On the Cover:
Winter Journey (Winterreise) 2010; Oil on linen, 26 x 20″; Collection of Jock Ireland, NYC

IN THIS ISSUE

+++

Contributors, 4

+++

LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

Sofia Gubadalaina by Anne Eisenberg, 5
Music from the Distracted Generation, by Barry O’Neal, 6
Tempest Treatments by Leonard J. Lehrman, 8
The Mark of Cain by Benjamin Yarmolinsky, 9
Magic to Do Magic to Do, by Leann Davis Alspaugh, 10

+++

BOOK REVIEWS
A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess reviewed by Mark N. Grant, 12

Marc Blitzstein: His Life , His Work , His World reviewed by Mark Zuckerman, 16

+++

CD REVIEWS

Paul Lansky - Imaginary Islands, The Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Justin Brown, conductor - reviewed by Benjamin Yarmolinsky, 18
Civilization and its Discontents By Michael Sahl and Eric Salzman - reviewed by Nancy Manocherian, 19
Michael Byron - Awakening at the Inn of the Birds, reviewed by Andrew Violette, 19
From Afar, Nicholus Goluses, guitar, 19
Little Heaven, Songs of Lowell Liebermann, 20
Robert Carl - From Japan, 20
Phoenix Ensemble - Stockhausen Schoenberg, 20
Evan Mack – Angel of the Amazon, Ionisation New Music Ensemble, 20
Cruzar La Cara de la Luna/To Cross the Face of the Moon, 21
Sumeida’s Song, 21
David Maslanka – Symphony No. 9, 21
Cornell University Wind Ensemble, Cynthia Johnston Turner, conductor, 22
Cornelius Dufallo – Journaling, 22
Simpson A Crown of Stars, Schnittke Requiem, 22
Francesa Anderegg, violin; Brent Funderburk, piano, 22
Animal Songs, Stephen Swanson, baritone, 23
Revolutionary Earthworks Music for Mechanical Piano by Carson Cooman, 23
Fred Ho and the Afro Asian Music Ensemble, 23
Yehudi Wyner, Orchestral Works, 24

SOME RECENT CDs by Ben Boretz, 24

+++

FILM REVIEW
All the Way Though Evening reviewed by Mark Shapiro, 26

+++

INTERVIEW
NMC talks with Robert Beaser, 28

by Anne Eisenberg

A big snowstorm brought much of New York City to a stop on February 9, but it didn’t deter the booted, scarved crowd drawn to Miller Theatre at Columbia University for the program Composer Portraits that featured the unconventional, powerful music of Sofia Gubaidulina, the 81-year-old Russian composer.

Gubaidulina’s music is known for its combination of the traditional and the avant guard – a striking blend of religious themes and atonality, microtonality and dissonant, episodic structure. This unusual compositional style was shown in all its scope and power in a varied program performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble that included a range of Gubaidulina’s music from Meditation on the Bach Chorale ‘Vor deinen Thron tret’ich hiermit’ for harpsichord and string quartet to Concerto for bassoon and low strings.

In the program were pieces from 1975 to 1993, composed despite extreme Soviet censure of Gubaidulina’s non-conformist music that included an official boycott in 1979. Not everyone was against her, though, during this difficult period. Shostakovich advised her in a famous piece of advice to “continue on your own, incorrect way” – and she did, supporting herself in part by writing scores for the movies. In the 1980s, her fortunes gradually changed, in part because the violinist Gidon Kremer regularly performed one of her pieces, introducing her music to a growing audience in the West. In 1992 she was able to permanently relocate in Germany.

Her unusual instrumental combinations were well illustrated in the centerpiece of Saturday’s program at Miller Theatre, Concerto for bassoon and low strings, composed in 1975, (before the boycott.) This intricate music was brought to life by the skilled bassoonist Rebekah Heller, and members of the International Contemporary Ensemble – in this case four cellos and three double-basses, conducted by Christian Knapp.

The mournful, opening soprano notes of the bassoon, reminiscent of the famous opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, start this rarely heard piece. Ms. Heller, who began playing the bassoon at nine, when the bassoon was far taller than she, was up to the many virtuosic techniques required for the work. These included multiphonics, with their many, unusually fingered pitches sounded at once, as well as microtones, howling trills and even violent, repeated tongue-flutters – particularly hard to perform on the bassoon. There were many other dramatic maneuvers of the instrument, too, in its dialogue with the low-register strings. At times Ms. Heller placed her teeth on the reed and oscillated her jaw – the result is a strange, high-frequency buzz. (The direction in the score for this dramatic maneuver is “clamore” or “clamorously.”) At other times, she had to make the bassoon sound alla saxofono, that is, imitating the sound of a human laugh as the saxophone can do.

In an online interview, Ms. Heller describes this dark, five-movement, complex work as a struggle for dominance between the strings and the bassoon – as the bassoon sometimes laughs, and sometimes sounds as though it is weeping.

The opening piece in the Miller Theatre program, Trio for violin, viola and cello, is dedicated to the memory of Boris Pasternak. The piece shows off many hallmarks of the composer’s style, including extensive use of glissandos, short phrases, and intense, almost-violent pizzicatos. The instruments begin playing together on a single note at the beginning of the trio, and then answer one another for a while. But eventually they go off on their own in separate, crashing, melancholy directions. In contrast, in another piece on the program Concordanza, composed for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, violin, viola, cello, and bass, the music ends dramatically with a convergence – the only chord of the piece.

On that snowy night at Columbia University in February, the composer’s distinct musical vocabulary was captured and brought to life by the skilled young musicians in ICE, who seemed extremely comfortable speaking Gubaidulina, and in transmitting this language to an appreciative audience.

“The obscurity created by the wrong kind of fame”– a wonderful phrase coined in 1955 by conductor Richard Franko Goldman to describe a pitfall suffered by some very successful artists. For example, Samuel F. B. Morse wanted to be memorialized as the accomplished painter he was, but history remembers him as the inventor of the telegraph. Arthur Sullivan thought he would be remembered for his serious concert works, but posterity knows him only as W. S. Gilbert’s collaborator. Even Shakespeare, some have argued, thought he would be remembered more for his sonnets and lyric poetry than his plays.

This “obscurity created by the wrong kind of fame” was a cross borne by a person who was one of the most famous writers and one of the most obscure composers of the last 50 years: John Wilson, better known to the world as Anthony Burgess (1917-1993). Suppose from the age of 12 your life’s ambition was to be a well-known composer, but life had other plans. After sedulously creating scores for the drawer for years while married to an unmusical wife and working as a schoolteacher, at age 39 you suddenly are a first-time published novelist three years after the BBC turned down your Passacaglia for Orchestra. Then, book by book, slowly but steadily, you become a well-known writer. At 54 you abruptly become a celebrity when one of your least favorite of your own novels is made into an extremely notorious motion picture. As a by-product of this sudden fame, the world (sort of) discovers you are also a composer, and in your remaining 22 years, you (now remarried to a music-loving wife) for the first time enjoy professional performances, some very modest income as a composer, and a long-delayed fulfillment. Yet even after your death people still don’t seem to remember or care that you were a composer. A good one.

