An experimental tradition? What could be more oxymoronic? And yet, and yet. How should an innovator not gain courage and determination from the example of other innovators, as John Cage did from Henry Cowell, or as Morton Feldman did from Cage? Feldman liked to say that Cage gave him permission, and probably tonight’s other two composers would want to agree. They met when studying, in Berlin in the mid-sixties, not with Cage but with Elliott Carter, and stayed together in Rome as members of the live electronic outfit Musica Elettronica Viva in the late sixties and early seventies. Since then, their paths have diverged, but along similar lines, both of them splitting their time between Europe and the U.S., between composition and teaching—passing on the permission.

MORTON FELDMAN (1926-87)
The Viola in My Life II

“Extremely quiet, all attacks at a minimum, with no feeling of a beat.”

So runs the performance marking for this ten-minute piece, which comes from a sequence of four compositions Feldman wrote in 1970-71 for the U.S. viola player Karen Phillips to perform with small ensemble in the first two (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, celesta, and percussion in tonight’s piece), just piano in the third, and orchestra in the last. At the time, he had spent two decades working with various kinds of indeterminate notation. Here, on the contrary, everything is prescribed.

But is there a difference? Nothing is being urged on. Not only does the music remain hardly more than breath-loud all through, but the rhythm floats. Also, the main melodic gestures—a phrase that winds up through more than two octaves in short even rhythmic values, and something that sounds like a memory of a folk tune, accompanied just by pizzicato cello—keep recurring, and repetition in this context, whether exact or gently disturbed, is a way of going nowhere. Statement is replaced by restatement, echo, memory. “My intention was to think of melody and motivic fragments—somewhat the way Robert Rauschenberg uses photographs in his painting—and superimpose this on a static sound world more characteristic of my music.”

Like photographs, these melodic gestures are images from another time. Straying here, they are lost—lost in a world of the lost. Exact notation, essential to their existence, is failing them. Barlines, invented to indicate strong beats, no longer do so. Crescendo markings, devised to communicate increasing tension or affirmation, have become ruffles in the plane. A tempo marking stands above music that is tempoless. The vast resources of difference are bending towards an essential sameness.

“Situations repeat themselves with subtle changes rather than developing. A stasis develops between expectance and its realization. As in a dream, there is no release until we wake up, and not because the dream has ended.”

ALVIN CURRAN (b. 1938)
Schtyx

From Alvin Curran’s enormous and hugely varied output of works—pieces with electronics or for live performance, site-specific or not—Schtyx is instrument-specific: a thirty-minute trio written in 1992 for David Abel, Julie Steinberg, and William Winant, who recorded it for CRI. The resulting album has the following note by the composer:

All his life, my father played the trombone and sang; just before he died, he became a music critic. He said: “Chords, yes Alvin, but it needs more melody.” Schtyx was the answer. It opens with a dotted quarter at 50. From the start, implications appear and never cease. They remain open for business like a river. The melody, first thought terminal, is recycled on a child’s buzz saw, but then reappears as a mensch. Ten minutes later, it turns up as a 5/4 waltz scrutinized by a group of unemployed harmonica players in the center of Darmstadt. It then visits Persia, Buffalo, and Irene, coming to rest on a bed of one-note hymns in Braxton’s former studio. Schtyx are a rim-shot away from the Grand Canal; there a gondoliere can be heard singing an early Christian song by Wolf. Later in the day on Piazza Navona, Willie 4X Jam will be seen selling cool hip-hop riffs to a gang of Neapolitain bass-drum smugglers. Schtyx are charts, bones, professions, shades, numbers, glues, hypes, acts, devils, organgrindings, wood implements, jugglers, chance operations, performance art, the Yiddish underground.

