Ukrainian piano miniatures

My ongoing interest in piano miniatures has led me from Mompou and Scriabin to the Ukrainian composer/pianist Valentin Silvestrov. Born in Kiev in 1937, Silvestrov's earliest compositions date from the late 1950s, many for solo piano. Reportedly written in a modernist style characteristic of the musical upheavels elsewhere in Europe and performed at Darmstadt along with the other luminaries of the time, they nevertheless sat poorly with the reactionary Russian musical establishment. They remain largely unrecorded to this day, and are not currently available in printed form either. Briefly expelled from the USSR Composers Union, Silvestrov withdrew from the limelight in the early 1970s, when he began using more expressive melodies and moving away from a strict twelve-tone approach. Although he continued to write extroverted works like symphonies (eight so far), he also began a series of pieces for private performance, designed to play at home. As his fame grew and the regime relaxed his travel prohibitions, these private pieces appeared somewhat sporadically in his catalog, but in the last decade or so, they have taken a more prominent place in his output. Although Silvestrov never made a career from piano performance like other composer-pianists, he features the instrument prominently, with both solo piano works and expansive pieces for piano and orchestra spread across his entire career. His publisher, M. P. Belaieff (coincidentally also Scriabin's), has recently issued compilations of these short pieces written for solo piano.

Silvestrov considers these pieces generally as bagatelles, but if I had to pick is a single word to describe them, it would be elegiac. Largely diatonic melodies with sparse and resonant accompaniments, Silvestrov betrays his avant-garde origins only through extremely specific notation, and even occasional use of the inside of the piano. Several different kinds of accents punctuate his phrases, and frequent tempo changes, often several in a single measure, are precisely specified, paradoxically creating a natural and organic rhythmic flow. His pedal markings get just as much attention as the rest. Nearly all of these pieces use the soft pedal throughout, and he holds the sustain pedal for several measures at a time, reiterating to the pianist not to change the pedal, even when the harmony changes around him. "The harmonies overlay and supersede each other," he writes frequently in Oral Music, a set from the late 1990s. He even notates a pedal vibrato, which I've never seen in any other piano music. The only comparable pedal markings I've ever seen are in Pierre Boulez's Third Sonata, a monster of a piece whose pedal markings are among the most frightening in the literature (and inaudible on most recordings, but that's for another post). And yet, these bagatelles are highly approachable, requiring great musical sensitivity without much traditional virtuosity.

Belaieff has collected a number of Silvestrov's piano works into three volumes arranged chronologically, a convenience not often available for score keepers of living composers. In addition, the thirteen bagatelles that Silvestrov performed on the lovely ECM album Bagatellen und Serenaden were published separately a couple of years after the recording was released. On the recording, Silvestrov performed the pieces from memory, selecting these thirteen from a much larger pool that he carries in his head. He probably wrote them down almost as a marketing tie-in with the recording, although to Belaieff's credit, other than the collection's title Bagatellen there's nothing on the cover to tie the two together. But the score reveals much that the album left shrouded. Where the recording has thirteen numbered Bagatelles, the score divides them into five separate cycles, with occasional titles to both suites and individual pieces. And for all the harmonic and chromatic richness of these brief pieces, only one of the thirteen has a key signature; the others appear to be in C Major, tonality of all white keys. This deception is one of Silvestrov's strengths, because for all of the pretty melodies and triadic harmonies, the progressions are anything but classically tonal. They wander all over the gamut, repeating anything from short motifs to longer phrases to whole sections, then suddenly stop with a slow arpeggio parked some distance from the last lingering resonance. Most unusually, the score labels the suites "opus 1 - 5," perhaps designating them as a new beginning after all of the other, more complex, music that he composed over the previous four decades.

