George Crumb: Zeitgeist, tableaux vivants for two amplified pianos

Crumb - Zitgeist

George Crumb è uno dei compositori che ho sempre amato. È uno dei pochi contemporanei che trovo emozionanti. Uno dei pochi che non scrivono solo ‘esercizi’ o ‘studi’.

Di questo brano ho già parlato, proprio qui, più o meno 9 anni fa. Ma allora non c’era la diffusione offerta dal libro di facce e non c’erano i video del tubo (non come adesso, almeno). Così ne approfitto per rimettere qualcosa, questa volta con il video dell’esecuzione e note dell’autore.

George Crumb, Zeitgeist, Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos (Book I) (1987, rev. 1989)

I. Portent – Molto moderato, il ritmo ben marcato
II. Two Harlequins – Vivace, molto capriccioso
III. Monochord – Lentamente, misterioso
IV. Day of the Comet – Prestissimo
V. The Realm of Morpheus (“. . . the inner eye of dreams”)
Piano I: Lentamente quasi lontano, sognante
Piano II: Adagio sospeso, misterioso
VI. Reverberations – Molto moderato, il ritmo ben marcato

Alexander Ghindin & Boris Berezovsky Amplified pianos

Notes from the author:

Zeitgeist (Six Tableaux for Two Amplified Pianos, Book I) was composed in 1987. The work was commissioned by the European piano-duo team of Peter Degenhardt and Fuat Kent, who subsequently gave the premiere performance at the Charles Ives Festival in Duisburg, Germany on January 17, 1988. Zeitgeist was extensively revised after this initial performance.

For a German-speaking person, the expression “Zeitgeist” has a certain portentous and almost mystical significance, which is somewhat diluted in our English equivalent: “spirit of the time.”

The title seemed to me especially appropriate since the work does, I feel, touch on various concerns which permeate our late-twentieth century musical sensibility. Among these, I would cite: the quest for a new kind of musical primitivism: (a “morning of the world” vision of the elemental forms and forces of nature once again finding resonance in our music); an obsession with more minimalistic (or at least, more simple and direct) modes of expression; the desire to reconcile and synthesize the rich heritage of our classical Western music with the wonderfully vibrant ethnic and classical musics of the non-Western world; and, finally, our intense involvement with acoustical phenomena and the bewitching appeal of timbre as a potentially structural element.

In many of its aspects—compositional technique, exploitation of “extended-piano” resources, and emphasis on poetic content—Zeitgeist draws heavily from my earlier piano compositions, especially the larger works of my Makrokosmos cycle (Music for a Summer Evening [1974] for two amplified pianos and percussion, and Celestial Mechanics [1979J for amplified piano, four-hands).

The opening movement of Zeitgeist, entitled Portent, is based primarily on six-tone chordal structures and a rhythmically incisive thematic element. The music offers extreme contrasts in register and dynamics. A very characteristic sound in the piece is a mysterious glissando effect achieved by sliding a glass tumbler along the strings of the piano while the keys are being struck.

The second movement—Two Harlequins—is extremely vivacious and whimsical. The music is full of mercurial changes of mood and comical non sequiturs. Although this piece is played entirely on the keyboard, an echoing ambiance resonates throughout.

Monochord (which in the score is notated in a symbolic circular manner) is based entirely on the first 15 overtones of a low B-flat. A continuous droning sound (produced alternately by the two pianists) underlies the whole piece. This uncanny effect, produced by a rapid oscillating movement of the fingertip in direct contact with the string, results in a veritable rainbow of partial tones. In addition, paper strips placed over the lower ten strings of each piano produce an almost sizzling effect.

The title of the fourth movement —Day of the Comet— was suggested by the recent advent of Halley’s comet (the previous visitation was commemorated by H. G. Wells in his science fiction novel of the same title). The piece, played at prestissimo tempo and consisting of polyrhythmic bands of chromatic clusters, is volatile, yet strangely immaterial.
Perhaps Debussy’s Feux d’artifice (Preludes, Book II) is the spiritual progenitor of this genre of composition.

