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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
March 10, 2006
"Since I was becoming disenchanted with electronic devices, largely because of their mechanical sounding rhythms and pitches and the lack of bodily involvement in making music with them, I began to think instead of simply holding down individual notes longer and longer on an organ. Instead of the digital clock to count...I began to think of a musician playing a steady pulse with maracas which the organist could then count together from."
Steve Reich is describing the genesis of Four Organs, a remarkable work from 1970 in which the players gradually stretch out a dominant 11th chord from a single beat at the work's opening to something over 200 beats by the close.
This rarely-heard work provided one of the highlights in an evening of highlights, courtesy of the UVic Sonic Lab: more specifically, organists Jeff Morton, Jonathan Crellin, Gillian Lemire-Elmore and Susu Robin, together with maracas-player (OK, you tell me the correct term) Nicholas Jacques.
Many of the audience accepted Christopher Butterfield's suggestion that they move around in the auditorium to experience the changing soundscape. For myself I was content to immerse myself in Reich's fascinatingly audible process - and enjoy the visual signals by which the players communicated.
I can think of few more thankless tasks than playing the constant maracas beat, yet Jacques maintained his steady rhythm with commendable imperturbability. Actually, I can think of just one even more thankless task: providing the octave pulse for Terry Riley's In C, which lasts three times as long (trust me, I've done it).
Reich's music from this period is endlessly fascinating and it was a real treat to hear Four Organs live. I don't suppose there's any chance of Drumming?
"The inclusion...of rigidly scored conventional harmonies is a matter of taste, from which a conscious control was absent." "It's a kind of music which doesn't depend on your likes and dislikes."
1950 was a crucial year for John Cage, in many ways marking the divide between his earlier, written-out music and the later, chance-derived scores. The String Quartet in Four Parts, about which Cage made the remarks quoted above, was premiered in August of that year. In the words of Cage's biographer, David Revill, "Cage had an intuition of where his work was going, but did not yet know the legend which would let him clarify it in thought and exploit it in action."
Cage's quartet - marvellously played by Erin van Kooten, Hollas Longton, Graham Percival and Jackie Fay - was the major work in the first half of the evening.
Perhaps surprisingly, especially to those whose image of Cage has been formed by his later work, there was a distinctly American feel to the music, as if Cage had somehow been channelling the spirits of Copland (not that he was actually dead at the time) and even Charles Ives - albeit through his own unique sensibilities.
The entire work is played without vibrato, which gives even the more conventional harmonies a distinctly eerie feel. In the quicker finale the Native American-inspired rhythmic pattern which informs the entire work became apparent, revealing the music's connection with the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano.
Lou Harrison's Suite for Cello and Piano opened the second half of the evening, in a fine, committed performance by Rachel Capon and Allie Picketts. The flowing opening movement and the toccata-like finale were excellent, but the emotional heart of the work (and the performance) is the elegiac slow movement, here deeply felt and intensely played.
Helmut Lachenmann may very well have been the one name on the programme which many audience members did not recognise. Despite having been born in 1935, his music has only begun to achieve the recognition it surely deserves in the last decade or so - and then primarily in Europe.
Wiegenmusik, from 1963, shows Lachenmann already extracting previously unsuspected sonorities from conventional instruments (a notable trait of his music) - in this case the piano; the actual thematic material is less important than the sounds created by internal resonance.
Jeeyeon Ryu gave the work - which is short and admirably to the point - a marvellously fluid performance, which confirmed my own opinion (formed at a concert in London last year) that Lachenmann is definitely The Real Thing.
To quote the composer himself, at the close of "...zwei Gefühle...," Musik mit Leonardo: Wun...der...bar!
The habit of giving non-musical names to pieces of music, so prevalent in the 20th century, may well have begun with Erik Satie; although he arguably took the notion of irrelevant titles further than any of his successors.
In the Trois morceaux en forme de poire - still one of Satie's best-known titles - his irreverence extends beyond the merely pear-shaped: Trois morceaux is actually in seven sections and, of these, only the first and the first page of the third seem to have been composed specifically; the remainder comprises music composed over a period of some thirteen years.
Pianists Nina Horvath and Michelle Chattaway opened Friday's concert with a fine performance of the three (or seven) pieces, which still retain their power to surprise, even if they no longer shock. Rhythms were nicely pointed and the duo's playing had a suitable air of colourful detachment - Satie is rarely, if ever, emotional.
To close, we had the spectacle of three computers in action, in Four-guns, a "re-interpolation" (is that really what they meant?) "of data from" Reich's Four Organs, by Kirk McNally, Adam Tindale and Jeff Morton - who also operated the computers.
I confess I was not quite sure what to make of this. Reich's chord was present (occasionally) and correct, as were some moderately interesting electronic effects.
But quite what the connection was I could not really say. Happily the trio resisted the temptation to make their "re-interpolation" as long as the original. A work in progress, perhaps?
Another outstanding concert from the Sonic Lab, who have never yet let me down.
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