Labor of Love

Many times people have asked me, shaking their heads: “How can anyone like that [dissonant, earsplitting, academic, boring, pointless, random — pick your adjective] modern music?” But the fact is, incredible as it may seem to some traditional classical music fans, many people do, as evidenced by the crowd filling the risers to near capacity in the Yerba Center for the Arts Forum Monday evening. The draw was a milestone of Modernism, Pierre Boulez' Le Marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master, 1955), which took up the second half of the program. According to Music Director David Milnes, the difficulty of the score absorbed up to 50 hours of preparation time for members of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. “It just pulls something out of you — an edge,” declared percussionist Christopher Froh during the preconcert discussion. That the effort was a labor of love was evident in the care with which Milnes conducted the work, and in the concentrated enthusiasm that the instrumentalists (flute, xylophone, vibraphone, percussion, guitar, and viola) put into the performance. Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty, who contributed her lusciously calibrated voice to the effort and has sung the work many times elsewhere, informed the audience: “It’s really cool; it’s so groovy and funky … it’s cool beyond belief.” The difficulty of the score lies in the serialized, constant shifts of meter and pitch duration, as well as the absence of repetition, more a requirement for ultra-diligent score reading than virtuoso muscular technique. When performed as well as the Contemporary Music Players handled the challenge, a unique world of kaleidoscopic clarity emerges, with sounds as off kilter and juxtaposed as the occasional words by surrealist poet René Char (as in, “Pure eyes in the woods/ Weeping seek the habitable head").

The Real Audience Winner

However, despite the reputation of the Boulez work as “a keystone of 20th-century music” (New Grove Dictionary), and its placement in taking up the entire second half of the program, the evident audience favorite was Luca Francesconi’s A fuoco (1995), which received hoots and cheers at the end of the first half for its ensemble-accompanied guitar soloist, David Tanenbaum. The 40 years that separate the Boulez from this work reminded me how pulse, apotheosized by Stravinsky and which later permeated almost all forms of music, has remained a chief driver of musical affect in the face of the calculated attempt of Boulez to deconstruct it with his Marteau. A fuoco had the pace and direction that the Boulez seemed to lack. Maybe if the Marteau had been played at its advertised 35-minute duration (it took 10 minutes longer), its impact would have been strengthened, but Boulez himself has conducted it slower in recent years, and such an approach could have clouded its exquisite clarity. The program began with two highly contrasting works played by different solo cellists. The first, Sept Papillons, was by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, whose operas and work in the French spectral school have gained her eminence. But these studies would have been better titled Sept Papillons Vampiriques — while the seven short études' butterflies emerged via numerous fluttering techniques, Leighton Fong’s bow was ordered to remain for the most part near the bridge of the instrument (sul ponticello), producing a 12-minute bloodletting of tiresome scrapes. What a relief, then, to hear hints of Chinese melody, and far more variety, in Zhou Long’s wistful Wild Grass, beautifully played by Stephen Harrison. My neck marks began to heal, and the fascinating progression of sections in the Francesconi that followed provided a complete cure. I left at the end grateful that the Players had for a moment abandoned their title of Contemporary in honor of Boulez' old piece, and reassured that love of Modernist music is not confined to a few dying professors, but still captures the attention of audiences and musicians alike. After all, plain and simple, good music is good music of whatever stripe.