Unlike Paul Bowles, Anthony Burgess did not split time periods of his life between the two muses. When I meekly asked him during Q&A at his 92nd Street Y lecture appearance in New York on May 10, 1988 how could he possibly do both at the same time, Burgess looked perplexed by the very question (why would it be any problem, his face seemed to hint) and then replied that he simply wrote during the day and composed at night. After a percentage of profits from his biggest hit, the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film adaptation of A Clockwork Orange (about which he had mixed feelings), Burgess became wealthy and could have afforded to stop writing to support his family and concentrate full-time on composing, especially now that most of the organizations who requested (or, more rarely, commissioned) his late pieces covered the copying and musician hire costs. But no, in the last two decades of his life Burgess published another 30 books while composing another 80 major musical works. It’s as if he were two Georges Simenons, one a writer and one a composer. In fact, his astonishing musical fecundity alone from the age of 60 to 76 may be unique, comparable at least in quantity to Leos Janacek’s similar age period.

According to this fascinating book by conductor/composer/musicologist Paul Phillips, Burgess composed everything in ink in final draft, in the neat hand of an autographer, rarely revising except to re-orchestrate to someone’s order, and never used the piano while composing. “Professional composers compose in pencil, erasing as much as they write. I am foolhardy enough to set everything down in ink, evading errors as though I were performing a surgical operation,” Burgess remarked. He wrote his books similarly, “producing a quota of finished pages each day and always proceeding without amending what had come before,” says Phillips. Burgess claimed to consistently write 1,000 words a day of prose seven days a week. He composed a set of 24 preludes and fugues for piano, a cycle lasting 90 minutes, in a matter of a few weeks in 1985. Yet he never learned to drive.

Both literarily and musically, Burgess was one of the 20th century’s most extraordinary autodidacts. He was an intellectual outsider, from working class Manchester, not London, not the product of Eton or Harrow or Oxbridge. His parents were part-time musicians and he grew up lower middle class, attended Catholic schools in Anglican Britain, got a B.A. from the university in his hometown while playing cocktail piano, arranged music for an army dance band while serving in the war. He never studied composition with a great teacher, and later applied to the Royal College of Music but failed the entrance exam when Herbert Howells “faulted him for not recognizing a Neapolitan sixth chord.” Nevertheless, merely from self studying scores and textbooks on harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration, he acquired the skills to compose some 250 opuses in all musical genres (an output far larger than that of most full-time composers) and a fluent, masterly feel for the orchestra – a gigantic reproof to the silly notion that legitimate composers can only be midwifed and wet-nursed by Ph.D.- granting university music departments.

But the obscurity Burgess fell into is a cautionary tale about the necessity for networks – academic, professional, collegial – for a composer to hit the radar. Even Ives (who unlike Burgess paid big bucks out of pocket for musicians to rehearse his pieces) had a devoted network of promotional epigones in Henry Cowell, Lou Harrison, and others. Burgess’s only network proved to be his late fame as a writer, by which time people took Burgess the composer as a gifted musical hobbyist. Even his friend Yehudi Menuhin, who introduced Burgess to Princess Grace and praised the violin concerto Burgess wrote for him, reneged on the promised Monaco performance.

I have listened to 10 CDs (mostly private recordings) of Burgess’s mature music (most of the early manuscripts are lost). How does it sound? Well, as the aforementioned Richard Franko Goldman once said in praise of the typical Robert Russell Bennett arrangement, “One never has to worry as to whether or not [Russell’s chart] will work. It just always does.” Or as Deems Taylor put it, “Does the music seem to run under its own power?”

Remarkably for a composer who had scarcely ever heard his orchestration played until the age of 58, Burgess’s music always sounds well. While not every piece is on an equal level of inspiration (whose oeuvre is?), if you’ve ever read disparaging comments about what a duffer Anthony Burgess was as a composer, trust me: you can discount them as either malicious or ignorant. He occasionally borrowed from himself and recycled themes from previous or unfinished works, but so have many other composers. Particularly impressive are his 35- minute Third Symphony and the 11-minute A Manchester Overture, both of which give Bax, Walton, and even Britten a run for their money; also the 26-minute Mr. Burgess’s Almanack for chamber symphony, the 25-minute cantata Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day for SATB chorus, orchestra and organ, the Second Guitar Quartet, the Piano Concerto, etc. Usually Burgess’s music is tonal, frequently with mild dissonance, but occasionally he goes outrightly atonal.

As a former pub pianist, Burgess was also proficient in jazz and commercial styles. Having started but not completed a couple of operas, he wrote a couple of musicals: Trotsky’s in New York! (late 1970s, unperformed) and Blooms of Dublin, his own adaptation of Ulysses broadcast on BBC radio in Ireland on the Joyce centenary in 1982. (Burgess not only wrote the book, music, and lyrics himself, but wrote the orchestrations for the 31-piece band the BBC allowed him.) Burgess was one of the few writers who ever tried to emulate Finnegan’s Wake in prose, notably with the multi-lingual pidgin-Russian argot “Nadsat” the characters speak in Clockwork Orange. Edmund Wilson, reviewing Finnegan’s Wake in 1941, compared an early draft of a passage from Finnegan Wake’s ”Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter with Joyce’s final draft of the same passage and criticized Joyce for not staying with the less portmanteau language of the earlier draft. Whereas the logodaedalic Burgess, in his book Re Joyce, “improved” a passage from “Anna Livia Plurabelle,” cheekily introducing even more complicated wordplay than Joyce himself had settled on in the final draft. Yet Blooms of Dublin is straightforward entertainment, with plenty of good tunes: part Victor Herbert operetta, part jazzy Broadway, part English music hall. The rumba melody of its Act Two song “Gibraltar” sounds almost like a quotation of “Speak Low” from Kurt Weill’s 1943 musical One Touch of Venus; Burgess had earlier tried to adapt into an opera the story upon which One Touch of Venus is based.

“The writing of a three-hundred page musical work is more laborious than the merely literary person is able to appreciate,” Burgess wrote. “A desire to avoid the labour to an end unrealisable in performance led me eventually to prose composition, which I have always seen as an analogue to symphonic writing…In a symphony many strands conjoined, in the same instant, to make a statement; in a novel all you had was a single line of monody. The ease with which dialogue could be written seemed grossly unfair. This was not art as I had known it. It seemed cheating not to be able to give the reader chords and counterpoint. It was like pretending that there could be such a thing as a concerto for unaccompanied flute…I still think that the novelist has much to learn from musical form: novels in sonata-form, rondo-form, fugue-form are perfectly feasible.”

While receptive to modernism and innovation, Burgess always maintained a strong reverence for the grand tradition. “During a six-week residency at SUNY-Buffalo in the spring of 1976,” according to Phillips, Burgess was “disheartened by students in the English department who regarded most great literature of the past as irrelevant.” Wrote Burgess, “I was made to feel even more old fashioned when I took a tape of my Iowa symphony to the music department. The head of the composition section was a Bronx man [Morton Feldman] who spoke of dis and dat and de woiks of Beethoven (the mention of the name provoked a delicate sneer among the students…” Burgess not only viewed rock music as trash, but, even more, the respectful scholarly treatment of rock and roll music irked him.