The fifth movement —The Realm of Morpheus— is like Monochord symbolically notated. The bent staves take on the perceptible configuration of the human eye (“…the inner eye of dreams”). Each of the two pianists plays independently, and the combined musics express something shadowy and ill-defined—like the mysterious subliminal images which appear in dreams.
Disembodied fragments of an Appalachian folk-song (“The Riddle”) emerge and recede.

The concluding movement of the work —Reverberations— recalls the principal thematic and harmonic elements of the first movement. This piece is constructed in its entirety on the “echoing phenomenon”—that most ancient of musical devices.

[George Crumb]

Venus & Jupiter

Either/Or: Elliott Sharp – Venus & Jupiter (premiere)

(perché in questo periodo mi alzo all’alba e vedo sempre Venere e Giove vicini nel cielo)

Richard Carrick – piano, Stephanie Griffin – viola, Margaret Lancaster – alto flute, Chris McIntyre – trombone, Josh Rubin – bass clarinet, David Shively – percussion, Alex Waterman – cello with Elliott Sharp – electro-acoustic guitar

Petites esquisses d’oiseaux

messiaen01

Since I have just updated some posts on bird songs and Messiaen’s interpretation of them, I thought I’d post his Little Bird Sketches in the 1985 version for a piano (there is also a version for two pianos).

Messiaen had already found the convergence between his two passions, ornithology and music. Already in 1951 he had composed a virtuoso piece for flute and piano used as an admission test for flute at the Paris conservatory (remember that the Paris conservatory is at a higher level and is equivalent to our own specialization academy). The piece was called Le merle noir and is his first work entirely inspired by the song of a bird (some fragments were included in previous works).

In 1953 he composed Réveil des oiseaux (The awakening of the birds) for orchestra, composed almost exclusively of transcriptions of the songs of the birds that the author could hear between midnight and noon in the mountains of the Jura Massif.

From this time he got into the habit of incorporating these transcriptions in all his works, as well as writing collections entirely dedicated to this subject (Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic birds) for piano and chamber orchestra, 1955-1956, La Chouette hulotte for piano, 1956, the monumental Catalog d’oiseaux (Catalog of birds) for piano, 1956-1958, La Fauvette des Jardins for piano, 1970-1972, Un Vitrail et des oiseaux (A stained glass and birds) for piano and orchestra, 1986, up to these Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (Little sketches of birds) for one or two pianos, 1985-1987). As works they are not simply collections of transcriptions, but real symphonic poems. Paul Griffiths observed that Messiaen was a more conscientious ornithologist than any of the composers who had preceded him, and a more attentive musical observer of birdsong than all previous ornithologists.

Indeed, Messiaen’s transcription work is accurate and takes into account musical problems that often escape scientific ornithology. He himself explains:

The bird, being much smaller than we are, with a heart that beats faster and nervous reactions much faster, sings at extremely fast tempos which are absolutely impossible for our instruments; therefore I am obliged to transcribe it at a slower tempo. Moreover, this speed is associated with extreme acuity, being a bird able to sing in such high registers as to be inaccessible to our instruments; therefore I transcribe the song one, two or even three octaves below. And that’s not all: for the same reason I am obliged to suppress those too small intervals that our instruments could not play. So I replace these intervals of the order of one or two paragraphs with semitones, but respecting the scale of values ​​between the different intervals, that is, if any paragraph corresponds to a semitone, then a true semitone will correspond to a whole tone or an interval of third; everything is enlarged, but the ratios remain unchanged, nevertheless what I give is correct.

Petites esquisses d’oiseaux (1985) – Håkan Austbø, piano

  1. Le Rouge-gorge (erithacus rubecula – pettirosso)
  2. Le Merle noir (turdus merula – merlo)
  3. Le Rouge-gorge
  4. La Grive musicienne (turdus ericetorum sinonimo di turdus philomelos – tordo bottaccio)
  5. Le Rouge-gorge
  6. L’Alouette des champs (alauda arvensis – allodola)

 

Anthèmes

Anthèmes refers to two related compositions for violin by French composer Pierre Boulez: Anthèmes I and Anthèmes II.

