Collage New Music

David Hoose, Music Director
Frank Epstein, Founder

Concert I: Distinguishing the Aesthetic(S) 
Sunday, October 20, 2019, at 8 pm
Edward M. Pickman Concert Hall
Longy School of Music of Bard College

 Tobias Picker // Octet (1978)

 Tobias Picker's Octet, dedicated to the ensemble Parnassus and its director, Anthony Korf, had its first performance, in Carnegie Recital Hall, [on December 7, 1978]. The nine-minute work happily confirmed the favorable impression made by Picker's Rhapsody, for violin and piano, at a Group for Contemporary Music concert the month before. The forces of the Octet are oboe, bass clarinet, and horn, violin, cello, and double-bass, harp and vibraphone/marimba; and they are skillfully and imaginatively handled.

The start of the piece suggests that of Tristan in the way motif steals upon motif to build into chords, but instead of Wagner's clinging semitones there is a gentle, open whole-tone flow—or, rather, a series of flows so directed that, while a cross-section through any point of the opening measures may reveal a common triad, one hears a web of lines and timbres instead of a chord progression.

 The scoring is smooth. Voice laps over or enters upon voice; coincidence on crossing points lends color and emphasis to the moments of unison; the texture is active but not dense or lumpy. A whole-tone melody implicit in the opening measures, later drawn out in a single thread by the horn, is never far away, but the moods and the motion of the music change freely, as if in a set of improvisations spun from that basic theme. The ending comes suddenly, perhaps too suddenly—but better that than a welcome outstayed.

 I find Picker's music hard to describe. I can't point to influences. Sometimes I think he may have been listening to Varèse timbres. Carter may have encouraged his feeling for inner rhythmic vitality. (Picker's music "keeps going" in an organic way, generating its own energy, not relying on motor or moto-perpetuo pulses.) The harmony seems to have been arrived at by intuition. My intuition tells me that he is one of the most gifted, individual, and unschematic of our young composers.

—Andrew Porter, excerpted fromThe New Yorker

Elliott Carter // A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)
When I agreed to write a cycle of songs for Speculum Musicae I decided, first, that it should be for soprano and chamber orchestra. The poems of Elizabeth Bishop impressed me because they have a clear verbal coherence as well as an imaginative use of syllabic sounds that suggest the singing voice. I was very much in sympathy with their point of view, for there is almost always a secondary layer of meaning, sometimes ironic, sometimes passionate, that gives a special ambiance, often contradictory, to what the words say. The order of the songs is entirely mine, alternating as they do between considerations about nature, love and isolation.

“A Mirror on Which to Dwell,” a line from the poem “Insomnia,” is the title I chose partly because it seemed to characterize the general world of the poems, partly because I wanted the music to be a mirror of the words and partly because Speculum Musicae, the organization which commissioned the work in honor of the U.S. Bicentennial. Its first performance was by soprano Susan Davenny Wyner and Speculum Musicae, Richard Fitz conducting, in New York City on February 24, 1976. The work is dedicated to the artists that gave its first performance.

—Elliott Carter

Giancinto Scelsi // Okanagon (1968)

Giancinto Scelsi was born in 1905, near La Spezia, in northern Italy, into a prosperous noble family. His grandfather had served in the Risorgimentomovement, and his father was a lieutenant in the navy. Hardly any photographs of Giancinto Scelsi exist (instead, he referred to a Zen symbol consisting of a circle and a straight line), and only a few precise and generally accepted biographical or compositional facts are known about him.

Scelsi’s remarkable talent for improvising at the piano was evident from an early age. After a ‘very old-fashioned education,’ he studied harmonic theory and composition with Giancinto Sallustio in Rome, and he was encouraged by Ottorino Respighi and Alfredo Casella, though without being an official student of either. By 1950, Scelsi had made numerous visits to Africa and the far East, and he lived for long periods in Paris, London and Switzerland. After attracting attention in Paris in 1931, with his symphonic poem Rotativa, he took lessons in atonal composition with Walter Klein. In the early 1930s, he studied with Egon Köhler in Geneva, who introduced him to the musical ideas of Alexander Scriabin. In 1937, he presented concerts of avant-gardemusic in Rome with Goffredo Petrassi. 

Between 1940 and 1950 Scelsi went through a psychological crisis, which he overcame through clinical treatment and the study of Eastern philosophies. (Scelsi claimed that working with traditional compositional methods, particularly serial ones, had caused his illness, and that only by means of repeatedly striking a single key on the piano and letting the sound fade away was he able to cure himself.)

After his final return to Rome, around 1952, Scelsi joined the Nuova Consonanza group of composers, but he led a largely secluded life. In his final years, Scelsi saw his musical work recognized in Germany, but throughout his life he remained unappreciated in his native Italy. Scelsi died in Rome in 1988. In addition to his musical composition, Scelsi’s works include at least six volumes of poetry, in French, published between 1949 and 1987, as well as an autobiographical narrative, written in Italian.

