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.
Filed under: Reviews | Tags: James Pellerite, Lawrence Golan, William Hill
There is an old saying that I have drawn attention to in past articles which says that the further away an individual is, or has to come from to arrive at any given spot, the greater his expertise. So many people believe this old rubric that when important musicians are mentioned or searched for, they immediately look to New York, Bloomington, Indiana, or Europe. This review concerns a recording made by two powerfully artistic individuals that live – are you ready for this? – in Denver, and a third who truly does live in Bloomington, Indiana. This review is about a CD that was released by these individuals in 2007. The three individuals are William Hill, who is on the Composition Faculty at the Lamont School of Music at DU, Lawrence Golan who teaches conducting at the Lamont School of Music, and last, but certainly not least, is the remarkable flautist, James Pellerite, who is now retired from the woodwind faculty at the renowned Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University in Bloomington.
The CD that I am referring to has the somewhat unusual title, “Funky Little Crustaceans.” All of the music on this CD was composed by William Hill, who as most of you should by now know, is not only a composer, he is also the timpanist with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra. The title of the CD is also the title of the first composition on the CD. It came from a stroll that Mr. Hill and his violinist wife, Natalie, were taking on the beach on the Outer Banks. As they walked along, some enormous waves crashed on the beach, and after each one, myriad crustaceans were washed onto the sand. After only a few seconds of wobbling about, they vanished into the sand as quickly as a fox can disappear into the mist. These small creatures of the sea did this in perfect unison. Mrs. Hill exclaimed, “What funky little crustaceans!”
Do not be misled by the title. This eleven minute work is a wonderful tone poem for full orchestra that Mr. Hill completed in 1990. As a matter of fact, he conducted five performances of the work with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in 1993. Funky Little Crustaceans begins with big chords which paint us a picture of huge waves crashing on the beach. This enormous opening then gives way to a “disjointed calypso,” which truly does describe the crustaceans as they move across the sand, startled by being out of the sea. In the liner notes for the CD, Mr. Hill explains that in the score “humorous and unconventional directions are given to the players: creeping along, suddenly skittering erratically ahead, apathetically dawdling”, etc. (Do any of you recall the “eye music” of Robert Schumann?). But most certainly this work encompasses humor and seriousness. I use the word seriousness, because even though this work is generally lighthearted, the orchestration is something to behold. For those of you not familiar with the term of orchestration, it means the assignment of different instruments of the orchestra to the various themes as well as accompaniment. The orchestration in this work is absolutely remarkable. I have come across many people in my life who think that composers don’t really have to work at orchestration, but that idea, of course, is because they do not understand the process. They also seem to believe that anyone who is trained in music can write it – they do not understand that a composer loves music so much that they have to own it, and that the music is pulled from very deep within. It takes years of study.
The next composition by Hill on this CD, entitled “Aurora Borealis,” is another tone poem of twenty-seven minutes written for orchestra and Native American flute. This composition gives us a fine example of a Native American instrument being used for serious music as it was originally intended and used. Let us hope that this CD helps give the Native American flute a newborn legitimacy other than shallow New Age music of the last few years.
The flautist on this recording is one of the all-time great flute players in the world. As a performer on the modern flute, Mr. Pellerite is well-known as an orchestral musician. He succeeded his renowned teacher, William Kincaid, as solo flutist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. He has held the position of principal flute also with the symphony orchestras of Detroit and Indianapolis and performed with orchestras of Chautauqua (NY), Radio City Music Hall (NYC), L’Orquestra Sinfonica de Puerto Rico, as well, the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony and the Minnesota Orchestra. His performances have included those under such eminent conductors as Leonard Bernstein, Pablo Casals, Neville Mariner, Dimitri Mitropoulos, Eugene Ormandy, Leopold Stokowski and Igor Stravinsky.
For many years he served as Professor of Flute at Indiana University, and many of his students now hold prominent university and symphony positions. During much of his career as a classical flutist and artist teacher he has appeared throughout the U.S., Canada, Mexico and abroad. Numerous residencies have included tours to Australia, Japan, Taiwan, Singapore and People’s Republic of China. For a return invitation by the National Youth Orchestra of Hong Kong he offered classes and woodwind seminars.
