Thursday, 30 October 2014, 8 pm
LEWIS - The Mangle of Practice (2014, LoC commission)
LEWIS - Assemblage (2013)
G.F. HAAS - in vain (2000)
It's difficult to write about music when you feel it so intensely that all words become paltry in comparison. The only thing I can say with assurance about Haas' in vain is that one must experience it.
But first on the program came works by George Lewis, whose aggressively energetic (and academic, based on his program notes filled with dialectics and teleologies) music was ultimately alienating.
The Mangle of Practice was a freewheeling mix of aggressive sul pont biting and goopy harmonic glisses and slides. It became a spectacle of the performer, MingHuan Xu, who is a fine and charismatic violinist. The music flowed from her body and violin as if she was creating the music as she went.
While the Mangle of Practice was at least engaging and cute at times, Assemblage was a barrage of noises that, on top of being unpleasant, were not particularly interesting. I've never seen such a stressed percussionist, constantly grappling for a different mallet and practically jumping around his setup. The climax of the piece was maddeningly loud, inducing a physical queasiness of sweaty hands and ringing ears. That combined with the soprano saxophone player's painfully red face made me laugh out loud.
During intermission I excitedly watched the harpist tune microtonally, and anticipated, anticipated...
The flurries in the beginning of the piece felt relatively nondescript -- a bedding of sounds and microtonality, uneven wisps of grass in the wind. The set. Yet there was something unnerving about the scales from the outset, especially the discreteness of the tones given by the piano and mallet percussion. They moved along, compressing, expanding, and pretty soon,
Stasis. Black forms lunging and plunging around each other in the dark, oozing some Lethean river of tar. It was sensual, even. Limbs slowly reaching and grabbing in the subterranean folds of bedsheets. Overtones began to emerge; the harp, sounding nearly like the broken toy piano of Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1, added some otherworldly light.
lights faded up to brightness.
there remained a chorale of strings forming the most intensely beautiful harmonies, melting into one another, blending, growing, shading themselves, sculpted marble. An infinitely hopeful, beautiful heaven. Certain strangely sublime scenes from Cocteau's Orpheus came to mind.
these sounds grow -- beating dissonances from the winds, harmonic series, slow slides morph continually morph the farben of the strings. this grows to a massiveness of jagged bows running against the current in succession.
it's harsh, my body falls forward with the music
each step impending disaster
each step towards a neverending end
in the second darkness there is no more sensuality, only bleak absurdity.
the stair grows, the stair grows, approach, approach the higher and higher heights
louder Louder LOUDER LOUDER
i clutch myself in agony ecstasy
in one final flash the conductor faces us, the void
music regains movement, continues on with absurd journey. it steps down in rhythmic unison, this time tragic, uniformity terrible, endless acceleration, discrete steps, start where they end, cyclic, cylic, forever downward descent, flurries of the inception return, cyclic, cyclic, cyclic, cyclic, cyclic, infinite staircase, cycle cycle cycle cycle TAM TAM cycle cycle cyclecyclecyclecycle TAM TAM cyclecycclycyccycyccccccccyclecycle c y c l e c y c l e cycle cycle cycle cycle cycle cycle --
Evidently I’ve gone crazy and my hands are very sweaty and my face is flushed and I can’t really move.
There’s a philosophical narrative to in vain that is of a completely different nature from the spectralism of Grisey and Murail. It seeks not to create impressions, colors, as Debussy did, but to create a Wagnerian, Mahlerian drama. A novel, an absurdist play. En attendant Godot. Parsifal. Sisyphus.
It’s the same gravitas Schnittke creates with his painful macabre irony, it’s heart-wrenching rather than mind-expanding, introspective rather than transportive, cathartic rather than kairotic. A world away from Saariaho, also influenced by the spectral school.
The seamlessness of connections, the slowly morphing nature of the works’ material, the infinite absurdity of the notion of “step.” The beauty of the timbres invoked by the microtonality, like delicate sieves of every configuration. Though the effect is rarely visual, the tone colors create the iridescence of an insect wing or a thin film of oil.
This music is heavy with history, countless allusions, stories from the Hellenic to the postmodern, it is simple, a parable, but complexified by its nuance, dimensions limitless, close to my heart.
