Pleased to announce a cassette release from GUE: edited improvisations from Laurel Uziell, Jacken Elswyth and myself for banjo, melodica, electronics and other instruments, recorded in London in 2022 and 2023, and expertly mastered by Angel Hair Studio. Many thanks to David of Blue Tapes.
Now available on Bandcamp and for pre-order (released October 25th): link here.
Also cassette-related: last year Ben Hall’s cassette label Ornette Coleman Fiend Club put out a poetry cassette of mine—a complete reading of the The Problem, The Questions, The Poem, a sequence that first came out in an out-of-print chapbook (held together with metal bolts!) from Rosa van Hensbergen’s Tipped Press back in 2015, and that re-appeared in my book A True Account, from the 87 Press. Available here.
[Extended cut of a review published on Bachtrack.]
Luigi Nono, Como una ola de fuerza y luz; Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 4
Sarah Aristidou (soprano), Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Joana Mallwitz (conductor), Konzerthaus: Großer Saal, Berlin, 14th September 2024
In his hundredth anniversary year, Luigi Nono is perhaps more often spoken about than performed. A fixture of the German new music scene for many years, his equal commitment to Communist politics and the musical avant-garde may now make him less palatable in an age of neo-liberalism and—increasingly—neo-fascism. But this is precisely why we should remember it. It was refreshing, then, to hear, paired with Mahler’s Fourth, a performance of his 1972 Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a Wave of Strength and Light) at the Konzerthaus Berlin, a large-scale work for orchestra, tape and soloists about memory, remembrance and struggle.
In 1971, some way into working on a piece for Maurizio Pollini and Claudio Abbado to be premiered at La Scala, Nono learned that his friend Luciano Cruz had died in mysterious, seemingly accidental circumstances, “apparently due to the inhalation of fumes from a heater in his house.” Nono had met Cruz, medical student, activist and co-founder of the Chilean Marxist-Leninist Movement of the Revolutionary Left, on previous tours of South America, both before and after the victory of Salvador Allende. Nono’s work ended as a kind of requiem to Cruz, an act of mourning and protest at his death and a pledge of commitment to the spirit of struggle in which he lived his life. Nono used a poem by Cruz’s comrade, the Argentinian poet and “minstrel of the revolution” Julio Huasi, from which the work takes its title: the poem is sung and declaimed by a solo soprano early on, but the majority of the piece is instrumental and abstract, rather than textual and programmatic. As with much of Nono’s work, the politics lies as much in the practices of listening it encourages as in simple mimesis or the straightforward presentation of dogmatic messages.
The collaboration with Nono and Abbado came at the height of their visible commitment. Documentary footage from the work’s premiere at La Scala shows the three engaged in a post-performance discussion with a large and attentive audience, fielding a listener who suggests that people would rather be listening to the music of King Crimson. Following the Gramscian principles by which the PCI, of which Nono was a long-term member, saw ‘high’ culture as one facet in the struggle for establishing hegemony, rather than something fatalistically compromised and bourgeois, this was a time of experimentation and struggle, culminating in the premiere of Nono’s ‘azione scenica’ Al Gran Sole Carico D’Amore at La Scala several years later. This struggle, however, did not simply mean producing or reproducing a music which laid Communist messages on top of conventional forms. And if to present a political message without transforming form would be to banalize that message, to experiment with for without attending to its political significance would be to abrogate political responsibility. Political meaning, then, emerges in and through form as site of dialectical contestation.
A deep admirer of Pollini’s virtuosity, Nono, he later explained, didn’t want to write a conventional concerto, nor to concern himself simply with musical innovation, but neither did he want to write programme music. The elegy for Luciano Cruz expresses itself, not just in the setting of Huasi’s poem, but in the form itself, but the form cannot be reduced solely to elegy—or at least, an elegy removed from the broader questions of the revolutionary process to which Cruz had dedicated his life. “I wanted my music”, Nono later remarked, “to be like a space that opens and closes, something like a life that extends and closes again, something like a programmatic metaphor, but free.” Onstage, five loudspeakers behind the orchestra echo the games with depth in Baroque basilicas—a spatial experimentation to be explored at length in Nono’s later Prometeo: “an alternation of bursts, violence and silences”, moving to and away from the audience. Nono had earlier written an elegy for Lorca, while Al Gran Solo Carico D’Amore would function as a kind of gigantic tribute to largely female secular martyrs, revolutionaries who’d perished in the struggles of the past century, from the Paris Commune to Bolivia. He was, however, interested in death “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”. This is not the melancholic pathos of ending, but the struggle of continuing: the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”.
