More from The Aesthetics of Survival, from “My Dear Igor (An Imaginary Dialogue)”:
Strav: It seems to me, Herr Schoenberg, you make everything so complicated. You are psychologizing and I have no taste for psychology. To me, the world is ordered according to the immutable laws of the Supreme Creator, laws that are absolute. Absolute values make it unecessary for us to search further for the truth. They precondition our lives and our relation to all things. Since this is so, I have always found it unnecessary to search beyond what is already given.
The New Image of Music, George Rochberg. Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn – Winter, 1963)
We shall not dwell on the noteworthy fact that, beginning with the Baroque era, the temporal structure of music, linked to an increasingly strong and expanding sense of tonality, developed ever more complex forms of sonorous continuity which reveal the presence of an implicit assumption of time as irreversible, linear, progressive. Bergson, the philosopher of pure duration, saw in music the embodiment of his ideas of “lived time,” the flux of change and becoming. But in 1927 Wyndham Lewis in Time and Western Man lashed out at the Bergsonian doctrine of duration and reasserted the archaic values of the “classical man” of Greek culture. “We have seen,” he said, “the subjectivism of the ‘Faustian’ or modern Western man, associated fanatically with a deep sense for the reality of Time–as against Space.” Lewis cherished classical man because he had “no sense…of Time. His love of immediate ‘things’ found in its counterpoint in his love of the ‘immediate’ in ‘time.’ He was that creature of the Pure Present so admired by Goethe.” Lewis’s rejection of the time doctrine and his reassertion of the spatialized consciousness of ancient man parallels the turning away from the “terror of history” which Éliade notes, on other grounds, as the emerging state of contemporary man’s consciousness.
Music dominated by the temporal image and music dominated by the spatial image reflect completely opposite attitudes or stances toward reality. While they are both supremely human forms of musical expression, the former tends toward the subjective utterance of the individual while the latter leans toward an objectified projection in which the composer’s energies are focused beyond himself and the lyrical flow of his inner personal states. Subjective man, “Faustian” man, to use Lewis’s terms views existence as change, himself and his history at the center of a process of becoming. For him, life is an experience, whatever the nature of its content, in which nothing stands still, nothing lasts, and the future beckons. Subjective man cannot transcend time; he is trapped in it. However, when man seizes on the present moment of his existence as the only real time, he spatializes his existence; that is, he fills his present with objects of perception which takes on solidity and concreteness–a state of permanence. His world is no longer one of time and change alone; it is a world of space in which time and change are modes of motion.
In the new music, time as duration becomes a dimension of musical space. The new spatial image of music seeks to project the permanence of the world as cosmos, the cosmos as the eternal present. It is an image of music which aspires to Being, not Becoming.
Bolding by me on what Rochberg points out as the broad artistic-philosophical difference between the Romantic and Modernist periods. I find it funny that he goes off topic a little bit earlier in the essay by railing on total serialism by comparing Boulez & Stockhausen negatively to Webern, “They were unable to keep the precarious balance Webern had maintained. While the stream of events in totally serialized works may be continuous in the sense that sound is always in motion, the discourse has lost its sense of direction.” He spent the entire first essay in The Aesthetics of Survival, Indeterminacy in the New Music, trashing totally serial music as essentially the same as indeterminate and seems to be a little hung up on it.
This has to be unintentional. (From the essay The New Image of Music on pg. 22 of Rochberg’s The Aesthetics of Survival):
“Finally, in the work of Varèse we discern the essential characteristics of a music which is fully and consciously spatial in its structure and imagery. Varèse’s first major works, composed in the 1920’s, reveal these characteristics in the full measure of maturity. Though it does not give up the motive, Varèse’s music relies heavily on densities…”
I finished composing this work back in December, but made revisions and engraving changes later. As you may remember, it was originally called “For Viola” but now it’s called “Closer” as in a closing pitcher on a baseball team. So click here for an updated copy of the work. If you want a violin version of the work, shoot me an email (you can find that in the about section of this blog). I’ll be playing this in the upcoming Circles and Lines concert at Vaudeville Park on April 8th.
I won’t be as exuberant as these guys, but I’ll try and shred it up a bit:
Come see Circles and Lines at Vaudeville Park on April 8th at 7:00 PM. My piece for flute and piano, Little Respite and solo Viola work, Closer will be performed!A little blurb about Circles and Lines below:
Circles and Lines is a new composers consortium dedicated to providing an eclectic and accessible sample of compositional styles in contemporary classical music. Its members include Angelica Negron, Noam Faingold, Conrad Winslow, Eric Lemmon and Dylan Glatthorn.
Circles and Lines has been reviewed by The New York Times, calling the group “the mirror image of most new-music groups” and lauding its members’ compositions as, “gracefully chromatic,” “quirky,” “thorny,” and “assured.” The group has also been featured on Q2’s (Radio Station WNYC’s contemporary programming) Live Concerts series. They wrote,
“Though the illustrious composers of Circles and Lines possess a range of experiences – from composing music for toys and unconventional instruments to founding the music criticism and review site OpenSourceMusic to being composer-in-residence at Tulsa’s Midtown School – they have all managed to find common ground right here in New York City. Featuring pieces which involve everything from electronics to prepared piano to banjo to chamber orchestra, this (L)PR concert exemplifies Circles & Lines’ colorful backgrounds and mission to program a performance that runs the gamut of today’s emerging composers.”
Though the group has won accolades for their work, its individual composers have also won prestigious awards and grants such as a MATA commission, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Award, NYU’s Creative Collaboration Grant and The Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Fellowship.
