I don't understand the impetus behind many of the "themed" new music programs that are so prevalent. In 2006, for example, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players offered a program called "Blood and Glamour," which, despite some enjoyable electroacoustic music, featured neither blood nor glamour. Other Minds has its Séance series, consisting of three Saturday concerts performed in the amicable and cozy atmosphere of the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco. At the 8 o'clock concert I attended, the theme's subtitle on the printed program reads: "Summoning the specters of musical forbears, channeling the spirits of their successors."
Wouldn't that be something — if a few musicians were gathered around a candlelit piano and recited incantations, encircled by a hundred or so strangers, who, through sheer will and musical devotion, succeeded in summoning an ultramodernist ancestor, whose flickering silhouette proceeded to sit down, adjust the bench, and play? (Of course, if the spirit weren't making an appearance that night, one of the musicians could fill in.)
Instead, as at most themed concerts I've attended, what happened was this: Performers came out and played music for an audience who listened, clapped, then, finally, went home.
If the "stuff" of themes is what people crave, shouldn't it be reflected in more than a name and (admittedly charming) lighting?
I just wonder if there's a connection between the reluctance to engage in nonstandardized performance rituals and the lack of attention paid to a composer like Ruth Crawford (Seeger). Her music was featured heavily on the concert, and rightly so — after hearing Sarah Cahill perform four of the Nine Preludes for Piano, the only reason I can imagine they aren't part of the canon is that many performers before her must have thought that if they were worthwhile, why, then, someone else would have championed them.
What's extraordinary is how accessible these pieces are, given Crawford's unswerving pursuit of a dissonant harmonic language. It's not easy music, but at the same time it's hard to lose track of where it's headed, for each phrase flows naturally to the next, smoothly but never monotonously. Contrast this with Scriabin's tantalizingly brief Five Preludes, Op. 74 that opened the concert. His forms are so compressed and cryptic that it would have been useful to hear them again, after the Crawford, as Glenn Gould famously did when playing Webern and Beethoven.
There's a flexible, seemingly effortless rise and fall to Crawford's music that Cahill brought out splendidly, especially in Prelude No. 5 and the virtuosic Piano Study in Mixed Accents. The latter took the moto perpetuo finale of Chopin's B-flat Minor Sonata as its point of departure, but instead of parodying it as Ligeti would later do (in his Selbst-Porträit for two pianos), Crawford uses various accent patterns to give the impression of a slower, lurching tune that spills into the foreground — a kind of "melody-within-a-melody" that, under Cahill's fingers, never faltered.
Jonathan Wilkes is a graduate student in theory and composition at UC Davis. He earned a B.A. in music from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in Piano Performance.