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TLS 5689: Joseph Horowitz: Hybrids and renegades; America's musical innovators did not rely solely on European modernism for inspiration
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Frank Forman
May 22, 2012, 11:20:30 AM5/22/12
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TLS 5689: Joseph Horowitz: Hybrids and renegades; America's musical
innovators did not rely solely on European modernism for inspiration
13 April 2012
Joseph Horowitz's Moral Fire: Musical portraits from America's fin-de-siècle
is due to be published next month. His other books include Classical Music
in America: A history, 2005.
AMERICAN MAVERICKS
San Francisco Symphony
There is a type of American creative genius whose originality and integrity
correlate with refusing to finish their education in Europe. Herman Melville
and Walt Whitman are writers of this type. In American music, Charles Ives
is the paramount embodiment. The unfinished in Ives is crucial to his
affect. Emerson, whom Ives revered, put it this way in his poem "Music":
"'Tis not in the high stars alone ... / Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone
... / But in the mud and scum of things / There alway, alway something
sings". The "Emerson" movement in Ives's Concord Piano Sonata (1910-15) is
both literally and figuratively unfinished. He regarded it as a permanent
work in progress. He also intended to make something orchestral out of it.
Over a period of thirty-six years (1958 to 1994), Henry Brant - a composer
variously admired for spatial effects and a sure symphonic hand -
transcribed the Concord Sonata for large orchestra. Brant's Concord Symphony
not only orchestrates Ives; it finishes him: the mud and scum are mostly
cleaned away. (Ives's actual voice, which we can hear singing on a recording
from 1943, was itself arrestingly frayed.) The result is improbable,
provocative, and important: music that demands to be heard. At its first
American hearing, at Carnegie Hall in 1996, the Concord Symphony was weakly
conducted by the composer. It has rarely been given since. In recent
seasons, Michael Tilson Thomas has emerged as its crucial advocate - with
his San Francisco Symphony (in concert and on CD), with his Floridabased New
World Symphony, and most recently as part of the San Francisco Symphony's
indispensable American Mavericks Festival, with stops in Chicago, Ann Arbor,
and Carnegie Hall.
Brant's decision not to attempt an Ivesian orchestration makes sense - the
Concord Symphony establishes its own sonic identity. His symphonic textures
and sonorities do not resemble those of Ives; he paints with acrylics where
Ives would use oils. Measure for measure, the score corresponds to its
source. But there are countless surprise timbres and voicings. In the
Concord Sonata, "Thoreau" evokes bells across the water; Brant here uses no
bells. "Thoreau", as composed by Ives, ends with a tolling bass line in
octaves: an Ur-pulse. Brant here thins the bass. Ives's simplest, most
finished movement, "The Alcotts", generates the most finished orchestration,
climaxing with a peroration as stirring as any by Aaron Copland; this
tremendous six-minute cameo should be sampled by every American orchestra.
Ives's most pianistic Concord movement - "Hawthorne" - is necessarily the
movement Brant most makes his own: some pages are unrecognizable as
transcription. In Ives, "Emerson" is wild and "Hawthorne" demonic. "The
Alcotts" adduces a parlor plainness. "Thoreau" is a seer. None of this
registers completely in the Concord Symphony. And yet the ear can still
trace the arresting mutations of Ives's faith tune - a derivative of
Beethoven's Fifth - en route to its final transcendental ascent.
Neither a highly literal appropriation, like Ravel's Pictures at an
Exhibition (after Mussorgsky), nor an interpretive paraphrase, like Liszt's
Don Juan Fantasy (after Mozart), the Concord Symphony is genuinely eccentric
- but not in the ways that Ives is eccentric. At its belated premiere in
1939, the Concord Sonata was decisively reviewed by Lawrence Gilman in the
New York Herald Tribune as "exceptionally great music ... indeed, the
greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially
American in impulse and implication". Decades later, Brant wrote of his
orchestration: "It seemed to me that the complete sonata ... might well
become the 'Great American Symphony' that we had been seeking for years. Why
not undertake the task myself? What better way to honor Ives and express my
gratitude to him?" The Concord Symphony, whatever its possible
disappointments, makes this bold impulse seem wholly understandable and
commendable.
