Month: September 2019

Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Los Angeles

Aperplicity in Pasadena

On September 6, 2019 People Inside Electronics presented Aperplicity, a concert of performance art and music performed by two Los Angeles-based duos. Aperture Duo with Adrianne Pope, violin and Linnea Powell, viola, joined forces with Autoduplicity, Rachel Beetz, flute and Jennifer Bewerse, cello, to present five pieces, including a world premiere. The spacious Throop Unitarian Church Hall in Pasadena filled up with a fine new music audience on a warm Friday night.

Time With People, Op. 1 (2013) by Tim Parkinson began the program with two performers sitting at a table holding a few snacks and cans of soda. This setting might have been two people meeting for lunch, or on their break at work. The two began speaking about the everyday issues in their lives – the difficulties of getting up and ready for the day, vacation in Hawaii, peculiar eating habits of the dog, the challenges of growing house plants. Their words were more like a stream of conscience and were not a conversation directed at each other. They simply talked on at length until a buzzer sounded, when one of the performers stopped speaking. Perhaps they were reminiscing about their previous Online Casino ohne Limit experience. A second, different buzzer, sounded and now both conversations were suspended while some familiar classical music was heard through the speakers on stage. A few moments later, the first buzzer sounded and the stream of words started up again from the first person. The other followed as the second buzzer was heard. This pattern was repeated with several variations as the two buzzers were sounded at different times and in different combinations. The topics changed from time to time, but were always about intimate commonplaces and never serious. All of this was very engaging and at times very entertaining – the audience broke into knowing laughter on a number of occasions. Time With People is a powerful commentary on our everyday conversations – we generally talk at people about the everyday banalities of our lives – and do very little listening in return.

Selections from Retrouvailles (2013) by Georges Asperghis followed. This was a series of three short scenes that began with two performers meeting mid-stage, embracing and patting each other on the back. This patting became faster and louder, and was soon distinctly rhythmic. Some French words were shouted, but there were no sung vocals or other music. The rhythms continued in this fashion for some moments before slowing, with the arms freezing in mid-slap at the finish. The second vignette had the two performers standing side-by-side and stamping their feet in a rhythm. Finger snapping, hand-clapping and side-slapping were added to this and the result was a cleverly choreographed bit of live percussion. The final scene had the two sitting at a sturdy wooden table with a wine bottle and a large glass. These were set sliding noisily across the table in a tidy rhythm that morphed into a rattling and pounding as the piece progressed. Some shouting soon accompanied these gestures, as might be heard in a rowdy bar. For the finish, the bottle was opened, the wine poured into the glass and the performers each took a cordial sip. Retrouvailles reminds us that music and rhythm are implicit in our most commonplace interactions, and how much we could add to our everyday life by being mindful of the musical possibilities.

Wash Me Whiter Than Snow (2013) by Jennifer Walshe was next, a piece for violin, cello and images projected on a screen above the stage. This opened with soft sliding sounds as both players bowed their instruments very slowly without fingering. Their free arms occasionally reached up and out while flowers appeared on the projection screen. The players then gently dropped their bows on the strings, producing a soft thump. A raucous recording of percussion was heard, and the players left their chairs and assumed various dramatic poses.

More acting and playing followed as the percussion recording ceased. There was a furious stretch of mimed cello and violin playing, a passage filled with complex pizzicato, and a bit of joyful singing and strumming. When actual tones were produced, the playing and vocals were excellent. On the screen, lions were seen pacing back and forth in a small cage. There was more pantomime playing of the stringed instruments which was followed by a soft scratching of bows on the strings and more acting. The piece ended with some vocals and a rough screech on the bowed cello as the violinist pantomimed an accompaniment. All the acting, singing and playing certainly highlighted the versatility of the performers, – Jennifer Bewerse and Adrianne Pope – considering they are from different groups. Wash Me Whiter Than Snow blurs the line between intention and reality, leaving the audience to sort out their impressions individually.

The premiere of Speech Suite (2019) by Todd Moellenberg followed, and this opened with a single word heard from the speaker. Two performers on stage, cellist and flute, began speaking concurrent phrases that were layered under the words emanating from the speaker. An intricate cello solo followed, and the sounds mimicked the rapidly spoken phrases. The listener’s brain was free to interpret the cello sounds as music or as speech, adding to the intrigue. More spoken phrases were heard from the speaker and the flute now accompanied, accurately mimicking the speech patterns. The two sets of sounds heard simultaneously created a pleasant confusion in the listener’s brain, sometimes the words were heard as music and sometimes hearing the flute tones as speech. The cello, flute and speaker were heard in various combinations in this way as the piece proceeded. Words and musical tones that resembled the patterns of speech delightfully overlapped. The two musicians displayed great skill matching the cadence and rhythmic patter of the spoken words. At the finish, a video of a Congressional hearing into some political foolishness was shown on the overhead screen while the stage speaker kept repeating “Liar!, Liar!” as the accompanying flute and cello imitated the same words. Speech Suite was greeted with appreciative laughter and extended applause.

