When Fa Joins Mi...
By
ALAN RICH
L.A.
WEEKLY STAFF WRITER
. . . THE FAITHFUL FLEE: SO GOES THE RHYME in support
of equal temperament. Music, your old prof surely had you believe, draws
its strength from its harmonic progressions, and they derive their strength
from the set of falsities and compromises worked out in Bach's time
to enable composers to create cadences and chromaticisms in all 24 keys.
There are, however, holdouts. Harry Partch used to proclaim that music
started going wrong about A.D. 1000, and built his own instruments to
rescue the art from the tamperers. Lou Harrison's music draws much of
its strength from his flirtations with Asian scales. Anybody with access
to a couple of transistors can prove that the 12 tones of the familiar
chromatic scale are the mere base of the mountain, whose electronically
attained peak is, as they say, outta sight.
You can't drop in
on new-music events nowadays without encountering some kind of challenge
to the old, set-in-stone principles. Microfest 2002, the latest installment
of an annual celebration of notes-between-notes, began on May 10 and
continues in various venues through May 26, with Harrison himself, a
birthday boy at 85, attending the May 25th event at Pierce College.
At the County Museum the resident California EAR Unit dubbed its seasonal
finale "Brownout" and trooped blithely across the audible spectrum.
Five days later, on the same stage, the phenomenal Stefano Scodanibbio
played spellbinding music on his string bass, the one instrument in
the "traditional" family that rebels most clamorously against the captivity
of "correct" tuning. As surcease the Philharmonic performed a whole
program in D major --Brahms and Mahler -- as if to proclaim that life
persists in the realm of major, minor and the dominant-seventh chord.
But there, too -- in the slow movement of the Mahler First -- the music
draws delight from its tightrope acts, its purposeful "sour" notes on
the edge of tonality.
MUSIC OF INEQUAL
TEMPERAMENT -- AND here I also include the whole range of the pre-Bach
repertory in "historically informed" performance -- does, of course,
breed problems, for the ears of hearers and, I should think, players
as well. Our Western ears ("Western" as in "civilization") are conditioned
from an early age to recognize the pull of a dominant chord resolving
to a tonic; it's when that resolution is kicked out of context (as in
Mozart's glorious deceptive cadences) that great music thrives on its
power to hold the attention, even to shock. The problems are surmountable,
of course. I cherish my five-CD set (now, alas, out of print) of La
Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano, because rhythm and -- yes -- melody
hold the attention by sheer energy during five hours of suspended, indeterminate
harmony. Scodanibbio's concert began with his Oltracuidansa, an hourlong
piece for bass and prerecorded tape, which reached me because the spiky,
dark forms wrapped around one another generated an infectious aggressiveness
that accorded nicely with my usual expectations in hearing a new piece.
The EAR Unit concert
was, again, full of noble if sometimes strenuous invention. The best
piece -- on first hearing, that is -- was Nick Chase's OPUS, which sought
to integrate the newly coined gadgetry of turntable manipulation into
the familiar textures of the EAR's madcap percussionists. The turntable
stuff, which Chase himself played, wasn't just the needle-scratch torture
I've heard (and unhappily endured) in a lot of hip-hop; these were recordings
of recognizable music (didn't I hear one of the Liszt Etudes?) speeded
up and slowed down by hand and fed into the surrounding brouhaha like
a running series of musical puns. Laetitia Sonami's A Blind Ride and
Anna Rubin's Landmine were sound-process works, with samplings electronically
manipulated; Sonami's work achieved its effects via a glove embedded
with sensors, which made the work as much fun to watch as to hear. Every
little bit helps.
Out at Claremont
College the first Microfest concert wandered widely over the map of
contemporary possibility. This year's Microfest -- five events in all
-- is all about "Global Tunings"; the first event drew upon the excellent
student/faculty gamelan maintained by Claremont's Harvey Mudd College
and led by Bill Alves, composer and faculty member of that school. The
program drew a large if not full house; the sounds were handsome. (I
would extend that accolade even to Tom Flaherty's antic Bowling Bells,
which used a surrogate "gamelan" of kitchen bowls of various sizes and
states of emptiness, played with a variety of implements including combs,
toothbrushes and you-name-it.)
Some of the music,
including three brief, shapely works by Alves himself, drew upon traditional
Indonesian gamelan techniques, extended exercises in resonant stasis.
One work, however, Masashi Ito's Water Drops, imposed a more Western
design onto the sonorities of the gamelan: melodic lines over a throbbing
accompaniment and, near the end, an infusion of solid, academic counterpoint.
It proved a valid venture in bridge building. Kipling's dictum to the
contrary, East needn't always be East.
MEANWHILE, BACK
IN D MAJOR . . . I emerged from the aforementioned Philharmonic concert
twice drunk: first from Hilary Hahn's extraordinary performance of Brahms'
Violin Concerto, then from Esa-Pekka Salonen's wild ride through Mahler's
First Symphony. Of these two inebriating experiences, Salonen's success
with the Mahler might have been easier to predict. Even so, his detailing
of the work's loopy mood-swings, the sardonic cackle in the gallows-humorous
third movement, the apocalyptic visions at the end (with eight -- count
'em -- eight hornists standing erect, the better to challenge the celestial
powers) was the stuff of wonderment.
A few weeks ago
someone on our Letters page accused me of the critic's cardinal sin,
predictability; I wish he'd been with me that night. (No, I don't, really.)
I have used my space here more than once to proclaim my allergies to
a) nubile violinists still in, or recently out of, their teens and b)
that particular work and most of its companions in the Brahms catalog.
The 22-year-old Hilary Hahn redeemed both those hang-ups that night
with a performance elegant, eloquent and suffused with a degree of lyrical
intensity that, for at least the 39 minutes of its duration, made it
the masterwork that had pretty much eluded my recognition over the past,
let's say, 65 years. The sheer insistence of her tone production might
even have elevated a lesser work that night; what it accomplished for
Brahms is somewhat beyond belief. That incredible buildup of melodic
persuasion that ends the concerto's first movement echoes in my skull
as I write these words 10 days later. Who could have predicted?
Copyright
2002 L.A. Weekly
back