Filed under: Reviews | Tags: Conrad Kehn, Einstürzende Neubauten, John Cage, John Zorn, Lou Harrison, Pauline Oliveros, Silvio Mix, Sofia Gubaidulina, Steve Reich, The Playground Ensemble
Thursday night, February 4th, I attended a concert on the Lamont Subscription Concert Series given by The Playground. The Playground is the Artists – In – Residence group of performers that has dedicated themselves to contemporary and avant-garde music. This particular concert had a theme, which was Music/Noise/Sound/Silence. The theme offers a hidden explanation as to why some of the pieces on the program were relatively old, as music of this century is considered. Keep in mind that the increase in speed of communications in this century has shortened musical periods, and indeed, the periods of all of the arts. The speed of communication has now allowed composers in America to know almost instantly what composers in Europe are doing. Therefore, something that seems new one day can be old in a couple of weeks, because many composers have tried it; some may have discarded it is a bad idea, while others may cling to it as a new source of expression.
The whole idea about the conflict between sound and silence reached its culmination in the years 1950 to about 1975 give or take a few years. This was a period of great experimentation. Generally speaking, all composers were searching for new sounds and new ways to make sounds. Some associated their ideas about sound with new philosophies (Joseph Schillinger’s Mathematical Basis For the Arts, 1942), while some turned to “new” technologies – tape recorders – to expand their possibilities (musique concrète, for example) as the computer (and the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Illinois) loomed on the horizon.
The opening piece on Thursday’s program was written by Silvio Mix, who was hoping to emulate the founder of the Futurist Movement in the first quarter of the 20th century, one Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti. It was his attempt to use sound rather than music, or perhaps, I should say sound as music, and indeed this piece used tone clusters as well as chords, and there was no question that it was probably quite modern for the time – 1924 – that it was written. This very short piece also utilized some advanced pianism which Ms. Heidi Leathwood performed quite well.
Next on the program was the 1942 Suite for Percussion by the late Lou Harrison. Harrison was an American student of Arnold Schoenberg and Henry Cowell. Though born in Oregon, Harrison, like John Cage, grew up in Southern California. During the 1960s, he became Composer in Residence at San Jose State University. His early percussion ensembles included “found” items and other objects that gave him the sound that he wanted. He also put tacks in the hammers of the piano to give it a more percussive sound, and thus, he developed a kind of “prepared piano.”
This Suite for Percussion, in three movements, was one of the two best works on the program. It was extremely well performed by Jason Rodon, Rachel Hargroder, Dean Hirschfield, Luke Wachter, and Dustin Arndt. It is a solid composition, and it must be remembered that in 1942, the percussion ensemble was just becoming an established medium, thanks to John Cage, who had written a ballet for percussion ensemble for his friend, Merce Cunningham, in 1939. This is certainly a 20th-century piece that will stand the test of time.
Following the Harrison was the famous piece, 4’33” (four minutes and thirty three seconds), by John Cage. According to the program notes, and I quote, “In the 1940s Cage began exploring Asian philosophies, and he came to believe that the purpose of music is to quiet the mind so that it is open to the divine. In 1951, he visited an anechoic chamber in order to experience complete silence. To his surprise, He heard two sounds: his nervous system and his circulatory system. This led him to the revelation that there is no such thing as silence: what we call silence is merely our failure to pay attention to the constant music around us. This experience led Cage to compose his most infamous work: 4’33””. While all of this is true, these notes omit an event in Cage’s life that became the deciding factor in composing this piece. On August 4, 2009, I wrote an article for this website, on the death of Merce Cunningham, who was a close friend of John Cage. In that article, I discuss the results of friendship between Cage, Cunningham, and the artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. If all of you will please forgive me for quoting my own article, I will do so here:
“In 1949, Rauschenberg painted a series of all black and all white paintings. He did this because, and I quote, “I didn’t want color to serve me.” Keep in mind that Cage is interested in sound that is not governed by our European concepts of scale and form. Cage’s concept of sound did not have to be governed by a scale, that is to say linear, but as extending in all directions. He was supremely cognizant of the fact that in order to have sound, one also had to have silence. Cage told me one afternoon in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, that he almost viewed Rauschenberg’s white paintings as silent paintings because they had no color. I think that Rauschenberg may have disagreed with this a little bit, because he still considered the canvas full. In any case, it was the Rauschenberg white paintings that gave Cage the courage, as he put it, to write this piece “4’ 33″. This is a piece of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. Cage told me that he was quite sure that many people do not understand the piece at all, and that was in 1975. Cage considered this piece to be one of his most important pieces, and he still would like to have the public take it seriously. It simply points to the fact that many in the public do not feel the need to find a meaning in a piece of art or a piece of music. That poses too many difficulties for them – particularly the difficulty of time. This piece has three movements and the length of each movement was arrived at by using the method of I Ching. The pianist who premiered this piece in 1952 was David Tudor.”