It would be hard to imagine a more sympathetic, knowledgeable, yet objective advocate for Anthony Burgess’s music than Paul Phillips, who conducts the Brown University Orchestra, the fine Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts, and guest conducts elsewhere. Most of Burgess’s music was never performed during his lifetime, and still hasn’t been, but Paul Phillips has conducted and studied more of it than any other musician in the world. His book neatly condenses a panorama of tasks into one succinct, lucidly written volume. It gives a thumbnail biography of Burgess, so one can sidestep the too verbose, maliciously distorted Roger Lewis biography or the more responsible but music-deficient Andrew Biswell biography. It provides a complete overview of the music, with excellent structural analyses, textual program notes, and graphic musical examples of most of Burgess’s major scores. It, too, offers useful plot summaries and interpretations of Burgess’s major literary works. And lastly, it brilliantly elucidates the purely musical organization of many of Burgess’s literary works, while also shedding light on the literary construction of some of his musical works (several are based on alphabetic motifs). No other scholar has been such a diligent exegete of Burgess’s unique efforts to interrelate the two processes of composition, literary and musical, which were poorly understood by literary scholars during his lifetime, as Phillips points out.

Mr. Phillips’s book also conveniently cross-indexes just about everything you’d want to have at your fingertips: there is a general index, an alphabetical index to Burgess’s literary works, an alphabetical index to Burgess’s musical works, a complete annotated chronological list of the music (eighteen pages!), a Burgess bibliography, a discography, a filmography. The chapter endnotes are a pleasure to read. This magisterial book is obviously the fruit of many years of labor and research and has been wisely designed as a permanent ready reference. You have to go David Drew’s handbook on Kurt Weill to find something comparable about a composer. In A Clockwork Counterpoint, Burgess has finally met his reverse Charon in biographer Paul Phillips, someone to ferry his composer’s soul from oblivion back to life. Now all we need are more performances and commercial recordings of the music!

A $500 fee in 1971 (when he was 54) from the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis to compose incidental music for their production of Cyrano de Bergerac was the first money Burgess ever earned for composing music, and not much more followed. But by the end of his life he was a multimillionaire from the proceeds of his writing, owning “three condominiums in Monte Carlo plus homes in Switzerland, France, and England.” Less than three weeks before his death of throat cancer in 1993, Burgess replied to a newspaper interviewer’s question: “Has music brought you more satisfaction and benefits than literature?”

“Generally, yes.”

Perhaps the greatest irony for American composer Marc Blitzstein (1905‐1964) – in a life and career laden with ironies – is that his biggest critical and monetary success came not from any of his many substantial original works, but from his Off‐Broadway adaptation of the 1929 Die Dreigroschenoper by German dramatist Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill. Indeed, The Threepenny Opera, which premiered in 1954, had many times more performances and generated many times more royalties for Blitzstein than all of his other works combined. Even though the underlying work is not his own, Blitzstein’s contribution to The Threepenny Opera exhibits qualities that distinguish his catalog of original work for the stage, comprising most of his surviving output: facility with language, fluency in a multitude of musical idioms, mastery of dramatic structure, and proclivity for social commentary.

Blitzstein was a piano prodigy in a Jewish Philadelphia family with a father devoted to left‐wing causes and a mother with family ties to the Yiddish theater, heritages that informed his composition. In his home town, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and the Curtis Institute of Music and went abroad to study (albeit briefly) with both Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg. He proved gifted and creative at languages, especially his own; in addition to his singable American translations of foreign language songs, he wrote most of the words he set to music. His music demonstrates considerable versatility, equally adept and effective in both cabaret and art song and in both popular musical theater and grand opera.

Although he was well‐versed in the music of his time and wrote and lectured about it extensively, he decried the modernist “art for art’s sake” movement and felt his music should communicate issues of social importance. He was involved for a time with communism and worked all his life for leftist causes, both with and outside his music. He had a penchant for satire and wit, aimed frequently at what he saw as social evils, particularly capitalism and racism. He wrote equally well for inexperienced singers – like actors, in the case of The Cradle Will Rock, or amateur chorus, as in Symphony: The Airborne – and seasoned professionals, as in his most‐performed opera, Regina, based on Lillian Hellman’s play The Little Foxes. His work was innovative, blending speech with song with shades in between and using popular idioms for dramatic effect: revealing character and evocative of time and place. His musical theater pieces frequently defied genre, as evidenced by reviews from both drama and music critics.

In short, Marc Blitzstein appears to be the ideal composer for the many music lovers who decry the state of modern American music as narcissistic and academic and seek genuine spirits who try to connect with audiences – yet he doesn’t seem to be.

It wasn’t as if Blitzstein’s career didn’t parallel others’ of his generation. Like his fellow Curtis alumnus Samuel Barber, Blitzstein joined the Army Air Corps in World War II – though of the music each wrote for the service, Barber’s Commando March is still performed while Blitzstein’s Airborne Symphony far less so. Like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copland, Blitzstein wrote literate, penetrating music criticism and also scores for documentary films. Like Copland, Blitzstein was active in social causes and in organizing composers – both were charter members of American Composers Alliance, though, as ASCAP affiliates, both had to leave when ACA associated with BMI. Like Bernard Hermann, Blitzstein wrote incidental music for Orson Welles’ theatrical productions. Both Blitzstein and Leonard Bernstein, a Blitzstein acolyte, came to popular musical theater from a classical background. And like other theatrical craftsmen of Jewish heritage, like Frank Loesser, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II – all of whom credited Blitzstein as an influence – Blitzstein wrote for Broadway.

Yet among this company, Blitzstein remains virtually unknown by comparison, a situation biographer Howard Pollack attempts to rectify in his thoroughly‐researched, comprehensive (and 500+ page) Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World (Oxford University Press).

Pollack uses the fruits of his research to illuminate the highways and byways – both personal and musical – of Blitzstein’s colorful and eventful journey. He details Blitzstein’s early life and his special relationship with his sister, Jo. He speaks frankly about Blitzstein’s homosexual liaisons – some long‐ term and some casual, like the one resulting in Blitzstein’s murder in Martinique – and his marriage – a love match even though he was gay – to Eva Goldbeck, who died of anorexia in 1936. He reveals the complexities of Blitzstein’s friendships – in particular with Kurt Weill, who regarded Blitzstein as a mediocre copycat up until the time Weill agreed to the Threepenny Opera project, and with Leonard Bernstein, with whom he had a supportive and competitive relationship – and collaborations, both failed (as with Jerome Robbins) and successful (as with Orson Welles). Blitzstein knew a lot of fascinating people, and with him as a vector Pollack reveals much about them.

Blitzstein’s world was just as fascinating, especially since so much of it was tied up with his work. His studies brought him to the Europe of Boulanger and Schoenberg in the 1920s. Back in the U.S. in the 1930s, he became involved in the communist movement and wrote music for political events. He was stationed in London during World War II, where he composed his Airborne Symphony and worked with a chorus of Negro soldiers. In the late 1940s and 1950s he was in New York City, creating his most mature work (like Regina and Threepenny Opera) and active in the anti‐House Un‐American Activities Committee movement (he eventually testified in front of HUAC, admitting his lapsed Communist Party membership but refusing to name names of anyone else, unlike Jerome Robbins, among others). Pollack offers evocative descriptions of the artistic cauldron that simmered around Blitzstein wherever he was at the time.

