JAMES TENNEY (1934-2006)
Three Pieces for Drum Quartet (1974-5)

1. Wake, for Charles Ives
2. Hocket, for Henry Cowell
3. Crystal Canon, for Edgar Varèse

James Tenney was, among many other things, a pioneer of computer music, and this percussion score is an algorithmic composition. The three pieces were originally conceived in 1974-5 for a mechanical instrument-cum-artwork, Drum, built by the U.S.-German artist Stephan von Huene for the Exploratorium in San Francisco and played automatically by hammers responding to information on a rotating disc. Tenney’s performing version sets the programs running live.

The first is the simplest sort of canon, a round, based on a drum rhythm from Ives’s Fourth Symphony, which is repeated with added intricacies as each new drummer enters. Two meanings of the title are invoked. The piece is a funeral celebration (though also a funeral march), and at the same time the Ives rhythm, like a ship, leaves a wake of disturbed patterns and dissolving ripples.

A hocket, in medieval music, has contrapuntal parts that fill in each other’s rests, and Tenney uses this technique to create spatial movement in the second piece, where he also draws on Cowell’s way of treating rhythm as analogous to pitch, with rhythmic octaves (doubled durations) and so on.

Varèse, like Ives, is honored with a canon on a quotation: in his case, a snare drum rhythm from his percussion classic Ionisation. This is built up gradually in the opening section; Tenney follows Varèse in likening the process to crystal growth. There is a middle section, played without snares, based on the same rhythm in reverse. Then the original form returns—and the snares, too—in a final section where the gaps between the canonic voices progressively narrow, until the players are together.

Larry Polansky devotes a whole chapter to the drum quartets in his monograph The Early Works of James Tenney, which is available online and most easily found via the link on the Tenney Wikipedia page.

ALVIN LUCIER (b. 1931)
Still Lives (1995)

1. Sunlight Diamond
2. Hammock
3. Barbecue Grill
4. Lamp Shade
5. Three Floor Tiles
6. Ferns
7. Bread Knife
8. Chopsticks

Through half a century of work in experimental music, Alvin Lucier has been alert in particular to how sound can make a space come alive, make it not just a neutral medium but part of the performance, a reverberant presence, scintillant with vibrations. One of his ways of achieving that is to have the performed sound constantly tracing, and being traced by, recordings of sine waves slowly rising or falling in frequency. Still Lives, written in the summer of 1995 for this evening’s performer, is a work of this kind. When a piano note and an electronic tone are exactly in tune, they reinforce one another. If they are a little apart in frequency, there will be a pulsing beat, depending on their distance. For example, if the piano plays concert A (440 Hz) while a recorded sine wave is at 438 Hz, there will be a beat of 2 Hz, or two pulses per second, increasing in speed if the sine wave is descending, and therefore drawing further away from the piano, or decreasing to zero if it is ascending to the piano’s pitch. “Under certain acoustical conditions,” the composer notes in the score, “the beating may be heard to spin through space.” There are effects, also, on the listener’s sensation of pitch, which is destabilized by the slowly changing electronic aura. Repeated notes on the piano may sound slightly different, because the frame of reference has slid.

Lucier has described how the work came to be written: “When pianist Joseph Kubera asked me to compose a work for him, I decided to write a suite of eight short movements. For the shape of each movement I simply looked around my house and selected images and objects that came into my line of vision, including the hammock strung between two trees in my back yard, a diamond of sunlight on the living room floor, a pair of chopsticks lying on the kitchen counter. I drew the shapes on paper, with precise timings and pitch information, and sent them to Bob Bielecki who programmed them on a computer and recorded the waves on DAT tape. I copied the shapes on music paper, then notated pitches for the piano which would cause audible beating: the near-unison, and, because of their strong overtones, the near-octave and -twelfth below the sounding waves.”

The movements vary subtly in speed and more widely in complexity, in proportion with the complexity of the shape drawn. “Ferns” is the most complex, with three sine waves throughout (two is the norm), against which the piano most often plays chords of three or four notes. “Bread Knife” is immediately simpler (one of the sine waves stays at concert A throughout) and “Chopsticks” simpler still.

An image of human endeavor unfolds. A person is using a tool (the piano) to communicate with the unseen (the electronic tones). What results is poetry.

FRANK DENYER (b. 1943)

The Hanged Fiddler (1972-73)

Denyer’s music is, to quote a Morton Feldman title, between categories. It does not fit into any evident western tradition (one may say the same of Cage’s music, or Ustvolskaya’s, or Scelsi’s, or indeed Feldman’s—all composers whose work Denyer the pianist has performed). It seems, perhaps, a step closer to nature than most of what we know, closer to the sound of wind shaking the leaves of a tree, of a rock cracking in the heat of the sun, of insect life and larger animals (not excluding human animals). Even though, like most composers, Denyer has spent much of his life in academic institutions (including a period in the mid-seventies as a doctoral student at Wesleyan and a long tenure as professor of composition at Dartington College in southwest England), his music comes from outdoors. A time in Kenya (1978-81) may have helped, though the first piece we hear tonight arrived before that and is already fully characteristic.

Begun in August 1972 and finished the following January, The Hanged Fiddler belongs to a group of short pieces on which Denyer was working at the time, intending them to be presented either as a set or individually. In this five-minute number, a solo violinist is accompanied by a percussionist (on bones and bass drum) and a drone that takes its note from the violin, moving on after a while so as to renew the harmonic horizon. The title refers to the stories told of fiddlers who played their last immediately before execution, but Denyer leaves it nicely uncertain what this condemned felon might have been wanting to convey. A confession, or self-justification? Lament or bravado? Or just the pattern of a travelling life in a line that loops near many folk traditions without settling in any, until it fades away in oscillation across the two lowest open strings?

Woman, Viola and Crow (2004)

Three decades later, in the summer of 2004, Denyer came up with another string solo in which the seemingly extraneous becomes essential, but now everything is done by the lone performer. One cannot say that her vocalization—whistling, humming, quiet singing, breathing, and, at times, the realistic imitation of a crow’s call—is accompanied by her playing (softened to a whisper by the use of a practice mute throughout), nor that the vocal sound accompanies the instrumental. Rather, the two twine around each other in the center, sometimes almost indistinguishable, which can give the startling impression that the woman (or the viola) has two voices at once. Denyer notes that “the integrity of the slow elongated melodic line lies at the heart of the piece,” and adds that: “Melodic continuity extends in very broad spans reaching across rests and silences.” Tuning is ultra-fine, with quarter-tones and sixth-tones, the notes often approached through slides or narrow intervals. The addition of noises—footsteps and the “soft shimmering sound” of a rattle attached to the performer’s clothing—helps condition the performance, which, Denyer further remarks, “should suggest the character of a very slow dance.” Like his pieces generally, Woman, Viola and Crow is highly evocative while not resembling or recalling anything with which we are familiar. It was written for Elisabeth Smalt and lasts about twelve minutes.

Out of the Shattered Shadows 2 (1999)

Faint and fragile as this piece often is, its presence is sure, and it needs very little introduction—except perhaps to say that the tuning is again incremental, that supplementary instruments are again the norm (especially rattles, and concertina reeds placed in cardboard tubes and mouth-blown), and that the duration is around fifteen minutes.

The composer’s website (www.frankdenyer.eu) provides more information about his music. There are recordings of The Hanged Fiddler on the album Fired City (Tzadik), of Woman, Viola and Crow on Silenced Voices (mode), and of Out of the Shattered Shadows 2 on Faint Traces (also mode).

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.