This is an “extreme work”, conductor Joana Mallwitz emphasized several times in her typically astute pre-concert talk. While, during her exposition of the Mahler symphony, she was able to illustrate her points with melodic excerpts played at the piano, the sonics of Como una ola are harder to render in reduced form, concentrated as they are in questions of timbre and coloration as much as line or melody. The orchestra is large, whether coming together in gnarly, clustered tutti, or divided into echoing instrumental groups; the solo piano part is demanding, making liberal use of clusters and low notes that threaten to blur individual notes and lines; the words sung by the soprano alternate between the clarity of declamation and a fragmenting into pure syllables and vowels. The tape part, meanwhile, is central to the piece. Sometimes, indeed, it can seem as if orchestra and soloists are playing around the tape, rather than vice versa: what Nono called “an acoustic game of rebounds, echoes, beats and pulsations”, of movement between absence and presence, all the more emphasized for the fact that the tape contains the playing and voices of the previous performers of the work, Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova, rather than tonight’s soloists. Extremity here is not just a case of volume, noise and dissonance—though the work has these in abundance. It’s also about those moments when the music falls away, leaving tape or soloist or a sudden silence, forcing us to re-adjust our focus, to concentrate and contemplate: it’s a work where pathos and drama are inseparable from thought and intellection, where we are not always quite sure where we are.
The work begins with a piercing yet quiet cluster of winds and high strings. It sounds once, then again, briefly, the strings this time cutting in like a knife. Echoing voice in the tape part briefly forms a virtual choir, simmering down to near silence, then joined by the live soprano part, at first wordless, then, in the opening words of Huasi’s poem, first singing, then shouting “Luciano!”, an appeal or cry to the dead, the syllables of the name melismatically extended. The live soprano part unfolds solo, save for the accompaniment of the tape, alternating high, sung lines with phrases shouted out in defiant appeal. Lament becomes call to arms, call to arms lament. It’s a demanding part, the singer having to balance intimacy with public exhortation, all while traversing the voices upper reaches. Over-emphasize, and it becomes shrill: let the strain show, and it loses force. Sarah Aristidou pulls it off with verve. The entry of the piano signals a new phrase. Once again, it’s a challenging part, sounding often in the extreme lower end of the piano in clusters and concatenating hammer blows, through which the pianist must retain clarity of line, even when thrown off by blurring effects of lower-register pedalling and echoing tape. Tamara Stefanovich clearly articulated individual notes without sacrificing the part’s fundamental drama, as the piano alternated with interjections from percussion and orchestra. This section, Mallwitz suggested in her talk, is Luciano’s struggle. Tonight it sounds somewhere between dancing and marching, but with both transformed to become ghostly versions of themselves, as much dream vision as clear portrait. Could we hear the clusters in the piano and the orchestral tutti as representing the mass, the solo line as the guiding vanguard, according to Cruz’s (and Nono’s) Marxism-Leninism? That might be too vulgarly schematic for Nono, yet one can at least note here that the interplay of individual and collective pertains, not just to the interaction of soloist and ensemble but within the solo line itself, as single notes merge to form clusters.
For this is a music of constant transformation. Brass, double basses and low wind (including two contrabassoons) swell in the titular waves, die down again. Clarinets, underscored by the sounds of harp amplified with contact mics, and sounding something like distorted strums from a mutant guitar, flutter as if hovering on an edge, rising and falling, a figure amplified and extended by the piano, now taken up by thick brass, passed around orchestral groups over rumbling bass drums: a music constantly seething, yet in check. A piercingly sustained high note whistle on tape brings the hall to a stop, and the orchestra surge back in, shadowed by the Tonband ghosts. The piano returns to its opening territory of clusters, low end “struggle music”, before falling silent as we end with a passage on tape, from these speakers above the stage which have something of the abstracted gravestone or obelisk about them.
