The Program
STEVE REICH
Music for Pieces of Wood
Steve Reich was achieving acclaim by the early 1970s for his minimalist
explorations of rhythm using percussion, melody instruments, and even clapping,
sometimes in combination with electronic media. Music for Pieces of Wood, from 1973, represented a progression away from the “phase shifting” of
Reich’s earlier minimalist pieces. The first of the five players lays down a
simple rhythmic pattern, repeated throughout the piece, everywhere delineating
the meter of 12-beat measures. The second player enters with a more complex
pattern, which also recurs throughout the piece. Against this the other three
musicians enter (one by one), each intoning (staggered rather than
simultaneously) an evolving pattern that begins with one note and 11 rests in a
measure, then two notes and 10 rests, then three notes and nine rests, and so
on. (Each of these measure patterns may be repeated or not, as many times as
the musicians wish—within certain parameters—with this decision assigned to
specific players at different points in the score.) Texture builds through
overlapping of parts; in the second half, the procedure reverses and the full
texture recedes to its initial simplicity. The interlocked rhythmic pattern
shifts 58 times in the course of the piece, which typically runs between 11 and
15 minutes.
—James M. Keller
MEREDITH MONK
Realm Variations
Meredith
Monk was born in New York City, and grew up in New York and Connecticut. After
graduating from Sarah Lawrence College in 1964, she plunged into a career of
artistic breadth that has included her visionary exploration of the human voice
as an instrument as well as the creation of interdisciplinary works that weave
together music, movement, image, object, light, and sound in an effort to
discover new modes of perception. She established herself in New York artistic
circles in the mid-1960s, and her reputation grew steadily through the next
decade; by the time she founded Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble in 1978, she
had long been a touchstone participant in the city’s world of contemporary art.
Realm Variations, commissioned and
premiered by the San Francisco Symphony, is
an example of Monk’s focus in recent years on creating compositions in
which “voices are like instruments and instruments are like voices.” The title
reflects the composer’s engagement with the idea of musical “realms,” which in
this case refers to the distinct pitch regions over which the performing forces
are deployed. Monk explains:
As part of this commission, I was invited to compose a work that would
spotlight Catherine Payne, the San Francisco Symphony’s piccolo player. I
realized that, as a singer, I didn’t know much about that high treble area, so
that was something to explore. Every piece I make is a learning experience. I
created a high realm in which the piccolo is joined by the violin and two
soprano singers. To balance the piccolo, I chose to use contrabass clarinet at
the bottom of the texture, along with bassoon and two low-voiced singers. And
then in the middle realm are viola, French horn, and two singers, one of whom
is me. The three realms start out distinct, but as the piece progresses they
crisscross in webs of activity. Completing the instrumentation is a harp, which
crosses all the boundaries; you might say it pulls that web into one realm.
I have never made a piece quite like this,
divided into areas of sound, although in the past few years I have been
working on the relationship of voices to instruments and vice versa. I’m
exploring how a singer and instrument can work together to make a third sound
that isn’t like either of them individually. Sometimes I treat the parts in a
contrapuntal way and sometimes I layer them.
Catherine Payne is unusual among piccolo players in her capacity for melodic
playing. She really can sing with that instrument. In this piece, I have
preferred to get away from the usual “sparkling” piccolo writing, though I do
make use of her flexibility. I also love how the instrument suggests a spatial
quality, how the instrument can extend into a performing space.
Realm Variations derives to some
degree from ideas of Buddhism, which Monk has practiced for many years. “In the
Buddhist tradition,” she says, “there are different realm categories—this idea
of joining heaven and earth by way of the human realm. I certainly don’t intend
to illustrate that idea through this piece,
but sometimes these principles are inspiring for me. Still, as the piece
developed, I had a sense that the realms did suggest aspects or processes of
nature.”
The work is cast as a multi-sectional
single movement. The variations are
not classical in the sense that a single theme is viewed from various
perspectives; these variations unfurl kaleidoscopically, as the realms
interpenetrate.
The orchestration is by Meredith Monk and Allison Sniffin; score
preparation is by Allison Sniffin.