The San Francisco Symphony's festival (which I heard partly at Ann Arbor's
Hill Auditorium and partly at Carnegie Hall - both acoustically resplendent
spaces) was from start to finish musically, viscerally and intellectually
enthralling. At least two of the featured mavericks - Lou Harrison and John
Adams - are highly polished craftsmen. If they qualify as mavericks, it's
because their renegade spirit remains intact. Harrison is chiefly known on
the West Coast of the United States. He is an unclassifiable hybrid who
consummately synthesized East and West long before it became musically
fashionable. His thirty-five-minute Piano Concerto (composed for Keith
Jarrett in 1985) is a rangy American masterpiece whose lean, uncluttered
textures connect with Copland and Roy Harris - and yet it is more polyglot,
more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. At
Tilson Thomas's festival we heard the kindred Harrison Concerto for Organ
and Percussion, music of extraordinary sonic freshness capped by a
cluster-laden perpetual motion finale anticipating the Piano Concerto's
rambunctious "Stampede".
Of Adams, the festival offered a terrific premiere: Absolute Jest for string
quartet and orchestra. During the second half of the nineteenth century,
landscape became the iconic genre for American painters, with Frederic
Church in the lead, inspired by a New World vastness of topography. This
trope has long since found its way into American music. Among contemporary
Americans, Adams brings to the act of composition an acute visual sense; he
keenly translates widescreen imaginary vistas, often majestic or
phantasmagoric. Absolute Jest plays on late Beethoven fragments - in
particular, a passage from the Vivace of Op. 135 that doubtless appealed to
Adams as one of the most raucous string quartet passages ever conceived. In
Absolute Jest this Beethoven scrap goes viral. Absorbed into an expansive
Adams soundscape, it generates a dialectic between New World and Old. The
disparate elements combine or collide in a fast and furious
twenty-five-minute trajectory that peaks and improbably peaks again, but not
without glimpses of serenity. I would like to hear the Berlin Philharmonic
play this music.
American Mavericks also formidably showcased two "unfinished" composers of
great influence whose compositions are more acknowledged than heard: John
Cage and Henry Cowell. The loudest Mavericks pieces included Sun-Treader by
Carl Ruggles. The quietest was Piano and Orchestra by Morton Feldman. Having
known both Ruggles and Feldman, Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall offered a
little talk juxtaposing the two composers as antipodes. The real purpose of
his too subtle speech, however, was to urge a large audience to remain
silent. Feldman's music attunes the ear to the softest sounds. At Carnegie,
these included shuffled papers and chairs, coughs muffled and unmuffled, and
a passing subway train. The score's sonic prickles and washes were
challenged by sounds less exquisite.
Copland, not normally considered a "maverick", was represented by the
Orchestral Variations - a 1957 reworking of his 1930 Piano Variations:
spare, hard skyscraper music preceding Copland's populist/Popular Front
phase. The festival's youngest composer, Mason Brown (b. 1977), contributed
its most conservative composition: Mass Transmission, an affecting choral
work with organ, superficially spiced by electronics. The oldest piece was
Edgard Varèse's Amériques (1921; revised 1927), which in any company retains
plenty of mustard. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is here an obvious
influence. But to the degree that Stravinsky is Russian, Varèse,
transplanted to New York, became categorically and brazenly rootless. His
title, as he once explained, does not refer to the Western hemisphere, but
rather is "symbolic of discoveries - new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in
the minds of men".
The orchestra brought with it a host of eminent soloists, all of whom proved
suited to the tasks at hand. The virtuosic organist in Harrison's concerto
was Paul Jacobs. The slashing string quartet for Absolute Jest was the St
Lawrence. The gripping singers for Cage's Song Books were Joan La Barbara,
Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. The pianists for Cowell's Piano Concerto
and Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, relished
unusual expressive possibilities. In Ann Arbor and New York, the festival
also included chamber works (which I did not hear) by David Del Tredici,
Lukas Foss, Meredith Monk, Harry Partch, Steve Reich and Morton Subotnick. A
cumulative festival statement, both impressive and startling, was that
twentieth-century American composers discovered a variety of avenues to
originality other than modernist complexity born in Europe.
Michael Tilson Thomas's first season as Music Director of the San Francisco
Symphony, 1995-6, featured an American composition on every subscription
program and ended with an American festival. Four seasons later, he
presented an American Mavericks festival that registered nationally as a
signature event. This season's Mavericks instalment, marking the orchestra's
centennial, testifies to a resilience of mission and implementation: the San
Francisco musicians tackled everything with unfailing concentration and
polish. At a time when other ensembles are retrenching, the tour party
totalled 129 musicians, twenty-three guest artists, and a stage/technical
crew of twenty-one. I cannot imagine that another American orchestra will
offer as necessary a series of concerts any time soon.
innovators did not rely solely on European modernism for inspiration
13 April 2012
Joseph Horowitz's Moral Fire: Musical portraits from America's fin-de-siècle
is due to be published next month. His other books include Classical Music
in America: A history, 2005.
