James Bean – This will rub against my grid

For a year I lived atop a heavily wooded hill in the Pacific Northwest. The dense chilled fog of the late-night and early-morning that settles around the hill's base is most definitely an object in and of itself, though it operates further as a modifier of other things, as well as the modified. Point-source headlights in a night clear of this fog pierce through the trees, offering an observer a distinct location, direction and velocity of a car floating up and down along the undulative descent. This car moves, though it is localizeable. As the fog accumulates, the lit car exists outside of itself, in an increasingly non-localizeable spray of light, through which now the trees puncture. The once-point-source has now split and crawled into each static damp particle, becoming a composite lit presence. The fog has ignited and is ignited.

As the local altitude gradients surge and recede, modulating the overall decline, the car and its lights pop in and out of this diffusive filter. At one moment, the car exists at a single point; at the next, it is swallowed (in one dimension) and is reemerged expanded (in another). While it loses its focused presence, it gains a distance, warmth, and ubiquitousness.

Perhaps this is a fair analog from upon which we can enter this music for flute.

When approaching the potential materials for this will rub against my grid, I considered this sense of diffusion and interpenetration — not only the ways in which breath could be filtered locally (density of fog, temperature) but also dynamically over time (dipping up and down into varying densities of diffusion, texture). There are times in this piece when pure pitch materials emerge, pointed, directional, and definite. The flute is moving, though it is localizeable. There are other times when the location of sound is dispersed in a bath of lateral dimension, as the air coming into the flute is heavily filtered by obfuscatory activity in the mouth.

This fleeting sense of activity is resultant from a relationship of many motions, the way the tongue is interacting with the teeth in various ways, and how that affects the flow, direction, and dispersion of air. What is perceived during the performance can't be defined by any singular activity, but rather it must be an incalculable multi-repercussion of many events. The sonic and performative material here must be the connective tissue between the objective directions on the page, not the directions themselves. In a sense, what can be put on the page is the location of the car, the temperature and humidity of the air, possibly more meteorological data. Maybe the lumen-rating of the headlights. What is experienced, however, is the disorienting momentary glow of the fog, and the thrill, or possibly the danger, of driving through it late at night.

What is on the page, the information that the player must physically and intellectually internalize in various ways, are things like the pitch content (which emerges more directionally at some points and more diffused at others — sometimes it is miles away), tongue activity (consonants like [k], [t], and [s], and other techniques like tongue-pizzicato, flutter-tongue, and traditional articulations), loosening the embouchure to create an "airier" sound, singing, and a few other environmental figures. These obfuscations themselves are given further dimension, as well as intensity, when the player may have indicated to inhale while going through these motions.

I imagine this piece as a set of sounds where there may be multiple lit objects, independently bobbing in and out of these blurring states throughout our field-of-view. Sometimes we are able to sonically capture many of these objects; sometimes we are staring into one head-on.

Etha Williams – Part II of Gesualdo, Stravinsky, Sciarrino

Stravinsky may have been the first to write works inspired by Gesualdo's music, but he would be far from the last; to examine the fate of Gesualdo's music in a later work, we can turn to Sciarrino's Le voci sottovetro (1998). Le voci sottovetro, like Stravinsky's Monumentum, arose out of a sustained engagement with the earlier composer's work and counts as one of several Gesualdo-inflected works that Sciarrino has written. Sciarrino had initially planned an opera about Gesualdo (Luci mie traditrici) but, upon learning that Schnittke was in the process of writing a similar work, Sciarrino amended his opera to center around the French Renaissance composer Claude le Jeune. Nevertheless, Sciarrino's interest in Gesualdo persisted, and he eventually formed the four-movement concert work Le voci sottovetro out of “crumbs left over from Luci mie traditrici.”

Le voci sottovetro, whose title translates to “the voices behind glass,” takes a somewhat more elaborate form than Stravinsky's work, with four musical movements – two transcriptions of Gesualdo's instrumental music (for Gesualdo did write instrumental music, albeit not in nearly as prolifically as vocal music!) alternating with two transcriptions of madrigals – between which troubled “lettere poetiche” by Torquato Tasso, a famous contemporary of Gesualdo who wrote many of the composer's madrigal texts, are read. The work as a whole thus runs as follows:

I. Gagliarda del Principe di Venosa (instrumental work)
A Girolamo Mercuriale, Padova (lettere poetiche)
II. Tu m'uccidi, o crudele (vocal madrigal)
A Maurizio Cataneo, Roma (lettere poetiche)
III. Canzon francese del Principe (instrumental work)
A Giovan Battista Cavallara (lettere poetiche)
IV. Moro, lasso (vocal madrigal)

In arranging his work thus, Sciarrino engages with questions of vocal and instrumental music and text-music relations in a rather different way than does Stravinsky: interspersing purely instrumental works and purely verbal, spoken ones casts new light on the sung texts that come in between. Too, as we shall see, Sciarrino's manner of recasting Gesualdo's madrigals throws new light on their aesthetic assumptions as well. (The choice to end with the madrigal Moro, lasso is interesting as well – it is by far Gesualdo's most well known work, and one of his most chromatic.)

