“Imagine … if one lived in the world of a Beethoven piano sonata.”
Beethoven aside, the metaphor is useful, for is not a composition a
world in which a performer or listener lives? A piece of music
encourages a journey; it invites travel. Melodies, motives, and
modulations: this is the terrain we must trek.
Peter Garland’s Peñasco Blanco refers to “a specific site of
Anasazi ruins in Chaco Canyon National Monument, which looks over the
expanse of two vast canyon systems.” This landscape, so open and
spacious, ironically contradicts the physical structure of the
composition. The piano and vibraphone lines are so close-knit that there
is little room for anything (or anyone) else. The rhythmic unison is
impenetrable. (From a performer’s perspective, it is a nerve-wracking
demand for precision.) When, in the middle of the piece, each instrument
makes its rhythmic “escape” from the interlocking counterpoint, it
feels like an opportunity for a new adventure. Freedom! But in the end,
we return to the opening’s formality, to the tight situation of two
parts playing in unison. The ABA form creates a world that, in contrast
to Garland’s suggested landscape, restricts personal exploration.
Here is the dilemma: life in a piece of music, particularly a notated
piece of music, is an entrapment. We may feel invited to journey, but
there is no escape from a composer’s chosen materials. Like the leopard
in Charles Ives’s song, The Cage, the best we can do is wander “from one side back to the other side.”
Yet, Ives has a knack for offering what you least expect, in this
case, freedom by way of the familiar. From gospel melodies and hymn
tunes to the noise and bombast of the street dance hall, the Songs
are musical snapshots of everyday life in New England, and like a
scrapbook, they invite observation more than they invite personal
traversal. We witness (or, rather, hear) the scenarios–the
landscapes–be they urbane and philosophical, wry or pastoral, but our
viewpoint is as a spectator, somewhat detached. Ives’s songs do not
confine us in the way that Garland does, because we remain outside the
structural cage, looking in.
John Cage’s In A Landscape offers a more abstract idea of
living in a piece of music. The lyrical meandering lines create an
atmosphere reminiscent of 19th century piano music, but the mood here is
aimless. The constantly evolving figurations of pitches, centered on D,
are at once static and subtly changing, much like a natural landscape
over the course of many seasons. In this landscape, our journey comes to
a halt. The piece is a meditation on music as a collection of
independent (and not even necessarily related) parts. To experience this
music is to accept the improbable and the unpredictable, with little
concern for direct exploration. Life in the world of a Cage piano piece
is paradoxically immersive and freeing.
Whether captured by its structure and design, viewed from an
observational distance, or conceptually set free, tonight’s program is
an exploration of what it might be like to live in the landscape of
music.
I wrote these program notes in spring 2003 for my Mills College
graduate recital of solo piano and chamber music by John Cage, Fred
Frith, Peter Garland, and Charles Ives. The concert concluded with a
freely improvised trio for piano, guitar, and gu zheng. The opening
quote was inspired by a passage in Professor David W. Bernstein’s
chapter “John Cage and the Aesthetic of Indifference” in The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts.
Labels: Music
continue reading...