The final piece on the program was I Delayed People’s Flights By Walking Slowly in Narrow Hallways (2005) by Mayke Nas and Wouter Snoei. Four performers were seated across from four large chalkboards. One performer began the piece by stamping on the floor as the others bowed from the waist while sitting down. More stamping by the others followed, in no particular order and without a common beat. Electronic sounds were heard from the speakers as one performer got up and drew a line on the chalkboard. Other players followed and more lines were drawn until a message emerged: “I Came Into The World.”

This set the pattern for the piece as it proceeded – single lines or single words were drawn until a phrase or message appeared. Some part of this would be erased and more words or letters added to change the meaning. In one sequence “I Approved Of Myself” was modified to “I DisApproved Of Myself” by the addition of just one syllable. “I Indulged in Self Doubt” became “I Indulged in Self Promotion.” All of this happened in fairly short order, the phrases and thoughts morphing at the speed of introspection with the players rapidly moving between the line of chairs and the chalkboards. In one sequence “I Called God Dead” appeared just as a rumble of thunder was heard from the speakers, and the message quickly became “I Called God Infallible”, which became “I Called Art Infallible” which morphed into “I Called Love Infallible.”

The arc of these visible thoughts, beginning with “I Came Into The World”, became evermore philosophical, illuminating the process of self examination in a new and striking way. The various noises coming from the speakers might have represented the uncertainty and buzz of distractions that are part of any mental process. The clear sequence of messages that appeared in written form on the chalkboards, however, tended to remove the normal self doubts that arise in a purely internal  rumination.  At the finish, the players covered all four chalkboards in a jumble of many words written in very small letters, as if ambiguity and confusion had overcome the previous clarity of thought. The players then began erasing all of this to reveal a final message hidden under the jumble: “I Asked For It.” I Delayed People’s Flights… is an extraordinary exploration of the thought process of self examination. The players received an enthusiastic ovation for their efforts.

by Paul Muller
Contemporary Classical

Dave Smith at Cafe Oto in London

Dave Smith is an excellent composer and a formidable pianist. In his early days he played in the Scratch Orchestra, and over the course of his career he has worked with the likes of Cardew, White, Skempton, Nyman, Bryars, and Parsons, and was an early champion and performer in the UK of Glass, Reich, and Riley. For the concert of his music celebrating his 70th birthday at Cafe Oto the place was packed. The largest and most recent (2018-2019) work on the program, Hunter of Stories, lasting 70 minutes, was described by Smith in his program notes as being a posthumous collaboration between the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), John Tillbury, and himself. Tilbury’s part of the collaboration was the selection of excerpts from Galeano’s final book whose name was given to this project, which are separated by short musical interludes by Smith. The spoken texts, which Smith described as, “intentionally varied, dealing with universal issues as well as the realities of Latin America, indigenous and modern,” were originally in Spanish, and are here presented in translations by Mark Fried. The thirty-two vignettes are divided into two groups, separated by a longer interlude; the entire set is framed by two longer pieces serving as prologue and epilogue. Some of the interludes draw on tunes from Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina, as well as from the Western Sahara. The work is dedicated to Tilbury. In this performance Tilbury was the speaker and Smith was the pianist.

Tilbury, joined by speaker Ella Marsh, was the pianist is These Special Colours (2002), a short, at least by the terms of this concert, work whose musical material is a Palestinian song called ‘For the Flag,’ and includes a poem published in the Palestinian Chronicle of March 26, 2002, by the thirteen year old Nura Salameh, describing the Palestinian flag. The concluding work, Kaivopuisto (1995-96), an approximately half hour long work in four continuous sections, was originally for ‘cello and piano. Smith was joined by Ian Mitchell in the first performance of a more recent version for bass clarinet and piano. Smith’s notes explained that Kaivopuisto is a large park in Helsinki which he visited in August of 1995 and that ”the piece is in no way descriptive although the (correct) impression may be that the park was spacious and the weather unusually hot.”

All of the performances on the concert were, apparently, flawless; they were certainly definitive.

by Rodney Lister
Composers, Contemporary Classical

Hayes Biggs on Mario Davidovsky (1934-2019)

Mario Davidovsky (March 4, 1934 – August 23, 2019)

Mario Davidovsky, composer, teacher, and winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his Synchronisms No. 6 for piano and electronic sounds, passed away peacefully last Friday at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side at the age of 85. The cause of death was heart failure.

Davidovsky was a pioneering figure in the burgeoning electronic music scene of the 1960s and 70s, and his pathbreaking work in combining live instrumentalists with prerecorded electronic sounds revealed exciting new possibilities in the realms of articulation, timbre, velocity, and expression. It could truly be said of Davidovsky’s series of Synchronisms that the electronic and acoustic media seemed to “learn” from each other: composers committing electronic sounds to tape and splicing musical events together could produce extraordinarily rapid, quicksilver patterns of articulation that at the time seemed beyond the limits of human performers. Sudden dynamic changes could be achieved in electronic music that also seemed to exceed the abilities of most executants. Even so, some of the finest young musicians of the time, like their forebears in previous eras, figured out how to incorporate a significant amount of these abilities into their own instrumental technique — to learn to play what formerly had seemed unplayable—, adding a new level of virtuosity that could be called upon by the composer. And Davidovsky had the magic touch when it came to introducing an element of human warmth and flexibility to the tape parts. It has often been said that in his hands this fixed electronic component, far from sounding rigid and unyielding, somehow gives the impression of “following” the live performer, similarly to the way a fine collaborative pianist follows and breathes with a singer or instrumentalist. Mario believed that the human executant was not to be supplanted, but that the things the instrument was capable of doing could be extended and enhanced.