For the sake of scope, I'll focus in the rest of this discussion on just Sciarrino's settings of Gesualdo's madrigals (“Tu m'uccidi, o crudele” [Book V No XV] and the renowned “Moro, lasso” [Book VI No XVIII]). These two movements, set not for vocal ensemble but rather for solo female voice, bring Gesualdo's hyperexpressive variety of the Renaissance madrigal in a strange and, to my ears, enticingly uneasy rapprochement with the Italian operatic tradition (a stylistic combination that no doubt owes its origins to Sciarrino's initially planned Gesualdo opera). Unlike Stravinsky's setting, the vocal, textual element remains, but the solo vocalist's melodic line is taken so freely from different voices of Gesualdo's original madrigal as to be nearly unrecognizable; in the opening of “Tu m'uccidi,” for instance, the first phrase comes from Gesualdo's Tenor part, the second from Gesualdo's Alto I and Tenor, the third from the Tenor again, and the fourth from the Alto I and Soprano. In constantly moving between voices (often to lines that are least prominent in Gesualdo's setting) as well as removing some lines of text entirely by giving them over to the instruments, Sciarrino creates a solo setting of these madrigals in which their melodic content and stylistic context are both profoundly defamiliarized. (The accompanying instruments, too, borrow freely from the original work, and – somewhat similarly to the Stravinsky – often alter voice leading without substantially altering Gesualdo's harmonic palette.)

Even beyond these profound alterations, however, the most distinctive aspect of these settings must be the extravagant instrumental effects (sometimes so out there as to seem in potentially questionable taste – to excellent effect) that, true to Sciarrino's title, cast the low solo voice as though “behind glass.” This occurs perhaps most strikingly at the opening of “Moro lasso,” in which the voice enters on the G# below middle C amidst high register pedaled piano counterpoint, sul tasto viola and cello, and bass flute and bass clarinet – all at a pppp dynamic. The effect is distinctively strange, and Gesualdo's most famous work, too, suddenly sounds strange again – is defamiliarized. Its chromaticism and affective resonances here, in contrast to in the Stravinsky, remain present but are refracted as though through a prism.

***

To my mind and ears, one of the most intriguing things about both Stravinsky's and Sciarrino's Gesualdo settings – situated nearly 40 years apart from one another, and over three centuries after Gesualdo's own works – is that in bringing the “early” into productive dialog with the “new,” they cast into question one of the very musical precepts that Gesualdo's music seems to accept unquestioningly and, indeed, upon which it relies: namely, the relationship of text and music, and off concrete affective expression and compositional technique. While in Gesualdo's madrigals – much as in Monteverdi's seconda prattica not much later – particularly poignant aspects of a text call for particularly pungent chromatic effects (and while even when performed in viol consort, they would have had such a tragic affective connotation), Stravinsky's and Sciarrino's settings either refuse such assumptions altogether, in Stravinsky's case, or musically reexamine and defamiliarize them, in Sciarrino's. In this way both provide vivid musical expressions of how we understand the distant past in our present, such that – to quote Proust, remarking on a somewhat different aspect of this past-present relationship – Gesualdo “is made to play upon the keyboards of several ages at once.”

Sources Consulted/Further Reading:
Balanchine, George. “The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music.” Reprinted in Opera Quarterly 22(1) (2007), 138-43.
Crawford, Dorothy. Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Deutsch, Catherine. “Antico or Moderno? Reception of Gesualdo's Madrigals in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Journal of Musicology 30(1) (2013), 28-48.
Mason, Colin. “Gesualdo and Stravinsky.” In Tempo 55/56 (1960), 39-48.
Watkins, Glenn. The Gesualdo Hex. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Etha Williams – Gesualdo, Stravinsky, Sciarrino : On some affinities of the "early" and the "new"

Since my two principal interests lie in early music, on the one hand, and new music, on the other – and having met numerous others with similar interests –, I spend a lot of time thinking about what common affinity such temporally distant eras might share. The very phrases “early music” and “new music” – common parlance in the world of concert programming, CD marketing, and the like – are perhaps a good place to start. The modifiers “early” and “new” both define their respective eras not in terms of compositional practice (as does, for instance, the phrase “common practice period”) nor in terms of an aesthetic (as do “baroque,” “classical,” or “romantic”), but rather in terms of their relative temporal position. In that one is “early” and the other “new,” they appear to be opposed; but in that both lie temporally outside the canonical works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they share a common “otherness” that composers, performers, and listeners – myself included – have seized upon.