One of the forms to which Silvestrov is repeatedly drawn is the postlude, by tradition a musical conclusion, such as the organ piece at the end of a church service. Characterized by calm and tranquillity, postludes also place themselves in time, and in Silvestrov's case, the time period is the entire history of western art music. He frequently revisits music from the past, finding elliptical and wayward sources for his reminiscences. For example, one of his pieces is based on a waltz by Franz Schubert composed for a friend's wedding in 1826 but never written down. It survived through oral transmission in the friend's family for generations until composer Richard Strauss wrote it down in 1943 and became widely known only in 1970 when Universal Edition published it in facsimile. The Wedding Waltz is in G-flat major, and although Schubert was fond of strange and unexplainable harmonies, the concluding G-flat in the melody is harmonized by a conventional G-flat major arpeggio. Silvestrov follows Schubert almost note for note until this cadence, where instead of G-flat major, he moves to D major, pivoting on the G-flat/F-sharp enharmonic equivalent. The effect is somewhat startling, but beautiful, and skirts the conclusion associated with a final cadence. Schubert's waltz is in a simple A-B-A form; Silvestrov sends everything around one more time, as if one repetition is insufficient to bridge the distance between 1826 and 2002. The second time through, the sound is fuller through the use of octaves in the bass and a shift in the melody that relegates some of the original melody to a harmonic role, and brings out notes that were originally in the background. The last time through, he lets the melodic phrases linger through a precisely notated rubato, altering the meter to let the tempo slow down, the heartbeat and breathing becoming more serene. Each retelling introduces slight variations in the melody and harmony, so the pianist can never become complacent or stop paying attention, which is part of what makes this such superb music to perform. Silvestrov's everpresent injunction, "listening into," is essential.

Silvestrov's exposure in the west has come largely through the efforts of Manfred Eicher, whose ECM label has issued seven albums devoted to Silvestrov since 2002, continuing their interest in more approachable Eastern European composers that also includes Arvo Pärt and Giya Kancheli. I first heard Silvestrov's music on pianist Alexei Lubimov's recital disc Der Bote, a superb set of ten piano elegies spanning three centuries. Despite my arcane iPod rotation practices, this one stayed there for a long time, until I finally had to pursue more recordings, and, ultimately, the scores. But the only recording devoted entirely to Silvestrov's piano music is by Jenny Lin, a sensitive and virtuosic performer of idiosyncratic repertoire whom I've written about before. Lin's recital comprises mostly Silvestrov's recent work, with the majority of the pieces composed since 1996 (and published in Volume III of his collected piano works). The exception is the penultimate piece, his first piano sonata from 1972, which functions as an echo of Silvestrov's roots in the avant-garde. Its sparse, resonant character and meandering melodies show the continuity between his earliest and his most recent compositions, even as it occasionally blossoms into dissonant, florid gestures.

Lin's recital is a clearer recording than Silvestrov's own performances on ECM, which were recorded in a church rather than a studio and which trade the building's glorious natural reverberation for a more controlled crispness. But Bagatellen und Serenaden has its own impeccable sequencing, moving from Silvestrov's performance to a series of arrangements of some piano pieces for strings, both with and without piano. The pianist on the ensemble pieces is Alexei Lubimov, who has remained one of Silvestrov's champions, and appears on other ECM Silvestrov recordings for piano and orchestra. With the addition of the strings, the sense of longing inherent in the melodies is heightened, and the natural resonance of the strings adds weight to the harmonies of the piano. Both albums include lovely versions of the Schubert Wedding Waltz, Lin with the solo version and Lubimov with the version for strings.

Whether due to lingering barriers between the former Soviet republics and the English-speaking world, or simply because Silvestrov is still active, there isn't enough written in English about him. The leading authorities on his music are all Russian, and writings from the apparently acknowledged expert, Tatjana Frumkis, as far as I can determine are only available in translation as liner notes. Wikipedia is pretty bare bones, and Silvestrov's page at a generally excellent Soviet Composer's site has little biographical information and hasn't really been updated in a while. Schott Music distributes his scores in the west. Lin's recital and the various ECM recordings are available just about anywhere, including the electronic retailers, but in all cases without the liner notes (which, especially for the ECM albums, are extensive).

Silvestrov photo by Victor Marushchenko.

The Visionary Dead

Recently I stumbled across a fascinating article in the Atlantic on the Grateful Dead's archive, which they donated to the University of California Santa Cruz a few years ago. One of my family has supported the archive since before its inception, so I'm very pleased to see it getting such positive attention. The article points out what truly visionary business people the Dead were, with behavior that seemed crazy at the time but which is now only starting to become mainstream, and which business scholars call "strategic improvisation" (sounds like a description of John Zorn's game pieces). Creating a cohesive community without regard for geography is another example, with parallels to internet-based communities that came along much later. Regardless of how one feels about their music, the Dead are a superb example of adaptability that is missing from most of the music industry.

