Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Evan Johnson On the Record: At the Exactest Point

At the Exactest Point
Stephen Jones
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cond. Sir Andrew Davis
Tantara TCD-0404STJ

Stephen Jones is a professor of music at Brigham Young University and Dean of their College of Fine Arts and Communications. He is also, the packaging to this single-length release on BYU�s Tantara Records label insists, an artist of great talent and profundity. The disc�s cover is littered with acclamations from luminaries of a certain type of midrange, big-time American music: Melinda Wagner, Claude Baker, Augusta Read Thomas. The liner notes begin with a relatively informative program note from the composer, but then blossom into a lengthy and obsequious series of paeans to the composer and the work, including a detailed description of the (unremarkable) rehearsal process, a meditation on the composer�s life and background entitled �Transformed by Music,� and a series of breathless narrations of the work�s premiere by the CSO, broken into sections with titles like �From Score to Performance� and �The Reviews Come In.� Substantial background information on the conductor and orchestra, including a complete lineup of performers, rounds off the hefty booklet.

Perhaps Tantara Records � which is to say, I assume, Jones himself � doth protest too much, I thought as I read the overblown praise. But, to be fair, I hadn�t listened to the thing yet.

But, to be fair again, what I heard didn't surprise me. Jones knows how to make an orchestra sound good in the manner to which it is accustomed, and he knows that to make a climax you make things louder, faster, and denser, especially where piccolos and percussion are concerned. He knows that dissonance and vertical density create tension if that�s what you want them to do. He knows that snaking low strings sound sinister. He knows that when you crescendo a dissonant chord in the brass it sounds cool, and that repeated dotted rhythms can impose momentum where none might otherwise exist, and that loud should be followed by soft and vice versa, and that all good stories have a satisfying culmination. In that sense, the piece is well constructed, and I grant Wagner, Baker, and Thomas that point. But I forgot it as soon as it was over. I listened to it again, and forgot it again. There is a wide variety of incident in this work � and aside from one nice rocking figure in the high strings at about the sixteen-minute mark, after the CLIMAX and before the breathless ENDING, I forgot it all.

Among the enthusiastic discussions of Jones and his work in the liner notes, one finds this quote from the composer: �I�m probably less concerned with originality and more concerned with what I call authenticity.� This distressingly widespread false dichotomy � from which it follows that late Beethoven and early Stravinsky were constitutively inauthentic � is the key to this piece. Jones has concluded that, to be authentic to his artistic convictions, he must consult his colleagues and a selected list of long-dead and therefore suitably illustrious predecessors to find out what those convictions should be. The result is At the exactest point.

posted by Evan Johnson 9/24/2005