Month: March 2019

Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Just Intonation, Los Angeles, Strings

Music of Ben Johnston in Pasadena

On Friday, March 15, 2019 the Lyris Quartet and the Kepler Viol Quartet joined forces at the Boston Court Performing Arts Center for an evening of the music of Ben Johnston. The concert was produced by Microfest and featured two of Johnston’s well known string quartets, as well as two rarely performed works. The Kepler Viol Quartet was on hand for the pre-concert talk to demonstrate the bass, tenor and treble viola da gambas used in Fugue for Viols, one of the concert pieces. The intricacies of viol construction, tuning, vibrato, intonation and bowing were explained to a surprisingly knowledgeable and engaged audience. The viola da gamba in the history of tuning was discussed and details of how Johnston re-purposed the fretting for just intonation were also covered. Ben Johnston, who studied with Darius Milhaud, Harry Partch and John Cage, was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Letters last year. At 93 years of age, Johnston may be one of our most influential but least familiar composers. His birthday falls on March 15, making this concert the perfect occasion to celebrate his music.

The first piece on the concert program was String Quartet #4, “Amazing Grace” (1973), performed by the Lyris Quartet. This is probably Johnston’s best known work and consists of a series of seven variations on the familiar hymn, all in different forms of just intonation. The opening section is the cantus firmus, in magnificent full harmony, with a rich and textured feel. Other variations featured expressive counterpoint, wistful introspection, and at times a certain stridency. The hymn tune appears just often enough to keep the audience fully connected. The ensemble playing by the Lyris Quartet was strong throughout, and also included striking solos from the violin and viola. The final variations combined complex passages with a pleasingly dense texture that was abetted by the unconventional harmony. Amazing Grace is perhaps the most over-exposed hymn of our time yet String Quartet #4 brings a vibrant new freshness to this old standard.

Duo for Two Violins (1978) was next, performed by Alyssa Park and Shalini Vijayan of the Lyris Quartet. John Schneider’s helpful program notes describe this piece as fulfilling “…one of the composer’s hidden agendas: to explore what would have happened to the traditional forms and language of Western music if the pure intervals of the Renaissance had not been abandoned.” Accordingly, Duo for Two Violins consists three movements – a fugue, an aria and toccata – lifted directly from Baroque sensibility. “Fuga”, the first movement, was anchored in the familiar formal structure, but the harmonies gave this a refreshingly modern feel. The second movement, “Aria” opened with a soft scratching sound in one violin and a quietly mournful melody underneath. The interplay between parts and the harmony produced by this combination was very alluring and the delicate playing only added to the overall charm. “Toccata” finished out the piece, and the busy opening of this movement was a nice contrast, providing an appealing bit of complexity and bounce in an uptempo finale. Duo for Two Violins is an elegant re-imagining of historical forms and tuning practice that gives new insight into the music history that might have been.

The Kepler Viol Quartet took the stage for Fugue for Viols (1991) and began the lengthy tuning protocol for the bass, treble and two tenor viola da gambas that make up the ensemble. According to the program notes “…Fugue for Viols has only ever been performed at a few early music concerts in the Midwest in the years that followed its composition…” Originally written for George Hunter, an early music colleague of Johnston’s at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, the structure of the piece is squarely in the traditional fugal format. The subject begins in the bass and proceeds to the treble and tenors in the usual way. The audience could hear immediately that the viola da gamba quartet is a smaller and more intimate musical experience. The dark coloring in the bass added a sense of the ancient while the just intonation harmonies were warm and woody to the ear. The timbre of the viols and the unusual chords were at the same time an old curiosity and a new experience. The playing was clean, and the Kepler Quartet brought new life to the old instruments in a most satisfactory way. Fugue for Viols is an intriguing update to the rarely heard viola da gamba quartet, at once familiar and innovative.

The final work on the program was String Quartet #9 (1988), whose four movements further explored Johnson’s interest in recreating classical forms set free from equal temperament. “Strong, calm, slow”, the opening movement, is just that, with sturdy chords rising upward with a solid and settled optimism. The tutti playing was rich and full, adding to the lovely harmony. The second movement, “Fast, elated”, featured rapid phrases in the violins and viola with an appealing counter melody running through the cello. The strong, purposeful feel was supplied by a fine tutti ensemble. Always in motion, there were moments of stridency, especially with the pizzicato phrases in the cello. “Slow, expressive”, the third movement, was full of warm four-part harmony with a deep bass line adding to the sense of calm and comfort. A handsome violin solo was heard, accompanied by moving lines in the second violin and viola along with pizzicato phrasing in the cello. The playing here was precise and elegantly expressive. “Vigorous and defiant”. the final movement, opened with a strong, declarative statement that mixed in a bit of tension. Fast moving phrases in the upper strings crested to a defiant statement, then began again with a strong pulse and rapid tutti ensemble. The playing was exquisitely tight, with the quartet on a solid footing despite the fast tempo and unconventional pitches scattered through the passages. All of this built up to a big finish that was received with extended applause from an appreciative audience. String Quartet #9 is a masterful construction based on old forms while using new musical materials, brilliantly performed by the Lyris Quartet.

