Stream of Consciousness: What I Thought While Listening to George Rochberg's String Quartet No. 3 for the First Time

With the first fearsome, pesante chords of George Rochberg’s String Quartet No. 3, Part A: Introduzione-Fantasia; Part B: March, I had an immediate sense of passing through a corridor of music history into a new domain: leave exhibits A and B, minimalism and serialism behind, enter a new tonality.  This music immediately suggests a musical narrative and a grand fusion of international and historic styles and mediums.  The driving energy of the introduction gives way to plaintive suspensions and a questioning falling major second motive traded surreptitiously between the violins that seems to poke, to question, “So what?”  Here, extended techniques and effects like portamento gliss hold an equal footing with dissonant and consonant harmonies presented in a pseudo-Beethovian, pseudo-Ives chorale.  

Next, furious tutti chords played with successive down bows at the very frog invoke something between Shostakovich and a Bartókian flavor, but with a decidedly American inflection of voice.  This violin melody ascends in intervals similar to a Shostakovich theme, but ornamented with turns and trills more characteristic of Bartók or Kodály (this effect is heightened by the dissonant chords played by the lower strings in a dumka rhythm with an alternating ostinato bass).  Yet, the Eastern European and Slavic gestures soon just provide the top layer for a cello solo that richly sings a hymn tune much like the Protestant, Transcendalist-influenced music of Ives.  

This American inflection is especially apparent after a textural shift when the cello plays a percussive col legno rhythmic figure accompanied by a violin open-string bariolage that sounds like bluegrass.  This technique of blending multiple national styles while chiefly focusing on the  usage of tonally complex harmonic structures reminds me of the compositional process employed by Bartók in Contrasts for Violin, Clarinet, and Piano (1938) when he strove to combine traditional Hungarian elements associated with violinist Josef Szigeti with the distinctly American jazz style of clarinetist Benny Goodman.

Another salient American characteristic in this movement is the driving, relentless rhythmic energy.  This forward propulsion of the pulse reminds me of a shuffle (even when it's in a slow tempo, it still wants to move push ahead).  I would compare this feeling of pulse to a later piece for string quartet with a strong American popular bent, Johns's Alleged Book of Dances by John Adams.

The second movement, Part B-III. Variations, opens sublimely with another hymn-like tune in the lower strings while the first violinist sings in a high tessitura with chillingly expressive, wide vibrato.  This writing sounds aurally unique due to the huge gap in registers between the first violin and lower strings.  I vaguely remember a Beethoven quartet that prevalently used this technique (maybe I will remember which quartet in the middle of the night sometime, or I could go ask Dr. Radice…)  Poor first violin, stranded up so high in the stratosphere all alone with no helpful support from its other three colleagues... The chasm between these registers provides another surprising turn of development in the late twentieth century: two simultaneous and contrasting emotional timbres.  Who would have thunk we would end up back here?(!)  


This Theme and Variation movement definitely harkens back to Beethoven, Schubert, even Mahler’s long, sonorous phrases and the overall spirituality of the work.  However, the open spacing for the four voices preserves a sense of novelty throughout this movement; it sounds like the quartet members still like each other, but don’t want to get too close together.  This movement ends so shockingly consonant, it's unbelievable that it originated in the twentieth century at all!


Now, the third part of this quartet has to be quoting Shostakovich String Quartet No. 8, because the rhythm and melody contour is incredibly similar to several motives from that quartet.  Rochberg contrasts the disjunct voicing of the second part with a tight, compact, dense sound achieved by writing for all four voices in a close range with often harsh dissonances.  This movement takes many capricious turns, oscillating between snarky, fierce, playful, sentimental, and fervent.  Rochberg makes brilliant use of effects like col legno, Bartók pizzicato, and simply put, secco bowstrokes.  The way he combines col legno simultaneously with the Bartók pizzicato still sounds fresh.


The lyrical middle section evokes American nostalgia, a cinematic Hollywood sentimentality, and it just drips with emotional sap and all the wonderfulness to be found at Disneyland and Paris, combined.

