[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TEWQZ5tLD0[/youtube]

Some people like to think that music is always somehow about something… usually them.  My bad love affair, the world will never understand me, much less remember me.  And lots of music — from the troubadours with their songs of courtly love  to the meditations and dramas of the romantics to the skitterings and upheavals of the New Vienna School — have been a kind of narrative of this beleaguered self, or if you will, the audience’s identification with the composer’s ups and downs. But the New York School  of Earle Brown (1926-2002), Christian Wolff (1936-  ),  John Cage (1912 -1992), and Morton Feldman (1926-1987) threw  this book out the window. Like the abstract expressionist painters with whom they were friendly, they believed in the concept of art as abstraction, not a representation of something external.  They wanted their listeners to experience music as sound unmoored from any story frame, an event in and of itself. Morton Feldman made a career out this approach and his focus on the specifics of sound was his calling card.

FOR JOHN CAGE (1982), which violinist Graeme Jennings, late of the Arditti Quartet, and and Christopher Jones performed here in mid-September as part of the sfSound Series, has all the stylistic hallmarks of his late work. It’s ultra soft – down to ppp – has an evenness of color, and its duration –78 miniutes– is roughly the same as a Bruckner or Mahler symphony, or the Beethoven 9th. But what happens in that time frame is an entirely different  story.

Feldman isn’t after a logical dialectical continuity but an ahistorical present, and this can make his music, with its fragmentary gestures, seem odd, or even empty. But Jennings and Jones made that lack of “content “ convincing,  and urgent. A slow steady sequence of quietly inflected piano chords sounded as if they were going somewhere, and Jenning’s playing of Feldman’s circumscribed violin gestures — cells, simple, spaced chords, harmonics -– was equally acute. And I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the composer achieved a kind of Brechtian alienation effect/affect by having the violinist use a leather mute, and the pianist play with the damper pedal half depressed so that the music appeared to disappear as it was being heard.

Classic masters like Brahms meditated on the past in the solo movements of his violin sonatas, but that past existed within a kind of narrative frame, whereas here only a present  past survived. Feldman’s music is both annoying –- when will it change, and where will it end ? –- and transcendent, and Jennings and Jones came down squarely on the side of the latter. And  the music seemed to gain much of its poetry from the place where it was played. A big mirrored dance rehearsal studio, with a spic and span Steinway grand where each sound had its tenuous, and all too fleeting life.

I must confess that composer Douglas J. Cuomo has only recently appeared on my radar screen.  That may mean that I’m not paying enough attention or it could mean that I never watched Sex and the City and thus avoided the theme, which is Cuomo’s most famous, and probably lucrative, credit.  In any event, Cuomo is currently having a career season in “serious” music.  A few months ago, Allan Kozinn selected Cuomo’s Arjuna’s Dilemma–which previewed this summer at the Pepsico Theater in Purchase–as one of the top picks for the new season, describing the 70-minute multimedia work as “a compelling opera based on the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text, set in a musical language that draws on Western and Indian styles.”

The Brooklyn Academy of Music will present Arjuna’s Dilemma at the Harvey Theater on November 5, 7, and 8 (7:30 pm) as part of BAM’s Next Wave Festival.

In yesterday’s Sunday Times, Matthew Gurewitsch writes more about Arjuna’s Dilemma and others works (like Philip Glass’ Satyagraha and John Adams’ Doctor Atomic) that draw from the Gita.  According to his account, Cuomo was looking for a project that would team the Indian singer Amit Chatterjee with western voices.  As Krishna, Chatterjee improvises segments of the score in raga style, in Sanskrit.  Tenor Tony Boutté, a Baroque and contemporary specialist, sings Arjuna, also in Sanskrit. A quartet of female voices serves as an English chorus. The instrumental writing, requires 12 performers, and contains a lot of jazzy tenor saxophone and tabla drums. A CD is already available on Innova and I’m listening to it as I type–my first impression is that the score is a compelling blend of new and ancient sounds and is good enough that I’m willing to overlook the Sex and the City thing.

Arjuna’s Dilemma is produced by the Music-Theatre Group under the guidance of the organization’s Producing Director, Diane Wondisford, and staged by opera director Robin Guarino.  Alan Johnson conducts an ensemble of distinguished musicians from a variety of traditions, including tabla player Badal Roy (Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman), members of the Philip Glass Ensemble, pianist Kathleen Supové, and saxophonist Bob Franceschini, a well-known Latin jazz player.

Cellist Maya Beiser will perform another Cuomo premiere at Zankel Hall on Thursday, October 30 (7:30 pm). Only Breath, for solo cello and electronics, was commissioned by  Beiser as part of a multimedia program titled “Provenance,” in which live music and original texts in Ladino, Arabic, Hebrew and Latin are woven together into an all-encompassing musical tapestry.  Only Breath made its debut in June at the Arts & Ideas festival in New Haven, and was then heard at Chicago’s Ravinia Festival in July.