The explicit correspondences between these two fields of music are manifold – including, to name a few, Anton Webern's dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac, the extraordinary confluence of early and new music programming in Los Angeles's Monday Evening Concert Series and in Paris's Domaine musicale during the 1950s and 1960s, and the Ensemble Recherche's “In Nomine” project, which has commissioned works based on the Renaissance “In nomine” melody from numerous contemporary composers. Having largely faded from cultural memory, such “early” influences become sites at which composers can find new ways of thinking about pressing musical questions such as those of contrapuntal procedures, of unfamiliar sounds, and of borrowed musical material and intertextuality.

Rather than trying to enumerate such correspondences comprehensively, though, I want to focus on just one site of such an interaction of the “early” and the “new”: Carlo Gesualdo, a Renaissance composer who has occupied a particularly prominent place in the modern musical imagination. Gesualdo's figure has loomed large in the twentieth century – a legacy detailed comprehensively in Glenn Watkin's study The Gesualdo Hex, from which much of the information presented here is drawn –, provoking a film by Werner Herzog (Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices) in addition to musical works by numerous composers including, but by no means limited to, Igor Stravinsky, Klaus Huber, Alfred Schnittke, and Salvatore Sciarrino. Examining just two of these works – Stravinsky's and Sciarrino's – can cast light on Gesualdo's legacy for modernity as well as the manner in which Stravinsky and Sciarrino used his music to rethink issues such as the relationship between vocal and instrumental music, affective expression and sonic abstraction, and the immediacy of text-music relations.

***

The standard narrative on Gesualdo runs something like this: during his life, at the twilight of the Renaissance, Gesualdo composed music of extraordinary chromaticism and dark expressivity, a darkness often read as stemming from the the composer's murder of his adulterous wife. As a courtly amateur, Gesualdo's music had only limited influence during and immediately after his life and was thus more or less forgotten until being rediscovered in the twentieth century, when it came to be prized for its anticipation of the radical chromaticism of Wagner and, even, of atonality itself.

While largely historically accurate, this narrative engages in a fair bit of exaggeration, particularly concerning Gesualdo's status as a neglected (until the twentieth century, that is) genius. While his influence during his own time may not have been as great as that of, say, Monteverdi, Gesualdo was indeed recognized and seen as a modernist then as well as now – albeit for somewhat different reasons. In the early- and mid-seventeenth century, commentators praised Gesualdo's ability to bring out the affective content of a text in a rhetorically eloquent manner, both through the extensive chromaticism for which he is now renowned and also through contrapuntal artifice, and saw him as a precursor to Monteverdi's quintessentially modern seconda prattica.

Nevertheless, Gesualdo's prominence waned in the subsequent centuries (without his being entirely forgotten – his figure persists at least as far as the later eighteenth century in writings and engravings!), and Gesualdo's renewed importance in the twentieth century did indeed mark a qualitative, as well as quantitative, change in the composer's historical fortunes. Putting a precise date on the modern renaissance of this late Renaissance composer is, like most such ventures, impossible, but the 1910s (the same time at which Schoenberg was making his forays into free atonality) saw an increase in both publications regarding Gesualdo (Ferdinand Keiner's dissertation [1914] and an edition of his madrigals by Ildebrando Pizzetti [1919]) and citations of him. One of the earliest such remarks came in 1915, by Hugo Leichtentritt, who praised Gesualdo's prescience thus: “Only at present, in the age of Richard Strauss, Debussy, Scriabine, Busoni, can one see that this great impressionist Gesualdo is akin to these modern masters, their brother. He is three centuries ahead of his time in his novel and extremely daring use of tonality or rather lack of tonality, his bewildering manner of modulation, his fine sense of colour in harmony.” And Egon Wellesz likewise, one year later, compared Gesualdo to Schoenberg, citing the former for chromaticism of a sort “which we cannot observe again until we reach the later works of Richard Wagner.”

Gesualdo, then, who during his own time was regarded as at the forefront of efforts to restore the affective-rhetorical power that music presumably possessed in antiquity, throughout the twentieth century gradually gained a reputation as a precocious practitioner of a chromaticism that would only find its ultimate fulfillment centuries later in the works of Wagner and Schoenberg. It might seem strange, then, that one of the first composers to extensively draw on Gesualdo's influence in his own music was a composer who had been aggressively diatonic during much of the first half of the twentieth century: Igor Stravinsky.