AMERICAN MAVERICKS
San Francisco Symphony
There is a type of American creative genius whose originality and integrity
correlate with refusing to finish their education in Europe. Herman Melville
and Walt Whitman are writers of this type. In American music, Charles Ives
is the paramount embodiment. The unfinished in Ives is crucial to his
affect. Emerson, whom Ives revered, put it this way in his poem "Music":
"'Tis not in the high stars alone ... / Nor in the redbreast's mellow tone
... / But in the mud and scum of things / There alway, alway something
sings". The "Emerson" movement in Ives's Concord Piano Sonata (1910-15) is
both literally and figuratively unfinished. He regarded it as a permanent
work in progress. He also intended to make something orchestral out of it.
Over a period of thirty-six years (1958 to 1994), Henry Brant - a composer
variously admired for spatial effects and a sure symphonic hand -
transcribed the Concord Sonata for large orchestra. Brant's Concord Symphony
not only orchestrates Ives; it finishes him: the mud and scum are mostly
cleaned away. (Ives's actual voice, which we can hear singing on a recording
from 1943, was itself arrestingly frayed.) The result is improbable,
provocative, and important: music that demands to be heard. At its first
American hearing, at Carnegie Hall in 1996, the Concord Symphony was weakly
conducted by the composer. It has rarely been given since. In recent
seasons, Michael Tilson Thomas has emerged as its crucial advocate - with
his San Francisco Symphony (in concert and on CD), with his Floridabased New
World Symphony, and most recently as part of the San Francisco Symphony's
indispensable American Mavericks Festival, with stops in Chicago, Ann Arbor,
and Carnegie Hall.
Brant's decision not to attempt an Ivesian orchestration makes sense - the
Concord Symphony establishes its own sonic identity. His symphonic textures
and sonorities do not resemble those of Ives; he paints with acrylics where
Ives would use oils. Measure for measure, the score corresponds to its
source. But there are countless surprise timbres and voicings. In the
Concord Sonata, "Thoreau" evokes bells across the water; Brant here uses no
bells. "Thoreau", as composed by Ives, ends with a tolling bass line in
octaves: an Ur-pulse. Brant here thins the bass. Ives's simplest, most
finished movement, "The Alcotts", generates the most finished orchestration,
climaxing with a peroration as stirring as any by Aaron Copland; this
tremendous six-minute cameo should be sampled by every American orchestra.
Ives's most pianistic Concord movement - "Hawthorne" - is necessarily the
movement Brant most makes his own: some pages are unrecognizable as
transcription. In Ives, "Emerson" is wild and "Hawthorne" demonic. "The
Alcotts" adduces a parlor plainness. "Thoreau" is a seer. None of this
registers completely in the Concord Symphony. And yet the ear can still
trace the arresting mutations of Ives's faith tune - a derivative of
Beethoven's Fifth - en route to its final transcendental ascent.
Neither a highly literal appropriation, like Ravel's Pictures at an
Exhibition (after Mussorgsky), nor an interpretive paraphrase, like Liszt's
Don Juan Fantasy (after Mozart), the Concord Symphony is genuinely eccentric
- but not in the ways that Ives is eccentric. At its belated premiere in
1939, the Concord Sonata was decisively reviewed by Lawrence Gilman in the
New York Herald Tribune as "exceptionally great music ... indeed, the
greatest music composed by an American, and the most deeply and essentially
American in impulse and implication". Decades later, Brant wrote of his
orchestration: "It seemed to me that the complete sonata ... might well
become the 'Great American Symphony' that we had been seeking for years. Why
not undertake the task myself? What better way to honor Ives and express my
gratitude to him?" The Concord Symphony, whatever its possible
disappointments, makes this bold impulse seem wholly understandable and
commendable.
The San Francisco Symphony's festival (which I heard partly at Ann Arbor's
Hill Auditorium and partly at Carnegie Hall - both acoustically resplendent
spaces) was from start to finish musically, viscerally and intellectually
enthralling. At least two of the featured mavericks - Lou Harrison and John
Adams - are highly polished craftsmen. If they qualify as mavericks, it's
because their renegade spirit remains intact. Harrison is chiefly known on
the West Coast of the United States. He is an unclassifiable hybrid who
consummately synthesized East and West long before it became musically
fashionable. His thirty-five-minute Piano Concerto (composed for Keith
Jarrett in 1985) is a rangy American masterpiece whose lean, uncluttered
textures connect with Copland and Roy Harris - and yet it is more polyglot,
more idiosyncratic, more remote from European models and experience. At
Tilson Thomas's festival we heard the kindred Harrison Concerto for Organ
and Percussion, music of extraordinary sonic freshness capped by a
cluster-laden perpetual motion finale anticipating the Piano Concerto's
rambunctious "Stampede".
