|
CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
December 3, 2005
|
By Jonathan Russell
When musical groups decide to put on a concert somewhere, they usually take whatever they can get — the larger the seating capacity, the more well-known the venue, the better. Rarely is there a sense that the venue has any particular connection to the music being offered. Saturday's three-concert marathon “A New Music Séance,” sponsored by Other Minds, was different: The music and venue fit together perfectly, each enhancing the other.
The venue was the Swedenborgian Church in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Emmanuel Swedenborg was an 18th century theologian who believed that spirituality and divinity were inherent in all things, especially in nature. He was an important influence on many thinkers, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and the American Transcendentalists. The Swedenborgian church reflects Swedenborg's ideas in its architecture and construction. Neither stark nor ornate, it is a simple space with earthy brown wooden beams arching overhead, a fireplace in the back, wooden rush-seated chairs rather than pews, and, especially with the many candles around the hall on Saturday, a feeling of warmth, earthiness, and deep spirituality.
This was an ideal setting for a concert devoted to the tradition that the Transcendentalist Charles Ives started in American music, popularly known (though I don't especially like this label) as the “American maverick tradition,” including the likes of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. The concerts presented music from the entire history of this movement, from Ives himself and precursors like Scriabin to living composers like Terry Riley, Kyle Gann, John Adams, and others, including several world premieres.
Most of the pieces on all three concerts were for solo piano, with a few violin-piano duos and Disklavier solos mixed in. All of the solo piano pieces were performed by the indefatigable Sarah Cahill — a total of 23 pieces and a good five hours of performing! What was most astonishing is that all the pieces I heard her play (I could not attend the 2:00 performance, but was there for the 5:30 and 8:00 shows) were played not only with great technical command (with a few small exceptions in the third concert) but with deep expressive and emotional nuance and commitment. Just about every piece sounded like it had been carefully thought through and chosen because Cahill felt some sort of deep connection to it. How often do you really hear that in one concert, let alone in a three-concert marathon? The Kate Stenberg and Eva-Maria Zimmerman violin-piano duo likewise played with great care and commitment.
The common theme was a spiritual or naturalist sentiment, either explicitly, through a programmatic association, or simply in the sounds themselves. Many of the pieces inhabited a meditative, modal soundworld. Andrea Morricone's I Studio (U.S. premiere) featured a simple repeating descending ground bass pattern with shifting filigree figures on top, that sounded at once improvisational and as if there might be some sort of complex polyrhythmic process underlying them. This all-white-key piece could have descended into a new-agey sort of sentimentality but avoided that, due to the complexity and unpredictability of the figurations. Kyle Gann's excerpt from Private Dances, Saintly (2004), which followed immediately after, was, unfortunately, unable to avoid this trap. It was unabashedly lyrical and sentimental but lacked the interest and complexity of figuration and texture that kept the Morricone intriguing and surprising. Henning Christiansen's Den Arkadiske, Terry Riley's Simone's Lullaby, Mamora Fujieda's Patterns of Plants, Alvin Curran's For Cornelius, Lou Harrison's A Summerfield Set, John Cage's In a Landscape, Henry Cowell's The Trumpet of Angus Og, and John Adams' China Gates were each personal and unique but had a similarly modal, meditative sensibility. Rather than needing to get somewhere, all these pieces seem content to stay in one place and meditate on the sounds they find there. I could really hear a unifying aesthetic at work here, and it was fascinating to hear the many takes on this aesthetic by composers over the past century. I certainly had been aware of the trajectory of this aesthetic tradition before, but had never heard it so clearly presented. A refreshing contrast to these meditative modal works came from the several more chromatic and harmonically complicated pieces, beautiful and meditative in an entirely different way. Ruth Crawford Seeger's Preludes Nos. 4 and 9 from the 1920's were dark, brooding, nuanced works in a harmonic and expressive idiom closest to that of the second Viennese school of Schoenberg and Webern. On a side note, it's fascinating to ponder that some of the roots of the American maverick tradition trace back to this, the same place that Boulez, who seems so opposite to someone like Lou Harrison, would also claim ancestry.
