Other Minds Festivals ➔ Other Minds Festival: OM 7: Artist Forum and Concert 2, March 9, 2001 (video), 1 of 4
Digital Moving Image
Event Type
Lectures and Panel DiscussionsOrigin
Other MindsIdentifier
OMF.2001.03.09.c2.AProgram Series
Other Minds FestivalProgram Length
162 minPart
1 of 4Dates
| broadcast| 2001-03-09 | created
Description
The second concert of the 7th Other Minds Festival of New Music (OM 7), held on March 9, 2001, at the Cowell Theater of the Fort Mason Center, in San Francisco, began with a panel discussion featuring a number of the Festival’s featured composers and performers, moderated by Other Minds Executive and Artistic Director, Charles Amirkhanian. During this fascinating group discussion, Alvin Curran describes his “Inner Cities” a series of pieces of piano music, as “no frills music” that inhabits his heart in a manner that is quite unlike the more collaborative improvisations and electro-acoustic amalgamations for which he is perhaps better known. Composer and jazz pianist Andrew Hill then talks about his own work for solo piano which he composed while ensconced in an Italian palace and describes it as both a portrait of a fellow resident but perhaps more importantly also of himself. Korean composer HI Kyung Kim relates how the idea for her work “Rituel” was inspired by a Korean shamanistic ceremony and a percussion and dance performance by Eun-Ha Park. Percussionist William Winant, talks about the Kim piece, what it was like to spend several days with fellow percussionist Glen Velez during the retreat held prior to the Festival, as well as his work with a variety of avant-garde rock groups such as Sonic Youth and Oingo Boingo. Jim Tenney then describes the structure of the four pieces of his to be performed later in the evening, two of which were in just intonation and one which has a graphic score in the shape of a pear.In part two of this program the concert begins with:
Fiddle Music First Suite
Cavalcanti [excerpts]
Born in Hailey, Idaho, in 1885, Ezra Pound earned a degree from Hamilton College in 1905 and briefly taught at Wabash College before traveling to Europe, where he spent most of his formative years. In the early teens of the 20th century, he opened a seminal exchange of work and ideas between British and American writers such as W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, and especially T.S. Eliot, for whom he helped reconstruct and edit The Waste Land. It was at this time in Europe that Pound also became interested in Japanese and Chinese poetry. From this poetry, Pound derived and promoted Imagism, a movement in poetry stressing clarity, precision, an economy of language, and foregoing traditional rhyme and meter. In 1920, Pound began composing; His music pursued the rationale of matching speech rhythms to the musical melodic line in a spare style reminiscent of Provencal folk music mixed with an aesthetic deriving from Antheil and Stravinsky. His repertoire includes two operas, “Le Testament de Villon” and “Cavalcanti,” as well as a body of solo violin music, including “Frottola” (an antique musical form), “Al poco giorno,” and “Fiddle Music First Suite.”
Pound's iconoclastic music can be compared to that of his American contemporary Charles Ives. Both composers subjected melody to sophisticated techniques of juxtaposition and layering, Pound shaping melody with literary contours and Ives with harmonic and contrapuntal textures. Each experimented with a combination of different genres concentrated in a single complex work—Ives incorporating hymns, folk tunes, ballads and minstrelsy, as well as instrumental pieces; Pound drawing from a vocal matrix of plain chant, homophony, troubadour melodies, bel canto and nineteenth century opera clichés, and from 20th century polyrhythms and cabaret style singing.
Sonata No. 1
In 1923, Ezra Pound commissioned from George Antheil two sonatas as a vehicle for Pound's companion, the noted Irish-American violinist Olga Rudge. Inspired by Rudge's wild and intense artistry, Antheil produced both sonatas inside of four months. After completing the first movement of the First Sonata, Antheil returned from a visit to Tunis, determined to get beyond its "Les Noces" sound. To whatever extent Antheil succeeded in this, the modernist devices in the “Sonata No. 1” went well beyond Stravinsky's idiom. Antheil's tone clusters, complex irrational meters, additive silence, and distortion of timbre had first appeared in America around 1915 in the music of Henry Cowell and Leo Ornstein, but Antheil had to invent notations for such techniques for which there is still no standardized notation. - Ron Erickson
The third part of the program continues with:
Chorale
Diaphonic Toccata
3 Pages in the Shape of a Pear
“3 Pages in the Shape of a Pear” presents the pianist with three pointillist images of a pear, without notes, musical symbols, or any directions whatsoever. In this way, the music is all and only shape, that is, visual shape, with the various parameters of sound devised by the performer. But in addition to the long and fruitful (pardon the pun) tradition of graphic scores, Tenney is of course working, tongue-in-cheek, with the classical precedent of Erik Satie's Morceaux en forme de poire (Pieces in the form of a pear) from 1903. This kind of ironic distance and reference occurring simultaneously reappears closer to home in the “Diaphonic Toccata” (dedicated to Ruth Crawford Seeger) and “Chorale,” compositionally separated by over 20 years and contrasting dramatic gestures—the former a confrontation (or reconciliation?) between the piano's reckless furioso and the violin's calming, lingering stream of melody, and the latter where the piano's deep, resonating, dirge-like chords cut into the violin's melody with a surprisingly literal emotionalism—but which share not only a sense of experimentation and harmonic language reminiscent of Henry Cowell, but also a symmetrical, arch-like classical structure.