But Pollack’s main focus – as it should be – is on Blitzstein’s work. The book’s structure is chronological, and Pollack introduces Blitzstein’s work as part of the historical narrative. This succeeds particularly well in the chapter devoted to Blitzstein’s critical writings in the 1930s, illustrated with a judicious selection of Blitzstein’s reviews. Talking about Blitzstein’s music presents a greater challenge, one that Pollack meets with thoroughness and insight. For each piece, Pollack reports the genesis and evolution, outlines a synopsis (for the dramatic works), provides an analysis of the score, excerpts critical reaction, and details the performance history, listing the complete cast from performances involving Blitzstein and occasionally some that didn’t. This works best for the more celebrated pieces, like The Cradle Will Rock and Regina, whose genesis stories are most interesting and the cast more familiar. It works particularly well for Cradle, where the suspenseful story of its premiere – thwarting the attempt to suppress it by the Federal Theater Project, which had, ironically, commissioned it – was the subject of a 1999 Tim Robbins film.

But sometimes this thoroughness impedes the narrative, as with the discussion of Blitzstein’s earlier pieces. For example, it may be historically interesting to learn that Imogene Coca, who later co‐starred with Sid Caesar on Your Show of Shows on 1950s television, made her debut in Blitzstein’s Triple‐Sec in1930; but it’s only being academically rigorous to recite the entire first cast, few (if any) of whom would be recognized by the normal reader. It’s a pity the physical book medium doesn’t allow for hypertext, so the reader could control seeing these details; failing that, however, the best place for this kind of information would be an appendix. However, the book has no appendix, though a catalog of work and a discography (especially in view of how sparse it would be) would have been helpful. The reader could use as a companion Leonard Lehrman’s Marc Blitzstein: a Bio‐Bibliography (Praeger, 2005), if they can find it (or afford it – it’s $125).

Despite these occasional bumps in the road, Pollack treats us to an eventful and rewarding voyage of immersion into the life and work of an important American composer. To say that Marc Blitzstein is undeservedly neglected unfortunately does not distinguish him from very many other fine American composers, especially those of his generation. Happily, it appears Howard Pollack is on a mission to correct this situation with an extensive biographical series on American composers, of which Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World is a superb example.

There is no question that the repetitive-pulse structures of minimalist composition make a powerful experiential point. The only question is whether they do not always make the same point, whose individual inflections are locked within an overbearing stylistic affective definition.

Everyone really knows that objectivity in the descriptive criticism of musical experience isn’t even really a coherent idea, let alone a real possibility. So it’s too bad that so much writing lusts strenuously to assert that kind of authority, so that it misses the real, available, and far superior opportunity to share creative images of those unique (and literally, but not metaphorically, unsharable) episodes of “secondary consciousness” (as Eliot Handleman calls it) we encounter in any immersed listening. I wasted a lot of energy and space - decreasingly over time - during my time as Music Critic for The Nation (1960-69) getting my prose to represent my personal experiences of music with the implication that they deserved to be taken seriously as candidates for determinate/definitive opinions/descriptions/verdicts. To what end is increasingly murkier to see. Maybe nothing more than a misplaced sense of where assertiveness of that kind would leave some residue of individual musical awareness in the jammed social space of musicjabber. In any case, I read all that as mostly having the effect of masking and blunting, rather than vivifying, the images of my senses, thoughts, epiphanies of music I was often jumping out of my skin listening to (Liszt! Mendelssohn! Bach! Salome! Stravinsky! Schoenberg! Varese! Milton! Elliott! Arthur!…!).

So now, is it at the other end (bottom of some tube or other) that I strike a discursively responsive pose (looking as attentive as is appropriate I trust, feeling quite uncertain as to my relevance in this new sound world, but up for anything…)…? It’s the music of someone that everyone reading this probably already knows better than I, Keeril Makan (with others to follow, below). A piece for violin and percussion, 2, and it really knows how to make a point: starting by hammering a repetitive canbang just enough more times than it would create a “motive” but canny beyond its compeers in leaving articulate space in which action (not the staticness of uninflected reiteration) can - and does - happen; space, miraculously, of changing length (no relentless buildup to the inevitable as in orgasmoform), even significantly downsizing progressively to widen, deepen, open clear space for its takeoff into scintillating hi-tech gamelan music. Which takes off, but does not lose itself in its own self- absorption - actually always seems sentient within itself, and interactive with me, gracefully falling off its theatrical cliffs into startling mode changes, from pattering in place into elonging a soundribbon that indiscernibly crosses big soundmode thresholds, unbrutally but continuously always on the move to elsewhere…but always in a pace and at a rate particular to each mode in itself, so there’s never a sense of a composing operation doing it to me but rather an inviting companionship offering sound discoveries and adventures in a humansize way but always engaging and, well, interesting to listen to. Zones d’accord for solo cello gets carried away with itself a bit more than I get carried away with it. But its occasionally frantic inventiveness of things for a cello to do that obviously a cello was never supposed to do is at least continuous listening fun, and maybe strikes a deeper resonance in its cumulative course. Target (maybe a bit of Diamandagalasism here, and even a touch of earthlight) finds ways to be (as against to become) continuously (and varyingly) intense. Like earthlight (and unlike Diamanda) it always gives me a place to listen from, spaces from which the individual utterance qualities can lodge their sonic and expressive interest - which seems to come from everywhere in the world within the single singer’s voice (gratefully and congenially composed for throughout the piece). I do love (and sort of miss somewhere in this piece) Diamanda’s piercing screams (one of the formative experiences of my listening life), but there’s more payoff than deprivation in its absence here. The compositional quality of Target is remarkable in how its unrestrained eruptive wildly variable emotional theater is channeled into a continuous musical unfolding that gives me a lucid sound window though which to hear each inflection and never goes over the edge of arbitrary. The disc is gorgeously recorded with what seem to be consummate performances by everyone (there is also Resonance Alley, a solo percussion piece) but I especially enjoyed the amazingly sonically and articuatively agile violin playing of Jennifer Choi of Either/Or and the microscopically precise sound and trajectory of the vocal performance by Laurie Robin.

Keeril Makan

TARGET

2 (1998)
Either/Or Jennifer Choi, violin; David Shinely, percussion
Zones d’accord (2002) Alex Waterman, cello
Target (2004) Text: Jena Osman
Laurie Robin, mezzo-soprano; California EAR Unit
Resonance Alley (2007)
David Shively, percussion
Starkland CD ST-217

Jocelyn Robert’s self-performed collections of “piano disklavier” pieces (mobile and immobile) have an arresting severity, a disciplined austerity not so much undercomposed or anticomposed as othercomposed. Like auditorialized analyses of precompositional schemata, a kind of sonically materialized conceptual art putting a receiver through an interesting exercise in listening, to sound objects which appear to remain tangibly at a distance in conceptual space, manifesting there more to be contemplated than to get up close and personal with. The piano-disklavier medium, and the very precise timing of every articulation (from swirling clouds of sound to starkly individuated single stone-steps) create a curiously post-Conlon Nancarrowish sensibility, strangely less aggressively techified than Nancarrow’s startling playerpiano hallucinations, whose self-propelled relentlessness gets me scrambling to get out of the way as much as straining to catch every mindblowing hammerstroke. Where the experience of a Nancarrow exercise is a trip into the uncanny supernatural, Jocelyn Robert’s pieces are more of a spacewalk, in a time that detaches from time and spatializes coolly evolving images of figures and phenomena. Something like, in the piece called für ludwig, a ghost-shadow of Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata, or in la pluie, a slowly materializing xray of some idealized Chopin Ballade. Elsewhere, Robert builds accumulating pitch-objects with minimal restricted pitchfields unfolding against one another in asymmetrical cycles; or maximal densely congested pitchfields whirling in lockstep like the particles of a manic comet. And then the meticulous stonestep music, prying open wide space-intervals (seeming not like time intervals but like openings to look within and through), and moving balletically along erratic unintuitive unpredictable but finally rational and civilized geometrical paths. Despite its near-zero severity, it’s all quite comfortable and mannerly; but I bet it would be completely out of sight on an old mechanical Nancarrow playerpiano.

