 |
| By Steven Schick |
Music can do this – it can let us touch a bygone era with breathtaking directness. But listening to 1969 with a mind formed by 2012 is a complex process in which time folds back upon itself and we hear both past and present simultaneously. I hear the Chick Corea of 1969, but I also remember what he sounded like in San Diego last year. Ah, the alluring friction of history where our most recent stories are etched upon the re-usable manuscript of a palimpsest, a parchment that has been scraped imperfectly clean so that the inscriptions of past stories are still visible in and among the present ones.
The past lies close to the present in tonight’s concert also. Luigi Dallapiccola’s Piccola Musica Notturna, arguably the most beautiful twelve-tone work from the mid-20th century, alludes by means of its title to Mozart and his Eine kleine Nachtmusik and by means of its musical language to Bartók’s night music or even to Wagner. Its shimmering surface and lithe formal structure are, however, all Italian. For this occasion we have commissioned an emerging composer, Michelle Lou, to compose a companion piece. Creating a work that responds in specific to one of the great pieces of the modernist repertoire is no small challenge and, proving her mettle, Ms. Lou has found a fascinating point of entry. Her piece, paralipomena, which will follow Piccola Musica Notturna without pause, takes it title from the Greek for “things omitted from a text.” Ms. Lou’s piece is essentially a photographic negative of the Dallapiccola. Using an identical sequence of measures Lou zigs where Dallapiccola zagged; where Dallapiccola is silent, Lou is expressive and vice-versa. The result is a ghost-like revisitation of a piece of music, which is itself an eerie revisitation of earlier music.
Two more works form other historically provocative couplings. Salvatore Sciarrino’s Le Voci Sottovetro (The Voices Behind Glass) is a set of arrangements of Gesualdo. The highly chromatic music of Don Carlo Gesualdo sounds as much at home in the early 21st century as it did four hundred years ago, but the sound world with marimba, piano, and bass flute is purely contemporary. Unfortunately Gesualdo is as famous today for murdering his wife and her lover as he is for the intense expressivity of his music. But it is intensity we’re after tonight as we intersperse Sciarrino’s four short, plangent arrangements with poetry of Torquato Tasso, a contemporary of Gesualdo best known for his La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered). In another pairing across the centuries we present Pascal Dusapin’s Comœdia, a set of songs on texts of Dante. Here the musical language is late 20th century but the rhetorical point of departure is medieval Italy. It’s an electric pairing: of a lucid work of great compositional facility by an important late 20th century French composer with texts that are, with no exaggeration, not just foundational works of Italian literature, but arguably the foundations of the Italian language itself.
The historical gap, once the manageable span between Lou and Dallapiccola, has widened to four hundred years between Sciarrino and Gesualdo and then to nearly a thousand between Dusapin and Dante. A listener might be forgiven for feeling that she has a foot on each of two icebergs gradually floating apart and that her only sure fate will be to fall into an icy sea. And then comes Xenakis, a composer whose compass is not measured in years or even centuries, but in millennia. Iannis Xenakis was many things – architect, mathematician, revolutionary, composer, and to anyone who knew him, an ancient Greek exiled to the 20th century. Palimpsest, the defining music of this concert, is layering upon layering, epoch upon epoch, of the bewildering contradictions of Xenakis. Like the composer himself, the music is both intellectual and savage; both refined concert music and the visceral and terrible remains of ancient tragedy. The emotional gestures of the music are sweeping, but the rhythmic language is parsed in differences of a hundredth of a beat.
When I imagine Xenakis walking out onto the street after a recording session I don’t know whether to picture 20th century Paris or Athens in the 5th century, B.C. But I have long since stopped trying to understand Xenakis; I am simply happy to take up residence in a musical world that is often generous and sometimes cruel, a world in which past and present are inseparable and a listener is often caught between them.
--
Zone 3: inscription
Monday, February 27 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Preconcert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
More information
Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, February 26 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B
Iannis Xenakis's Palimpsest · Hosted by Steven Schick
More information
