November 7, 2006
Published on Tuesdays
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Mickey Butts
By Jeff Dunn New compositions are like fashion. Some composers change styles over time to keep pace with conventional expectations. These are the perfectly acceptable mass-market outfits, often quite attractive. Another, shrinking group of composers have continued to present the same clothes so long, they look like they came out of Grandpa's attic. Today, these are displayed by the strict modernists, acolytes of Babbitt and Cage, who stand by the precepts of the 1950s and 1960s. But Kevin Volans' creations are neither of these. They are haute couture, made to order to solve a specific compositional problem in an adventurous new way. His latest, a piano concerto commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, debuts Nov. 15 at Davies Symphony Hall. Unlike the new music of yesteryear, the greatest challenge will not be to the audience, but to the pianist, Marc-André Hamelin. While Hamelin is a masterly technician, Volans may have given him one of the most difficult concertos ever written. A recitation of the facts of Volans' background is filled with buts. Volans is an Irish citizen, but he was born in South Africa in 1949. He studied in Cologne under the ultra-avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen in the 1970s and was even his teaching assistant for a year, but his music has pleased an immeasurably larger audience. In 1987, his White Man Sleeps, performed by the Kronos Quartet, exceeded sales of all classical competitors except Luciano Pavarotti.
Kevin Volans
Volans holds a Ph.D. in music composition but makes the bulk of his living as a composer rather than as an academic. His music can sound postminimalist, but Volans insists that the music he wrote in that vein, based on African practices, predates minimalism by 2000 years. (I guess we should call it Paleo-minimalist.) Finally, while he has been influenced theoretically by Stockhausen (the importance of craft and making every work new) and Morton Feldman (simplicity, clarity, variety, and silence), his music rarely sounds anything like that either. Volans' music has been performed worldwide and has been extremely well-received in Europe as well as in the United States. Wrote New York critic Kyle Gann: "By refusing to repeat himself or anyone else, Volans remains one of the planet's most distinctive and unpredictable voices."
Is this a traditional concerto? It's more traditional than anything I've written before, yes. I should say my whole interest in music since post-Second World War music has been in non-narrative form and this piece, by way of contrast, is very narrative, which for me means it's closer to the music before World War II than after. Not so much the material, but the way it is put together. It flows from one idea to another, in a similar way to a more traditional kind of concerto. The piano part is also traditionally a showpiece for piano ... there are things like arpeggios. I have taken on as much as I can of the traditional without abandoning what I normally do. I don't expect it to be played dramatically or romantically at all; it's just simply narrative. Is it in the postminimalist mode you've been writing in the past? No, no. I don't think I've been writing postminimalist music, particularly. I certainly wrote most of my music as antiminimalist. It's been misinterpreted as minimalist. Minimalism is an American idea. I base my music on African music, which predates minimalism by 2000 years. I feel that to call African music minimalist is like calling the pyramids Art Deco. Even though repeat-pattern minimalism certainly came out of Africa in the sense that Steve Reich went to study African music, I think African music is different. What I was interested in African music was its irregularity, not its regularity. African music has irregularities within the repetition and a sort of handmade quality of as opposed to minimalism, which you should play like a machine. So [my concerto is] a very different sort of world, though superficially it might look similar. For example, there are repeat patterns in the piece. It's very difficult to describe; [but] it's quite a different piece in my output. There is quite a lot of repetition, but the whole manner of presenting the material comes across in a much more narrative and traditional kind of way. It's a fairly tonal sounding piece, but in fact the harmonies are very dissonant. Are there any serial qualities? No, nothing at all to do with serialism. I spent some time reviewing your very interesting Web site, where you say, "If there are to be no fixed laws of composition, no formal concepts, then musical discussion (even of technique) needs be via imagery — metaphor." I wonder if you have a "metaphor" for this concerto. I'm very reluctant to give pieces titles these days, because people just latch on to the title and not to what the music is about. So all my later works have been called things like Trio Concerto and Concerto With Double Orchestra, and so on. But I did give the [new piano concerto] a subtitle of "Atlantic Crossing" because