by Paul Muller
Classical Music, Recordings, Review

Beth Gibbons Astonishes in a New Górecki’s Third

After a decade-long studio hiatus, Beth Gibbons steps from behind the curtains with a project that feels as organic as it does surprising. Organic because its integration is undeniable, and surprising only to those unfamiliar with her trajectory. The Portishead frontwoman has always been known for her intensity as singer and songwriter, navigating a range uncommon both within and without the scene to which she has been aligned. The darkly inflected splash of Portishead’s 1994 debut, Dummy, threw her and bandmates Geoff Barrow and Adrian Utley into a drawer marked “Trip Hop,” a label that risked gessoing over the genre-defying shades of her vocal palette even as it gave listeners a viable canvas upon which to paint their appreciation. By 1997’s self-titled follow-up, strings had become a haunted theme of their sound, reaching ecstatic heights in such singles as “All Mine,” wherein Gibbons unleashed her soul through an emotional megaphone of fractured magnitude. All of this came to a head that same year when the band fronted a full orchestra at the Roseland Ballroom in New York City. The spirit of that concert seems to have planted a seed in the singer’s heart, easing her shift from a distance into the contemporary classical space of Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3.

Those who grew up with the successful Nonesuch recording of this “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs,” featuring Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta under the baton of David Zinman, will have a thick cluster of brain cells to unravel in order to make room for yet another version, for since then a number of recordings, each with its merits, has appeared. Ewa Iżykowska’s on Dux (2017) arguably fills the finest diurnal cast, while Joanna Kozłowska’s on Decca (1995) is a close second for its cantata-leaning gradations. That said, and despite its muddy production, the Nonesuch blend of tempi and intimacy struck a profound chord with its 1992 release. For the present album we find ourselves in passionate redux. Given the current sociopolitical climate, when division has become the rule beyond exception, its immediacy is sure to ripple across the minds of new and familiar listeners alike. And if any conductor is worthy of ensuring that resonance, it’s Krzysztof Penderecki, here leading the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in a live recording from 2014. Whether or not you agree with the concept (Górecki’s family reportedly wanted nothing to do with the project, and even Björk once turned down an offer to sing the Third), it’s difficult to push against the candor therein.

Long before Gibbons breaks the ice of our expectations, however, the violins in the first movement cry out with vocal integrity, enlivened by Penderecki’s own compositional reckonings with tragedy. The pacing is compelling yet offers enough breathing room for the piano’s restorative metronome. Gibbons makes an arresting entrance, noticeably different from predecessors not only in her ability to cut heart strings by force of a mere syllable but also for being fed through a microphone, thus lending an otherworldly appeal. Yet despite the technological intervention, if not also because of it, her honesty cultivates shared vulnerability. In that respect, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the words she’s singing—all too easy to forget when the meaning of this music has faded in favor of an effect cherished by popular imagination. Knowing that this centuries-old lamentation of a mother to her son occupies the center of an orchestral palindrome like a relic encased in glass provides insight into the worldview of a composer whose love for God embraced every note.

The second movement is built around an inscription by an 18-year-old girl to her mother found on a Gestapo prison wall. Unlike the desperate cries of innocence and revenge that surround it, Górecki was moved by its prayerful bid for forgiveness, unfettered by talons of war. Gibbons approaches this text with a remarkable combination of mature and childlike impulses, navigating both sides of life in poetic truth as Penderecki wraps her in a cloak of empathy. Her effort to understand the nuances of a language not natively her own, taking on the trauma of its becoming, is obvious and translates through her bravery.

The third and final movement centers around a folk song dating back to the 15th century, in which the Virgin Mary begs to share her Son’s wounds on the cross. The sheer humanity Gibbons draws from these verses shows in the urgency of her delivery as she follows the score with fluid precision, at once floating over and entrenching herself in the orchestra’s insistent pulse. In the process, she illuminates the fear churning at the bottom of all faith and the moral resignation required to turn it into knowledge.

Górecki once said in an interview: “I do not choose my listeners.” And yet, there’s a sense in which his music seeks out listeners more than ever, binding to flesh and spirit as if to make up for his death in 2010. All the more appropriate, then, that this piece should resurface in the present decade, when its connotations of genocide and sacrifice might ring truer even to those who once treated this symphony as a pretty backdrop. We live in harsh times when excuses for ignoring history are thinner than ever, and when a piece like this deserves a reboot to examine its inspirations more deeply. For while the Symphony No. 3 has been read above all as a critique of the Holocaust, Górecki clearly wanted to keep the font of his most personal work untainted by the fingertips of politics. If anything, an overwhelming maternity, compounded by the fact that the composer lost his own mother at the age of two, prevails, lighting a humble candle—not a universal torch—that continues to burn in his absence.