 Following his personal crisis, Scelsi developed a form of musical expression influenced by his studies of Eastern philosophies, and number of his works allude to mystical or meditative realms of expression. In these compositions lay the birth of a new creative concept, one focused exclusively on sound and tone. A shift toward the use of micro-intervals and highly subtle nuances of tone production led to his almost complete renunciation of the piano, in favor of string instruments and the human voice. From around 1960, Scelsi refined this process to such a degree that it is almost impossible to apply traditional analytical criteria to his music.

—Markus Bandur, translated by Saul Lipetz; edited by David Hoose

A piece of "enormous, almost terrifying power," according to Harry Halbreich, Okanagon, for amplified trio of harp, double bass and tam-tam,is well beyond Scelsi's first major works (Tre canti popolari, 1958, Four Pieces on a Single Note, 1959), when he was looking for the inclusion of special sound effects created by inharmonic spectra, of which noise is an integral component. The three instruments are amplified (the harp’s and tam-tam’s resonators “must produce a hoarse and severe sound”), are treated in an unusual way (the bottom notes of the harp are "taken with two hands,” requiring an unusual position of the player), and all are occasionally used purely as percussion instruments. Very specific colors (chopsticks for the tam-tam, and a nail or metal plectrum for the harp) and unusual tuning (scordatura) of some of the harp strings contribute to the strange sound of a work that Scelsi considered “a rite or, if you will, as the heartbeat of the earth.” Okanagonhas an incantatory character, and its musical “time” is "both static and dynamic.” 

Scelsi himself considered rhythm to be the primary impulse: “We can conceive of the absence of one or more elements in an organic life reduced to its simplest physical expression, but not the absence of rhythm, the vital pulsation.” Therefore, musical rhythm seems able to exist independently of the other elements (the rhythm, for example, of a drum, a wood, a gong). Rhythmic language is therefore the expression of thoughts arising from vital dynamism. In Okanagon, the sound of the ensemble is closely related to a very slow periodicity, its “deep rhythms.”

—Pierre Michel, edited by David Hoose

Steven Mackey // Five Animated Shorts (2006)

 The idea to write a piece for cimbalom and mixed ensemble came from Tim Williams. As a percussionist and artistic director of the contemporary chamber ensemble Psappha, Tim had performed my music often and knew that I was sympathetic to “underdog” instruments—instruments not entirely embraced by the western concert music establishment. Tim taught himself how to play the cimbalom out of love for the instrument, and he is now one of only a few concert cimbalom players outside of Hungary. 

I primarily associate the cimbalom with gypsy, vernacular music, although I am familiar with its use by composers such as György Kurtàg. Tim and I were both interested in an ensemble piece that featured the cimbalom, but not a concerto per se. I again thought of the cimbalom in a more indigenous setting (like at Tim’s wedding), where it plays exhilarating folk music with other instruments (guitar, violin, bass, etc.). In that context, the cimbalom leads much of the music the way a singer might, by presenting the tune and embellishing it, but it is still part of the group, not in opposition or competition, as a concerto soloist often is. In Five Animated Shorts, all the instruments have important soloistic roles, and the piano, in particular, shares the spotlight with the cimbalom. The different but related timbres of the two instruments, both struck with felt hammers, are an important focus of the orchestration, and the cimbalom transforms the familiar modern music group into something a bit exotic.

Also contributing to the form and substance of Five Animated Shortswere discussions and preliminary work I had done with another friend and frequent collaborator, Rinde Eckert. We were leading a workshop in experimental music theater for which he had invented a character—a scientist performing psychological experiments involving the identification of out-of-focus slides. Rinde wrote the following text:

Slide
Slide of
Slide of dog
Slide of dog running
Dog running
Running

This was just one of many hypothetical images that Rinde described on behalf of his psychologist alter ego. These images stuck with me for a variety of reasons: Rinde and I are both dog owner/lovers; I liked the idea of writing music that would both set this text and animate the implicit motion in a still photo of a running dog; I liked the simple additive and subtractive process that connects the single word “Slide,” at the top, to “Running,” at the bottom. The motion between “Slide” and “Running” connects them as action words, even though “Slide” starts its life as a noun. Issues relating to this line of text permeateSlippery Dog and Still Motion.

As I began composing for cimbalom, with all these ideas as a back drop (instrumental folk music via cimbalom, dogs, running, sliding, creepy scientists with projectors, etc.), the music started to take shape as four short character sketches, followed by a long lullaby, Lonely Motel.

Each movement seems to have a little narrative to share or scene to draw; because of the quirky characters and generally bright, playful colors, the medium of short animated films seemed like a helpful metaphor to invoke in the title, not to mention the fact that four of the five pieces are literally animated and relatively short.

 —Steven Mackey