it starts tempestuously, and gets calmer, and heads to a more tempestuous ending. So there is a kind of tranquility in the sense that there's a certain kind of an arc, but the material at the end is very different than the material at the beginning. There's very little correspondence, even harmonically, between the beginning and the end of the piece. I had originally started writing the piece when I was in Greece and I was on the shores of the mainland of Greece from where, it's thought, Achilles set out to free Helen of Troy. I was reading Greek drama and very much aware of the role of the sea in Greek literature. Images of the sea turn up all the time. And the drama has these rhythms, beats of seven, the rhythm of wave patterns: ONE two THREE four FIVE six seven. ONE two THREE four FIVE six seven. It has this feel, somehow, of the sea. I tried to avoid the narrative aspect, but I decided to call it "Atlantic Crossing" because of the Irish-American connection. The Atlantic crossing is the most significant in Irish history of any kind of sea crossing, in the sense that people crossed to America to flee the Great Hunger and so on. I just had to relocate the piece from Greece to Ireland. I was thinking about the image of the sea, what you'd written on your Web site about Debussy and his having the Japanese woodcut of that wave. Was that picture in your head? No, it wasn't, actually. It's a good thing you mentioned it: The first large orchestral piece I started writing but abandoned was called 36 Views of the Waves. The sea has always been really important for me. We used to have a house at the sea, and go there every year on holiday. Whether these images are audible in the music is another matter. I didn't set out to write impressionist music or program music. I find with music that people can find almost anything they want in it, which is one of the reasons why titles are dangerous. When I wrote the piece White Man Sleeps, the last movement has a very quiet but fast-running movement. On the first performance, one critic wrote that it represented the white man sleeping! Which I thought was extremely unfortunate, perfectly wrong! Maybe you should call the concerto Desert Sands, and see if anyone hears an ocean in it! Exactly. I'm sure it's exactly the same phenomenon. But anyway, I just thought, well for once I'm going to say "Atlantic Crossing" and evoke the sea for the Irish-American connection. So you wouldn't mind, because of your subtitle, if the audience starts thinking about the sea as they listen to the piece? I wouldn't mind, for those people who don't listen abstractly. It gives a starting point for listening, but I don't think titles should ever be taken literally. I don't want to speak on how anyone listens to anything. That's the role of entertainment, as a guide to listening. Fulfilling expectations is pretty much the role of entertainment as opposed to art. I come from the school of music where I am interested in music as an art form and going beyond expectations — including the expectation of the composer. This is pretty standard in European circles. Certainly Morton Feldman always said this, as well. He was a great friend. Are there any influences of Feldman or others in your music? There have been influences all the way along, but I don't think that they are that obvious. In the same way, I think that Stockhausen is still an influence in my work, but again it's not that obvious. You see, I regard composition as a way of trying to redefine reality, not an attempt just to write more music. We have plenty of music; we don't need more music. If you're going to write something, you have to write something that hasn't been written before. And I think this sense of redefining reality ties into the act of composition itself — that you cannot simply restructure sound in a way that you know what's going to happen. There is a certain element of exploration. In order to compose, I think you have to go beyond what you know. And you have to go beyond your own technique. Otherwise, there's not a point in writing anything. It seems that your outlook is that of an explorer. Otherwise, you'd still be in South Africa today. ... I suppose, yes. But you see, for me to write a piece that appears to be more traditional is in a sense quite an exploratory thing to do. It is a kind of departure. It has to be true to what I really believe in. It was a struggle ... from the moment I knew that I was going to have a piano concerto to write. I had already written one before with a completely different premise. The Concerto for Piano and Winds, where the piano part was meaningless without the orchestra and the orchestra part was meaningless without the piano ... a giant interlocking pattern. [But] this time I thought, well no, I'm going to treat the piano as independent ... competing with the orchestra for supremacy. I decided that this concerto was going to be about the piano in a big way. That, by its very nature, makes it a much more traditional approach, completely different, say, from Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, where the piano plays the odd note or odd chord, [and] is