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RECITAL REVIEW
Anthony de Mare Steven Mayer
February 3, 2007
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The Piano's Full Range By David Bratman
Anthony de Mare sat down at the piano on Saturday evening at Stanford's Dinkelspiel Auditorium, in a concert of works that spanned the life of the American piano repertoire from jazz to classical and points elsewhere, but not all that he did there fit under the conventional definition of making music. He recited or half-sang texts by James Joyce and Oscar Wilde while tapping on the piano frame, lifting the lid over the keys and slamming it shut with a resonant bang (ouch!), honking a bulb horn (the type Harpo Marx used to wield), slapping various parts of his own body, hooting and crying out, and playing a few notes, as well.
John Cage, who provided the Joyce texts and instructions for the tapping and slamming, claimed that any sounds can be music. He elevated this notion into his basic artistic principle. But what he actually proved was that the set of organized sounds is larger than the set of music.
This is not a criticism. Expect music from these works and they will sound silly, pointless, and frustrating. But if you have ears to hear the larger realm of organized sound, they can be fascinating. De Profundis by Frederic Rzewski consists of 30 minutes of Wilde's letters from Reading Gaol, with the other effects listed above. But listen to the work as an actor's recitation accompanied by additional sounds, and it becomes a riveting theatrical experience. If I had to choose between austere serialism and this, I'd pick this: It's the more emotionally moving work.
The concert was part of a series of lectures and performances titled "The American Piano," organized by author and music historian Joseph Horowitz (see "'The American Piano': In Need of Tuning" in this issue). During the second half of Saturday's program, titled "American Mavericks," De Mare played other modern American works that sounded more like music while still expanding on the conventional ideas of what you can do at a piano. He performed Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues, making the piano sound like a deafening cotton mill. He played some of Cage's early works for prepared piano, with screws and weather stripping inserted between the strings to make the piano sound like the percussion ensemble that Cage would have preferred to write for.
A Room sounds like distant gongs. Tossed as It Is Untroubled sounds like a giant, plucked folk instrument with no resonance.
De Mare played Henry Cowell's Advertisement, bashing the keyboard with his fists to convey the incessancy of flashing neon signs. And most eerily of all, he played Cowell's The Banshee, leaning over the open piano box and stroking, striking, and plucking the strings to produce the unearthly wail of this ghost of Irish mythology.
The importance of receiving artistic works for what they are and not as something else, no matter how thin the line that separates the categories, was brought home by the other half of the program, an essay in the evolutionary origin of jazz piano titled "The Black Virtuoso Tradition." Steven Mayer offered short pieces by five composers, in chronological order. It seemed to me that Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) and Scott Joplin (1867?-1917) in the 19th century are best heard as one type of music — call it "classical," to stretch a point — while in the first half of the 20th century, Jelly Roll Morton and Art Tatum were making something quite different. Between them came James P. Johnson, at the hinge point that marks the creation of a new kind of music. Johnson took the unvarying left-hand rhythm of Gottschalk's and Joplin's showpieces and combined it with a new, unpulsed chromatic lyricism, improvisational in feel and often in practice in the right hand. It's a comprehensible jump from there to Tatum, who composed little music of his own, in the conventional sense of the word. But Tatum would take pop songs or classical pieces — Mayer played Tatum's versions of Dvorák's Humoresque and Massenet's Elegy — and add syncopated rhythms, bent melodic lines, startlingly altered chords, and musical breaks in the form of elaborate Lisztian runs. In the process, Tatum remade the music to such an extent that it can be heard as a new work of his own, inspired by the original. For anyone not apt to distinguish Tatum's originality from the rote quality of the thousand cocktail lounge pianists who have puttered along in his wake, Mayer's set was a useful lesson in the sources and nature of Tatum's genius. The relationship between Tatum's theme transformations and the variations in Gottschalk's infectious march Souvenir de Porto Rico (the composer's spelling) was obvious, but so were the differences.
Mayer played Gottschalk with great force and power, transforming The Banjo from a twangy piece of vamping into a thunderous outpouring with no trace of banjo in it. He then backed off considerably, becoming gentle and dreamy in Pine Apple Rag, one of Joplin's most famous fast rags. Johnson's Blueberry Rhyme was similarly relaxed and conversational. The energy picked up in Morton's Frances, while the Tatum pieces were tossed off with virtuosity and aplomb. Both Morton and Tatum largely improvised their performances, but Mayer believes that the recordings they made function as physical realizations, with the artistic integrity of fully composed works. He has transcribed these recordings, and plays them with the same level of artistic interpretation that he'd apply to any written score. To demonstrate this, he had a 1929 recording of Morton's Frances played before he performed his transcription.
Two works by Stanford composers were performed between the sets. Both were duets between computer programming on a Yamaha Disklavier and a live performer on the same keyboard. Chryssie Nanou played Per Bloland's Elsewhere Is a Negative Mirror, Part I, a soundscape work using electromagnets that set the piano strings vibrating and produced a synthesizerlike sound. Mark Applebaum played his own Intellectual Property, an improvised fight for control over the keyboard between his live and previously recorded selves, moving from abstract modernism to a more jazzy style. As music, it's possible that these pieces were meant as a bridge between the two competing ideas on the program. But in many ways they were also a comment on the piano itself that was as abstracted as the evening's theme.
(David Bratman is a librarian who lives with his lawfully wedded soprano and a wall full of symphony recordings.)
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Anthony de Mare
Steven Mayer