New Reviews at Furthernoise

I have two reviews in the February 2010 issue of Furthernoise.org: Extended Night, an EP by Dining Needle, an ambienteer from the Seattle area; and Anthropology, Vol. 1 from Loren Dent, on Infraction. Sound samples and more information at furthernoise.org.

Still more notation

The more time I spend looking at alternate musical notation, the more I come to Graham Collier's statement about jazz: all that matters is the performance. Notation always leaves something out, although classical musicologists might like to think otherwise. Recent entries around the blogosphere provide more evidence, or at least food for consideration.

Composer, educator and writer Kyle Gann had a crise de conscience a few weeks ago, publicly wondering why he persisted with blogging. Heartened by comments, he found that one reason to continue was to share a wealth of music that's not in general circulation and "whose score notation, if it exists at all, doesn't adequately represent it." This is a long post, with musical examples — both scores and mp3s — from Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Mikel Rouse, David First and Glenn Branca. Money quote:

Perhaps we can begin by de-fetishizing the printed score and admitting that it is only a tool, and not always a complete or even necessary tool, that it can sometimes be thrown away once the music exists.

One of the comments to this post calls the faith in notation "scriptism" and points out that it already represents the minority practice in contemporary music.

Meanwhile, over at the Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson is engaged in a three-part round table discussion with members of the ELISION ensemble and associated composers (Liza Lim, Richard Barrett and Evan Johnson). Part one focuses on interpretation, and the participants present the their multiple perspectives. I especially liked Johnson's statement that the goal of composition is "to present a textured and bounded space for interpretation." I'm not terribly familiar with the ensemble or its composers — a cursory listen makes me think they incline towards more complex music than I usually like. Part two of the discussion aims at extra-musical influences and whether they foster the creation of a new program music; the ever-fascinating conceptual composer Peter Ablinger features heavily here. Part three went up this morning, dealing with Klaus K. Hübler and radical instrumentalism, but I haven't had time to digest this part yet. All worth reading.

Another view on composition

An ongoing theme of this blog is the nature of a musical work, especially in light of the radical modifications to that concept since World War II. Most of the musicians I've discussed in this context so far have come from the classical tradition, with its strict dichotomy of score and performance. Jazz comes from a completely different background, yet its contrasting compositional practice has approached a parallel that has much in common with Cage and Wolff, despite obvious differences in musical language and instrumental techniques. Graham Collier's recent book, The Jazz Composer: Moving Music Off The Paper, acts like a frame for a consideration of classical open form works, a boundary between two completely different traditions that reveals an unusual perspective on graphic and open scores.

One shared characteristic is that compositions are written with specific performers in mind. Jazz band leaders starting with Duke Ellington (Collier's pioneering example of a jazz composer) wrote their music with the individual characteristics of their players in mind. Similarly for the classical avant-garde, many composers had performer-muses whose unique musical talent contributed to some kind of virtuosic breakthrough (Cage and Tudor, Berio and Berberian). We wouldn't have anywhere near the amount of piano music from the avant-garde of the 1950s and 1960s without David Tudor. But the downside was that the composer wouldn't always get the imagined and desired results. Stockhausen wrote his open works in the 1960s with his ensemble in mind, and complained when his intuitive music was performed badly by others. Morton Feldman reportedly quit writing scores on graph paper because they were so often poorly interpreted.

Feldman's experience is a reminder that music is created by the people playing it, that it can be played well or poorly, but it must be performed to be experienced. While this statement may be a tautology to a jazz fan, it's one of the biggest differences between jazz and classical composition; the latter grants compositions an independent existence and generally higher value than performances thereof. It's true that classical compositions have an intricate set of relationships that can be expressed notationally, and studied both as a compositional example and for spectator appreciation. Open form compositions are often closer to the jazz perspective than the classical one, where the audible results are all there is, without some imagined ideal creating the shadow on the wall. The classical paradigm permits these scores to be published and thereby made available to other performers, who may have no direct connection to the composer. Having improvisation at its core, jazz has not progressed down the publication path, so our only examples of jazz scores are those that the composers choose to share, generally on his or her website. Transcriptions of jazz performances are very common, but not to be confused with the original compositions, and meaningless for an understanding of the nature of the work itself.