Schtyx are what you use to get away with it. For example, from the wings of the theater a chair is moved mercilessly from left to right. Its angle to the river determines the tempi as well as the amount of hommage owed to Satie’s furniture store. All this occurs in strict urban counterpoint as if from John’s window on 18th St. The violin has multiple tasks, such as peddling unmuted hats and footwear on the bridge; similarly, the pianist in bar seven has a chick-pea attack followed by chords of smoked trout and marbles. Clark Coolidge supplied the book; later he faxed the instructions. So in the E flat adagietto, Miles runs when Edith says “cookie.” Sections come and go, and cardboard boxes full of sampled objects are launched from the marimba theme park. Trisha Brown makes a gypsy violin maker cry on 19th century harmonics while dog whistles are blown, harmonicas inhaled. Three violins come from their cases, Chicago style get down, and howl softly at the moon. Yet another tune over the arpeggiated piano rolls and no one can hold the violin’s identity back any longer. The school is overrun with Irish tenors. Melody bursts from the bathroom and the traps break into patterns remeniscent of Sonia Delaunay’s recent paintings. A plastic windshield scraper used to cut the Bazooka gum in equal meters is now discarded, leaving the musicians to quickly figure out what to do next. The violin scrolls and plays only what’s written; the other two only play from the mayonnaise stains on their scores. Is it Torah or Fakebook? ING or DURING? Cecil Taylor, Cole Porter, and Morty Feldman have a conference call—they decide to order a Golem. Fellini thought it was a great idea but said he couldn’t be there. Gabriella Munter painted Kandinsky in bed from the next room in Munich. This music was written 35 kilometers southeast of Rome.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI (b. 1938)
96

Frederic Rzewski’s musical life through the last half century has been extraordinary. In a sense, he has done everything: playing Karlheinz Stockhausen’s most challenging piano pieces, pioneering—with his friend Alvin Curran—electronics in live performance, vitally reconnecting with repertories very different from the erstwhile avantgarde, from Bach to Busoni, and creating a solo piano colllection that extends through ten hours, The Road. That title, though, says it all. He may have traveled through many different landscapes, but he has kept to the same path, the same principles of curiosity, of remaking, and of doing as much as a musician can do to change the world. Things picked up along the way, like improvisation, have not been lost. There have been no volte-faces, only a consistently conscientious reaction to changing circumstances—circumstances way outside the concert hall as well as within it.

Like many of Rzewski’s pieces, 96 is a system at once strict and unruly. He wrote it in 2003 for his teacher Carter, in anticipation of the latter’s 96th year. The metronome speed is appropriately quarter note = 96, and the piece honors its dedicatee also in spelling out his name in notes: C – A – Re (D) – Ti (B) – E – Re= (B=). A twelve-tone row is produced by adding the six remaining notes, and this rotates throughout most of the piece, which comprises a pair of brief five-part canons plus a homecoming. The canons are in octaves and double octaves, and may be played by any instruments having the requisite ranges.

A further 96 is given by there being eight soundings of the twelve-tone row in the first canon before the pattern is disturbed—though perhaps the greater disturbance comes from the harmonic and rhythmic consequences of instruments singing the same song at different levels and times.

FREDERIC RZEWSKI (b. 1938)
Pocket Symphony

Rzewski wrote this half-hour piece in 1999-2000 for the Chicago-based group eighth blackbird, who included it on an all-Rzewski album, fred (Cedille CDR 90000 084). Fitting the commissioning ensemble’s regular lineup of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion, the piece has an instrumentation very similar to that of the Feldman piece heard at the start of this program. Resemblances end there, though, pretty much. Rzewski’s music is exuberant and crammed with divergent references, running from creepy film music à la Bernard Herrman in the second movement to twelve-tone Schoenberg in the fifth, from novel instrumental effect to popular song. It’s all here, and yet the intelligence that pieces it together is identifiably Rzewski’s, finding a world—and the message is social-political as well as musical—in which many different things can coexist, the strains leavened by mutual awareness and humor.

Each of the six movements includes a cadenza for one of the players—not necessarily near the end: that for clarinet comes at the beginning of the fourth movement. These cadenzas will obviously be conditioned by what leads up to them and what they must return to, but Rzewski evidently expects his musicians to equal—if not exceed—his own openmindedness. Also, the whole nature of the cadenza is changed when everyone—not just the soloist—has one. It’s not a mark of prestige but an invitation generously extended to all.

The Pocket Symphony is altogether democratic, too, in its composed sections. In the first movement, Rzewski offers a characteristic interrupted unison, where the marimba sustains a flow of sixteenth-notes, out of which the other instruments pick other patterns, with pauses for breath or wonderment. Elsewhere, the intricate and clear textures—also often strange and funny—show off everyone equally. Oddest of all, perhaps, is the finale, which starts with noises, into which the cello tentatively interposes twelve-note melody, continuing as the violin commences a chromatic ascent from its lowest note, and continuing still as the whole thing threatens to turn into a tango until the cadenza, this time for cello, stops it—or doesn’t, if the cellist so wishes. Anything can happen.

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.