Nono would later link his more elegiac works to his interest in the Jewish music of lamentation heard and suppressed throughout Europe from the Middle Ages on, and continued in the work of modernist poets like Edmond Jabès. There are no specific echoes of that tradition here, but this remark nonetheless comes to mind as the pianist falls silent and Aristidou sings over the virtual choir on tape. Under Mallwitz the performance lent, perhaps, more into the contemplative aspects, an undeniably effective approach. Carefully beating out the regular tempo by which each bar lasts the same length, she conducts with a cool precision and poise. This unshowy approach enables the music’s own extremities to emerge unforced. For this is not a concerto or soloistic work: soprano and piano spend much of the piece silent, waiting. Neither, for all its volume, is it fundamentally a music of energy: instead, it offers a drama of stillness as well as activity, of intimacy as well as massiveness, the present and the ghostly sounding at once, the live musicians constantly stopping for the tape, expectant, funereal. In this music of contrast, extreme pitches, high or low, silences and near-silences followed by fortissimo orchestral outbursts, intense outward drama juxtaposed with inner stillness and contemplation, so that all these opposites become dialectical counterpoints of each other, transforming into and out of themselves, inextricably woven. Above all, this is a music of listening, a work in which massive orchestral resources are used as much for the heavy silences they carry as for Romanticist drama, in which piercing dissonance can give tender remembrance.
Nono realized the original tape at the Studio di fonologia musicale di Radio Milano alongside original performers Pollini and soprano Slavka Taskova. Of these, only the 87-year old Taskova is still alive. What we hear in live performance, then, is the sound of live musicians duetting with ghosts. These ghosts are, too, perhaps, ghosts of revolutions that never were, revolutions that were defeated by coups, reaction, internal dissent. “Luciano! Joven como la revolución” (“Luciano! Young, like the revolution”) declaims the soprano. But at this point in time, the revolution is no longer young. In Chile, the year after Como una ola premiered, the CIA helped depose the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, while today, Nono’s Italy is currently ruled by a neo-fascist government for the first time since the days of Mussolini. But Nono’s music refuses defeatism. Near the end of the work, we hear a section which Nono, nodding to Mao, called “the long march”, as the orchestra gradually, painfully moves from low to high notes, in what may be the closest to a passage of ‘programme music’ in the work, the struggle personified. But, typically for Nono, that’s not the end: instead, in a passage Mallwitz drew particular attention to in her pre-concert talk, we hear a kind of cloud of sound heard in the tape, replaying echoes of previous music. There is no final conclusion, for time leaps forward and back, like the revolution itself. And, like the revolution, or so it can seem, it falls silent. All the more urgency, then, when defeatism and pessimism threaten to settle in, to hear this music of another time, this music of commitment. Nono saw death, “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”, and the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir”, “that Luciano Cruz may live”. It’s a reminder that death—the death of a comrade, the apparent death of the revolution, of revolutions plural—is never set in stone, that change can, and may come, through struggle—the struggle to listen, to play, to organize, to continue.
***
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, wrote Theodor Adorno, “avoids all monumentality”. In comparison to the massive scale of his previous two symphonies, the Fourth is relatively short. For Adorno, it’s something like a children’s symphony, in which evocations of marching bands, of triangles and sleigh bells, offers a child’s untainted vision of music. Through this faux-naïvety, however, the adult composer can offer glimpses of the violence present in these apparently innocent evocations—war and the military band, the spectre of child death in the child’s concluding image of heaven, the shadowing violence of its Christian religious imagery—and the anti-Semitic usages to which it had been. In some ways contained and concise, the work is also fragmented, awkward, proceeding through episodes of chamber music-like texture, dances and marches, parodistic folklore, distorted echoes of Schubert, Beethoven and Wagner. With its grandiose, Beethovenian choral ending, the Second Symphony had offered an affirmatory image of resurrection undeniably powerful, gloriously moving, yet troubling in its perhaps too-excessive celebration of religious assimilation on the part of the Jewish composer. A vision of heaven without judgment becomes the ultimate judgment, the vision of inclusion that which abolishes the image of the outsider in love, yet which would reveal itself in its full force in the decades to come in the German-speaking world, with the horrific demonisation and exclusion of the outsider turned into a systematic programme of mass murder. In the Fourth Symphony, we hear the Paradisal vision of resurrection and inclusion once more, but this time replayed, as it were in miniature, as a children’s song. Before this conclusion, all sweetness and piety, however, the work is, as Mallwitz commented, of “scurrilous, grotesque figures”: a work of jumps and discontinuities as much as sweetness, nostalgia and consolation.
