FESTIVAL AT CORNISH continued |
|
|
-Page 4- |
Drury’s performances of several of Cage’s prepared piano pieces (many composed to accompany the dances of Cornish student dancer Merce Cunningham, who became Cage’s lifelong creative and life partner) reminded listeners that his music’s appeal didn’t all come from the flash of Imaginary Landscape. Played sensitively, as here, the prepared piano sound can be subtle, even restrained, yet still expressive. Two hushed songs for voice (Jessika Kenney) and closed piano (Kocmieroski, tapping the lid) were especially atmospheric. Drury also displayed admirable restraint in Cage’s serene score to Cunningham’s 1947 ballet, The Seasons, convincingly conveying the Hindu-influenced work’s sense of repose.
These early Cage pieces have until recently been overshadowed by his later, culture-altering development of chance music, the juncture at which the two old friends, Harrison and Cage, diverged artistically (though never emotionally). “I’d rather chance a choice than choose a chance,” Harrison famously quipped. After hearing one of Cage’s 1940s piano works at a University of Oregon concert with me a few years ago, he murmured, “That’s the John I loved.”
The marathon’s big finale, Cage’s 1951 Sixteen Dances for the PRPQ and chamber ensemble, marked a transition between the percussion and those aleatoric works, and for me it proved more interesting historically than musically. According to the superbly detailed program book’s explanation by Jarrad Powell, Cage first composed a “gamut of sounds and sound events” for this piece, which could be arranged on a chart and then ”arrayed within predetermined rhythmic structures,” resulting in “procedures that removed to some degree the making of direct aesthetic choices according to taste.” Although I didn’t hear it mentioned at the festival, a predecessor may have been Cowell’s “kits” of interchangeable musical modules, which inspired Harrison to structure some of his dance works that way beginning in the early 1940s.
Hearing this piece juxtaposed with the percussion and prepared piano pieces, it’s easy to discern the connection between the moment-by-moment felicitous combinations of sound that percussion afforded Cage and the glittering constellation of sound moments that flicker off and on throughout the long piece. In conjunction (though not coordination) with Cunningham’s choreographic movements, even Cage’s proto aleatoric works provide unexpected, often enchanting juxtapositions of sound and motion.
Cage must have been delighted when he heard the results in Sixteen Dances, which was deeply influenced by the Hindu esthetics that fascinated him at the time. For the first 20 minutes or so, these unexpected instrumental sparkles intrigued me, but they gradually grew tedious, as my brain, I suppose, vainly craved some sense of direction or evolution or change. Cage himself was famously a fan of the value of boredom, so I’m not sure this counts as a criticism. The next step, for Cage, was using chance to completely divorce artistic ego from the product, a common impetus among post WWII artists.
With one exception, the other later Cage works on this valuable program provided a similar combination of intellectual delight and eventual squirm-inducing emotional blight. Cheap Imitation (a 1969 re-envisioning of Satie’s lovely Socrate, which powerfully influenced Cage), selections from Eight Whiskus (1984) , Three2 — as usual with Cage, they made me listen in different ways, and I’m glad the festival planners chose to go beyond all three composers’ works from the time of Cage’s Cornish tenure.
But for me, they don’t work so well onstage sans dancers, at least at this length. (In fact, I wish the festival had featured at least one dance concert, inasmuch as Cage’s appointment at Cornish was actually in the dance department and many of the works performed here were actually composed for dance.) Of the later works, only 1985’s Ryoanji (partly composed during Cage’s 1983 Cornish residency) made me want to see and hear it again. Maybe it was just the intoxicating colors provided by bamboo flute, voice, soft percussion, and trombone (played by veteran Seattle musician Stuart Dempster), with the musicians sitting cross legged on the stage, scores on the floor in front of them, or maybe it was the evocative gagaku-like vibe, but the piece really felt like a kind of meditation in a Zen garden like the famous one in Kyoto that inspired it.
Artist Pictures: Gamelan Pacifica; Seattle Chamber Players; Paul Taub; Mikhail Shmidt; Mathew Kocmieroski; Jessika Kenney; Stuart Dempster; Adrienne Varner; Pacific Rims Percussion Quartet;
Sunday’s closing concert by Seattle’s Gamelan Pacifica proved climactic in several ways. It showed how Harrison completed the journey he began with an American percussion ensemble by, characteristically, going forward into the past: adopting and extending that apotheosis of percussion ensembles, the Javanese gamelan orchestra. And, juxtaposed with the later Cage works on the program, it showed how far these two great friends and musical geniuses diverged from their early common interests.
Unlike Harrison’s gamelan works, the product of years of intensive study of classical Javanese musical forms, Cage’s 1986 Haikai eschews any traditional gamelan performance practice, instead treating the instruments as just another set of sound sources. Each page of the score represents a haiku based on 17 events. The musicians have to respond to each other as well. Since an event can consist of a sound or a silence, the piece winds up sounding pretty ethereal, and looks like it’s a lot more fun to play than to listen to.
Or perhaps it merely seemed diffuse in such close proximity to the melodically compelling and rhythmically inventive Harrison works on the program, which were written around the same time as Haikai but seem to come from another planet. The concert kicked off with one of the finest concerti of the 20th century: Harrison’s glorious Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan, a propulsive work that so overflows with Harrison’s joyous spirit that it brings tears to my eyes every time I hear it. The melodies just keep pouring out, an overwhelming efflorescence of melodic beauty spiced by the instruments’ just intonation tuning, so much richer than the usual equal temperament. Live performances are scarce, owing to the necessity of retuning the piano to the accompanying gamelan’s particular intonation. (Powell and his tuning maven, GP member Stephen Fandrich, probably spent as much time tuning instruments for the festival as playing them.) The young soloist, Adrienne Varner, nailed her part, both in solo and ensemble passages — without succumbing to the whole Romantic flamboyant soloist vs. orchestra duel that would violate Harrison’s esthetic.
Email this piece
