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Classical music reinvents its relevance to times
Philadelphia Inquirer
May 23 2004
'The present is always an awful place to be."
That line from the Tony Kushner play Homebody/Kabul speaks to
everyone's inner drama queen, the part of us that says our times and
only our times are supremely troubled. But now, with the Iraq torture
photos, the beheading on video, and, in this election year, the
contentious polarization of American society on numerous social
issues, it's the tumultuous late '60s all over again. And that's
enough to make you shut off the radio and listen to some nice Mozart
over your morning coffee.
As if pretty music's going to help. Escape isn't possible, even if it
were advisable. So does that mean art takes a hike until things calm
down? Wrong again. Current events change what we want to hear - and
how we hear it - but they don't leave us deaf.
Like a Rorschach ink-blot test, classical music benefits from its own
abstraction, taking the color of its surroundings in ways that were
particularly startling in one recent musical event, and in another
yet to come. Last month, Orchestra 2001 premiered the Andrea
Clearfield cantata The Long Bright, and Alfred Schnittke's Concerto
for Mixed Choir has its local premiere by the Choral Arts Society at
4 p.m. today at First Baptist Church.
Inspired by the scourge of breast cancer, the Clearfield cantata
consciously addresses the outside world in a text-based piece that,
heard now, mushrooms into a larger issue: grief for those who are cut
down in, and even before, their prime. Format-wise, it joins a long
line of works, such as Britten's War Requiem and John Corigliano's
Symphony No. 1, that speak their impassioned messages in no uncertain
terms.
While many great pieces of music are like cathedrals that initially
leave you so overwhelmed you don't know where to look first, these
more message-dominated pieces direct your attention with great
purpose. Just as Britten's antiwar requiem utilizes graphic poetry
written by a World War I casualty, Clearfield employs equally
compelling verses by David Wolman, who commissioned the piece in
memory of his wife, Anni Baker, a breast cancer victim.
Musically, such pieces often reference preexisting artifacts that are
communicative thanks to their familiarity, but galvanize attention
even more when found in unexpected places. Corigliano's symphony, for
example, used a mad tarantella dance to dramatize AIDS-related
dementia. Clearfield composed one movement as rap music (sung by a
girls' chorus), its rhythmic aggressiveness suggesting the
mercilessness of disease, and, in a larger sense, the mercilessness
of fate.
There's also room for more original acts of compositional wizardry.
Since Clearfield leads you to expect a fairly straightforward
harmonic language, mentions of "cancer" and "malignancy" are all the
more penetrating when the harmonies around them unravel, cancerously,
in all directions.
Some say this is one of the best pieces written recently by a
Philadelphia composer. I agree, but listening to it on an archival
tape at home, I particularly missed the audience group-experience, as
I do with Britten's undeniably great War Requiem. The kind of pain
these pieces bring up needs to be shared. In contrast, Schnittke's
choir concerto is so effective on disc, I never thought I needed to
hear it live.
In the years before his 1998 death, Schnittke composed excruciating
monuments to Soviet repression, with piano concertos that exploded in
fury and retellings of the Faust legend with violence worthy of
Quentin Tarantino. His late symphonies, written amid a horrific
succession of strokes and heart attacks, suggested a composer prying
music out of himself, or attempting to play on a half-broken violin.
The choir concerto is different: So grand, difficult and impractical,
it's not the sort of piece composers write voluntarily. The chunky
text, by the 10th-century Armenian monk Grigor Narekatsi, has an Old
Testament fierceness. God is fearsome and humanity dreadful, "full to
the brim with black sorrow" and "enslaved by sin." I don't connect
with that literally. But the music, with its alternately undulating,
growling and screaming vocal sonorities, gives voice to a lot of
moments many of us have had lately.
Though undeniably a masterpiece, the composer didn't want this jewel
performed in the West, perhaps because it was so personal, so en
famille. Yet the verse is so ancient, it transcends any sense of
modern religious denomination. The music focuses singlemindedly on
revealing the verse, but with a passion that seizes American ears as
well as Russian ones. Perhaps the composer didn't realize what a huge
range of meaning his music has. While Clearfield's piece accommodates
some individual interpretation, The Long Bright is likely to say much
the same thing with every performance.
Not Schnittke. Some recorded performances look backward at sorrow
from a place of serenity; others are still mired in the deepest
psychic mud.
What doesn't figure into this equation of perception is the usual
masterpiece mystique. The music invites you into such a close
dialogue that you're not marveling as much as utilizing it. Laudable
as it is that Mozart's Ein Kleine Nachtmusik has been cheering people
up since 1787, I wonder if it's more important that a handful of
Philadelphians stand to gain a better understanding of their worlds
via Schnittke and Clearfield, so as to know what is hopeless and what
is not.