Jocelyn Robert
mobile
pendules 1
für japan
la foule la rue
la place pendules 2
für oslo
für ludwig merles cd a-111

immobile
bolerun 1
für louisa
für eli
bolerun 2
la pluie
merles cd h-121

Jocelyn Robert, Piano Disklavier

Serendipitously, as I was walking down Broadway pondering how to convey to readers of New Music Connoisseur the experience of watching 31‐year old Australian filmmaker Rohan Spong’s tenderly engaging 2011 documentary film All the Way through Evening, my attention was drawn to a fellow pedestrian coming up the avenue toward me. On his lapel – startlingly – was pinned a frayed and faded AIDS Awareness Ribbon. Those inverted twists of red satin once seemed ubiquitous, but it was ages since I had last noticed one. Later I read on a blog that in some circles they long ago came to be considered “unfashionable.” To a teenager or a twentysomething in America or Europe or Australia today, the once savagely omnipresent AIDS epidemic might seem as remote as the Vietnam, or for that matter the Peloponnesian War. In the film’s press kit, Spong observes that, although he is gay, “I come from a generation that came after the initial outbreak of AIDS. I didn’t know anyone who had died, and didn’t know anyone who knew anyone who had died as I was growing up.”

The actor Jeremy Irons inaugurated the AIDS Ribbon at the Tony Awards in 1992, five years after Larry Kramer founded ACTUP, seven years after President Ronald Reagan’s first public mention of the disease, and three years before the epidemic peaked in the United States, extinguishing over 48,000 lives. (Not a parenthesis: since the beginning of the pandemic, AIDS has killed approximately 30 million people worldwide, and continues to claim nearly 2 million victims annually.) In the 1980s and 1990s artists produced a cornucopia of books, plays, films, paintings, ballets and musical compositions evoking the sorrow and anger felt so personally by so many as they reacted to the losses exacted by the virus.

Zoom in on New York City, 1990, where the epidemic is raging but has yet to reach its peak, and where many of these artists lived and worked.

Zoom in more closely, to the gracious and airy St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. We’re still in 1990. It’s December 1, and the socially and politically aware Mimi Stern-Wolfe, Artistic Director and Impresaria of Downtown Music Productions, has curated, and is now presenting, the first in what will become an unbroken string of annual concerts in connection with World AIDS Day. (In a sly bit of historical irony, St. Mark’s happens to enclose the vault of none other than cantankerous anti-Semite Peter Stuyvesant, who sought, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to rid New Amsterdam of Jews; to his Dutch bosses he wrote understatedly that he “deemed it useful to require them in a friendly way to depart.”)

Zoom over now to an East Village (sorry: “Lower East Side” – more about that in a moment) apartment, a film location agent’s dream, chockablock with scores, archives and videotapes – videotapes! – with just room enough for a sonorous Steinway grand incongruously adorned with leftie stenciling: “Support Your Local Musician.” These are the headquarters in which Stern-Wolfe, now an impish 75, appears to have been living for decades.

In 2010 Spong touched down in New York City and somehow connected with Stern- Wolfe as she was in the throes of putting together the program and recruiting the artists for her twentieth annual show. The undertaking is, as she confides in the movie, a hassle; the project entails a lot of sweet-talking on the phone. Spong immediately perceived the possibilities for a documentary that would celebrate both the missionary labor of Stern-Wolfe and the loving camaraderie of an intimate community of composers and performers, many just a few degrees of separation from Stern-Wolfe’s confederate and pal, the tenor Eric Benson, for whom the concert series is named. The concerts, and Stern-Wolfe’s dedication to presenting them year after year, constitute the material of Spong’s film.

“All the Way through Evening” magnanimously folds into its sixty‐six minutes extensive footage of vintage concert performances of music by three composers – Kevin Oldham, Robert Chesley, and Chris DeBlasio – plus interviews with a cadre of artists who have loyally been tending the votive flame, notably “heldentenor” (as he is billed) Gilles Denizot, deploying a winsome Gallic accent, and countertenor and violinist Marshall Coid. Underscoring memorably poetic shots of painterly-looking skies and cityscapes is the grittier music of Robert Savage, performed by cellist Robert Kogan.

The film is organized into acts, each of which focuses on a single composer. The acts hew to a pattern, schematic yet satisfying, progressing from wintry exterior shots in city neighborhoods to the cozy interiors in which Spong interviewed the speakers. In each panel the composer’s family and friends reminisce and offer commentary about the era in which the early concerts took place. A musical performance concludes each episode.

Oldham gets to go first. His is a flashy, easeful pianism, gratifying to watch and to listen to; his collaborator Karen Kushner, tells us that he had big hands and liked to play Rachmaninoff. She chokes up. After learning of his diagnosis Oldham devoted himself single‐mindedly to composing; there was the pressure, not surprisingly, of “something he wanted to say.” Heartbreakingly, many of the projects on the long to-do list he set himself remained unfinished, and survive only in sketches. In photos Oldham looks like Donny Osmond in his early prime, all gleaming teeth and bright, glad eyes.

Next comes songwriter Robert Chesley, represented by his Emily Dickinson setting “Nobody Knows this Little Rose.” The camera’s eye travels over the glittering ornaments on a Christmas tree as Chesley’s sister Joan Englehaupt talks about her brother: he was, she says, a “keen observer.” Segue to the naughty bits. There is a brief clip from a film of Chesley’s play Jerker (as, also, in “tear”) about phone sex that morphs into something loftier and more vulnerable. Chesley’s friend Perry Brass deftly skewers the kebab of “high art and low sex” on which Chesley and his circle routinely feasted. Countertenor Marshall Coid brings Chesley’s Dickinson setting to life in a sweetly communicative rendition.

Anchoring the film is a performance from Walt Whitman in 1989, a songcycle by Chris DeBlasio (on poetry of Perry Brass) that contains the movie’s melancholy but also promissory title phrase. Stern-Wolfe reports that after receiving his diagnosis, DeBlasio, in contradistinction to Oldham, turned his back on composing; AIDS activism became his preferred – his only – expressive medium. For a time he could see no point in writing music, until successfully goaded by Brass, who lured him back to pen and paper with an obvious but essential imprecation: “Only you can write your music.”

In the movie, we eavesdrop as Stern-Wolfe watches, apparently for the first time, a videotape of a performance by the baritone Michael Dash, with Chris DeBlasio at the piano. In an outburst of spontaneous collegiality she exclaims, movingly: “He was such a good pianist.” Moments later her anguish is palpable as she realizes that the cameraman has focused entirely on Dash, cutting DeBlasio out of the picture.

In press materials and on-line commentary about the film, Stern-Wolfe has attracted to herself, like iron filings, a trilogy of e‐adjectives: elderly, eccentric, exuberant. Actually, she seems not to be any of these things. Age has brought to her features a craggy, crannied elegance that the camera adores, but she is no Methuselah. She is more mischievous than strange, and notwithstanding her high spirits admits that she is slowing down.