This album and its accompanying film are scheduled for a March 2019 release on Domino.

by Tyran Grillo
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Piano, Seattle

Piano Drop at Seattle’s Jack Straw

Destruction and reclamation, gimmick and avant-garde

One of the odder fads bequeathed to us by the 1960s is the ritual destruction of musical instruments. It’s a custom most famously associated with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Pete Townshend. But what bursts out in popular culture often has precedents in the avant-garde, and the origins of this particular brand of onstage iconoclasm can be traced to the Fluxus movement, specifically its founder George Maciunas. In a nod to classical tradition Maciunas chose the piano, rather than the upstart electric guitar, as the foil for his aggression, directing performers of his 1962 Piano Piece #13 to nail down the keys of the chosen target (Sonic Youth famously performed the piece in 1999). Maciunas’s legacy was continued by fellow haute culture exponents Raphael Montañez Ortiz and Annea Lockwood, the former using an ax, the latter using an array of execution methods that included burning, burying and drowning.

The instrument (photo: Jack Straw)

It was Ortiz that provided the inspiration for the Pacific Northwest’s most famous entry in the klavierzerstörungen tradition. To help gin up publicity for a 1968 outdoor concert benefitting two local arts organizations (including the now defunct KRAB-FM radio), promoters arranged for a secondhand upright piano (purchased for $25) to be dropped from a helicopter. The stunt succeeded in its goal, with a few thousand young attendees journeying to a rural farm in Duvall (25 miles outside Seattle) for a day of folk, rock and choreographed demolition. In the event, safety concerns limited the plummet to a modest 50 feet, producing more of a dull thud than a thunderous clang. But it was still enough to obliterate the case, keyboard, hammers and dampers, leaving only the frame, soundboard and the top five octaves of strings.

The addled contraption lay half-buried in its grade-level tomb for 50 years before being exhumed by Jack Straw Cultural Center, the successor organization to KRAB-FM and a Northwest counterpart to New York’s Harvestworks and Roulette. The carcass was deposited on an exhibition table in Jack Straw’s New Media Gallery, where it was made available for the explorations of several West Coast musicians. The missing bass strings precluded performances of “under the lid” standards by such early masters as Cowell and Crumb, and the missing keyboard ruled out what could have been an intriguing variation on Lachenmann’s Guero. So the invited artists set out to create new works for this unique instrument, working under few restrictions other than an appeal to accept its deformed intonation and to limit the duration to a Cagean 4’33”.

Amy Denio (L) and friends (photo: Levi Fuller, Jack Straw)

Thus it happened that on February 23, 2019 a standing audience assembled around the beleaguered corpse to watch 16 composers and ensembles strike, stroke and probe its innards. The acts included a folk band and an oral history reminiscence (both evoking the hippie spirit of the 1968 event), but most of the new works were composed miniatures in the American experimental tradition. Many of them emphasized standard Cowell/Crumb on-string playing techniques, occasionally aided by digital effects or EBows. But Music for a Dropped Piano by Seattle’s ubiquitous multi-instrumentalist Amy Denio stood out in its use of bowed piano technique. And Aaron Keyt’s Piano Gusting saw four performers directing their breath through straws at clip-on contact microphones attached to the strings, the signal thence fed into small handheld loudspeakers, creating a chorus of metallic piano-like tones modulated by breath rhythms—one of the evening’s most remarkable sound experiences.

Two other composers found unexpected points of reference. Luke Fitzpatrick, a violinist by trade who recently resuscitated Partch’s Adapted Viola from decades of case-bound oblivion, levered his experience salvaging moribund instruments with his piece 3144. Attacking the Duvall piano with finger taps on the soundboard and plucks and strums on the strings, Fitzpatrick directly evoked the sound world of Partch’s plectrum instruments. Simultaneously he intoned the piano manufacturer’s stamp and serial number (“Ivers and Pond Piano Company No. 5, 3144”) using the same delivery he has developed for his performances of Partch’s Li Po Songs.

Hendrix immolating his guitar (photo: Ed Caraeff 1967)

Dave Knott also found an external reference, gently laying a small guitar (that had itself been dropped and detuned) on top of the piano’s remains like a vicarious empath, conjuring up images of saplings rising from the decaying nurse logs common in the nearby forests. While Knott strummed the baby guitar, his fellow Eye Music members David Stanford and Susie Kozawa played the doomed piano like a huge prepared autoharp.

The vaunted instrument destroyers of the 1960s tended to enlist their actions as anti-war agitations, or as demonstrations of the fragility of life and culture. But the performers showcased at Jack Straw embraced a different, more redemptive tradition, one closely associated with the Pacific Coast: that of reclamation. Whether it’s Cage, Harrison and Partch making percussion instruments from junk, or Edward and Nancy Kienholz building sculptures and installations from society’s discards, the tradition is one that regards art as a regenerative act that reminds us of the essential musicality and expressiveness in the tiredest and poorest things around us.

Piano Drop featured works by Jeffrey Bowen, James Borchers, Bradley Hawkins, Ski, Gust Burns, Austin Larkin, Brandon Lincoln Snyder, Bruce Greeley, Home Before Dark, Jay Hamilton, Count Constantin and Stanley Shikuma in addition to those mentioned in the review.

by Michael Schell