Einstein on the Beach

The opening of Philip Glass’ Scene from Act 4, Scene 2: Bed from his opera Einstein on the Beach has always reminded me of the famous organ line from Bach’s Toccata and Fugue.  I think it is the elaborate melismas extended in an improvisatory web over a sustained pedal, suspensions, and delayed resolution that remind me of the opening bars of the Toccata.  Perhaps the instrumentation, a synthesizer, also serves as more than a passing reference to the organ used by Bach.  This resolution of the opening chord transitions to new thematic material that appears much like a subject in a fugue.  If you strip fugal technique of countersubjects, tonal answers, counterpoint, and even episodic development, this is one possibility of what you might get.  Our form here is open, with infinite possibilities really.  What separates a fantasia from minimalist opera?  Perhaps just about 300 years.

The entrance of a soprano senza vibrato and expressione glides smoothly over arpeggiated major triads, forming seamless, long curvatures that might be called phrases.  The contour of this melody begins placidly with a stepwise motion that soars unexpectedly in disjunct leaps.  This is not a vocal line marked by phrasal direction or diatonic leading tones; rather, the destiny of this melodic line plays a secondary role to the more primal interest of highlighting the gradual, timeless evolution of the triad.


Next, Scene from Act 3: Spaceship, also from Einstein on the Beach.  Once again the synthesizer’s arpeggiation of triads opens the scene, but this time the brief introduction seems to infer the mystical sonic universe of an underwater kingdom or a glistening Emerald City shimmering in the distance.  An abrupt textural change occurs with the entrance of the vocalists, signaling a pulsating, frenetic quickening of pulse and tempi.  A fascinating layering of timbres develops between the vocalists and electronic instruments, bringing to mind the texture of a richly ornamented silk scarf that has been discarded in a heap on the floor.  The spiraling, twisting layers of folds and wrinkles of this musical cloth provide the aural interest for listeners.


Two more distinct textural shifts occur, seeming to erupt as a pandemic of change.  A middle section contains a breathless, long passage of extended sixteenths notes racing tirelessly up and down the diatonic scale.  The doubling of harpsichord, saxophone and flute for this passage provides a captivating timbre that succeeds at providing an articulate wash of sound (something of a paradox, therefore, awesome).  This scalar motion ceases as abruptly as it began; it is immediately answered by a gyrating, energetic tutti passage marked by rapid arpeggiation and a groovy bass line that functions like a basso continuo for saxophone and harpsichord.  The rhythmic variation is fascinating, sublime, and impressive in its polyrhythmic complexities.


Glass even provides us with a satisfying tag at the end of the scene, played in unison by instruments as disparate as harpsichord and baritone saxophone.  A brief, unexpected caesura provides a tongue-in-cheek transition of silence that is answered by a final, frenzied choral outburst.  If this scene were a march, these last phrases are the stinger.


I was curious to see some actual video of the staging for the opera, so I have uploaded this short clip from the Universal Music Society's recent staging at the University of Michigan.  This includes interviews with Philip Glass as well.  

Minimalism: A Matter of Time, or The Theme of the Dawn of Eternal Time

Richard Serra's sculpture "A Matter of Time," Guggenheim Museum Bilbao 

The term minimalism seems to be as evasive and slippery for Steve Reich and Philip Glass in a similar way that being pigeonholed as "impressionists" irked Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.  Since this music has been associated with minimalist sculptor Richard Serra and painter Sol LeWitt, I have posted some of images of their works.

Here is some of Sol DeWitt's work:

I ended up spending a long time perusing images of Serra and LeWitt simply because these visual images seem so appealing, so clean, so fresh.  However, while it might create an interesting listening experience to absorb this visual medium simultaneously while hearing a minimalist music performance, I can understand why the term "minimalism" has seemed inadequate to composers.  Visual repetition often appears organic, balanced, cohesive, and ordered; hearing a sonic version of repetition that is phased, or seemingly "out of sync," becomes mesmerizing, psychedelic, entrancing, time altering. Add the many layers of rhythmic cells, sophisticated just tuning capable with synthesizers, and the assistance of electronic devices to provide digital delay and looping, and we have suddenly ventured off the cliff into a new territory entirely.