Shape, balance, reference, distance, equilibrium, symmetry, contrast, form. These are the particulars of a creative approach that reconstructs its own relationship to the traditional values of classicism, one which brings a mathematical conscience to free will, explores the transformation from conception to perception, and celebrates the dialectical tension that results. This is James Tenney's music.
- Art Lange
Diaphonic Trio
For the last 25 years, I have been engaged in an effort to redefine "harmony," and to renew the process of harmonic evolution, which had come to a halt in Western music in about 1910. This effort inevitably involved working with pitch systems other than 12-tone equal temperament, which had been the unchallenged standard in Western music since the Baroque era. In this “Diaphonic Trio” for violin and piano (it is a "trio" because the left and right hand piano parts are always treated as two separate "voices") I have tried to combine with this concern for harmony my fascination with two other essential threads of development in earlier 20th century music. These were chromatic saturation and dissonance—especially as these conditions were exemplified in the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern in Vienna, and Charles Ives, Edgard Varèse, Carl Ruggles, Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger in the United States. The piano is tuned to a non-tempered 12-note scale based on the harmonic series of a low F, and the same set of pitches is used in the violin part as well, notated in the score by numbers above each note indicating its deviation in cents, or hundredths of a tempered semitone, from the corresponding note in equal temperament.
Diaphonic Trio was commissioned by Sabat/Clarke with the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. - James Tenney
Rituel
“Rituel” is written in memory of two of my dear friends, who were born in the same year: Ok-Koo Kang Grosjean, a poet whose heart was pure and passionate, and Marnie Dilling, a Catholic sister and ethnomusicologist in Korean music who was a faculty member at the University of California, San Diego. Both passed away from illness too soon, much before their time. Marnie and I both studied with the Korean percussion teacher, Eun-Ha Park, for whom this pieces is written and who is performing tonight. This piece is meant to represent an actual shamanistic ceremony, with the intention to speed my friends on their journey to heaven.
The role of the Korean Dancer, Eun-Ha Park, is one of a shaman who performs a spiritual ritual. the piece has three sections, one of which carries the grief and sadness (represented by the cloth the dancer carries) for the loss of the dear souls, one which is stage of trance (the cloth aside, to symbolize the casting aside of grief. The next section, the experience of shamanic possession, is supported by the chang-go (drum). The use of the kwoang-gari (small gong) is employed to represent the experience of heavenly exultation. The instrumental ensemble serves to aid the dancer in moving through these divine experiences by means of their notated accompaniment as well as improvisational sections. In addition, the performers experience the spiritual contact along with the dancer through the experience of “breathing together,” that is, the performance of the music together.
The work is scored for Korean percussion choreography, Western percussionist, violin, cello, and clarinet doubling bass clarinet. - Hi Kyung Kim
The participation of Eun-Ha Park was made possible in part by the support of the Asian Cultural Council
The program concludes in part four with the last five minutes of “Rituel”
Note: The sound drops out briefly during “3 Pages in the Shape of a Pear” and in “Rituel.”
Genres
New musicSubjects
New musicAcknowledgment
Digitized by the California Audiovisual Preservation Project (CAVPP) supported in part by the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, administered in California by the State Librarian.Related Event
Other Minds Festival 7Related place
San Francisco (Calif.) (was recorded at)Related Entities
Other Minds FestivalAmirkhanian, Charles
Curran, Alvin S., 1938-
Tenney, James
Kim, Hi Kyung
Hill, Andrew, 1931-2007
Winant, William