Collier states at the outset that for jazz composers, all that matters is the performance. Some classical open scores are beautiful pictures in and of themselves — I have pages from Cage's Concert for piano framed and hanging in my studio. But despite admiration for visual scores like Takemitsu's Corona, the whole point is to inspire the performer to create a performance that could not be obtained any other way. Cage deliberately composed so that he could be surprised by the results, accepting the risk that the surprise might not be pleasant. We're also distracted by looking for form in open scores, when the form is what is audible in the results. In jazz as well as contemporary classical, the target audience of an open form composition is the performer, who must put his own substantial creativity and vision into the results to create a meaningful statement for an audience (even if the audience is only the performer himself).

Some of Collier's other elements, such as appropriate space for musical events, and levels of interaction that divide the listener's attention, are applicable to a lot of the music on my shelves. Markedly, they don't apply to testosterone-laden bop solos, always in the same order and over an unvarying rhythm section, designed to show off instrumentalist's technical chops. He has considerably more sympathy with classical composers than a jazz language that was surpassed definitively in 1959 when Miles Davis released Kind of Blue, epitomizing what Collier calls "the revolutionary decade." Gil Evans, Ornette Coleman, and Charles Mingus are the other stars from this seminal period. Collier acknowledges their influences for his own compositions, which he uses to illustrate some of the specifics (with audio examples at the book's website). Paralleling his disdain for most contemporary mainstream jazz figures, few other living composers other than Coleman and himself get more than a passing allusion.

In addition to the technical material, The Jazz Composer is entertaining because of Collier's polemics. He despises the reactionary jazz stance taken by Wynton Marsalis and others connected with the uptown Lincoln Center version of "Jazz," and anyone who wants to put jazz performances in a museum. He tackles jazz education as one of the primary culprits in maintaining bop in its privileged position. He confronts many of the jazz prejudices head on, addressing biases against Europeans, gays and women. Amusing sidebars aside, Collier writes as a practitioner, from the inside, addressing musical topics beyond the insular world of jazz.

Suite Concrete

From the earliest examples of musique concrète, practitioners have started from instrumental rather than environmental sounds, taking samples from sympathetic performers as the origin for their electroacoustic works. Although environmental and field recordings become more prevalent in recent years, in the mid-1990s composers like John Wall re-initiated the use of instrumental fragments. Wall's earliest work originates almost entirely with short, nearly recognizable snippets of commercial recordings, as if his compositions sought a performance practice that the diverse set of sampled musicians could not produce together. Partially because his methods inadvertently lumped him with plunderphonics, his more recent releases have avoided pre-released material, or at least made it completely unrecognizable and unacknowledged, in favor of live recordings which he then manipulates in the studio.

Wall retained connections with the British free improvisation community, so his musician sources perform on piano, double bass, and trumpet. Adam Sonderberg (also a member of Haptic) and Salvatore Dellaria's project the Dropp Ensemble also works with musician sources, but the credits on their recent album Safety also include open circuits, oscillator, treatments — obscure and elliptical sounds from the outset. Their stable of fifteen contributors (plus six more musicians credited for "Research and Development") includes noted improvisers Jason Kahn, Tomas Korber and Christian Weber. For the various and sundry electronics and synthesizers, one is hard pressed to identify any individual contribution on the four tracks that comprise this set. But one of the unifying factors is how Sonderberg and Dellaria incorporate acoustic instruments, often leaving them identifiable, anchors that focus the listeners attention amidst the background noise. The authors are reticent about their methods as far as I can find, but the album notes that the contributions were recorded around the globe, and they confirmed to Richard Pinnell that the musical fragments were assembled in their studio, solely by the duo.

The four pieces pace themselves together extremely well, starting a trajectory from the amuse-bouche Inlet leading to the slow pace that begins Everywhere Present and Nowhere Visible. Levels of activity bubble up to the surface, each level with its own rhythm and frequency level, and each has its own story to tell. There are three fairly distinct sections, and it almost sounds like the same source with different treatments underpins each one. What sounded like fast drum beats gets progressively slower and drier, until the last silence leads to Vernacular Rooms. Here, the frequency spectrum is much wider, a clattering, rich sound with hidden layers of static. As Weber's bass was briefly identifiable on Inlet, so Jason Stein's bass clarinet becomes a focal point guiding the listener through the abstract rattling. The clarinet's long, sustained tones provide a slow moving harmony at the piece's core, but the outer layers are very active throughout. The noise and static suddenly become background, revealing the previously hidden gentle murmuring.