—James M. Keller
LUKAS FOSS
Echoi
In
the mid-1950s, Lukas Foss began experimenting with graphic notation,
indeterminacy, and compositions that gave performers more or less control over
a piece. In later works, he sampled the possibilities of electronic music,
minimalism, and cross-fertilization between the Classical tradition and other
musical styles.
The four movements of Echoi, from
1963, reveal Foss’s interest in improvisation. Although the score appears
“composed” in a traditional way, numerous footnotes detail how the sounds
should actually be approached: with a great detail of freedom while observing
specific directives.
Foss reflected on Echoi (The Byzantine Echoes) in a voluminous
program note. Paraphrased and much condensed, the note describes Echoi I as“four simultaneous cadenzas” that introduce the four players “in a joint
disorderly display of virtuosity”; order is imposed “as if by accident.”
Whereas Echoi I was “not yet music,” Echoi II is collected and “completely composed (in every sense of the
word).” Echoi III is “a game of sounds”; the music is “dreamlike” and
“hallucinatory.” Echoi IV in a sense echoes the chaos of Echoi I. At the conclusion, said Foss, he wanted “hundreds and
hundreds of notes” to convey the sense of an obsession.
—James M. Keller
MORTON SUBOTNICK
Jacob’s Room: Monodrama
Morton
Subotnick became famous as an electronic pioneer through his 1967 composition Silver Apples of the Moon, the result of
a visionary commissioning program by Nonesuch Records; indeed, it was the first
tape piece ever commissioned by a record company.
Even then, while most composers working in the electronic medium saw an
opportunity to create music in a novel sonic
world without reference to traditional procedures, Subotnick was firm
about imposing a discernable structure on his works.
Jacob’s Room’s origins stretch to
1985, when Subotnick composed its first incarnation for the Kronos Quartet and
singer-composer Joan La Barbara, to whom Subotnick has been married since 1979.
The work’s subject was holocaust—“the Holocaust” of the World War II era, but
also holocaust in the sense of the
broader destruction
of humanity. The narrative begins with a passage from Virginia Woolf’s novel Jacob’s Room that at first alludes to the British Museum as an
enormous brain encapsulating all
knowledge, and then depicts the character Jacob, isolated in his room as
he reads Plato’s Phaedrus. In a
transcendent moment, he grasps his connection to the larger world. Subotnick
interlaces a plot line from Nicholas Gage’s 1983 memoir Eleni, in which the narrator grapples with his mother’s long-ago
execution, a casualty of the Greek civil war; ultimately, in a parallel to
Woolf’s Jacob, the son finds some way to countenance reality.
“The original version had several performances, but the piece was moving in the
direction of an opera,” Subotnick explains. “The Minnesota Opera asked me to
write a work for their experimental workshop, so I adapted the piece into a
larger version with electronics.” Subotnick aborted that project after two
years, but the work continued to evolve. “I expanded the Minneapolis version,
using video, to make a chamber opera for the American Music Theater Festival in
Philadelphia in 1993, and I thought that was the end. But then I got a
commission for an opera from Berlin. I went to my original idea and developed
it into a full-length, hour-and-a-half
opera, premiered in 2010. This new piece for San Francisco is yet
another conception of the whole thing. For this, I went back to the full opera
and [adapted material from that] into a monodrama, about 28 minutes long.”
In this new version, music distributed among various characters in the opera is
concentrated into a single voice—that of La Barbara, who “throws” her voice
around the auditorium by way of the digital possibilities accessed through
three microphones. The music’s mood and sound can change suddenly, suggesting
dreamlike stream-of-consciousness alternations: serene contemplation of Plato
at one moment, the horror of a mother being tortured at another.
The work reaches structural highpoints and moments of psychological clarity in
two vocal cadenzas, one near the work’s center, the other near its end. “The
second cadenza,” Subotnick says, “is the quietest part of piece, but it is the
emotional climax. There is a poignant moment before the epilogue where she
articulates just the word alone. The
basic notion of Jacob’s Room is that
holocausts are not just local catastrophes; they also gradually destroy the
thin fabric we have of being human. They deprive us of the artifacts we have
created and our empathy as a group. When these things fall apart, we find
ourselves alone in the universe.”
—James M. Keller