***

Stravinsky composed his Monumentum pro Carlo Gesualdo (1960) at a time when Gesualdo's prominence was growing both in general concert life and in Stravinsky's particular compositional imagination. The work consists of three movements, each a setting of one of Gesualdo's madrigals from his last two (and most extravagantly chromatic) published books: “Asciugate i begli occhi” (Book V No XIV), “Ma tu, cagion di quella” (Book V No XVIII), and “Belta poi che t'assenti” (Book VI No II).

The most notable difference between Stravinsky's setting and Gesualdo's originals is, of course, Stravinsky's elimination of the voice: what had been works in a preeminently vocal genre – the Renaissance polyphonic madrigal – have been made purely instrumental. To this end, Stravinsky evokes another baroque tradition – that of Venetian polychoral church music – in the way he deploys “choirs” of instruments in antiphonal contrast with one another. (Indeed, as Watkins has shown, the third madrigal subtly references Giovanni Gabrieli's famous polychoral Sonata Pian e Forte.) Thus the first and third movements constantly alternates wind and string textures (a practice, moreover, that sounds distinctively Stravinskian as well as faintly baroque), while the second makes use of the contrast between woodwinds and brass. Such alternation between instrumental choirs, along with other free alterations of voice leading and octave displacement on Stravinsky's part, qualitatively alters Gesualdo's sinuous chromatic voice leading, removing much of its vocal lyricism and shifting the aural focus further towards the (now wordless) vertical sonorities.

Stravinsky's transcription was not the first transformation of Gesualdo's madrigals from vocal to instrumental media; as early as 1635, just over two decades after Gesualdo's death, Giovanni Battista Doni proposed that, in incidental theater music, “for action of a melancholy nature one plays a madrigal of the Prince of Venosa on the viols.” Yet there is something qualitatively different from the theatrical use that Doni suggests and the instrumental settings Stravinsky prepared. In Stravinsky's setting, the affective connotations of Gesualdo's chromaticism are heavily suppressed, and the alternation of instrumental choirs and changes in voice leading serve to foreground the way that individual phrases balance and contrast with one another rather than the affective content of Gesualdo's pungent dissonances. Too, the treatment of phrases in blocks of relatively static color and dynamics contributes to this sense. Indeed, Robert Craft reported that Stravinsky described the work as “no less than a 'definition of what is vocal and what instrumental'” – a quintessentially metamusical abstraction if ever there was one. If Paul Lang's judgement of Craft and Stravinsky's approach to Gesualdo as “arctic” may seem somewhat harsh, it is nevertheless hard to deny that in Monumentum, the molten lava of Gesualdo's expressive chromaticism has hardened, over the centuries, into something akin to igneous rock.

In this regard, it is instructive to note that while it originated as a concert work, Stravinsky's Monumentum found a place – indeed, probably its most enduring place – in the theater. Balanchine, who saw the element of dance as central to Stravinsky's style in the composer's balletic and non-balletic works alike, choreographed a ballet to Stravinsky's music and premiered it just months after the concert premiere of the work. A clip of the ballet, following Balanchine's staging, can be found starting 4:13 in the video below:

What is perhaps most noteworthy here is the degree to which the theatrical setting corresponds with and, indeed, enhances the music's sense of abstraction – through the simple black and white costumes, the degree to which the dancers' choreography often follows the interweaving of the polyphonic lines, and the lack (typical in much of Balanchine) of narrative or even overt affective content. Such an understanding of Gesualdo's music – in terms of abstraction of sound and movement alike – would likely have seemed stranger to the composer's contemporaries than would the chromaticism itself.

Stay tuned for PART II, to be released next week. For information about Etha Williams, click here.

Sources Consulted/Further Reading:
Balanchine, George. “The Dance Element in Stravinsky's Music.” Reprinted in Opera Quarterly 22(1) (2007), 138-43.
Crawford, Dorothy. Evenings on and off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939-1971. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Deutsch, Catherine. “Antico or Moderno? Reception of Gesualdo's Madrigals in the Early Seventeenth Century.” In The Journal of Musicology 30(1) (2013), 28-48.
Mason, Colin. “Gesualdo and Stravinsky.” In Tempo 55/56 (1960), 39-48.
Watkins, Glenn. The Gesualdo Hex. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010.

Etha Williams – Singing in "thinner and thinner air": Schoenberg and Ferneyhough's works for soprano and string quartet

Schoenberg's Second String Quartet occupies a particularly special place in my musical life; indeed, it's not an exaggeration to say that this piece is what eventually prompted me to pursue a career in musicology. I first heard the quartet – or rather, just its final movement – under what might at first seem not the most promising circumstances: an undergraduate music course for non-majors in which I was enrolled. Our TA gave us – most of whom had at best a somewhat shaky conceptual understanding of what exactly “tonality” entailed – a brief explanation of the work's historical significance: that the first three movements, each in keys only distantly related to one another, became progressively less and less strongly rooted to their home tonality, and that the fourth and final movement departs entirely from tonality as the soprano sings Stefan Georg's words: “I feel the air of another planet...”