The suite's conclusion, Forget Collapse, starts with a thunderclap, a wide hissing environment like the rain, and high pitched sine waves from Everywhere Present circle the sound field. Individual percussion strokes on bells, sticks and drums, appear like beacons in the mist, adding an urgency mitigated by the occasional lingering gong or cymbal stroke. A transitional hihat stroke extends endlessly to an extended white noise with individual elements and frequencies gradually isolating themselves. Slowly evolving into a metallic and noisy drone, a brief window shows the quiet white noise and tape hiss that has been subliminally present all along, and to which the suite will slowly ebb.

Besides the integrating presence of acoustic instruments, I hear these pieces as a suite because of sound elements that recur across the set. As shimmering high sine waves in the finale recall the earlier suggestives ones in Vernacular Rooms, a few persistent sounds provide a foundation for the countless sonic variations and unique, abstract gestures. The relatively short length, just over a half hour, gives Safety an opportunity to be heard as a whole, more than a collection of four disparate pieces, a rare example of an electroacoustic suite that really hangs together. Safety is available directly from and/OAR as well as creative distributors worldwide.

Adios 2009!

It's that time again, to look back and reflect on the music and events from the past twelve months. Staggeringly, I acquired almost twice as much new music this year compared to 2008, largely through the discovery of web sites and blogs that make available bootleg radio broadcasts. This had the unfortunate side effect of reducing the number of netlabel releases that I was able to absorb, because there are only so many hours in the day. However, it also had the impact of increasing the amount of contemporary classical music I heard, since most of the boots were otherwise unrecorded new music. A somewhat depressing consequence is that I looked over the list, and several times asked myself, what's that? I don't remember anything about that one!

Another shift in my listening habits, especially in the last quarter of the year, is that I've started listening more to CDs than downloads. I've been a staunch advocate for downloads for years, and even got into a bit of a flamefest on the ambient mailing list on the subject. And yet, it bothers me that I listen so much to downloaded music in preference to recordings that cost considerably more than the downloads, and which sit largely forgotten on the shelf. This change in attitude is perhaps a response to emusic's two-pronged price increase, not only charging 40% more per download, but forcing the use of twelve credits for an album if the album has any tracks longer than ten minutes. Even though I've kept my subscription, and even though I recognize that paying a quarter for an album is unfair, the luster has fallen off the pumpkin with this service.

Albums that made an impression this year (album links to reviews I wrote) include:

• Sleepy Town Manufacture and Unit 21 — No Traces (Infraction)
• Library Tapes — Fragment (Kning)
• Colin Andrew Sheffield — Signatures (Invisible Birds)
• Steinbrüchel — Sustain (Koyuki)
• Saito Koji — Time/Line (Resting Bell), freely available
• Haptic — The Medium (FSS)
• Gregg Kowalsky — Tape Chants (Kranky)
• Mara's Torment — Tactile (Ping Things), freely available
• Richard Garet and Brendan Murray — Of Distance (Unframed)
• Jasper TX — Black Sleep
• Carbon Based Lifeforms — World of Sleepers (Ultimae)
• SunnO))) — Monoliths and Dimensions (Southern Lord)
• Andrea Neumann — Pappelallee 5 (Absinth)
• John Cage — Dream (Wergo)
• Gavin Bryars, Philip Jeck and Alter Ego — The Sinking of the Titanic (Touch)
• Berliner Bach Akademie — The Art of Fugue (Arte Nova), a very nice arrangement for four different quartets
• Celer — Brittle (Low Point)
• Jason Kahn — Timelines NY (CONV), a freely available version of a piece that Kahn has released on CD with other performers, and with the score on the website as well
• Chant, Davies, Drew & Edwards — Decentered (Another Timbre), improvisations plus two pieces by Michael Pisaro and a beautiful version of John Cage's Four 6, for four players using any way of producing sounds
• Thomas Köner — La Barca (Fario)
• Jozef van Wissem — A Priori (Incunabulum), but freely available at Ubu Web
• Ólafur Arnalds — Found Songs (Erased Tapes), freely available
• Balmorhea — All is Wild, All is Silent (Western Vinyl)
• Greg Haines — Komarovo (Slaapwel)
• Radu Malfatti & Klaus Filip — Imaoto (Erstwhile)
• Dropp Ensemble — Safety (and/OAR)
• Jon Balke — Book of Velocities (ECM)
• Parks — Hidden (Infraction)

I eagerly look forward to the new music of 2010, and wish everyone a happy and safe new year.