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: BROWN NEWD MUSICThere’ll probably be some music, but we’ll manage to find a quiet corner where we can talk | |
A few days ago it rained. I should be out gathering mushrooms. But here I am, having to write about Satie. In an unguarded moment I said I would. Now I am pestered with a deadline. Why, in heaven’s name, don’t people read the books about him that are available, play the music that’s published? Then I for one could go back to the woods and spend my time profitably. | |
Nevertheless, we must bring about a music which is like furniture—a music, that is, which will be part of the noises of the environment, will take them into consideration. I think of it as melodious, softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself. It would fill up those heavy silences that sometimes fall between friends dining together. It would spare them the trouble of paying attention to their own banal remarks. And at the same time it would neutralize the street noises which so indiscreetly enter into the play of conversation. To make such music would be to respond to a need. | |
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- Eric Satie |
- John Cage |
* excerpt from Eric Satie in Cage, John. Silence. Wesleyan University Press, Hanover: 1939.
Charisma (1971) -- Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001)
Iannis Xenakis led a remarkable and painful life from the beginning, losing his mother at age five and his left eye at 22, serving significant jail time, and earning a death sentence in Greece for political terrorism.
Born in Romania to Greek parents, he lived and worked in Greece, France, Germany, and the United States over the course of his life. Xenakis left his mark on the music world not only with his daring compositions and methods but also through his extensive writings, lectures, and teaching. He pioneered a technique he called “stochastic composition,” based around the use of probability models to derive musical parameters, as well as “sieve” theory and graphical representations of music founded on architectural forms. An architect as well as a composer, he apprenticed with Le Corbusier and studied music with Olivier Messiaen, among others. Extremely experimental, he wrote extensively for both acoustic instruments and electronic media, sometimes employing light shows and other visual stimuli. Many of his compositions were based on architectural models or written for site-specific performance, while others composed new buildings from their musical formations.
At the top of Charisma’s first page, the composer quotes the Iliad: “then the soul like smoke moved into the earth, grinding.” Xenakis wrote this work in memory of French composer Jean-Pierre Guézec, his student at Tanglewood in Massachusetts, in the year of Guézec’s death. As I listen to this piece, I can see this voyage’s smoky haze in the long, held tones, feel its disturbing cause in the sudden high notes and acoustic “beating,” and hear the ‘grinding soul’ in the cello’s harsh scratch tones and the clarinet’s dissonant multi-phonics. Nouritza Matossian, Xenakis’s biographer, wrote that the composer was indistinguishable from his music, and this work, with its unpredictable, vacillating extremes in energy, seems to parallel his tumultuous life and constantly churning intellect. As in much of his other music, he expands the timbral possibilities of the clarinet and cello, in isolation and together, challenging both the performers and listeners with distinctive new sounds emanating from familiar instruments. The score’s extended techniques include microtonal pitch variations and deliberately detuned passages that create audible “beats,” caused by the interference of closely related sound waves, along with extremely high clarinet notes and extensive multi-phonics, key clicks, cello scratch tones, and, at the end of the work, the lowest cello string tuned an octave down. A controversial piece sometimes criticized for a lack of musicality or informed part writing, I hear the musicality manifest itself in the piece’s utmost sensitivity to timbre and dynamics, as well as its successful programmatic elements. The writing is fertile and innovative in its drive to extend the limits of sound production and combination within a musical context.
Telephones and Birds (1977) -- John Cage (1912-1992)
John Cage was born in Los Angeles and studied briefly at Pomona College until he dropped out of school. However, he went on to study composition with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg, among others. Over the course of his career, Cage would teach at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, the Chicago School of Design, and Black Mountain College, where he collaborated with artists such as painter Robert Rauschenberg and choreographer Merce Cunningham. Cage pioneered aleatoric music—music in which the composer and/or performers use chance operations, such as flipping a coin, to make compositional and performance decisions—and was also a prolific writer on music, achieving guru-like status for his whimsical and profound meditations on silence and timbre.
Telephones and Birds was premiered on January 18, 1977 and the Minskoff Theatre in New York City as music to accompany dance by Merce Cunningham and company. To perform the piece, the musicians flip six coins and consult a chart from the I Ching—a classic Chinese text that has evolved over the past 5,000 years—to attain a corresponding number value 1 through 64 for the specific permutation of heads and tails combinations of the coins. The musicians perform several of these operations, using the I Ching numbers to make decisions about the sound samples of either bird calls or telephone messages they will play. In this performance, I Ching numbers are used to decide:
• what sound from a list of 32 bird calls and 32 telephone messages will be played
• the duration of the sounds
• when the sounds will be played.
The telephone messages were obtained from the North American Rare Bird Alert hotlines for several states and Canadian provinces.
Fratres (1977, transcribed for string quartet 1989) -- Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) 
Estonian composer Arvo Pärt was born in 1935 outside Tallin in the small town of Paide. After early experiments with serialism and collage technique, Pärt emerged from a period of self-imposed silence with a fully formed and unique aesthetic which found its locus of expression in 1977, in Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa, and Fratres, some of his most celebrated works. Pärt calls this style “tintinnabulation,” derived from a Latin root meaning “little bells,” and, as he himself emphasizes, its power is in its profound simplicity: “I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements--with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials--with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation."
The basic principle behind Pärt’s tintinnabulation is the presence of two or more voices, one approaching or retreating from a central pitch in stepwise motion, and the other outlining the triad. The bareness of Pärt’s writing is meditative. Fratres is, in essence, a long crescendo and diminuendo punctuated by the deep heartbeat of cello pizzicato and the quiet, everpresent drone of the second violin. Even when the piece reaches its dynamic climax , it is not an ecstatic revelation, but rather a deep, resonant affirmation. What emmanates is an organic body of sound that, in its humble purity, is eternal and infinite.
- Nora Krohn
In Liquid Days, part 1 (1986) -- Philip Glass (b. 1937), lyrics by David Byrne (b. 1952)
Oh Round Desire Love likes me
Sleep
Sleep...Being in Air
We are old Friends |
Love needs a bath
Drink Me
Drive...Why do You Ask?
In Liquid Days |
Words © Dunvagen Music Publishers / Chester Music
I’d be shocked if a room full of people ever reacted unanimously to a performance of a piece by this unfailingly controversial composer. His acolytes and detractors cross all musical perspectives. To some, it’s pure fluff, superficial and pedantic harmonic musings, wasted musical time. Others revere it as a rare, convincing postmodern critique of both popular culture and the often self-important academic avant-garde that claims to be its foil. Most of us, however, are somewhere in the middle. The use of a limited harmonic language can be frustrating and even offensive at times, but it is often soothing hypnotic, and distinctly beautiful. The obvious references to popular music, perhaps stronger here than in much of his other work, sometimes resonate as valid critiques but can seem like contrived pretenses to artistry.
In this sense the connection with David Byrne is illuminating. I hear the two composers appropriating each other in this song: Glass gleans a non-“new music” frame of reference and a set of lyrics which augment, in typical Byrnean irony, the anti-poetic malaise of his musical language, while Byrne, the ultimate postmodern musical dilettante, gets to crawl into that cramped, often ignored and yet undeniably important hot tub that is late twentieth-century “art” music and splash around irreverently.
As evidenced by his highly successful film scores, and by his more esoteric but broadly acclaimed operas, Glass’s music is often much better heard in a context outside its own musical discourse. Here a fabulous set of words help the composer to take a step back from his own aesthetic pretense and accompany in a way that few others can.