anything but a virtuoso piece. I decided that [my concerto] was going to be a virtuoso piece. There have been very few virtuoso pieces written in the last 60 years or so. Is your piece fully notated? Yes, absolutely. It's one movement, about 23 minutes. And lots of notes: The piano plays 14,000-plus [notes] in that time. It's a very virtuosic piece. It's extremely difficult. Has the pianist been working on it for a while? I think so. We had a meeting about it a month ago in London. He thought it was extremely difficult. Do you know Marc André Hamelin's playing? Yes. If anyone can play a difficult piece, it's Hamelin! He was a little concerned that I made it difficult [just] because he was playing it. But I think it would have been perverse to write an extremely simple piece for him to play. He would have loved it if I'd written an extremely simple piece, but he is a man of extraordinary talents. With every piece I write, I like to know who's going to play it in advance. I prefer on the whole writing chamber music, because you get to work with the musicians. [You] write the piece for them, to match their abilities or their special qualities. I did write it for him, but I didn't deliberately set out to make it incredibly difficult, but he does suspect that I might have done that! Is it one of those pieces where it sounds like you need three hands to play it? No, not so much that, but he is flying around the keyboard at a great pace. I didn't think it would do any harm to see what would happen if I tried to write a contemporary piece that would be a showpiece for piano. Anything special about the instrumentation? It's standard, but it's a large orchestra. The only fairly unusual thing is I have two drummers. They play only drums. They play sets of drums (eight or nine each). That's about the only unusual thing — and they have to be good! I've got one contrabassoon and two piccolos and four flutes, two doubling piccolo, and three of everything including bass clarinet and contrabassoon. San Francisco offered me the whole orchestra, so I decided to make it fairly large. How did the commission come about? Was it through your contacts with the Kronos Quartet? You know, I really don't know. It came about through my agents. I have the same agents as [Michael Tilson Thomas]. But basically I wanted to write a piano concerto, so I asked my manager to see what she could find as a possibility. Have you met with MTT before? No, I haven't. Will you be out for the premiere? Oh, absolutely, yes. What's your favorite part about San Francisco? Are you going to have some sourdough bread? [Laughs] No, I would say the friendliness of people is probably my favorite aspect. It's a very friendly and relaxed city. Quite charming. Lovely! I've always enjoyed it. I've been out to San Francisco several times. I've written four pieces for Kronos. I enjoy the Japanese food. I've seen, looking over your career, that you've gone through quite an interesting evolution. You've always been seeking to go beyond, to learn something from every piece you write. What is your reflection on your career so far? Well, I have no complaints! I've moved around quite a bit. It's taken me places, although sometimes it's been almost by chance. I've been extremely fortunate that I've spent my whole life as a professional composer, without a teaching job or anything. It's hard work, but it's great to be free to travel. I very often in November head back to South Africa — I have a house there — for summer to avoid Irish winter. I compose there for three months, and then come back when it starts looking up in Ireland again, and so on. I started to write the piece in Greece, so I went to Greece for a month to stay with friends, and now I'm Spain for a month. With computers it's fantastic. You can just take your work with you. Do you use Sibelius software for composing? Finale [software], for my sins! I've used it since 1990 and have had endless problems with it. To finish off this concerto, I bought a new Apple Mac only to discover after I bought it and spent 48 hours fiddling and had it modified and had extra RAM and everything put into it, that Finale didn't work with it. Only [Finale] 2007 will work with the new Mac. And you start screaming on the telephone after spending three and a half hours downloading fixes and everything, none of which worked. In fact I have to go and do exactly that now. I find that some things are still not working. Why do you suppose White Man Sleeps was such a big seller? There are three recordings of it. But I think the reason the Kronos sold so well was the really good marketing. It was beautifully packaged. And the whole disc was really interesting. And Kronos sold it, too. They used White Man Sleeps as the theme song for their radio show for a while. It was just the right piece at the right time. Writing for string quartet certainly made a big difference. Stockhausen always insisted with every piece that there should be a new formal structure, a new way of putting it together, and a new sound world. The young composers of my generation were always encouraged to use very unusual instrumental