The second movement is, in part, a Totentanz: in an early draft Mahler suggested that its solo violin part evoked Freund Hein, a folk personification of death, leading us up to heaven in a dance. Tuned higher than normal, so that it is not quite in tune with the orchestra, Mahler suggests that the violin part be played aggressively, with a deliberate roughness, suggesting a folk fiddle. Adorno points to “possibly synagogal or secular Jewish melodies” here, while Norman Lebrecht describes the solo as “a migrant threat to sedate society”. This is the music of outsiders, who, in a closed and racist society figured as death itself. As with the ländler that suffuse Mahler’s work or the sleigh bells that begin the symphony, we here hear the violin intruding the high art space of the orchestra, not as the kind of decorous folk playing that would suffuse the nationalisms to come—with disastrous consequences—but as the eerie, the sound from outside, the sound of the outsider. It’s as if the soloist in a concerto turned up with a battered fiddle and proceeded to play, the orchestra playing along or contrasting. At the Konzerthaus, the unnamed soloist played it with aplomb: not too grotesque or overdone, not too sweet or smoothed over.
So to the finale, with its child’s image of Heaven. There’s something artificial to this paradise, its source, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Armin’s collection of German folk poetry Das Knaben Wunderhorn, having altered its folk sources in order to make them seem more “authentic”. An image of a child’s image, a fin-de-siècle pastiche of an idealized image of the medieval, the song is not, quite, placed in quotation marks—Mahler made it clear that the work was to seem sweetly authentic—but it is troubled by shadows that Mahler makes no attempt to hide, most notably, in the image of “the butcher Herod”, infamous for the Massacre of the Innocents, slaughtering animals for the heavenly feast. Even in Paradise there is no vision of a world without hierarchy and without slaughter.
In Nono’s work, suggested Mallwitz, the first half evokes and laments Luciano himself, while the second half becomes a vision of the socialist future for which he died—a vision which converts lament into struggle, yet a struggle which, in that coda, retains the trace of lament. In Mahler’s fourth, meanwhile, the concluding vision of paradise has an element of horror and terror within its serenity. What Mallwitz calls “the borderless imagination of a child” is not immune from the violence of “das irdische Leben” evoked earlier in the work. “These are not only the modest joys of the useful south German vegetable plot, full of toil and labor”, writes Adorno, “Immortalized in them are blood and violence; oxen are slaughtered, deer and hare run to the feast in full view on the roads. The poem culminates in an absurd Christology that serves the Savior as nourishment to famished souls and involuntarily indicts Christianity as a religion of mythical sacrifice”. The piece echoes strains of the prior movements, as when the sleigh bells of the opening come in just before the mention of the “butcher Herod”—just as those movements contained fragmentary motifs from the song itself, in order to make it seem the work’s natural culmination. As such, for Adorno, the work seems “like a long backward look that asks: Is all that then true? To this music shakes its head , and must therefore buy courage with the caricaturing convention of the happy close.” There is, then, a sadness to this apparent fairytale. “If it dies away after the words of promise ‘that all shall awake to joy,’ no one knows whether it does not fall asleep forever. The phantasmagoria of the transcendent landscape is at once posited by it and negated. Joy remains unattainable, and no transcendence is left but that of yearning.” “There is no more music on earth”, repeats the singer quietly as the work ends. Yet earth is where we hear this music. Consolation is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing of all, if it only acts as compensation for present suffering.
Aided by Mallwitz’s resolutely unsentimental approach, Aristidou balanced sweetness and irony, the voice’s final fading seemed rendered as anti-climax, symphonic scale falling away to powerless song. Throughout, Mallwitz’s rigour was refreshing in this music today played so often as to risk seeming hackneyed. This does not mean that it lacked emotion: for to treat the symphony solely as ironic critique and passive defeatism would be to do equal violence to the work as to take it at uncritical, pietistic face value. “Mahler’s humanity is a mass of the disinherited”, wrote Adorno. “He promises victory to the loser”. As Adorno notes, Mahler’s achievement lay in defamiliarizing clichés, joining disparate and incongruous materials in a fragmentary whole. In the Fourth, a symphony that picks up songs, folk dances, marching band music, whose protagonists are the fiddler and the child, a high culture symphony in which music ‘from below’ brings it down from within. It’s this Mahler that we might couple to Nono. His irony, lament and sentiment, apparently polar opposites to Nono’s interrogation, commitment and struggle, in fact reveal themselves as part of the same urge to reconfigure, both the ritual of the Concert and Work, and the same urge to transform the society of which they are a part.