Anthèmes I is a short piece (c. 9 minutes) for solo violin, commissioned by the 1991 Yehudi Menuhin Violin Competition, and dedicated to Universal Edition’s director Alfred Schlee for his 90th birthday. In 1994, Boulez revised and expanded Anthèmes I into a version for violin and live electronics at IRCAM, resulting in Anthèmes II (c. 18 minutes duration), produced in 1997. (Expansion and revision of earlier works is common in Boulez’s compositional process; see also Structures.)

The title is a hybrid of the French “thèmes” (themes) and the English “anthem”. It is also a play on words with ‘anti-thematicism ‘: “Anthèmes” reunites the “anti” with the “thematic”, and demonstrates Boulez’s re-acceptance of (loose) thematicism following a long period of staunch opposition to it (Goldman 2001, 116–17).

Anthèmes I owes its structure to inspiration Boulez drew from childhood memories of Lent-time Catholic church services, in which the (acrostic) verses of the Jeremiah Lamentations were intoned: Hebrew letters enumerating the verses, and the verses themselves in Latin. Boulez creates two similarly distinct sonic worlds in the work: the Hebrew enumerations become long static or gliding harmonic tones, and the Latin verses become sections that are contrastingly action-packed and articulated (though Boulez says that the piece bears no reference to the content of the verses, and takes as its basis solely the idea of two contrasting sonic language-worlds) (Goldman 2001, 119). The piece begins with a seven-tone motive, and trill on the note D: these are the fundamental motives used in its composition. It is also in seven sections: a short introduction, followed by six “verses”, each “verse” preceded by a harmonic-tone “enumeration”. The last section is the longest, culminating in a dialogue between four distinct “characters”, and the piece closes with the two “languages” gradually melding into one as the intervals finally center around the note D and close into a trill, and then a single harmonic. A final “col legno battuto” ends the piece in Boulez’s characteristic witty humour, a gesture of “That’s enough for now! See you later!” (Goldman 2001, 83, 118). [from wikipedia]

See also: Goldman, Jonathan. “Analyzing Pierre Boulez’s Anthèmes: ‘Creating a Labyrinth out of Another Labyrinth’“. Unpublished essay. [Montréal]: Université de Montréal, 2001. OCLC: 48831192.

Andrew Gerzso has for many years been the composer’s chief collaborator on works involving live electronics and the two men regularly discuss their work together. He describes the way in which all the nuances in this nucleus of works were examined in the studio in order to find out which elements could be electronically processed and differentiated. As a result, the process of expanding these works is based not only on abstract structural considerations (such as the questions as to how it may be possible to use electronic procedures to spatialize and to merge or separate specific complexes of sound),but also on concrete considerations bound up with performing practice: in a word, on the way in which the instrument’s technical possibilities may be developed along figurative lines.

IMHO, it is quite clear that the electroacoustic is limited to “dress” the instrumental part, albeit with effects well made. Anthème II is not a real electroacoustic composition and even a revision of the original. But it’s really helpful to students. See also this good page  from IRCAM: Anthème & Anthème II and this one with Max patches.

From You Tube, Anthèmes before and after

Organ2/ASLSP (2015 check)

Sometimes I check if the German site where John Cage’s Organ2 / ASLSP is being performed, expanded to an incredible 639 (six hundred and thirty-nine) years, still exists and the answer so far is yes.

To find out more about this epic execution that began in 2001 and destined to end in 2640, I refer

Finally, here you can hear the epic 2006 note change at 8:36 in this audio clip. The last was in 2013 and the next is expected on September 5, 2020.

This is the organ used for execution.

 

HalberstadtBurchardiChurchOrganForOrgan2ASLSP

Epitaph for Moonlight

schaferUn altro brano corale di Murray Schafer con una bella partitura grafica.