Of Adams, the festival offered a terrific premiere: Absolute Jest for string
quartet and orchestra. During the second half of the nineteenth century,
landscape became the iconic genre for American painters, with Frederic
Church in the lead, inspired by a New World vastness of topography. This
trope has long since found its way into American music. Among contemporary
Americans, Adams brings to the act of composition an acute visual sense; he
keenly translates widescreen imaginary vistas, often majestic or
phantasmagoric. Absolute Jest plays on late Beethoven fragments - in
particular, a passage from the Vivace of Op. 135 that doubtless appealed to
Adams as one of the most raucous string quartet passages ever conceived. In
Absolute Jest this Beethoven scrap goes viral. Absorbed into an expansive
Adams soundscape, it generates a dialectic between New World and Old. The
disparate elements combine or collide in a fast and furious
twenty-five-minute trajectory that peaks and improbably peaks again, but not
without glimpses of serenity. I would like to hear the Berlin Philharmonic
play this music.
American Mavericks also formidably showcased two "unfinished" composers of
great influence whose compositions are more acknowledged than heard: John
Cage and Henry Cowell. The loudest Mavericks pieces included Sun-Treader by
Carl Ruggles. The quietest was Piano and Orchestra by Morton Feldman. Having
known both Ruggles and Feldman, Tilson Thomas at Carnegie Hall offered a
little talk juxtaposing the two composers as antipodes. The real purpose of
his too subtle speech, however, was to urge a large audience to remain
silent. Feldman's music attunes the ear to the softest sounds. At Carnegie,
these included shuffled papers and chairs, coughs muffled and unmuffled, and
a passing subway train. The score's sonic prickles and washes were
challenged by sounds less exquisite.
Copland, not normally considered a "maverick", was represented by the
Orchestral Variations - a 1957 reworking of his 1930 Piano Variations:
spare, hard skyscraper music preceding Copland's populist/Popular Front
phase. The festival's youngest composer, Mason Brown (b. 1977), contributed
its most conservative composition: Mass Transmission, an affecting choral
work with organ, superficially spiced by electronics. The oldest piece was
Edgard Varèse's Amériques (1921; revised 1927), which in any company retains
plenty of mustard. Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is here an obvious
influence. But to the degree that Stravinsky is Russian, Varèse,
transplanted to New York, became categorically and brazenly rootless. His
title, as he once explained, does not refer to the Western hemisphere, but
rather is "symbolic of discoveries - new worlds on earth, in the sky, or in
the minds of men".
The orchestra brought with it a host of eminent soloists, all of whom proved
suited to the tasks at hand. The virtuosic organist in Harrison's concerto
was Paul Jacobs. The slashing string quartet for Absolute Jest was the St
Lawrence. The gripping singers for Cage's Song Books were Joan La Barbara,
Meredith Monk, and Jessye Norman. The pianists for Cowell's Piano Concerto
and Feldman's Piano and Orchestra, Jeremy Denk and Emanuel Ax, relished
unusual expressive possibilities. In Ann Arbor and New York, the festival
also included chamber works (which I did not hear) by David Del Tredici,
Lukas Foss, Meredith Monk, Harry Partch, Steve Reich and Morton Subotnick. A
cumulative festival statement, both impressive and startling, was that
twentieth-century American composers discovered a variety of avenues to
originality other than modernist complexity born in Europe.
Michael Tilson Thomas's first season as Music Director of the San Francisco
Symphony, 1995-6, featured an American composition on every subscription
program and ended with an American festival. Four seasons later, he
presented an American Mavericks festival that registered nationally as a
signature event. This season's Mavericks instalment, marking the orchestra's
centennial, testifies to a resilience of mission and implementation: the San
Francisco musicians tackled everything with unfailing concentration and
polish. At a time when other ensembles are retrenching, the tour party
totalled 129 musicians, twenty-three guest artists, and a stage/technical
crew of twenty-one. I cannot imagine that another American orchestra will
offer as necessary a series of concerts any time soon.
Dontait...@aol.com
May 24, 2012, 6:51:47 PM5/24/12
to
On May 22, 10:20 am, Frank Forman <chec...@panix.com> wrote:
> TLS 5689: Joseph Horowitz: Hybrids and renegades; America's musical
> innovators did not rely solely on European modernism for inspiration
> 13 April 2012
[big snip]
> TLS 5689: Joseph Horowitz: Hybrids and renegades; America's musical
> innovators did not rely solely on European modernism for inspiration
> 13 April 2012
So Joseph Horowitz can write about about something other than
distortions and lies about Arturo Toscanini? Wow.
Don Tait
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