I think that it is important to realize how Cage fretted over writing this piece, and he told me more than once that he simply wished people would listen to the reasons he composed it. On Thursday, this work was performed by soprano Megan Buness, who thankfully, did not seem self-conscious at all. It was a surprise to see it performed by a vocalist, because every time I have seen it performed, it has been done at the piano. I do not have the score, but I do seem to recall that Cage did not specify the medium. The danger in performing this piece is that the performer will become ill at ease if the audience becomes restive. Fortunately, this did not happen.
There followed three compositions: one by Pauline Oliveros, entitled Sound Patterns; Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, from 1972; and a work by Sofia Gubaidulina, entitled Dots, Lines, and Zigzags. I lump these three works together because they seemed to be, in so many ways, the oldest on the program even though the Oliveros piece was written in 1961, and the Gubaidulina was written in 1976. The reason that they seem old is that they employed a kind of composition that reached its zenith between 1960 and 1970, and was then quickly abandoned. The Oliveros piece employs a small choir that makes popping and clicking noises with their mouths, as well as occasional hoots and hums. The Reich piece is simply clapping a specific rhythm over and over. The Gubaidulina is a piece for bass clarinet and piano, wherein the clarinetist toots and squeaks while the pianist strums inside the piano. I do not mean, by my description, to make fun of these three pieces, for they do show what composers were writing during a specific period of time in which everyone was searching for something new.
After the intermission, The Playground performed a work entitled, The Dead Man, written in 1990 by John Zorn. It is a suite of thirteen short pieces written for string quartet, in this case very well performed by Sarah Johnson, Anna Marshall, Don Schumacher, and Richard von Foerster. There were portions of this piece that I enjoyed very much, but there were portions of this piece that seemed out of sync because of the old techniques used to play the instruments. Please keep in mind, that when I say old techniques, I am referring to sound effect noises – scratchings and bows being whipped through the air – which were used in the 1960s. They simply were out of place in a work that was written in 1990. John Zorn is an American composer who seems to have a dependence upon shock value for some of his reputation. Not only does he compose serious music – I’m sure that every composer considers everything he writes as serious – but it is sometimes hard for me to do so, when the album covers features scenes of graphic violence and human degradation. It was reassuring to hear this piece, because it did raise my opinion of Zorn a notch or two.
The last work on the program was entitled, Tabula Rasa (1993), by the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten. This group was formed in West Berlin in 1980, and while they are considered an experimental rock group, the work that was performed Thursday night did not seem to me to be rock at all. It was composed for junk percussion, voice, string quartet, electric guitar, and electric bass. I would like to see the score for this work. It has four movements, and required the use of electric drills, and a glockenspiel-like instrument built out of box-end wrenches. This certainly attracted my attention, but the test came when I closed my eyes. I was then able to get away from the sight aspect, and I heard some real music being made. It combined some old methods of playing the instruments, and yet had a very attractive sense of theater after the fashion of William Albright’s chamber-theater-percussion-light composition of the 1960s, entitled Beulahland Rag.
This concert provided a real historic perspective of a certain genre of new music, most of which came from one of the most experimental periods in the history of music literature: the 1950s through 1975. As I stated above, a lot of the experimentation from this period of time did not result in ideas which will last. However, it is extremely useful to be reminded of the constant searching by the composers who wrote it. Conrad Kehn and The Playground Ensemble presented a fine program.
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