Abdullah Ibrahim Trio, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, September 7th 2024
As HKW Director Bonnaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung remarks from the stage, “when Abdullah Ibrahim is in town, he deserves a packed house”, and the audience duly flows into the Miriam Makeba Auditorium well past the advertised start time. Beginning fifteen minutes late, the concert lasts perhaps another ninety without a break, although it feels much shorter. Now 90 years old, Ibrahim largely follows the format of his recent trio album 3, recorded last year at London’s Barbican. Ibrahim, flautist Cleave Guyton and bassist Noah Jackson—the latter members of his group Ekeda—rarely play together as a trio. Rather, the pianist alternates extended solos with duo features, from up-tempo, traditionally-swinging jazz—Guyton playing Monk on piccolo, Jackson playing ‘Giant Steps’ on double-bass—to slower pieces characterised by Bachian counterpoint and timbral combinations reminiscent of the exquisite 1963 duos recorded by Eric Dolphy and Richard Davis. But Ibrahim is the real focus, his playing manifesting what we might call late style: pared down, all ornamentation cleared away.
For decades, Ibrahim’s solo performances have involved long medleys in which fragments of his familiar songbook are linked like flowers in a garland. In the past, these were often driven by propulsive groove. As he gets older and older, the medleys get slower and slower, music stripped back to the bare bones—a blues scale, a Monkian dissonance, a rich, impressionistic chord. As Ibrahim once remarked of Good News From Africa, his superlative 1973 duet with bassist Johnny Dyani, “[when] you play bebop, you fill out a space. When you play our music, you don’t play notes, you just play space!” Without a rhythm section, Ibrahim’s rubato playing unfolds introspectively, in flexible, slow time. Chords, melodies, transitions come together as in a waking dream, in which each phrase has simultaneous fragility and depth. It’s as if the weight of history accumulated in the pianist’s fingers at once lends them the collective power to strike the keys, and weighs them down, so that each note played must be wrested from the accumulated ghosts of time, ageing and history. To play is to “invest in loss”, Ibrahim remarks in a recent interview. One must “strike the note [...] with the utmost sincerity”, because “you don’t expect to get anything in return”.
We might, I think, view all of Ibrahim’s late performances as essentially variations on the same structure. In a 1984 interview with Graham Lock, Ibrahim linked the role of repetition in his music to the Islamic Tariqa, or state of trance. “At home we have chants – you say: ‘There is no God but He’; say that for five, ten hours, you’ll get stoned! [...] That’s where the music comes from and its purpose is to put you in that stage[.]” Previously, this could be heard in the repeated, loop-like structures which guided and grounded Ibrahim’s music. But his current mode, a set of repeated ruminations on the same pieces, might too be linked to that state of Tariqa, to the way a prayer follows a set pattern in order to address questions that remain new precisely through repetition, drawing again on that water from an ancient well. Tonight, the beautiful and sombre ‘Blue Bolero’ that emerges as the evening’s theme or leitmotif, a kind of anti-fanfare, as it did overt twenty years ago on African Magic, another trio album recorded at HKW back in 2001, as well as on the more recent Dreamtime. The piece is played three or four times, orientating the music, giving it direction.
Towards the end of the performance, Ibrahim plays the melody to ‘Ubu Suku (Evening)’, a piece first heard on Duke Ellington Presents the Dollar Brand Trioback in 1963, but receiving perhaps its finest rendition in a breath-catching duet version with Archie Shepp the following decade. I’d had the melody in my head all day: one of Ibrahim’s most beautiful pieces, its melodic figures rise and fall, surging into an impassioned sigh met with a lilting, halting left-hand reply. Guyton and Jackson’s arrangement for clarinet and cello gives the piece a chamber-music quality, but it’s the special weight of Ibrahim’s brief solo rendition that sticks in the mind. As the applause rings out, Ibrahim returns once again to ‘Blue Bolero’, then abruptly stands up from keyboard. His wife, Marina Umari, comes on stage to support him as he links arms with the other musicians and the audience rise for a standing ovation. Putting a hand to the side of his head, he sings, unamplified, as he’s done at the end of all his recent concerts, alternating a South African refrain with English words bespeaking the Middle Passage. (On 3, the piece is sub-titled ‘The Sound of Centuries Old Maritime Cargo’.) “When I came back, there was no one there to welcome me home”, he sings, barely audible. With everyone in the room standing, it’s as if we were at church, the music carrying the weight of those apartheid years in which Ibrahim became a kind of national composer, Mandela calling him “our Mozart”, but also of those longer and ongoing imperial histories with which those years are entwined.