From left, Jonathan Cohen, Trevor Gureckis, Jay Wadley, Sugar Vendil, Ryan Manchester, Izzi Ramkissoon, Danielle Eva Schwob.
On Thursday I went to see a shmorgasborg of new works by young composers brought together by the curating of Sugar Vendil at The Nouveau Classical Project and the MATA Interval Series. The Nouveau Classical Project’s mission is to combine classical art music and fashion, but as I know almost nothing about fashion, I’ll put my music critic hat on and stand in the sound corner, while more knowledgeable folks can take on the visual & material side of the clothes.
If any of you remember the night of March 10th, 2011, you’ll know that in New York City it was miserably raining. So much so that the transportation in the city was a little slow. With that being said, I arrived just after Trevor Gureckis’ arrangement of Aphex Twin’s Cliffs began, and was held at the door by Issue Project Room staff. I feel inclined not to say anything about the piece as I feel that I should only review it if I weren’t listening through a door and a few seconds after it’s beginning. I also feel that there were clear aspects of the piece which I can describe and the effect of the piece was not lost on me for my tardiness.
Trevor’s program notes on the work describe how he’s set up the arrangement:
In this arrangement I’ve set it up be more improvisatory than a verbatim re-performance. The basic structure is the same but there are moments when the musicians improvise on individual cells pulled from the patterns.
Using light electronics to layer violin & flute “cells” with some echo effects, Mr. Gureckis replicates the quiet, somber, and quite frankly, post-minimal affect that Aphex Twin creates in the original track. The main difference is that the flute and violin in Gureckis’ piece take over for the voice and Koto effects that Aphex Twin use. Other than that, the arrangement is a fairly straight forward replica. The entire work is simple in its design, with the organ repeating the same harmonic progression and the instruments taking on the “cells”. Towards the end of the work (just as in Aphex Twin’s track) the organ drops out and the violin and flute improvise even as they make the now silent organ’s repeating harmony apparent.
The next work by Izzi Ramkissoon called The Asperity of Lace was written for Clarinet, Prepared Piano, and Live Electronics. There were two aspects to the live electronics in the work. One was the sound, with looping, pitch shifting, delay, time compression, expansion and the sampling of a pre-recorded prepared piano controlled by Mr. Ramkissoon from his laptop behind the audience. The other was a set of images and video programmed to track the clarinetist’s pitch. The entire work was very percussive (hey there prepared piano and electronics!) even degenerating into what I have decided to term a “grove-jam” (seriously it’s what I wrote down in my notes). In some of the segments of the work with fuller textures, it was very hard to pick out the individual instruments but eventually the looping and manipulation brought them out through repetition of musical fragments.
Jonathan Cohen's Dress for Clarinetist Isabel Kim
The third work of the evening was Mehr Licht by Danielle Schwob. I actually had the pleasure to hear this work a few weeks ago by different players at her organization Syzygy’s latest concert, “Plugged In”. Her program notes are fairly descriptive of the work in that it, “portray[s] a journey from obscurity towards the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel.” The work begins softly with a backing track of electronics and shortly there after, the percussionists use various instruments to imitate the sounds emanating from the computer. If I may cast aside the intentional fallacy for a moment and get a little programmatic in my description, the points of light represented by chimes, (some of the) electronics, and (what I assume to be) a mbira, can be seen but only through the murky water of the rest of the electronics track. Indeed, there are many instances evoking water to this listener, especially in the use of the wave drum (it might have been a sample of one though). As the light slowly becomes “clearer” the music converges and begins to form complete musical phrases. At the climax of the work, it drops the minimal & pointillist character and the violin takes on a full fledged melody. After the climax, a short denouement occurs and the music fades back into the minimal ideas, but maintains its new, more chromatic identity.
In the fourth slot was Ananta by Ryan Manchester. This work was far simpler than the other works on the program. Written for toy piano, electric cello and Tibetan singing bowl, the work relied heavily on the cellist and pianist exchanging fragments of lines or chords with interjections from the ringing of the Tibetan singing bowl. The work was responsorial in the way the cellist and pianist interacted. Overall the effect of the piece was meditative, and I didn’t even need to look at the program notes to see that Mr. Manchester was going for that.
Finally we had Things My Father Never Told Me by Jay Wadley. This work was probably the most traditionally minimal of the batch, with the clear influence of Steve Reich. On hearing the work, I thought Music for 18 Musicians, but I seem to be off because the composer claims Reich’s City Life was the main influence on the work. The most notable aspect of the work were some of the cool electronic effects that were used on the instruments. For example, the clarinet was manipulated at one point to sound like a fog horn, apparently by a “vocoder controlled by the breath of the clarinetist.” One thing I will note was that for such an array of sounds and textures, it was awfully short for a minimal work (in fairness, there was probably a time limit put on the only new commission of the concert).
Well, the writing was on the wall for that one. I really hope the New York City Opera doesn’t follow them down that rabbit hole.
Detroit Symphony Orchestra officials have suspended the rest of the 2010-2011 season, through June 5. This comes on the heels of striking DSO musicians voting today to turn down management’s “final offer.” Though management’s press release noted it’s possible some of the season could yet be salvaged were a settlement reached in the coming months, DSO Executive Vice President Paul Hogle said this afternoon that the current offer is now withdrawn.
Mayor Dave Bing’s spokesperson Karen Dumas said, “We are very disappointed with the news, but when you have two parties that are equally committed and passionate, finding common ground can be difficult and sometimes impossible.”
There are also some more in depth looks in how these final months have played out here and here. I personally believe this has more to do than just the decline of classical music. It’s a sad story about Detroit and America at large as well.
