitly:
Peace
Good friends
Till we meet again
Peace