Alexander Scriabin's Vers la Flamme (1914) opened the third concert, and its lush, colorful harmony and sense of deep mystery fit perfectly with the darkened, candlelit church. Ronald Bruce Smith's Trois regards (1989) for violin and piano inhabited a richly colored, resonant, Messiaen-inspired harmonic landscape, beautifully atmospheric, wispy, tender, though with an ending that seemed a bit too drawn out. Johanna Magdalena's Dissonant Counterpoint Nos. 5, 7, and 8 (1934) showed the downside of excessive chromaticism; it was grey and non-descript and did not make a compelling case for rescuing its composer from obscurity. Daniel David Feinsmith's Self (2005) featured Cahill reciting a Ralph Waldo Emerson text as she played a refreshingly dramatic and declamatory musical setting which fit the words very well. Cahill was at her best here, successfully performing the mind-bending task of combining a wide variety of piano gestures and runs with a dramatic rendering of the text. Finally, for good measure, there was one Disklavier solo piece on each concert. The Disklavier is a sort of updated version of the player piano; it is a real acoustic piano, but with a digital apparatus hooked up which “plays” the piano according to whatever is programmed into it, allowing for possibilities (incredibly fast passages; chords of many notes; complex polyrhythms) that could not be realized by a human pianist. The 5:30 concert featured Kyle Gann's Nude Rolling Down an Escalator (1999), a parody of many of the gestures and clichés of the Modernist tradition (the title itself a technologically updated send-up of Duchamp's early modernist painting Nude Descending a Staircase). It was a highly effective and entertaining parody, with many in the audience audibly chuckling in several spots. It was also a delight to watch the Disklavier play, to see the musical gestures on display visually in the patterns of keys going up and down. The Disklavier piece on the 8:00 concert was Gary Noland's epic Grande Rag Brillante (1979, rev. 1989), an enormous rag with humorously sudden and bizarre modulations and shifts. Noland also flexed his compositional muscles with an intricate fugue. By the time the rag came back a second time and then went into a second fugue, though, it was getting tiresome and wasn't funny any more. It wasn't wild and crazy enough to be really a parody and it was simply way longer than any rag ought to be. And the most disappointing aspect of it was that, though certainly difficult, it looked to be entirely playable by a human pianist. Why were there no ridiculously, inhumanly fast runs? Why no enormous chords? What's the point of a Disklavier piece if a real person could play it?
Another rag closed the marathon, William Bolcom's ever-popular Graceful Ghost (1970). I'm used to hearing this piece performed with swung eighth-notes, so Cahill's straight-ahead version felt a bit stiff to me. Though plenty of people I respect think it's a lovely little piece, I've never cared much for it — I grew up hearing my mother play Joplin rags, and Bolcom in comparison always strikes me as over-complicated and under-felt. All in all, the New Music Séance was a stunning achievement, a compelling display of a broad and varied aesthetic tradition in a setting ideally suited to it. I was especially happy to see the church completely sold out for all three concerts, a testament to the important place this music holds in the Bay Area. The only objection to be made is that, in spite of the brilliance and nuance of Cahill's playing, it was an awful lot of piano music. And, although the program order was well-chosen to maximize contrast and interest, it was still not only a lot of piano music but a lot of piano music in a similar style and sound-world. Perhaps just a few more pieces involving another instrument or even a few without the piano at all would have gone a long way toward keeping the sounds a little fresher. But this is a minor complaint. Far more important is that the music being performed was music that the performers, organizers, and audience believed in deeply. If more new performances had such a sense of devotion and commitment to the music being played, not only on the technical level but on the emotional and spiritual levels as well, it would go a long way toward making new concert music the relevant, important activity we all want it to be.
(Jonathan Russell is a professor of musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an editor with PBA Music Publishing. He is active in the Bay Area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
|
Sarah Cahill