While the composers themselves undoubtedly raged against the dying light, the movie is eerily devoid of anger. The overall mood is one of sorrow, reconciliation; the vein is lyric not tragic. Stern-Wolfe astutely points out the simplicity and directness of expression that characterize all of the vocal music we hear. Referring to the fading legacy of her beloved composers – and, no doubt, to the gradually nearing terminus of her own personal voyage – Stern-Wolfe observes: “The world moves so fast…it sweeps things under the rug.” There is a triple poignancy: of the athletes dying young; of Stern-Wolfe in the early twilight of her journey through the Vale of Sorrows; and of a vividly remembered era already receding, with shocking swiftness, into history.

The film’s visual style is subtly appealing. The nostalgia the movie rather queerly inspires is attributable not only to the fossilized-in-amber (culturally speaking) quality of its heroine – Stern-Wolfe inhabits not a gentrified contemporary “East Village” but a poor, artsy, teeming-with-immigrants “Lower East Side” – but also to the sepia tones in which the images are cast. Spong has a particularly alert way with hands and faces. He crops them interestingly, at curious angles, and catches them in the act of doing captivating things. With a film-maker’s tactile gaze, he shows a thumb passing under fingers at the keyboard, or a lowered eyelid softly palpitating in an effort of recall. He presents Stern-Wolf in eloquent silhouette, as she might have been painted by de la Tour.

Fifteen years ago I had the privilege of conducting a recording of Chris DeBlasio’s beautiful cantata The Best Beloved. Marshall Coid played first violin. In a strange and bitter irony, that recording’s producer Gabe Wiener died, shortly after the music was recorded, of a cerebral aneurysm. He was 26.

The veteran Da Capo Chamber Players have a knack for programming, and on October 10 at Merkin Concert Hall they showed that flair yet again when they opened their 41st season with “Cool Britannia”– an innovative program featuring contemporary chamber music by composers born in the British Isles.

Wigmore Hall in London might be a typical venue for this program, but it transplanted beautifully to the upper westside of Manhattan. The young, appreciative audience had a chance to hear the work of musicians across the pond too rarely performed here, including Luke Bedford, currently the first composer in residence at Wigmore Hall, as well as Sir Richard
Rodney Bennett, Mark-Anthony Turnage, Thomas Adès, and others.

Luke Bedford’s Self-Assembly Composition No. 1 was a spirited highlight of the evening. Like Terry Riley’s In C, the piece is written to be played by any number of instruments. “It’s up to the group to create the structure of the piece from the written suggestions in the score,” Mr. Bedford says in the program notes.

“The duration is entirely up to the performers.” In this performance, the music created by the players was fast, intricate and lively, as though a Conlon Nancarrow piece for player piano had been turned into tumultuous, virtuosic chamber music.

Each selection of the evening was introduced by a flute solo played by Patricia Spencer from Sir
Bennett’s Songs for the Instruction of Singing Birds that evoked the calls of the starling, woodlark, canary, bull finch, and nightingale. The bird calls, which sounded nothing like Messiaen’s, were stretched and molded by the jazz idiom that the composer, who once supported himself playing jazz piano, has used to effect in his film scores.

The program also featured an unusual, powerful piece from the opera The Tempest, composed by Thomas Adès and Meredith Oakes, and transcribed by Mr. Adès for violin, clarinet, cello and piano. The music changed moods swiftly, an occasional sweet strain floating into dissonance and then reappearing lyrically.

“Cool Britannia” was the occasion not only to celebrate modern British music, but to salute a departing member of the players: Andre Emelianoff, who has played with the group since 1976. James Wilson is the new cellist. In honor of Mr. Emelianoff, the American composer Stephen Jaffe wrote Cameo, a short, striking jewel of a piece that featured both cellists at the October performance. “I was honoring the passing of the torch,” Mr. Jaffe said.

The theme of the lovely, haunting piece is heard in a call and response pattern as the two cellos answer one another across the stage. Mr. Jaffe, who is a professor at Duke University, said that the theme of Cameo originated in a piece he’d written earlier for Da Capo called Partito, for cello, piano and percussion that he wanted to revisit as part of the occasion.

The music was playful and elegant. “Contemporary music is often so severe,” Mr. Jaffe said. “I wanted the cellists to have fun with this.”

By Leann Davis Alspaugh

You know you’re in a theatre full of science geeks when the line “What is this Death…is it a form of entropy?” gets a big laugh. Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera made its American premiere in March 2011 at Boston’s Cutler Majestic Theatre, a co-production of American Repertory Theater, MIT’s Fast Arts Festival, and Chicago Opera Theater. The production brought together composer Tod Machover, poet laureate Robert Pinsky as librettist, director Diane Paulus, and Gil Rose conducting the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). The MIT Media Lab assembled high-tech forces on stage and off, ranging from remote-controlled Operabots and video-infused periaktoi to “sound-producing Hyperinstruments.” A bank of 40 computers and a wireless network ran the software that controlled the robot choreography and coordinated the sound and video environment. Puppeteers were stationed on the catwalk above the stage to assume manual control in case the robots ran amok.

In the abstract setting of the opera’s prologue, the robots tilt their triangular-shaped heads and wonder about such baffling concepts as suffering, memory, and the lessons of the Organic Age. Their elegiac opening is also tinged with irony as they introduce the evening’s program: “Units assembled for the ritual/Performance at command,/As the Human Creators have ordained,/In memory of the Past.” They whiz away and morph into the opera’s human characters, the four members of the Powers family.

The wealthy Simon Powers (James Maddalena) wants to cheat death by immersing himself in the System, technology that will enable him to stay in touch with the physical world after his death. He is abetted in this project by his protégé Nicholas (Hal Cazalet). If the Borg-like black cladding on his left arm is any indication, Nicholas is already in the process of being assimilated. Simon’s wife Evvy (Emily Albrink) and daughter Miranda (Sara Heaton) each have different reactions to Powers’ transformation. Evvy tries to accept her husband’s latest caprice and is eventually, according to the libretto, absorbed into the System. To this viewer, her transformation was a descent into madness rather than an apotheosis. Miranda’s reaction, on the other hand, is a refusal to accept the unnaturalness of her father’s fate. She is so insistent in her need for her father that she even convinces him to return for a short time.

Audiences have been much preoccupied with the technological elements of this opera. Indeed, the stagecraft is mesmerizing – the Venus-flytrap-like armature described as a chandelier is especially beautiful. But once the in-the-moment effect has worn off, there isn’t much left to sustain an impression of real originality. Instead of being provocative, these innovations often seem to work against the rich characterizations of, in particular, Maddalena and Heaton.

What prevents Death and the Powers from reaching the kind of vividness that makes opera really work is its music. Known as “America’s most wired composer,” Tod Machover is deeply interested in experimentation and pushing the boundaries of opera. With Death and the Powers, Machover has said that he wants to use technology to bring the audience closer to the performers. There is no question that he achieves an accomplished level of integration between the electronic soundscape, acoustic music by the 15-members of BMOP, and the programmed stage effects. Without a convincing musical bridge between the props on stage and the people delivering the story, however, the connection is lost.