In regards to musicologist Leonard Meyer's theory of "reduced redundancy," musicologists now have ground to argue that the emergence of minimalism marks a drastic shift: the kind of shift that creates a demarcation of a new stylistic period.  Meyer's theory poses that each accepted musical period (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.) progresses through three developmental stages: preclassic, classic, and mannerist.  From a cursory glance at the surface of things, works belonging to the beginning of a style period (the preclassic stage) may appear naive, simplistic, and overly formulaic.  However, this preclassic stage also brings to the limelight material that is unprecedented.  Artists composing within this stylistic parameter have been forced by their immediate mannerist predecessors to create a vacuum.  Blow the field wide open, into oblivion.  With oblivion, take the nothingness, fill it up.  Fill it with something new...

We see a steady pendulum in music history, constantly ameliorating the decadence of the preceeding stylistic period.  Thus, Bach's fugal technique gives way to the accessibility of the Rococo; the masses of Palestrina (so many rules of counterpoint!) pave the way to the Florentine Camerata; the extravagance of Baroque opera leads to Gluck's opera reform.  Sometimes a composer may progress through these three stages within his or her own compositional career.  Consider how Stravinsky delved into his Neoclassic stage after his first romantic, colossal-scale works like "Le Sacre du Printemps."  

Here's a question: do we see the emergence of minimalism as a direct result of Milton Babbitt's extreme, paramount application of serialism, or as a question arising from the implications of John Cage's "nothingness" and "silence?"  Perhaps, John Cage answered Babbitt's sophisticated and elitist works with the "bomb" necessary to usher in a postmodern age.  Bombs, whether proactive or reactionary, are designed to obliterate and destroy.  But rising from the ashes of the nothingness creates the new.  Minimalism, like the dawn, poses a question.  

The question is this: where are we headed today?  

(Answer: anywhere!)

Feminist Blog

Pauline Oliveros is a composer whose work and life I would like to get to know better.  


It seems like women have not played a significant role in the discussion of the American avant-garde thus far, with the exception of passing remarks about earlier composers Amy Beach and Ruth Crawford.  Particularly in the post-World War II 1950's music scene, women are more than underrepresented; they are simply nonexistent!


We did not really discuss this, but as we looked at American serialists like Milton Babbit the tone of serious music tipped dangerously to a “masculine” extreme.  Previously, in the Classical and Romantic eras strong, testosterone-driven, rationally conceived passages were carefully balanced with more lyrical, sensuous secondary thematic counterparts.  Sonata form can be viewed as the small prism of a delicate dance between the sexes: neither party seeks to overthrow or overbalance the either, at least not until the tonic key swoops in during the recapitulation and swallows up the realm of the feminine secondary theme.  I just played the Schumann Violin Sonata in D minor on my graduate recital last night, and this piece serves as a good example of a male who displays a multifaceted [albeit mentally unstable] personality that encompasses both masculine and feminine traits.


However, with Milton Babbit and ultra-rationalism, this dualism and nuance disappeared entirely.  The “serious” music of the 1950s swung dangerously (in my opinion) to the extreme of favoring elite academicism and posed a threat to the sentimentality of expression as a viable tool in musical execution.  This was a conservative, conformist decade riddled with gender stereotypes and a male-dominated approach to art.


Thus, Oliveros' distinction of two types of creative processes shed light on some concepts I had already been pondering for some time.  In “The Contribution of Women Composers,” she distinguishes two modes of creativity: “(1) active, purposeful creativity, resulting from cognitive thought, deliberate acting upon or willful shaping of materials, and (2) receptive creativity, during which the artist is like a channel through which material flows and seems to shape itself.”  (Interestingly, this theory has now been corroborated by Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman in his new book Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011). 



She attributes this intuitive approach as a legitimate path that has too long been discredited and/or marginalized.


Artists who are locked into the analytical mode with little or no access to the intuitive mode are apt to produce one-sided works of art.  Certainly many of the totally determined, serial works of the post-war years seem to fit that category […] [We need] the recognition and re-evaluation of the intuitive mode as being equal to and as essential as the analytical mode for an expression of wholeness in creative work.  Oppression of women has also meant devaluation of intuition, which is culturally assigned to women’s roles (Gann 162-163).