I hear a voice from the audience quietly harmonizing behind me, and imagine if the whole hall had raised their voice in anthem. But that would not have been appropriate, for this is about quietness, about ‘solotude’: being alone, but with witnesses. Ibrahim keeps singing as he’s guided off stage, and as he disappears into the shadows and the applause gets louder, I swear I can still hear him singing, and I wonder where his mind has travelled. For this music is not just about one person, but about those legacies which have formed and informed his music, and this song is neither a statement of facile resolution nor fatalistic acceptance, but of a kind of hope that comes out of facing the abyss, plucking a note out of it, a word, a song. I swear I can still hear him singing.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Schoenberg/Ives, Kammermusiksaal, Philharmonie Berlin, September 2024
Marking the joint 150th anniversaries of Arnold Schoenberg and Charles Ives, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s recital at the Kammermusiksaal presented Schoenberg’s complete solo works for piano (at least, of the completed or acknowledged), its second half offering Ives’ monumental Concord Sonata: a programme ambitious in scope and full of food for thought.
The five sets of Schoenberg pieces, around forty-five minutes in length, move from the early, tentative break into atonality at the turn of the 1910s, into the organisation of the twelve-tone method in the work of the early through late ’20s: visions of worlds falling apart and reconstituting themselves in alien forms; a beautiful collapse followed by a meticulous and often equally beautiful reconstruction, all the more beautiful for the historical precarity behind its grand, visionary announcement of the new, dodecaphonic world, holding together like a kind of Jenga Tower made of the twelve-tone rows.
The earliest of those breakthroughs here are the Drei Klavierstück, Opus 11. One of Schoenberg’s first atonal works, it’s now over a century old: music existing in a state of concentrated tension, moving from introspective stasis to sudden flurries of impassioned gestures in a kind of febrile, streaming invention. Aimard, who perhaps has a cold, can be heard murmuring along with the music, his body moving expressively round the keyboard’s centre-point in a series of feints, lunges and flourishes, seemingly somewhere between the performative and the unconscious reflexes by which he translates score to sound. In the transition from the second to third piece, he turns the page himself, his free foot tapping on floor, then visually describes the next surge of sound with a flamboyant sweep of the arm before playing it.
While Opus.11 surges out at length, lasting around fifteen minutes, the Sechs kleine Klavierstück, Op.19, offer more truncated flows, outbursts, and, often, extreme concision: the final last movement, reportedly written at the shock of Mahler’s death, is a mere nine bars long. Aimard’s hands leap from the keyboard, his shoulders twitching as if startled at its touch: the body, like the sound, in a state of condensed concentrated tension, each pause ready to become a leap, each leap a pause. In the minimal second movement, with its halting repeated chords, Aimard makes ringing use of the pedal, emphasizing the music’s sparsity and spaciousness, while at times in the spikier passages, he seems to be dancing while sitting down. What he gives us here is a Schoenberg with edge, as befits the rhythmic impetus he brings to Messiaen and Ligeti, but he’s also willing to hold back, to sink into the pauses, those depths of expressive silence or near-silence into which the music keeps falling.