Machover’s score is layered with energy and affecting passages, but it fails to achieve a dramatic trajectory. The composer’s reliance on repetitive phrases along with electronic sounds and processed vocalizations disrupt the opera’s momentum. Instead of a whole coalescing from “the meeting of organic and the inorganic,” the opera’s disparate parts become dead-end iterations that work against the magnetism of its human elements. Anyone who has ever felt the deflation at the end of a movie too reliant on computer generated effects knows the feeling.

Part of this failing lies with Pinsky’s libretto. Seeking clever word play, he falls back on tired puns: “I am a producer./And business is my wares./Lady’s Wear, Software,/ Hardware—Artware,/Warware, Peaceware—/I am in Every Ware:/Or you might call it Being Ware—.” Looking for accessibility, he resorts to tin-eared colloquialisms: “What does it matter?/Simulation, place,/Medium, voice,/ Face, shmace.” The best lines come from other poets, as when Simon sums up the opera’s theme by quoting May Swenson’s “Question”:

“Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt . . .
when Body my good
bright dog is dead.”

Death and the Powers centers on the kind of “human perfectability” trope that has become a speculative fiction standby in everything from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to The Matrix trilogy and the man-machine hybrids of Star Trek’s Borg. An operatic treatment of this idea in a highly-technological age offers fresh possibilities of insights into ideas about the self, performance, identity, and authenticity. However, if these ideas are at work in Death and the Powers, they are buried under layers of enervating technology and soulless effects.

Early spring productions at American Repertory Theater also included two new works adapted from Greek plays. Both Sophocles’ Ajax in a new translation by Charles Connaghan and the rock musical of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound reinterpreted well-known themes in startlingly modern ways. The good news is that neither Ajax as a desert warrior suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder nor Prometheus as a leatherclad victim of tattooed tyrants sacrificed classical power to contemporary polemics.

To be sure, the creators of Prometheus Bound didn’t miss the chance to exploit a play that portrays a god punished for his kindness to mankind. Best known for his work with the metal band System of a Down, composer and social justice activist Serj Tankian seized on the theme of tyranny in Steven Sater’s new translation. Director Diane Paulus reinforced this point by partnering with Amnesty International. During the show’s run, eight Amnesty appeals were highlighted, ranging from victims of sexual violence in Africa to prisoners of conscience in Vietnam; the performance I saw urged action on behalf of Reggie Clemons, a prisoner on death row in Missouri.

This intense and exciting production gained much from being performed at Oberon, A.R.T.’s nightclub-style space. Just as the season-opening Cabaret had immersed the audience in Berlin’s Kit Kat Klub, so Prometheus patrons found themselves up close and personal with every minute of the god’s travails. Seating was available only around the perimeter of the room, while those with dance floor tickets dodged a rolling dais and huge ladders – not to mention actors climbing over patrons’ tables.

Being a rock musical about “a damned god in chains,” the production design leaned heavily on goth, punk, and urban grunge. Tattoos were obligatory as was glittery makeup. Hermes’ gold-winged Nikes were an especially witty touch. As always, the A.R.T.’s technical elements were perfect. The head mics worked without a glitch, and the sound mix was well-balanced.

The vocal settings called for high-volume belting as well as delicate harmonies. Uzo Aduba was affecting as Io, the maiden seduced by Zeus and turned into a heifer. The power ballad “What I Think of Myself” was a heart-rending attempt to understand why fecklessness should have such freakish consequences. Gavin Creel’s Prometheus was strong and subtle. Gabe Ebert’s Hermes was by turns menacing and comic – “Who does a god have to smite to get a cocktail around here?!”

The stage proper was occupied by the eight-member Choke & Jerk Band. They deftly charged through Tankian’s score, executing an impressive array of musical ideas from the self-righteous anthem, the ethereal ballad, the anguished lament, and the head-banging rock song. Surely, no straight-play treatment of Aeschylus could match the thrill of hearing Prometheus’ famous monologue, which culminates in “All human culture comes from Prometheus,” as a stadium-size rock anthem.

By Mark Zuckerman

Start the idea of great Twentieth Century Russian composers and three names likely spring to mind: Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, and Dmitri Shostakovich. Of the three, only Shostakovich spent his entire creative life in the Soviet Union. He came of age just as Joseph Stalin came to power in 1924 and navigated Stalin’s 30-year reign, surviving him by almost a quarter century. He is probably best known internationally for his large works – 15 symphonies, 6 concerti, and two operas – and in Russia for these, numerous film scores, and incidental music. Not as well-known are his chamber works, including 15 string quartets.

While a career as a composer is rarely a bed of roses, pursuing one in Stalinist Russia was particularly thorny, especially for someone with Shostakovich’s gifts. Today’s composers might gripe about their inability to attract sufficient attention or about getting an unflattering notice. However, none risk scrutiny by a despot whose bad review could have dire effect, not just on their careers but on their lives – and a ruthless paranoid like Stalin proved he had no compunction about banishment, imprisonment, torture, or even murder for people who displeased him.

Shostakovich learned early on that his high-profile pieces would attract the attention and criticism of the regime, so he fit his symphonies with narratives that resonated with Soviet objectives and became circumspect in his utterances, public and private. His chamber music had a more specialized audience and attracted much less attention from the authorities, so perhaps in these pieces Shostakovich felt he could let his hair down and be self-revealing.

At least that’s the premise behind Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser, published by Yale University Press. The idea of interpreting a segment of Shostakovich’s body of work as autobiography provides an intriguing framework for a penetrating biography. The book’s structure mimics Quartet No. 15, Shostakovich’s final quartet; the chapter titles (Elegy, Serenade, Intermezzo, Nocturne, Funeral March, Epilogue) are from the quartet’s movements.

Lesser discusses each of the quartets chronologically but organizes the biography thematically by what she presents as the composer’s personal subject matter for each quartet. Some of the evidence is concrete, such as the extended silence by the second violin opening No. 12 as a tribute to the recently deceased second violinist of the Beethoven Quartet (the group for which Shostakovich wrote almost all of his quartets). Interpretations of other quartets are more speculative. But even if it were simply a conceit, and the purported evidence entirely discounted, the organizing principle proves effective in illuminating a fascinating life.

The reason is Lesser’s obvious love for and involvement with the music, which spurred considerable research and motivated her immersion in Shostakovich’s private and public life. She writes in a warm, engaging way, effortlessly managing a breadth of events, vignettes, and observations that shed light on a wide assortment of facets belonging to a complex personality, including, but not limited to, the facts of his life and his musical interactions. For example, she encourages us to compare the career of Shostakovich, who toiled as a servant of the Soviet state and adopted (or was forced to adopt) attitudes of great subtlety, with that of Alisa Rosenbaum, a contemporary from the same home town (St. Petersburg) who left Russia for America to become Ayn Rand, a chief exponent of libertarian absolutism. She describes the poignant friendship between Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten, two composers who were quite literally worlds apart but who had great admiration for each other’s work. And she describes delicately, but frankly, the combination of passion and practicality in Shostakovich’s love life. Her subject emerges as multi-layered, befitting a creative personality whose life circumstances resist superficial analysis.