The Politics of John Cage's "HPSCHD"

After reading Sara Haefeli’s stimulating and insightful article “HPSCHD, Gesamtkunstwerk, and Utopia,” I hardly know where to begin my discussion about the anarchist politics behind John Cage’s music.  First, her comparisons between John Cage’s philosophy to Wagner’s “total art” seem apparent when examining the poster for the premiere of HPSCHD at the University of Illinois Assembly Hall.  The poster depicts John Cage as a sort of mythic demi-god that is half Greek deity crossed with a modern American astronaut.  The halo, winged helmet, and winged sandals seem to suggest a 1960s Hermes destined to serve as messenger between the old and new: the portraits of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann seem to hover above his left shoulder just inches from the wielded sword that ushers in the “technology of the future” lying to the right of Cage’s feet.  Beethoven, Mozart, and Schumann’s heads sprout from a dragon’s body like snakes from Medusa’s head or the multiple-headed Lernaean Hydra famously slain by Hercules.


It is striking to depict a new work in mythic proportions.  To immediately draw this parallel implies both the self-assurance and egoism of the composer.  This image of dragon-slaying hero seems to boldly contrast the interview of a gentle, soft-spoken elderly John Cage discussing his philosophical views about the role of silence as music.  The goal of HPSCHD was to reach a sports-arena sized audience with a combination of multimedia devices including seven harpsichords, 208 computer-generated tapes, 64 slide projectors projecting 6,400 slides, and eight film projectors playing 40 films.  Mahler wrote his symphony for a thousand; John Cage writes a piece for an arena that seats 18,000. 

Cage conceived this piece on both micro and macro levels.  Computer music played tones from the octave, divided in a range of 2 to 56 microtones, as a representation for the “microscopic” level, while the visual images of outer space were meant to convey a “telescopic” level.  I love the first-hand account provided by University of Illinois musicology professor Nicholas Temperley who writes that the “area was full of (mostly) young people sitting or lounging.  Rising from them was a fog of smoke, and the smell of pot was beginning to reach the outer spaces.”  This atmosphere so characteristic of the 1960s seems suggestive of Cage’s ideal that a performance ought to be experienced on an individual level, meaning that each person who enters the arena will hear and process the experience in a different, unique way.  Furthermore, this individualized way of hearing and experiencing music correlates to John Cage’s political views of a pluralistic anarchy “in wish he wished to live: a world that allowed for personal freedom; a world of abundance; a world in which each perspective differed and all perspectives fared the same” (Heimbecker 478).

However, in the same way that Wagner’s anti-Semitism became a vehicle for the evils of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, John Cage scholars today are examining his lack of commentary on the civil rights movement that was actively unfolding on college campuses during this time.  That he writes often about his political views on poverty, anarchy, and technology but neglects to really reflect on the protest that occurred on the University of Illinois campus in 1968-1969 over the increased admission of African-American students seems suspicious and somewhat surprising.  In a 1970 interview, Cage comments, “Now the exciting thing about the blacks is, that they are going to be free of the laws [regarding harmony and composition], which were made by whites to protect them from the blacks, among other things, and to keep the blacks in slavery and to keep the white people more powerful.  Now, it won’t be good for the blacks to become powerful like the whites […] anymore than it would be good for the noises to become as harmonious and as devoted to counterpoint as the musical sounds.”  Although I cannot accuse John Cage of being hateful or spiteful in his words, I agree with Dr. Haefeli's assessment that Cage and others were involved in an "abstract kind of social revolution that could serve as an umbrella for all sorts of sub-issues."  For Cage in the 1960s, issues of poverty and the distribution of resources trumped racial equality as the paramount societal ills of the time.

Graphic Notation

I am including a recent example of graphic notation by a good friend of mine, composer Matt Aelmore, who is a Manhattan School of Music M.M. alum and current doctoral candidate in composition at the University of Pittsburgh.  His piece around 6:30 uses an actual floor plan as the score for the piece.  (This is coming from the same guy who composed the piece Quartet for the Time Being for Violin, Bass Clarinet, Piano, and Vibes for Terrance and me back in 2009 at Wichita State University).  Here is the link to Matt's website: http://mattaelmore.bandcamp.com/releases.  The piece is for electronics, oboe, and voice.  He attributes the design of the score to Patrick Waldo.