Georg's text in this movement – “Entrückung” (“Rapture”) from his collection Der siebente Ring, which also provides the text (“Litanei”) for the quartet's third movement – treats, among other themes, that of transcendence: transcendence of the earth for “another planet,” of the self for “the holy voice..” The indescribability, the fundamental other-ness, of the transcendent is integrally bound up in our cultural understanding of it (indeed, it is arguably this issue that underpins the Old Testament ban on images). Thus Dante, attempting to describe a vision of Beatrice's face upon arrival at the Empyrean, could only convey it by describing his inability to convey it: “Here I concede defeat. No poet known,/comic or tragic, challenged by his theme/to show his power, was ever more outdone.” Transcendence, so emphatically outside human experience is by necessity difficult to capture sensibly. Indeed, even Georg's poem, with its descriptions of “unfathomable thanks and unnamed love” and “swimming in a sea of crystal radiance” can begin to seem almost kitschy, or at least over the top, at times. And so when I prepared to listen to the last movement of Schoenberg's quartet that day, I wasn't sure how to imagine what the “air of another planet” might sound like.

Whatever I might have imagined, the music was radically different from that imagination. I have long struggled to put into words just why this movement made such an impression on me at the time. Perhaps it was because it truly did sound as though “from another planet,” and yet it was also immanently sensible. It was strangely beautiful, and beautifully strange – and it made me want to learn more about music so that I could understand how a piece like this came about, and what gives its musical substance such great expressive and significant force.

***

In its 1908 premiere, Schoenberg's Second Quartet prompted a small succès de scandale on account of precisely one of the features for which it is now celebrated: the inclusion of a soprano, singing the aforementioned Stefan Georg texts, in its third and fourth movements. (Reportedly, following the third movement there came calls to end the performance, and by the close of the quartet, Schoenberg's music was more or less inaudible under the din of the crowd.) The first intimation of a vocal intrusion into the quartet, however, comes even earlier, in the middle of the second movement where, after building up to a fortissimo climax with tremolos in the first and second violins, the quartet quotes the Viennese song “Ach du lieber Augustin.” (The song's refrain: “Oh, you dear Augustin/All is lost.”) The tune at once evokes programmatic allusions (in particular, the line “all is lost” can be read as referring both to Schoenberg's dissolution of tonality in this quartet and the simultaneous dissolution of his first marriage) and sounds markedly – even comically – out of place. Eventually, the tune itself dissolves and “is lost” as it becomes chromatically inflected and is subjected to Schoenberg's process of “developing variation.”

When the voice – a solo soprano – itself comes in in the third movement, it, too, seems to be something of an alien intrusion into the string quartet even as it helps provide extra-musical significance for the work's audacious moves away from tonality. In many ways, including a solo voice – particularly one that, like the soprano, floats above the quartet redo – seems to go against many of the central principles of the quartet genre – those of equality of instrumental parts, of relative textural homogeneity, and of “durchbrochene arbeit” (the practice of developing musical material by splitting it amongst various instruments).

Schoenberg actively foregrounds such tensions in his setting of Stefan Georg's “Litanei” in the third movement: written in variation form, the movement's quartet part treats the principal themes from the previous two movements (continuing in the venerable tradition of cyclic form; compare Schoenberg's use here with the invocation of previous themes in the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony) while the soprano sings new, thematically independent material. The result is a remarkable, anguished commentary of sorts on the music that has come before – a commentary that, moreover, seems to derive its force as much from the gulf between the vocal and the quartet parts as it does from their union. This anguished prayer leads to the fourth movement's other-planetary “rapture” – and, moreover, to the quartet's most radical movement: not only is the final movement largely removed from tonality (though it touches on triadic harmonies and does end, albeit somewhat tentatively, on a F# major chord, the parallel major of the key in which the first movement began), but it is almost entirely athematic, privileging texture over themes and departing entirely from traditional forms. Much of the harmonic and melodic motion occurs by fifths – an interval that traditionally forms the bedrock of tonality, yet here is presented divorced entirely from its conventional harmonic function. Tonal and formal gravity, so to speak, have been suspended on this new musical “planet.”

Extra-musical associations have long been used to justify transgressions of musical norms; indeed, such practices can be traced back at least as far as Monteverdi's seconda prattica, in which Monteverdi justified departures from Palestrina-style perfect counterpoint through the demands of attentive text setting. But what seems remarkable to me in Schoenberg's employment of this device is that while Georg's texts help articulate the decisive strangeness of the quartet, they do not explain this strangeness away. Rather, the quartet's deliberate incongruities – which caused such a stir at the quartet's premiere – expressively heighten this strangeness, and in so doing begin to make it sensible.