The two small pieces of the Opus 33A and B, written two years apart at the end of the ‘20s, are rarely heard or discussed: in Aimard’s hands, they’re turbulently pensive and pensively turbulent. We end the first half with the Suite für Klavier, Opus 25, often cited as Schoenberg’s first piece to be fully written using twelve-tone rows as its basis. Adopting the form of a Baroque dance suite, and incorporating the B-A-C-H motif into one of its rows, it consciously harks back to Bach: in his pre-concert talk, Wolfgang Rathert describes the piece as a “furthering of tradition, a furthering of tonality”, rather than its negation, with Schoenberg emerging as a paradoxical “conservative revolutionary”. It was, indeed, this that, for Pierre Boulez, constituted the work’s classicizing weakness, as if Schoenberg had put what had emerged in the rejection of tonality into a straitjacket, or a costume. Likewise, for Adorno, the suite offered “a kind of Bauhaus-music, metallic constructivism which derives its force from precisely the absence of primary expression”; “an ascetism [...] the negation of all façades”: one whose rejection of the facile or sentimental paid the price of a drive toward the negation of music itself, in the very guise of purifying it. But it’s precisely this kind of tension that gives the piece its power, whether we hear it—as Schoenberg seems to have intended—as a gesture of rapprochement, a work that has summarized, exemplified and furthered the tradition it’s often taken to destroy, or as a work whose virtue lies in its very lack of reconciliation, its very awkwardness, a far cry from the glacial worlds of neo-classicism to which it forms a twelve-tone equivalent (and on which Schoenberg himself—perhaps protesting too much—heaped virulent scorn).
In Aimard’s performance, those gestures of measured turbulence heard in the Opus 33 in the Opus 25 take on a twittering, even capering quality, hectically measured, as tone rows are made to dance the Gavotte, the Minuet and the Gigue. Aimard here matched the precision and austerity that some performers emphasize with a wilder edge, as the dance skitters along helter-skelter or slows almost to a crawl, a trill hovering there as if about to trip over itself. After a particularly lively musette, Aimard pulled his hand away from the keyboard in a gesture that for a moment looks like a tennis player’s fist pump, while with the final flourish of the gigue he looked about ready to jump off his stool: a fitting end to the first half, met with warm applause.
As Rathert pointed out in his pre-concert talk, Schoenberg’s piano works are all titled simple “Stücke”, pieces. Deliberately sparse, they lack a programme, establishing themselves in the tradition of ‘Absolute Music’, the “stücke” an intimate form, a music existing for itself, aphoristic and contained. Revolution, if it happens, happens here within the soundworld—even as that soundworld, in its very insulation or isolation, becomes porous, absorbing the currents of the times with an intensity all the greater than a conventionally programmatic reflection. Charles Ives’ Concord Sonata, by contrast, adopts a grand programme. The piece’s full title is Piano Sonata No.2, Concord, Mass., 1840-1860, and its movements contain dedications to key Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, father and daughter, and Thoreau. Before the piece was even fully premiered, Ives had published a 125-page book of essays explaining its philosophical background in New England Transcendentalism, alongside his theories of music, assertive, forthright, cantankerous, and convinced of its visionary heritage. Musically, too, everything about the piece spills over, from the lack of barlines to the addition of extra staves when the piano part becomes too dense for the normal two, to the chords that become clusters, played with a piece of wood. In contrast to the self-contained world of Schoenbergian Absolute Music, it’s full of quotation, sometimes obvious, sometimes submerged, from church hymns to popular songs, circus band music, and a prominent transformation of the ‘fate’ motif from Beethoven’s fifth which functions, for Ives, as a kind of leitmotif for humanity’s searching after spiritual knowledge, as well, we might suggest, of the revolutionary hopes encoded in the European Romanticism of which Beethoven stands as epitome and herald. (The composer Lou Harrison, indeed, termed the Concord a piece “in the grand manner [...] probably the last [...] romantic sonata”.)
In these works by Schoenberg and Ives, then, we hear two different trends in twentieth-century modernism: on the one hand, the avant-garde as a self-contained experimentation arising from the material, further and further isolated from clear social reference (even as that isolation cannot help but bespeak the social); on the other, a music that insistently flows into and out of the social.
In Schoenberg’s works for piano we hear ideas worked out in miniature—experimentation through compression. In Ives’ sonata, by contrast, we hear experimentation through expansion. The work, as Rathert’s programme notes and pre-concert talk suggested, is a kind of endless text, constantly revised with new elements—in the case of Ives’s own recordings, sometimes improvised—and a layer of intellectual associations and quotations.
What both Schoenberg and Ives have in common is a tension between fixity and the monumental and the fleeting, the improvisatory, the eddy of feeling and the edifice of structure.
