Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Evan Johnson's On the Record - My Dear Siegfried

My Dear Siegfried
David Behrman
XI Records XI 129

I used to really dislike going to concerts � they were stodgy, uncomfortable, inconvenient, and as often as not terminally boring. Except for truly exceptional events, I�d rather put on a CD at home. As a matter of fact, I still dislike going to concerts. But at the same time, especially as my own compositional work evolves towards unrecordability, I treasure the human interactions they involve, the performative tensions and the aura of presentness that recordings can never capture.

I mention this because I wanted to like a lot of the things on this two-disc set of electroacoustic music by technological pioneer David Behrman; his background as an acoustic explorer and associate of the likes of Gordon Mumma and Alvin Lucier promised an extremely interesting experience, and I had never before heard any of his work. Unfortunately, with a couple of exceptions, I still feel like I haven�t heard it. Most of these pieces just don�t show up on record; the sounds are there, but the music seems to depend no more on sound than on the human presence and the performative experience.

The title work is the centerpiece of the record, filling the first of the two discs. It features readings of letters and other correspondence of World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon and one S. N. Behrman, presumably a relative of the composer although no further information is given. The texts, which are straightforwardly delivered, are accompanied by a �performance environment� in which live performers (here an ensemble of voices, shakuhachi, and keyboards featuring the composer and well-known experimental vocalist Thomas Buckner) improvise and interact with a responsive computer system.

The result is a spare, beautiful, often compelling sort of simultaneously �futuristic� and deeply personal accompanied recitative. It is clear why Behrman found the texts, prominent among which are Sassoon�s pacifist reactions to the First World War, particularly relevant for today�s geopolitical climate; sentences like �On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them� are certainly heard differently today than they would have been three years ago.

But there is a sense of occasion, ceremony and ritual inherent in this work � as if the performers were genuflecting at the altar of pacifism � that makes the recorded presentation at least as frustrating as it is compelling. It is not just the spontaneity of live interactivity that is missing, but also a sense of purpose shared between performers and audience. I felt the need to have been where the performers� bodies were. That having been said, Dear Siegfried is a major work by an important figure in American experimentalism that should be heard, and what comes across on record is not easily forgotten.

The second disc holds smaller pieces that trace the development both of the technology of electronic computation and sound reproduction and of Behrman�s relationship to it. The most compelling pieces are the simplest, the purest, and technologically the most primitive: Touch Tones and Pools of Phase Locked Loops, both of which involve the interaction of live performers with audibly experimental computer systems � �audibly experimental� not in the sense that the resulting sounds are particularly complex or outr�, but that there is a strong sense of struggle communicated by the presence of complex electronic systems that today would be nearly trivial MSP patches. It is hard to imagine computer-generated sounds conveying an impression of difficulty, but Behrman manages, particularly in Touch Tones, a modest five-minute work that I found to be the most independently compelling music on the disc. Noisy sounds, produced by Katharine Morton Austin and the composer with objects like sandpaper and electric drills, are �heard� by a computer, which then responds with an irregularly descending arpeggio of detected harmonic peaks; the disjunction between humans� music and the attempts of electronic devices to respond to it has never been as poignantly obvious. Touch Tones is an allegory of the constitutive failure of electronics when faced with art.

This is a record worth acquiring, especially at the bargain price of less than a single full-priced CD. The packaging is elegant, the booklet exemplary (it includes an interview with Behrman and full texts of My Dear Siegfried), and the music rarely heard and important, even if more often than not it makes the listener miss the concert hall.

posted by Evan Johnson 7/14/2005