*

In an essay exploring the relation between music and language – and, in particular, music's Sprachähnlichkeit, its similarity to language –, the philosopher Theodor Adorno likewise touches, from a slightly different angle, on the work's complex mediation between expressiveness and expressionlessness: “Schoenberg...had to find means of composition that would rise above the gliding of the chromatics without reverting back to a lack of differentiation. The solution lay precisely in those extraterritorial chords that had not yet been occupied by musical-linguistic intentions – a kind of musical new-fallen snow in which the subject had not yet left any tracks. … In the last movement of the F-sharp Minor Quartet, the new chords have been inserted as literal allegories of 'another planet.' It follows that the origin of the new harmony must be sought in the realm of the emphatically expressionless, as much as in the realm of expression, as much in hostility to language as in language – even though this hostile element, which is alien to the continuum of the idiom, repeatedly served to realize something that was linguistic in a higher degree, namely, the articulation of the whole.”

Such issues lie at the heart of another work that has been very important to me in my explorations of recent music, Brian Ferneyhough's Fourth String Quartet (1990) – which, like Schoenberg's Second Quartet, employs the unusual combination of string quartet and soprano and which the composer wrote in conscious response both two Schoenberg's work and to Adorno's larger treatment of the issue of Sprachähnlichkeit. Crucially, Ferneyhough was concerned with exploring the viability and limits of the music-language relationship in contemporary music; as he writes in a discussion of the work, “I don't take Sprachähnlichkeit for granted; in fact, the appropriateness of the concept was part of the problem I set myself. … In my Fourth Quartet, I set myself the task of examining, one more time, how, and if, the phenomenon of verbal language and the essentially processual nature of much recent musical composition could be coaxed into some kind of Einklang, some mutually illuminating coexistence.”

In contrast to Schoenberg's quartet, whose movements progress with ever-increasing tension to the final movement's ecstatic Entrückung, Ferneyhough's quartet employs a rather different strategy. It is structured in two pairs of movements, each consisting of a rather short instrumental movement (the first of which Ferneyhough compares to the “curiously truncated sonata allegro structures in the opening movement of Schoenberg's Second Quartet”) followed by a longer movement with voice (setting Jackson Mac Low's “Words and Ends from Ez,” a deconstruction of Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos). In both of the pairs, the vocal movement quite audibly mirrors the structural organization of the preceding instrumental movement.

The first movement consists of progressive, though often somewhat violently fragmented, developments of the opening idea, a rapid repetition of a single pitch played on two alternating strings; the second movement shares not only the first's impulse towards linear development, but also its fragmentary, fractured quality, now expressed directly through frequent grand pauses between sections. In this movement, the vocal part is consistently directly tied to the quartet part, constantly imitating (in various, constantly shifting fashions) material heard in the latter; however, this imitation seems to become increasingly free over the course of the movement, particularly in the middle of the movement when the soprano begins speaking parts of the text – emphasizing that Sprachähnlichkeit can describe not only a similarity to abstract language, but also to spoken language itself. The third movement moves to a different type of fragmentation – one of instrumentation, as different instruments drop out and are foregrounded over the course of the work, casting into question the concerted nature of the string quartet. This reaches an extreme in the fourth, vocal movement, which concludes with a remarkable lengthy passage for solo, unaccompanied voice. In both pairs of movements, the opening instrumental movement sets up the problem (fragmented variation, disintegration of the concerted quartet) that is qualitatively transformed, and placed into dialog with the problem of linguistic and musical expression, through the vocal movement.

***

Retrospectively discussing his Second Quartet in 1949, Schoenberg let his sci-fi side show through for a moment, remarking, “The fourth movement, Entrückung, begins with an introduction, depicting the departure from earth to another planet. The visionary poet here foretold sensations, which perhaps soon will be affirmed. Becoming relieved from gravitation – passing through clouds into thinner and thinner air, forgetting all the troubles of life on earth – that is attempted to be illustrated in this introduction.” Thinner air, but still breathable – and it is this that, for me, makes much of “new music” so fascinating.

Sources Consulted:

Adorno, Theodor. “Music, Language, and Composition.” In Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert, 113-126. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.
Arnold Schoenberg Center. “Zweites Quartett (fis-Moll) für zwei Violinen, Viola, Violoncello und eine Sopranstimme” Accessed July 9, 2013. http://www.schoenberg.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=179&Itemid=354&lang=en
Crispin, Darla M. “Arnold Schoenberg's Wounded Work: 'Litanei' From the String Quartet in F sharp minor, Op. 10.” In Austrian Studies 79 (2009), 62-74.
Ferneyhough, Brian. “String Quartet No. 4.” In Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop, 153-164.