For my own graphic notation project, I stewed and fretted for weeks.  Nothing clever, even plausible, came to mind until the middle of last night (of course!)  This was a positive thing; I had expected to have no creative inspiration until I got in the shower before class this morning, since all of my best thinking takes place in the shower.

I am writing a performance piece called Ronald that is more about the recycling process than just using recycled materials.  The instruments are mostly derived from items contained in a McDonald's Happy Meal.  The performers will use some obvious instruments, such as drinking straws cut into oboe reeds, and some more odd mediums such as throwing chicken nuggets into a large piece of cardboard covered entirely with aluminum foil.  The soprano will play the central role in the piece as she simultaneously eats a hamburger while performing slogans with many histrionic melismas (all with her mouth full, of course).  Other key performers will slurp and gargle soft drinks, and may also choose to crush chunks of ice between their teeth.  They can, however, alternatively opt to throw and hurl chunks of ice into resonant objects.  Other auxiliary instruments may include crinkling, crumpling, rustling, shaking, and flattening sandwich wrappers and blowing up the paper bag and popping it.

In order to represent Ronald McDonald (for whom this piece is named), I would like remaining performers to provide clown props of their choice.  These sounds should be used to signify the clown, Ronald McDonald, being tickled by a walrus and then slowly starving to death at the bottom of a pit.

The last performer will serve as an allegory for the digestive system.  Much belching is encouraged, no, applauded.        

Smelling Music

It is strange that we accept a vast plethora of sound effects in our movie soundtracks, but that the idea of attending a concert simply for an opportunity to bask in sounds seems repellant to many people.  Morton Feldman’s goal of presenting sonorities as significant, free-standing entities can seem radical since he did not trouble himself with sending his audience a musical message.  Music is broadly applied as a communication tool; yet, it can also serve as an entry point into a realm where interpreting transitions to meditation, meaning toward being, and transmitting into absorbing.

If we were to enter a concert hall with the intention of placating the mind and spirit, we might experience Feldman’s music in the way that the earth accepts the drops of rain.  In this joyful passivity, questions of origin and meaning are irrelevant as the cool moisture slowly seeps in through the crusty, cracked surface and slowly permeates to deep, dank roots.  If we could learn to “smell” this music, we could progress.  Who questions the message behind the scent of a fragrant flower, dirty diaper, or inviting kitchen as it enters the nostrils?  The sense of smell relates entirely to the way in which we experience the scent.  Isn’t it strange how a certain smell can trigger an instantaneous burst of nostalgia?  Our brains are so well-connected and adept at this type of neurological absorption, I believe that this same possibility of opportunity lies within the way we listen.  


In his 1964 interview with Robert Ashley, Feldman speaks freely about the doctrinaire approach that many young composers acquire as they approach great aesthetic works and seek to adapt them for their own use.  Feldman argues that “the intention, the aesthetic of the work may be a complete mystery to this young composer.  But in the form of politics it is not a mystery.  It is very concrete.”  For this reason, Feldman describes a process in which the original spirituality and conception of a work gets traded for a humanized (tangible?) rationale that allows it to enter a sphere of broader circulation and recognition.  He compares this to the proselytizing role of religion, in which the “divine being” is slowly traded for a stringent, canonized doctrine.  As support for this analogy, Feldman offers the example of the revisionist composer who gains power by surrounding himself or herself with eager young adherents.  This, he argues, is how “schools of thought” are born.


Feldman writes that these revisionists are often perceived by the public as fanatics.  However, he objects strongly to this, saying instead that “what they are fanatic about is amazing to me, because they have created nothing new.”  He cites moments in history when artists have produced original works through the “complete inner security to work with that which was unknown to them,” using John Cage and 1950's painters as examples.  His tone is honest, frank as he states that he never composed his music based on ideas; rather, he writes “unfortunately for most people who pursue art, ideas become their opium.”


I am struck by a common thread running through this course: those who embark on an experimental path invariably pursue an inner impulse that propels them forward to unknown territories for the sheer purpose of pursuing something that brings sheer delight and inner fulfillment.  This self-assuredness is so remarkable that it is perhaps the most salient characteristic of the avant-garde in its purist form.