Worthy as this biography is on its own, the book also delves into the music. In addition to a valuable discography as an appendix, there are descriptions of each quartet interspersed with the biographical material. Lesser is a skillful writer with an impressive body of literary work but no formal musical background, making her attempt to explain the musical essence of each of the 15 Shostakovich quartets ambitious, if not audacious. She is up front about her approach, setting the bar pretty high nevertheless:

I have sometimes borrowed from the languages of literary and art criticism, both of which have a stronger tradition of impressionistic response than one usually finds in academic music criticism. I have tried to remain faithful to the specific demands of music… Still, my approach … is essentially that of a writer, and this entails certain pitfalls… The line between correct interpretations and incorrect ones is bound to be fuzzy and inconstant… But there are wrong interpretations, wrong assumptions, wrong pathways in approaching an artwork…

Readers of New Music Connoisseur undoubtedly would appreciate that there are musically rigorous forms of music criticism where the language ventures into the realm of “impressionistic response.” Presumably, there are “academic” forms of literary and art criticism (that may be just as dry as “academic music criticism”) but these aren’t the ones whose languages Lesser is appropriating – so it’s hard not to read this as an evasion, at least in part. But perhaps we can appreciate Lesser’s precarious position and, in view of her close listening and her courage in venturing into this territory, allow her the leeway to communicate what she hears in her own way.

Ultimately, though, however valiant the attempt, the result is disappointing. Portraying each of the 15 quartets as if it were essentially a work of drama ignores a wealth of information – some of it essential, even as an introduction to the uninitiated – and wears thin after the first few quartets. The lack of musical sensibilities hides even the most basic formal aspects of these pieces – ones that could be described without resorting to technical vocabulary – an irony, considering Shostakovich was known (and criticized by the Stalinist commissariat) for being a formalist. There are some observations that betray limitations in aural acuity. And there are flights of fancy into the opaque, as in this comparison from the description of Quartet No. 5: “The repetitions are both obsessive and probing, not reassuring as they are in Bach…”

Given the reward a reader gets from the biographical sections, it’s extremely tempting to allow Lesser the privilege to include what amounts to a personal diary. However, she occasionally undermines her credibility by violating her own criteria, as with this passage excerpted from a multipage comparison of Shostakovich to Schoenberg:

Whereas Arnold Schoenberg invented his arithmetical serialist technique to break the hold of Romanticism on music, Shostakovich is using a variant of the technique to do something very different… Perhaps he even believed that twelve-tone serialism, as strictly practiced by Schoenberg and his most obedient acolytes, could hamper the composer’s creative role. What Shostakovich was doing in the Quartet No. 12 was not to capitulate to serialism’s rigid rules, but to adopt certain aspects of the twelve-tone approach as an enhancement to his available palette.

This is by far the longest comparison with another composer in the book (most are throwaways, like the Bach comparison quoted above) and the only one so hostile. It’s also, quite simply, wrong – at least about twelve-tone music, Schoenberg, and his “acolytes” – and betrays an ignorance of both the aesthetic and the music of these composers. This parroting of received wisdom (in this case, not so wise) is incompatible with a work of serious scholarship.

Lesser wants to portray Schoenberg as the real totalitarian composer while promoting Shostakovich as the embodiment of personal expression. In reality, Schoenberg was the one who held fast to his artistic convictions, come what may; he was (to pursue Lesser’s earlier comparison between contemporaries Shostakovich and Ayn Rand) Howard Roark (of Rand’s The Fountainhead) to Shostakovich’s Gail Wynand, who knuckled under to the Ellsworth Tooheys of the commissariat.

The further Lesser gets from Shostakovich’s life, the shakier her ground. In the Epilogue, where she attempts to discern the appeal of Shostakovich’s quartets and why Shostakovich wrote the way he did, she wanders underinformed into the terrain of Euro-American musical history of the 1950’s:

Shostakovich was in many ways less isolated than his Western counterparts. For whereas he was patently eager to communicate with his audience … many mid-century European and American composers were at best uninterested in and at worst virulently disdainful of the people who came to listen to classical music. In 1958, … Milton Babbitt published a piece in High Fidelity [“Who Cares if You Listen?”] that became a kind of credo for the rest of his profession… This kind of breathtaking but far from atypical narcissism did not, I think, end up being very helpful to either American composers or their potential audiences.

First Schoenberg and now, not surprisingly, Babbitt, pilloried here yet again for his High Fidelity article with the sensationalized title that most critics never get past. Lesser actually quotes from the article itself, although she proves no different from other critics by missing the import of what Babbitt says. By now, with the passage of more than half a century, we might expect a more dispassionate reading of this article that appreciates Babbitt’s actual message – which is, essentially, three things, none of them so unreasonable:

First, that composers ought to be provided with environments where they can develop their art free from commercial and social pressures – in other words, to enjoy the kind of support and access to resources the Soviet system provided Shostakovich (whatever the related perils), to pursue the kind of internal artistic direction Lesser believes Shostakovich followed in writing his quartets. The success of composers making their living as faculty in institutions of higher learning has gone a long way toward realizing this objective.

Second, that composers writing highly specialized music would attract niche audiences of highly specialized listeners, more like the specialized audience for Shostakovich’s string quartets (albeit somewhat smaller, perhaps) than the mass audience for his symphonies. Babbitt was shrewd in choosing his audience for this proposal: readers of a fledgling magazine for audiophiles. Audiophiles were a brand new, specialized group who cared about the enhanced listening made possible by recent advances in audio technology (e.g., the development of commercial stereo recordings, which was just months old when Babbitt’s article appeared) and who wanted to turn their living rooms into listening spaces superior to the concert hall. What better source for potential recruits? Given the current ubiquity of individual listening devices with personalized playlists, and today’s proliferation of niche musical markets, we should credit Babbitt with prescience.

Babbitt’s third point was that he considered musical dilettantes useless, at best, or at worst, actively harmful. In his view, they perpetuate romantic yet unrealistic myths about the world of music and engage in uninformed, imprecise chatter that is accepted as meaningful musical discussion. It’s understandable that Lesser might take umbrage at this. However, in a way, her simplistic assessment of the complex musical culture of the 1950’s proves Babbitt’s point. At the very least, after arguing quite eloquently that Shostakovich was the victim of unfair criticism – and backing it up with careful, thorough investigation and perceptive analysis – she would do better to respect that the same treatment might be due the topic she dismisses with such casual disdain. Ditto for her editors at Yale University Press.

Despite these flaws (and doubtless there are those who consider them not all that serious), Music for Silenced Voices is a worthwhile book, written by a music lover mostly for other music lovers. Those readers who come to it unaware of the Shostakovich quartets likely will want to get to know them and will be grateful for the introduction.

On the Cover:
Back Street Ballet, silkscreen, by Meredith Mayer.

IN THIS ISSUE

+++

Contributors, 4

+++

LIVE PERFORMANCE REVIEWS

Cool Brittania by Anne Eisenberg, 6
Nico Muhly, Dark Sisters by Ben Yarmolinsky, 7
Spring for Music by Barry O’Neal, 8
Song and Dance from a Scottish Master by Barry O’Neal, 10
Gods and Robots by Leann Davis Alspaugh, 12
Private Lives: Double Bill at the Glimmerglass Festival by Leann Davis Alspaugh, 14
Brave New Works by Amanda Keil, 16
Thoughts on Trying to Make Music That Matters by Leonard J. Lehrman, 18

+++

CD REVIEWS

In Brief by Andrew Violette, 20
Poul Roders by Andrew Violette, 22

+++

BOOK REVIEWS

Music for Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets by Wendy Lesser review by Mark Zuckerman, 24