Ravi Kitappa – Permutations

We of Fonema Consort hold a special place in our heart for the young NYC concert series Permutations. Both Fonema Consort and Permutations were founded around the same time, and it has been a mutual joy to watch each other "permute" in these formative years.

Nina Dante : Attending a performance on the Permutations series is more of an experience than a traditional concert. Set the scene for us, if you will: what is the concept of Permutations?
Ravi Kittappa : Permutations is meant to be a few things: a performance series, a fundraiser, and a party. All three equally. Each permutations is the same format but a different experience, hence the name of the series. The basic idea is that artists can use the event to present something a little different and more intimate than their usual shows while connecting more directly with their audience, raising some money, and having a party with their friends and supporters.

ND : Can you tell us the inspiration behind the creation of Permutations, and its history up to today?
RK : The first Permutations was a little over a year ago - permutations040612, featured the Color Field Ensemble, which came full circle at the last Permutations (permutations032913) which featured members of Color Field performing virtuosic soli. Since the first Permutations I would estimate that the events have raised over $8000 for the various ensembles and artists who've presented their work. We've had performers from NYC and from throughout the US as well as performers from Germany and France. The money raised from Permutations has gone to funding music festivals, producing a radio-play, making recordings, funding tours, and keeping a German performer in NYC!
Around the time that Permutations started, I was keenly aware of NYC musicians that would perform to small crowds of 30 or so people and either have to pay to do so or get something paltry at the end of the night. They would feel that these performances were successful (and they were!) but would be in the hole monetarily afterwards. It's a discouraging thing. From my experience in my younger days in punk rock and the rave scene, I knew the remedy was just a little of the DIY ethic. Along with getting the musicians paid in order to allow them to keep producing and performing, Permutations had to be a fun, community building party. Our hope is that people come to Permutations even when they are unaware of the performer or the music, because they want to experience something new, support the artists, and have a drink and some fun afterwards. I think at each successive Permutations event there are more and more folks like that.

ND : We loved performing at Permutations last year- the series has such a unique vibe, which I think has partially to do with the atmospheric venue in which the concerts take place. Can you tell us a little about the venue, and what role it played in the creation of the series? How do you think the venue lends itself to performances of new music?
RK : The venue is kindly donated to us by Jake and Heather Boritt, patrons of the arts and more specifically, arts and culture in Harlem. I can't thank them enough. Jake had told me of the space after some of the renovations were complete and I specifically had heard about a Highlands Dinner Club event that had happened soon after. Once I saw the space I knew I wanted to do Permutations.
The speakeasy nature of the event as well as being in Harlem, give the night a lot of character. Of course, the performers really interact with the space, deciding how exactly it will work best for them. All the performers are aware of the city soundscape that can sometimes interfere with the proceedings, but it has always worked.

ND : Permutations takes place in NYC, a city whose new music scene is quite mature. Can you tell us what role you would like Permutations to play in this scene?
RK : My humble answer is that Permutations attempts to make NYC more accessible and more of a viable venture for performers and groups. In general, Permutations is a lot of fun too, which often only happens at the bar after a typical NYC new music performance. So there's a hope for community building as well. Permutations is about empowering the performer. We haven't taken one cent from any of the performers who've played . All the money goes to the performers. I'd love to see someone sell out a Permutations at $200 and put on a crazy show and put that money towards a project that would be difficult to fund in another way.

ND : We of Fonema Consort are so happy to be a part of Permutations in these exciting early years of its growth. We are so curious to see what the series becomes in the next few years- what is your vision for the future of Permutations?
RK : Ahhh. Well I don't want to give anything away, but as you know, I no longer live in NYC. The virtuoso pianist and my friend, Karl Larson, has been running NYC Permutations events since September. We are looking to start Permutations West in San Francisco and are hoping to help facilitate performers playing the east and west coast. Groups could plan their tours based around the funds they raise in NYC and SF permutations. We have some other things cooking as well, but I can't divulge that info just yet.

Monte Weber – Mimesis

The conceptualization of Mimesis came about through the struggle to pinpoint my own compositional aesthetic with regards to stuttering and speech therapy. Instead of portraying the struggle and inconsistency of my own speech I decided to let the process of repetition and fluidity govern how words transform. Hogs in suits with wet cigars becomes A hut damned king throws thorns which riddles by transforming single words: hogs-->hags-->august-->hot-->a hut, etc. The process involves the repetition of each word while altering one or more vowel/consonant sounds to achieve fluid transformations and to arrive at a word with a completely different connotation. In Mimesis, the conversational discourse between the two performers explores the inherent unnoticed virtuosity involved in speech.