These elements were certainly brought out in Aimard’s performance, which combined the virtues of virtuosic precision with that same edge of wild energy he’d brought to the Schoenberg. We began with Emerson contemplating eternity with the strains of Beethoven’s ‘fate’ motif wafting or hammering by within dense chords or at the tail end of melodies. Aimard gives the music a sense of flow, of the questioningly affirmative, as the motif dies out into a pedalled silence. The swirling opening of the second movement, dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne—what Ives described as a “phantasmagoria” inspired by Hawthorne’s fantastical tales—visits the circus, arpeggiates into dreamy reverie, capped off with a cluster played with a block of wood. Aimard renders this music of filigree contrasts, of vibrant energies and flitting light and shadow, with a jubilant exuberance laced with contemplation and something at times approaching swing.
The simple soberness of the relatively short third movement, ‘The Alcotts’, offers lyrical contrast, the fate motif now a pensive parlour song, now a church hymn. (At one point, we even hear a snatch of ‘Here Comes the Bride’.) It’s as if the work is saving up its energies for the finale: not, however, in the traditional grand manner, but instead, in near-silence. Ives conceived a loose programme for the piece imagining Thoreau taking three walks in late summer, contemplating Walden Pond. In the magically quiet opening, Aimard treads a careful line between leaning into the piece’s contemplative nature with over-indulging its luxuriousness. He has the hall rapt as he surges up from a pause and into the beautifully harmonised melody that forms the emotional centre of the movement.
The melody in question is based on the opening to a phrase from Stephen Foster’s ‘Down in the Cornfield’ (the title by which the song is mostly known today, in replacement of its offensive original). For Ives, this quotation had personal significance: it was, as Kyle Gann notes in his book on the sonata, Ives’s father’s favourite song, and is quoted and transformed in various forms across numerous of his pieces. The echo may seem troubling, given the controversy and ambiguity surrounding Foster’s minstrel songs: its lyrics impersonate slaves mourning the death of their master, though Donald Berman, another recent interpreter of the sonata, has recently suggested that the text represents slaves ironically celebrating that death, Ives’s quotation of the song thus highlighting Thoreau’s abolitionism. Whether it’s a political signal or an apolitical echo, it’s hard not to hear the troubling echo of a pitifully condescending caricature, a contradiction it would surely be foolish to ignore, for it was, too, at the heart of the wide range of abolitionist politics and its representational modes. Certainly, a too triumphalist reading of Ives risks overlooking what’s troubling in his visions of liberty, as those visions reflect wider prejudices—the comments made about spirituals in his published writings, for instance—and as the desire for liberty, including that of abolitionism, couches itself in forms that do not fully render or do justice to the humanity of those whose liberation they purport to seek. Which is to say that the question of what liberty might mean, and for whom, which the work puts to question in, say, its citations of Beethoven and its fervent Transcendentalism, not to mention its exceeding of conventional harmonic rule, are also questions that can be put to the work itself: for in the texture of Ives’s music, and this is its enduring power, every affirmation opens onto a question—that ‘Unanswered Question’ most famously asked in 1908, a few years before the completion of the sonata. Whatever the ramifications of the Foster (half-)quotation, it’s at the heart of the movement, accompanied by a gently tolling, repeated three-note figure that, Gann writes, Ives meant to suggest the tempo of nature: a melody and an accompaniment always seemingly on the verge of resolution that, nonetheless, never quite resolve. In the spellbinding conclusion, the music surges to one final peal before ebbing away as the ‘nature’ figure fades to nothing, a moment treated by Aimard with an unobtrusive reverence met by suitably warm applause.
He offered an encore from another North American experimentalist who, while in Europe, refused to study with Schoenberg, keen to stick to her own path, and whose revival, unlike that of Ives, has come in fits and starts. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s fast and furious Piano Study in Mixed Accents of 1930 was a piece, Aimard announces from the stage, that, in the '80s, György Ligeti used to give the piece to friends with the suggestion that they play this music. From the forty-five minutes of Ives to the mere minute of Seeger, different worlds come in different forms, the condensed and the expanded, the exercise and the programme. Perhaps we might speculate that for Seeger, the fervent socialist, in what seems a technical exercise in palindromic form, those “mixed accents” are too the “mixed accents” of history, the teaming and unpredictable rhythms by which its contours are envisaged, planned or challenged: the tempo, in other words, of revolution. Either way, in the worlds of all these pieces, there is still much for interpretation, contestation, debate. Aimard’s readings this early September evening offered us a fine way in.