Of this work, Mr. Hill says in the liner notes, “Aurora Borealis is very much a tone poem in the genre of the works of Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy. Bits of the almost minimalist techniques of Jean Sibelius are also recognizable. An impressionistic musical language used to depict the icy monochromatic stillness of the far north, with gradual hints of color developing into more subtle shadows of the spectrum as the piece evolves. An almost organic growth of material, from the first isolated harmonics strings and single tones of the flute, takes the music through very slow changes of harmony, melody, and tone color.” There is no specific program for Aurora Borealis but it was dedicated to and written specifically for Pellerite. I am quite familiar with James Pellerite’s performance ability because I was an undergraduate student at the Jacobs School of Music from the late 1950s to the early 1960s while Pellerite was on the faculty. After listening to this CD, I cannot imagine anyone else performing Hill’s composition. There is no question that Pellerite’s playing was world-class then, and it has gotten better over the years. There is a lesson to be learned here for any young person attempting to be a performing musician: practice. Once again, the orchestration in this work attracts immediate attention. I have been fortunate to hear several of Mr. Hill’s compositions, but again the orchestration on this CD in these pieces has left an indelible impression. I think that most composers cannot abide having their output compared to other composers – especially by reviewers, because the reviewer invariably compares the music to the wrong ‘other’ composer. Therefore, I hope that Mr. Hill will forgive me when I say that his orchestration is reminiscent of Ravel, Gershwin, and Prokofiev. Please understand that I am not saying Hill copied from these composers. He is certainly his own man, and he is so gifted that he does not need to copy from anyone. I am saying that in his orchestration ability, he is equal to them. This whole work shimmers with incredible beauty.
The last composition by Mr. Hill’s on this CD, “Seven Abstract Minatures,” is a suite of seven pieces based on seven out of eighteen pen and ink drawings that were also done by William Hill. He has always been interested in the relationship between the visual arts and composition, and he has been trained in drawing and painting as well as composition. Both his drawings and the music itself are most remarkable, and it is actually quite difficult to describe the drawings with the remainder of the space in this article. Suffice to say that I most certainly do have some favorites. They are (2) “Moebius?,” (3)”Prism,” (4) “On the Mall,” and (6) “Mountain Twilight.” The second work in the suite, Moebius, is pastoral like, and yet it soars. Prism begins very softly with celeste and vibraphone, but it gathers strength as the full orchestra enters. On the Mall, which is a parody of wealth and commercialism set against the blues depicting street people, is a wonderfully descriptive piece. Mountain Twilight, Number 6, captures that time of day as well as the oncoming chill of nighttime. Mr. Hill could have called this suite a “Tone Poem Suite” because every single piece opens our imagination, as do the drawings which are in the booklet accompanying the CD.
The music on this CD is excellent and extremely satisfying to hear. William Hill has been critically acclaimed as a composer, soloists, visual artist, recording artist, and conductor. Currently he is Principal Timpanist with the Colorado Symphony and teaches composition and counterpoint at University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. Mr. Hill has served as a composer with the Ohio Chamber Orchestra, National Music Festival, Denver Chamber Orchestra, Colorado Music Festival, Grand Teton Music Festival, Colorado and Denver Symphonies, and the Nova Series of Salt Lake City.
Hill’s music has been chosen four times as a winner in the Percussive Arts Society International Composition Contest, and an ASCAP Plus winner every year since joining the organization. Commissions and grants have been awarded to Mr. Hill from organizations such as Meet the Composer, The Denver Foundation for the Performing Arts, the Denver Chamber Orchestra, the Academy in the Wilderness, the Colorado and Denver Symphonies, and University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music. William Hill has been chosen as the Composer of the Year for 2007 by the Colorado Chapter of the Music Teacher’s National Association.
William Hill holds the Bachelor of Music with High Distinction from Indiana University, and the Master of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music. He was awarded the Performer’s Certificate from Indiana University, and the Maurice Abravannel Music Director’s Award from the Music Academy of the West.
But you must understand this: the success of a recording such as this, requires not only artistic excellence from the composer, but also from the conductor and the orchestra. These are very difficult pieces rhythmically and musically, and Dr. Lawrence Golan and the Moravian Philharmonic have made this breathtaking performance possible. A native of Chicago, Lawrence Golan holds degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (B.M. and M.M.) and the New England Conservatory of Music (D.M.A.). In addition, he studied at all of the major conducting festivals including Aspen and Tanglewood, where, in 1999, he was awarded the Leonard Bernstein Conducting Fellowship. The long list of distinguished conductors with whom Dr. Golan studied includes Robert Spano, Jorma Panula, David Zinman, Seiji Ozawa, Gustav Meier, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop, Murray Sidlin, and Harold Farberman. Golan teaches at the Lamont School of Music in Denver, and has conducted worldwide and throughout the United States, conducting symphonies, ballets, and opera. He is also the Resident Conductor of the Phoenix Symphony as well as the Music Director and Conductor of the Portland Ballet Company.
All three of these musicians have created an album of new music which, most certainly, will have very broad appeal. It belongs in everyone’s personal library where it will be a constant source of pleasure.
This was recorded by Albany Records. The catalog number is TROY924.