Each word’s ability to transform so fluidly tells me something about the connection between seemingly disparate words, that is to say that if hogs and hags dwell within such close proximity within this easily traversable continuum, perhaps for a stutterer learning to attain fluidity is only a matter of working through hogs in suits with wet cigars.

Peter Margasak – Frequency

Just under a month ago, Chicago's newest New Music series Frequency had it's debut concert at Constellation, a new venue in Chicago that hosts the series. In anticipation of our performance on the series on May 26th, singer Nina Dante had some questions for Frequency's founder, critic Peter Margasak, on the inspirations and motivations behind the series.

Nina Dante : It is extremely exciting to see the emergence of Frequency, one of the few concert series dedicated to new music here in Chicago. Can you tell us when you started thinking about creating this series, and how the idea developed into reality from there?
Peter Margasak : I've been interested in the idea of programming live music for many years, always seeing voids in the local concert-presenting landscape and thinking about how it could be filled, but that was about as far as it ever went. When Mike Reed told me about Constellation, I shared some of my ideas and he proposed doing this weekly series, and getting a chance to present music that's really important to me has been exhilarating. One of the primary focuses of the series is to give a regular spotlight to the explosion of interesting, independent, and adventurous new music ensembles I've noticed in Chicago over the last few years. There are so many terrific groups, but I think the sense of community that exists in Chicago feels a bit diffuse to the outsider--the average person probably doesn't realize what an exciting moment this is, so Frequency is, in part, trying to concentrate the activity to make it more visible as well as to give the musicians their own space on a consistent basis.

ND : After the opening concerts of the venue and the series, what are your impressions of how Constellation's environment lends itself to performances of new music?
PM : I think music sounds great in both performance spaces, and because the bar is in the lobby area and separated by two sets of doors there's no issues with ambient noise. I've noticed that audience members are really hear to listen to music, which is the whole idea.

ND : You once described Constellation as a "hybrid space a la Roulette, Issue Project Room Le Poisson Rouge. Chicago needs and deserves this." What role do you see Frequency/Constellation playing in Chicago's blossoming new music scene? Can you share any reflections on how you see Chicago's rapidly developing new music scene being unique from that of New York City's?
PM : That description was a bit off the cuff--those venues all have very specific identities and aesthetics and I think Constellation is quickly developing its own. Because Mike Reed is at the helm, the bulk of the music is rooted in jazz traditions, but more importantly, Constellation seems determined to provide a platform for many stripes of non-rock music under-represented in the city. With the presence of Links Hall, Constellation feels like a real performing arts center and I don't feel like Chicago has had anything like it, especially one that focuses on more cutting-edge and progressive work.

ND : New music is a major part of your career as a critic, and it must be important to you personally for you to become an advocate through Frequency- definitely not a light undertaking. How did new music come to be a part of your life?
PM : I've been obsessed with music since I was a kid. I started out with pop music, buying 45s and K-Tel compilations. I think what's always defined my relationship with music is curiosity--I've always been driven by new sounds, new experiences. Explaining how my tastes developed could fill a book that probably wouldn't be too interesting to read, but my relationship with new music is a relatively recent development. I've had my early experiences--I remember skipping high school one day to catch a matinee screening of Koyaanisqatsi in the early 80s and checking out Milton Babbitt records at my public library, but it was decades until I seriously engaged. I've been buying and listening to contemporary music for many years---Cage, Luigi Nono, Luc Ferrari, Giacinto Scelsi, and Xenakis, and groups like Arditti--but a real cogent picture of the music didn't emerge until I started hearing the music live, especially through concerts by ICE. I've got a long way to go, but I'm hooked. There's no turning back.

Joan Arnau Pàmies – Organicism

My interest in writing scores is strongly connected to the inherent ability of music to embrace reality. I understand music as a network of potential relationships, a priori, of any kind; as an extremely intricate machinery that allows interpretation to flourish. Not only do I understand interpretation as the act of performance (as in the activity that takes place between score and performer), but also as an essential aspect of both the process of composition and the act of listening.
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When composing, I make an effort to meticulously analyze every single material that I am interested in. Whether I am dealing with a particular psychological visualization of a potential sound or the nature of a simple notational signifier, each object needs to function as an essential mechanism of the overall outcome.
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To compose, for me, is a matter of penetrating into my own ability to discern the implications of every single compositional decision: it is an exhaustive process that attempts to transmute my own perception of reality into a different domain. Composing embodies labeling, triggering, listing, critiquing, but it also provides a setup in which noise causes a predetermined system to reorganize itself at a higher level of complexity—hence unpredictability, inconsistency, diversity.