Epitaph for Moonlight (1968), for youth choir with optional bells.
Roanoke College Choir, Jeffrey Sandborg director.

It is a free composition in which the singers must improvise from given indications of pitch, intensity and duration. To accompany the voices there is a selection of instruments as desired: glockenspiels, metallophones, vibraphones, triangles, bells, cymbals. The vibrations from these instruments, when used carefully, produced luminous effects that are evocative of moonlight reflecting on water. The score is written graphically and so does not require a knowledge of conventional musical notation.

Snowforms

Murray ShaferR. Murray Schafer – Snowforms (1982) – for treble choir

The text consists of inuit words for various kinds of snow : apingaut , first snowfall; mauyk, soft snow; akelrorak , drifting snow ; pokaktok , snow like salt.

Notes from the composer:

In 1971 I flew the polar route from Europe to Vancouver over Greenland. Clear weather provided an excellent opportunity to study the forms of that spectacular and terrifying geography. Immediately, I had an idea for a symphonic work in which sustained bulks of sound would be fractured by occasional splinters of colour. That experience remains clear in memory. It suggested the orchestral textures of “North/White” and it returns now to shape “Snowforms”, yet very differently, for my memory of the vast foldings of Arctic snow has been modified by the experience of passing winters in Ontario. Often on a winter day I have broken off from other work to study the snow from my farmhouse window, and it is the memory of these forms which has suggested most of the continuous horizon of “Snowforms “.

Sometimes I have given children ‘sight-singing’ exercises in which they are asked to ‘sing’ drawings or the shapes of the distant horizon. Snowforms began as a series of sketches of snowdrifts, seen out the window of my Monteagle Valley farmhouse. I took these sketches and traced a pentagram over them. The notes of the pieced emerged wherever the lines of the sketch and the stave crossed. Of course I modified the drawings as necessary since the work is primarily a piece of music and only secondarily a set of sketches. I printed the work so that the shapes of the snow were in white over a pale blue background.

The entire piece is soft, and I wanted the voices to slide from note to note just like falling or drifting snow. Snowforms is related to Epitaph for Moonlight, Miniwanka and Sun ; they are all descriptions of nature. Later I was to add Fire, A Garden of Bells and Once on a Windy Night as further celebrations of natural phenomena. As the urban populations of the world grow, the forces and charms of nature are more distanced from increasing numbers of people. But I do not write such works out of nostalgia; they are a very real part of my life. Snowforms was actually preceded by a much more complex work of the same name which was performed once by the Vancouver Chamber Choir, but I am glad I withdrew it, substituting this simpler and purer expression of one of nature’s most beautiful elements.

Notes from co-conductors :

This 20 th century monument of treble choral literature was written in 1982 by the imaginative, highly respected, internationally praised composer, R. Murray Schafer. Watching from his farmhouse window in Ontario , Schafer was intrigued by the various shapes, forms, and ever-changing, soft foldings of snow. From these observations came the inspiration to write Snowforms. Using graphic notation, he asks singers to sing ‘shapes’ or ‘drawings’ which are representations of snow forms on the distant horizon. Schafer’s graphic notation is augmented by suggested pitches and the voices are asked to ‘glide’ from one pitch to another in a continuous portamento. A time log is written in the score to suggest durations but Schafer is quite specific that conductors should not feel ‘enslaved’ by the timed suggestions. Although it was written for two part treble chorus, there are a few times within the score when each of the two parts split into four independent lines. Except for the occasional interjection of words which mean various types of ‘snow’ in the Inuit language the entire piece is hummed thereby giving a sense of smoothness and peaceful quietness or hush. Challenges for the conductor are to find gestures that suggest and mirror the contours that are found within the score. Challenges for the singers are to believe the piece will ‘work’ and to trust the instincts and imagination of not only the composer and conductor but also of themselves. Snowforms is a remarkable work that fascinates listeners but more importantly encourages collaboration and exchange of ideas between conductors and singers. It encourages performers to create music beyond the bounds of a traditional score with very satisfying results. – DL