combinations. So White Man Sleeps was written for two harpsichords, 17th- and 18th-century harpsichords in African tuning, viola da gamba, and percussion. That piece was very, very successful, but it was only performed once a year, when I was available to do it and get people to let us retune their harpsichords and borrow the harpsichords and deal with the insurance and all sorts of problems. I was eventually persuaded by Kronos to rearrange the piece for string quartet in normal tuning and did that. It turned out to be a very different piece, but I was absolutely stunned when [all of a sudden] there were 20 string quartets playing the piece — which was a complete turnaround from writing for totally nonstandard ensembles. It was quite a learning [experience], as far as I was concerned, about the benefits of writing for standard ensembles like quartets. The whole previous generation were really opposed to standard ensembles. But now you're writing for orchestra. What got you into that? I'm writing a lot for orchestra now at the moment. The next thing I'm supposed to be doing is a percussion concerto. And I just wrote this triple concerto, the Trio Concerto. I found it difficult writing for orchestra, insofar as you don't get to know the musicians beforehand. And you don't get to know them afterward, either. You have a very short period of time to sort out problems if there are any. And you have almost no time to get to know what would be the most appropriate thing to write for them. Again, you don't want to write something that is perfectly standard. So for any orchestra it's extremely difficult, because the larger the orchestra, the shorter the rehearsal period, and the less opportunity there is of actually writing something to custom-fit an orchestra. But you're less of a perfectionist than Stockhausen? Oh, I wouldn't say that! [Laughs] But certainly, I'm more relaxed! Stockhausen really tried to do completely new things with orchestras. Like rearranging the orchestra backwards, so the leads were sitting in the back. Those things just don't work. He tried it, but he had to abandon it as an idea. He didn't like the fact that the playing sort of tailed out toward the edge slightly. The whole thing was crazy. He was a bit crazy like that. He was spoiled. The previous generation were incredibly spoiled because there was so much money available. They could simply choose what they were going to write for, and how they were going to write it. If you came around nowadays and said, "Well, I want a soprano soloist, three choruses, eight brass, two Hammond organs, and six percussionists," you would never get a commission for it, because it's a one-off kind of thing. Or if you want four helicopters. Stockhausen got a lot of grief for that one! Yes, I know, because it cost a fortune. The commission was enormous, but the actual cost of putting it on was 10 times as much. So nowadays you have to be much more conservative. There simply isn't the money available. Are there any last comments you would like to make about your piece for our readers? Just be careful about "traditional." When I say "traditional," I mean that it leans toward traditional or it appears traditional, or something like that. I didn't set out to write a traditional piece, but it has a more narrative structure than I've ever employed. It does go somewhere, from A to B, hence the "crossing." But I don't want people to read that literally, because I don't know what they'd make of it, if it started in "Ireland" and ended in "America." The ending is quite something else. I don't know how they'd interpret the ending, in that case. So there is no program implied. You simply do not know who the audience is and how they're going to respond. But I did write the piece for the piano, and that's quite a traditional idea in a way. It's about the piano. (Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.) Have an opinion about what you've read here or elsewhere in SFCV? Sound off with a letter to the editors. ©2006 Jeff Dunn, all rights reserved. SFCV is a nonprofit journal supported by foundation grants and individual contributions. If you enjoy what you find here and want to see our work continue, please consider making a contribution. By virtue of a generous matching grant, it will be doubled. Your contribution (tax-deductible) may be made by credit card
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From September 1, 1998, to Nov. 7, 2006, SFCV has published, in addition to our weekly features, Music News, and Listening Ahead columns, 2,560 reviews of Bay Area performances by: 53 symphony orchestras (531 reviews), dozens of recital presenters (445 reviews), 42 opera companies (357 reviews), 94 chamber groups (304 reviews), 39 new-music ensembles and programs (268 reviews), 53 early-music ensembles (199 reviews), 38 choral groups (163 reviews), 17 music festivals (120 reviews), 24 chamber orchestras (100 reviews), six musical theater groups (17 reviews), as well as numerous world music groups (15 reviews), youth music ensembles (14 reviews), and other organizations (14 reviews).
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