Philadelphia Inquirer
May 23 2004
'The present is always an awful place to be."
That line from the Tony Kushner play Homebody/Kabul speaks to
everyone's inner drama queen, the part of us that says our times and
only our times are supremely troubled. But now, with the Iraq torture
photos, the beheading on video, and, in this election year, the
contentious polarization of American society on numerous social
issues, it's the tumultuous late '60s all over again. And that's
enough to make you shut off the radio and listen to some nice Mozart
over your morning coffee.
As if pretty music's going to help. Escape isn't possible, even if it
were advisable. So does that mean art takes a hike until things calm
down? Wrong again. Current events change what we want to hear - and
how we hear it - but they don't leave us deaf.
Like a Rorschach ink-blot test, classical music benefits from its own
abstraction, taking the color of its surroundings in ways that were
particularly startling in one recent musical event, and in another
yet to come. Last month, Orchestra 2001 premiered the Andrea
Clearfield cantata The Long Bright, and Alfred Schnittke's Concerto
for Mixed Choir has its local premiere by the Choral Arts Society at
4 p.m. today at First Baptist Church.
Inspired by the scourge of breast cancer, the Clearfield cantata
consciously addresses the outside world in a text-based piece that,
heard now, mushrooms into a larger issue: grief for those who are cut
down in, and even before, their prime. Format-wise, it joins a long
line of works, such as Britten's War Requiem and John Corigliano's
Symphony No. 1, that speak their impassioned messages in no uncertain
terms.
While many great pieces of music are like cathedrals that initially
leave you so overwhelmed you don't know where to look first, these
more message-dominated pieces direct your attention with great
purpose. Just as Britten's antiwar requiem utilizes graphic poetry
written by a World War I casualty, Clearfield employs equally
compelling verses by David Wolman, who commissioned the piece in
memory of his wife, Anni Baker, a breast cancer victim.
Musically, such pieces often reference preexisting artifacts that are
communicative thanks to their familiarity, but galvanize attention
even more when found in unexpected places. Corigliano's symphony, for
example, used a mad tarantella dance to dramatize AIDS-related
dementia. Clearfield composed one movement as rap music (sung by a
girls' chorus), its rhythmic aggressiveness suggesting the
mercilessness of disease, and, in a larger sense, the mercilessness
of fate.
There's also room for more original acts of compositional wizardry.
Since Clearfield leads you to expect a fairly straightforward
harmonic language, mentions of "cancer" and "malignancy" are all the
more penetrating when the harmonies around them unravel, cancerously,
in all directions.
Some say this is one of the best pieces written recently by a
Philadelphia composer. I agree, but listening to it on an archival
tape at home, I particularly missed the audience group-experience, as
I do with Britten's undeniably great War Requiem. The kind of pain
these pieces bring up needs to be shared. In contrast, Schnittke's
choir concerto is so effective on disc, I never thought I needed to
hear it live.
In the years before his 1998 death, Schnittke composed excruciating
monuments to Soviet repression, with piano concertos that exploded in
fury and retellings of the Faust legend with violence worthy of
Quentin Tarantino. His late symphonies, written amid a horrific
succession of strokes and heart attacks, suggested a composer prying
music out of himself, or attempting to play on a half-broken violin.
The choir concerto is different: So grand, difficult and impractical,
it's not the sort of piece composers write voluntarily. The chunky
text, by the 10th-century Armenian monk Grigor Narekatsi, has an Old
Testament fierceness. God is fearsome and humanity dreadful, "full to
the brim with black sorrow" and "enslaved by sin." I don't connect
with that literally. But the music, with its alternately undulating,
growling and screaming vocal sonorities, gives voice to a lot of
moments many of us have had lately.
Though undeniably a masterpiece, the composer didn't want this jewel
performed in the West, perhaps because it was so personal, so en
famille. Yet the verse is so ancient, it transcends any sense of
modern religious denomination. The music focuses singlemindedly on
revealing the verse, but with a passion that seizes American ears as
well as Russian ones. Perhaps the composer didn't realize what a huge
range of meaning his music has. While Clearfield's piece accommodates
some individual interpretation, The Long Bright is likely to say much
the same thing with every performance.
Not Schnittke. Some recorded performances look backward at sorrow
from a place of serenity; others are still mired in the deepest
psychic mud.
What doesn't figure into this equation of perception is the usual
masterpiece mystique. The music invites you into such a close
dialogue that you're not marveling as much as utilizing it. Laudable
as it is that Mozart's Ein Kleine Nachtmusik has been cheering people
up since 1787, I wonder if it's more important that a handful of
Philadelphians stand to gain a better understanding of their worlds
via Schnittke and Clearfield, so as to know what is hopeless and what
is not.