Snowforms Score

The Harmonics of Real Strings

john_lelyIn questa composizione di John Lely per violoncello solo, l’esecutore esegue un lunghissimo glissando su una sola corda, dal capotasto fino al ponte, esercitando una leggera pressione per ottenere gli armonici, da cui il titolo The Harmonics of Real Strings (2006/2013). Nel CD edito da Another Timbre si possono ascoltare quattro versioni del brano, una per ciascuna corda del violoncello. L’esecutore è Anton Lukoszevieze.

Nella stessa pagina trovate anche un’intervista con il compositore. Nella pagina di John Lely su Soundcloud potete ascoltare anche le versioni per violino e per contrabbasso.

Invisible Cities

Invisible Cities (2013) è un’opera di Christopher Cerrone, compositore e librettista, ispirata alle Città Invisibili di Calvino, pubblicato nel 1972.

INVISIBLE-CITIES-production-photo-by-Dana-RossLa fruizione è inusuale. Il palcoscenico è la storica Union Station di Los Angeles. Non c’è separazione fra gli strumentisti, i danzatori, i cantanti e il pubblico: tutti si aggirano per la stazione e il pubblico può ascoltare la musica dovunque, essendo dotato di cuffie wireless (il main sponsor è Sennheiser). E devo dire che ambientare quello che, sia pure solo in superficie, è un racconto di viaggi in un luogo deputato ai viaggi è una bella idea.

Perché l’opera narra, appunto, il racconto di Marco Polo a Kublai Khan. I suoi viaggi e le favolose città che ha visto: alcune reali, altre frutto dell’immaginazione. Città di desiderio, di segni, e di memoria.

La musica è semplice, quasi minimalista, di quella tipica tonalità americana che, grazie alla ripetizione, annulla il dramma tonale per diventare quasi drone music (ma si può anche sentirvi la netta influenza di Escalator Over The Hill di cui potete leggere fra i collegamenti, sotto). Nel player, qui sotto, potete ascoltarne una parte, ma il modo migliore per farsi un’idea è andare sull’apposita pagina dove si possono vedere dei video ad alta risoluzione, girati nella Union Station, con audio molto buono.

Note dal sito dell’autore:

The music of Invisible Cities is the result of my first collision with Calvino’s extraordinary novel. For years I had been unable to bridge categories of music, thinking that a work could be either lyrical or conceptually rigorous, but not both. Calvino’s novel, however, is both a tightly structured mathematical work, yet also opens with the gorgeous line:

“In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.”

After reading that sentence—so pregnant with meaning, lyricism, mood—I immediately began composing. I imagined the sound of a unearthly resonant and gong-like prepared piano, the ringing of bells, and wind players gently blowing air through their instruments. All of this would support a lyrical and deep voiced Kublai Khan who is slow moving and sings with gravitas. I imagined there would be two women, two high sopranos, who always sing together in harmony: they would be the musical personification of the cities that pervade the novel. And of course, our Italian explorer would be a tenor, light and quick moving, melismatic, and deft.

As with Calvino, there are many formally derived components to my opera. The orchestra is split into two (left and right) halves which alternate melodies to create the whole. The left part is associated Marco Polo, the right is associated with Kublai Khan. And the opera is structured as formally as the novel, always alternating Polo and the Khan’s conversations with Polo’s stories of le città.

To borrow a term from of one of Calvino’s favorite writers, Jorge Luis Borges, Invisible Cities is a garden of forking paths. As the work progresses, you might find yourself wandering back to the same place in Union Station again and again only to find new things happening each time. In the same way, the same few musical ideas of Invisible Cities are revisited again and again, just from vastly different perspectives. As we grow and evolve, the same objects in our lives can acquire such different meanings. That above else governs what Invisible Cities is about: how our memories change as we get older, how our map of the world gets larger, and how our past is always being changed by our ever-shifting present.