Four American Composers - Cage/Ashley/Monk/Glass
Tim Bray
Greenaway, best known for his film "The Draughtman's Contract", which is
opaque, disturbing, well-photographed, and worth seeing.
Anyhow - each of these films is one hour long. The composers are John
Cage, Meredith Monk, Phil Glass, and Robert Ashley.
General comments: Too often the films degenerate into fast cuts between
composers rapping and their work being performed. This is often
uncharitable to both the composer and the work. Sometimes though, the
two enhance each other.
Film by Film:
Start with Robert Ashley - his work was a TV "opera", "Perfect Lives".
It had moments, but there was too much vocalizing about the hidden
structure beneath the surface of the work. Nice visual presentation -
all the talking heads were echoed with multiple video images. Anyhow, I
hadn't heard of him before, and am not a fan. Oh yes - the principal
pianist was named "Blue" Gene Tyranny - good name, dynamic player too.
Meredith Monk - For those who don't know, MM is a New York singer,
dancer, composer, filmmaker. Her vocal work ranges from operatic to
elevator to throat-wrenching screaming. All of her work lent itself to
the movie medium very well. Much of the music is not pretty but almost
all is beautiful. I was dazzled by her choreography, film work, and
presentation. Her troupe of performers was very impressive in their
musical virtuosity and commitment to the work. Unfortunately, they had
a LOT of MM talking about her work. This was unfortunate. Anything I
say about this will make me sound like a raving sexist bigot. But the
music... any time you get a chance to see "Dolmen Music", run don't
walk.
Phil Glass - we all like Phil Glass now. He had not much interesting to
say except about the kind of people, and the number of people, in his
audiences over the years. I own and love "Glassworks", and it was nice
to see a few shots of it being performed, but I still don't think I'd
pay for a ticket to a concert. "Floe" from Glassworks was fun to watch.
Most interesting were the discussions of the technical problems - Glass
on the problems of notation for dense, repetitive music. His singer on
the problems of voicing given the speed and range of the parts. The
wind players on breathing difficulties. An enjoyable hour.
John Cage - this film <watch out, cliche approaching> changed the way I
think about music. I have long felt that John Cage is an entertaining
charlatan, whose ideas, though provocative, are wrong (music, I think,
is a place for minimizing entropy), and whose music is unlistenable
didactic masturbation. I still think this - mostly. But some of the
thoughts and music in this very dense hour have opened my eyes. To
begin with, Cage's story of his experience in the echo chamber at MIT,
that launched him on the road to aleatoric music - flawed but
compelling. The work made up of many (27?) one minute stories, which
were used to punctuate the film. His stern lecture on why he doesn't
"use" records, as though they were a particularly noxious drug. His
amusement at himself and the world. The film is true to the ideas of
Cage. Among other things, it opens with an extended cinematic essay on
the destruction of the interior of a church in preparation for a Cage
concert - the noise of this destruction is, Cage would say, music.
Two of the pieces presented in the film are real ear-openers.
"Roarratorio" is Cage's tribute to Joyce, consisting of words selected
randomly from "Finnegan's Wake", interspersed with Irish traditional
music and aleatoric noise. It is unusually large and complex for Cage,
and unforgettable. Finally, a work whose name I have lost, for
electronics and three performers on a variety of conch shells filled
with water. The shells are not blown, they are tipped back and forth in
the immediate vicinity of a microphone. They make pretty bubbling
sounds. The combination of conch bubbling and electronics was evocative
and truly new. The internal structure of the shell is sufficiently
complex that the performer cannot consciously control the timing or
nature of the sounds - an instrument after Cage's heart. He was a
performer, and the film of his 70 year old child's face bent in
wonderment over his shell, continually surprised at the music for which
he would deny authorship...
Guess I have run on some. The movies should be seen.
Tim Bray (ihnp4!alberta!ubc-vision!mprvaxa!tbray)
M. Kokodyniak
> charlatan, whose ideas, though provocative, are wrong (music, I think,
> is a place for minimizing entropy), and whose music is unlistenable
> didactic masturbation. I still think this - mostly.
>
I like your reference to entropy in music. It seems that many
modern composers (or at least the ones I have heard) maximize the entropy
in their music. One piece that comes to mind is "Little Organ Concert"
by some composer whose name eludes my memory. (This piece was first performed
at the inaugural organ concert at Roy Thompson Hall in Toronto.)
I have never heard the Canadian Brass and the Elmer Eisler Singers
make such pitiful and grotesque sounds. At times, one could hear the
audience giggling and even laughing. I don't know what the composer's
intentions were, but I certainly got a few laughs out of it. At certain
seemingly random moments, various choir members made the sounds similar
to cats in heat, hissing at a human intruder. However, at one point, it
sounded as if the composer really got going with a musical idea. The choir
and brass were going at full blast and full organ was engaged -- it
started to sound like the majestic ending to a symphony. But within
a few seconds, the organ stopped, the choir went flat and the brass
fell off their notes and dwindled into a menagerie of random notes
so typical of modern composition.
In general, the entire piece seemed to be a disarray of
detatched musical ideas, like islands in a sea of entropy. Listening
to that piece is analogous to hearing a would-be philosopher utter
some broken phrases, some of which superficially sound as if they were
extracted from some great literary works. My reply would probably
be "So what? What does it all mean?" But if it doesn't mean anything,
then what is the point of expending the effort to say anything at all?