Mario Davidovsky was born in Médanos, Argentina. His parents were Natalio Davidovsky, a general manager of an agricultural company, and Perla Bulanska Davidovsky, who taught Hebrew school and was something of a champion of social justice. She was an educated woman who engaged in scholarly biblical study, and she had a strong interest in caring for Jewish children who had been orphaned, even to the point of taking them into her home. Mario’s parents had been brought by their parents to Argentina from Lithuania in the early years of the twentieth century. Mario’s grandfathers both were rabbis, and one of them was also a Hebrew scribe. Living in a small town with many immigrants, in an observant Jewish household within a very Roman Catholic Latin American culture was critical to Mario’s development as a human being and as an artist. He developed a very strong belief in the ethical and moral component of being a composer, a belief that he worked to instill in his students for the rest of his life.

Music was an integral part of the family’s life, and Mario began taking violin lessons at the age of 7. By the time he was thirteen was already composing his own music. When he was fifteen his family moved to Buenos Aires, but he didn’t start formal composition studies until he was eighteen. He took instruction at a school modeled on the German Hochschule für Musik concept, studying with German and Austrian emigrés. Later, he attended the University of Buenos Aires, with the idea of pursuing a career in law, but in 1954 committed to composition. At about the same time he had his first compositional success, winning first prize in a competition with a string quartet. He graduated from the university, having received a solid grounding in musical theory and composition with Guillermo Graetzer and Teodoro Fuchs. He often spoke of his gratitude for the rigorous training in counterpoint that he received there. The sense of lyricism and of a through line in Mario’s music is pervasive, whether in the sparse textures of the early electronic pieces or the more opulent sonorities of Shulamit’s Dream.

Aaron Copland, who had for a long time had an interest in cultivating ties with Latin American composers, invited Davidovsky to Tanglewood in 1958 and introduced him to Milton Babbitt, who in turn introduced him to the world of electronic music, and who also was about to embark on a new venture, the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, along with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky. In 1960, Mario moved permanently to the United States, settling in New York City. In the electronic music studio at Columbia, he familiarized himself with the equipment and began creating his first electronic compositions, and later assisted Edgard Varèse in preparing a new version of the tape part for Déserts. He often said that his early musical experiences had not prepared him for the daunting challenges of the new medium, that — as he put it — “nothing I know counts.” In a very real way it certainly was true: he was working with oscillators that were notoriously difficult to keep in tune, splicing many bits of tape together to create a few seconds of music, and having to build each individual sonority from the ground up, so to speak. The attack, steady state, and decay of the sound, natural and unique to every traditional instrument, had to be created anew for each piece; in effect he was creating the instrument itself. All of this taught him valuable lessons that would radically alter the way he thought about writing for conventional media and ensembles. His concept of orchestration was forever radically transformed by his experiences in the tape studio.

After mastering the medium of instrument(s)-plus-electronic sounds, he took a break from it for a while and applied what he had learned from the new technology to works for acoustic instruments and voices, which gave rise to a significant flowering of vocal music, much of it based on Biblical or Jewish-themed texts. In 1975 he created the first work of his to utilize a biblical text with which he had been obsessed since he was a youth: The Song of Songs (in Hebrew, Shir ha-Shirim). The resulting cantata, Scenes from Shir ha-Shirim, for four vocal soloists and chamber orchestra, brilliantly connects the tangy sonorities of Medieval and Middle Eastern musical traditions, and the weird composite instruments he fashions using regular Western classical instruments (oboe, clarinet, strings, piano, percussion) easily remind one of similar dazzlingly bizarre sonorities that he was able to create in the studio. Years later, in memory of his mother, he composed another very different setting of texts from the Song of Songs, Shulamit’s Dream, for soprano and large orchestra. Hearing the two settings in succession is rather like hearing the same text set by two different composers: one from the late Middle Ages, the other from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. And yet it’s still Mario’s voice we’re hearing.

After an extensive hiatus, Davidovsky returned to the electronic studio and the Synchronisms series, completing four more works for electronics with, respectively, violin, guitar, clarinet, and double bass.

Davidovsky was the director of the Electronic Music Center from 1981 until 1994, taught at various times at the University of Michigan, Yale University, and Manhattan School of Music, and served on the faculties of City College of New York, Columbia University, and Harvard University. In 1982 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Davidovsky is survived by his son, Matias; his daughter, Adriana; his sister, Luisa Paz, and three grandchildren. His wife, Elaine Joyce Davidovsky, died in 2017.

When Mario spoke of the purpose of art and the ethical responsibility of the artist, he summarized it very beautifully as reflecting “the transcendental, profound wish that someone is served.” Thank you, Mario, for serving us all so generously.

  • Hayes Biggs
by Christian Carey