| |
A Structural Reverie on an Ideal Site.
Jean Rousset on Flaubert
The Flaubertian
window:
someone stands thinking, while looking out of a window.
A post for those
who are both
immobile and adrift
stuck in inertia
given over to the vagabondage of thought
a point of fixation
yet
diffused in space
closing-opening
barrier-flight
confinement-expansion
circumscribed-unlimited
contraction-dilation
staying-fleeing
“Our age during
the first decade of the 20th century was an effort characterized
principally by energy and precision, charged with intellect
and obsessed with a passion to embrace and organize vastness
and complexity. It embodied the changes in sensitivity brought
about by speed in aviation motoring and cinema, exploiting also
the sensuousness of new materials shaped by new industrial modes....electricity
and steel were clean compared with the cheap nastiness of 19th
century industrialism....The robust challenge of the prewar
modern era was eclipsed by the despair and decay of post WW1
modernism....[this definition of modernism] covered everything
and anything from Baudelaire on provided its themes were decay,
despair and disgust with the unchallengable pointlessness of
existence.....This [angry and despondent] post war modern ego
is always portrayed by that mixture of sentiment and covert
agression that is inspired by wounded love.....” a paraphrase
of Barzun’s opening essay in The Energy of Art.
The Dutch air is
cold against my back as I read on the little single mattress
on the floor of Pauline’s apartment in Amsterdam. It is
1999. Not finished with Rimbaud. Reading again about somebody
else…. the Master of Silence….The Red Sea “a
blank page upon which his future will be written”….
I am leaning against the opening under the door. A pillow which
my mother, on the other bed in the room has thrown me, wards
off the chilly blasts.
Hardly anyone asks
me about my studies with Karlheinz Stockhausen in Philadelphia
in 1964. One reason of course is that a particularly American
audience for him and his music disappeared after 1967. Thereafter
the glory of his name was proclaimed only in Europe and Japan.
He has his own publicity machine to blame for this because of
the offensiveness of his messianic antics and his general rudeness
to all the important musical figures he met here. In 1964 Karlheinz
had not yet come to believe he was Mankind’s Cosmic-Spiritual
evolutionary lurch forward. When I knew him he was merely an
important musician working a teaching gig in the U.S., performing
on the road with Max Neuhaus and David Tudor, promoting his
music on American college campuses, and saving money to buy
his dream house in Cologne. Karlheinz’ approach is essentially
a variant of Beethoven’s thematic-process, as it was understood
by Berlioz and Liszt. He gives music a dramatically expanded
set of fundamentals, derived, in part, from his analysis of
both acoustic and electro-acoustic sound-properties, a careful
study of Webern, long conversations with Belgian composer Goeyvarts
and others, and a gigantic personal musical gift. I dare to
say that, by my unfeigned zeal to learn and my inability yet
to cloak myself in too much pretense, he became (for a few months)
my friend. He has few.
An example of the
new non-modern direction I took post-1973: my Two Shakespeare
Sonnets for Voice and Trombone from 1974, a piece that
creates an idiomatic (stylistic) tension between the era of
Berlioz and post WWI modernism. The Shakespearean texts (which
contribute to the tension by adding yet more incongruity) are
treated as irony in the manner of a Dadaist poem and are also
set ‘syllabically’ (mechanistically, one could say)
imitating Stravinsky’s (alleged) practice.
The piece is typical
of my new viewpoint in that all the musical actions aim to suggest
and represent a plurality of associations; literary, visual,
psychological, social, cultural. The influence of Shakespeare,
by way of Berlioz, on my music is very significant and these
two Songs exploit this as do all my compositions throughout
the 1970s. “Pure” imagination, to borrow from Borges,
is dreaming about dreaming and then, through the actuality of
the music’s performance, a representative approximation
from this ‘pure’ imaginative realm is (hopefully)
revealed. (Also from Borges: Art is “Voluntary Dreaming.”)
In this sense imagination is cousin to metaphysics. In such
pieces I move continuously along a scale of ‘associatives’,
mediating freely between and among them, like a rapacious collector
storming the realm of pure imagination in search of meta-musical
flora and fauna. Each of my works from then on is an “individualized
plurality of associations”. Does that make me an Associative
Pluralist? Perhaps. After 1973 my music will combine associative
elements (particulars) and different densities of pluralities,
each piece with as individualized a structure as possible......
It is correct to
conclude, therefore, that I am perhaps a self-confessed Surrealist
(or, borrowing again from Borges,: a super-realist!), a practitioner
of the Art and Science of Misdirection and Illusion.
We (or those like
me, I should say) make art because we yearn to discover forms
of our own devising, forms which come to life by our own hands.
A man catches fish because he understands the ways and habits
of the fish. A composer ‘catches’ music because he
understands the ways and habits of music. Unlike the fisherman,
I can also invent the fish. A musical work will (by its particulars)
reveal its structure, and this self-disclosure informs us of
the work’s distinctive features. This is the only useful
kind of musical analysis.
The Five Miniatures
for Flute Clarinet and Percussion 1962, the String
Trio 1962, and the Sextet for Piccolo, Oboe, Bass
Clarinet, Cello, Bass, and Piano 1962 are the three
principle works I wrote while studying with M. William Karlins
during 1962 and 1963, my final years at the Manhattan School
of Music.
I began studying
with Bill when I was no longer able to repress my interest in
serialism. My three principle works combine the serial practices
of Schoenberg, Webern, and Stravinsky. They derive from Elliot
Carter’s work too. The Miniatures suggest
Varese and Boulez, the String Trio, Bartok, and
the Sextet is a little piano concerto after the
model of Stravinsky’s 1959 Movements for Piano and
Orchestra.
As of this writing
(summer 2000) the Sextet was performed, although
it was actually a rough but very capable reading by Gilbert
Kalisch with Arthur Weisberg’s Contemporary Chamber Ensemble
back in 1968 or '69 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
NJ. The Five Miniatures in 1974 at what is now
the University of the Arts in Philadelphia (unfortunately the
tape of this performance was lost). The String Trio
has never been played.
How fortunate I
was to have met Bill Karlins when I did and somehow had the
foresight to ask him to teach me! Of all the musical personalities
swirling around the name and the person of Stefan Wolpe during
those years, Bill Karlins, Ralph Shapey and Raoul Pleskow (who
never officially studied with Wolpe) made the most of Wolpe’s
influence. Their pieces attain the same heights of poetic greatness
as Stefan’s. Bill’s teaching of Hindemith’s Traditional
Harmony and his understanding of row-technique, has served me
well especially during the 1990s, when my music began to take
on some (dare I say) original shape and form.
Bill stands out
as the years go by, first of all, as one of those of my teachers
whose music I am more and more fond of. His strongest pieces
are not out of place in the company of other masterworks. Recent
visits and talks have rekindled the energy of our earlier relationship.
And from this perspective I can add some of the weight of the
intervening years to point out, for instance … how valuable
it has been for me (through Bill) to have connected the whole
tradition of tonal music to my studies of the Second Viennese
School. The now widely known methods and aesthetics of Berg,
Schoenberg and Webern Bill understood as expansions of …
as well as reactions to … the atmosphere, and the rhetorical
tone of (primarily German) 19th century music. Further, Bill
was studying with Wolpe at the time. My lessons overflowed with
his enthusiams for what was happening to his own music through
his contact with Wolpe. (Bill taught as a practitioner, as I
do, and, like Wolpe, he regarded teaching as a compositional
activity.)
|
