From the Artistic Director

By Steven Schick

I had just listened to a new pressing of Bitches Brew and was putting the record away when I played a favorite game of mine: I imagined what the world looked and sounded like on the final day of those famous sessions when Miles and Wayne Shorter and Jack DeJohnette and the rest walked out of the Columbia Studios on 30th Street and into an August day in 1969. Cars were big and televisions were small. There must have been scattered conversations on the street about the moon landing and the war in Vietnam, but the hot topic was probably Woodstock. The heat of July had broken and out in Queens baseball fans sat in comfortable 70-degree temperatures as the Mets won a squeaker against the Giants.

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.

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Zone 3: inscription
Monday, February 27 · 8:00 pm · Herbst Theatre
Preconcert talk with Steven Schick at 7:15 p.m.
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Contemporary Insights: Music and Conversation
Sunday, February 26 · 4:30 pm · ODC Studio B
Iannis Xenakis's Palimpsest · Hosted by Steven Schick
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Conversation with the Composer: Michelle Lou

Stanford-based composer and bassist Michelle Lou discusses her new work paralipomena, commissioned by the Contemporary Music Players as a companion piece to music by Luigi Dallapiccola:


How did this idea of writing a companion piece first come about, and how was Dallapiccola's Piccola Musica Notturna chosen as the basis for it?

It was actually Steven Schick's idea. At first, I was asked to write a short trio with instrumentation of my choice. I asked if I could have more instruments and so he almost tripled it in size and asked me to create a companion piece to Dallapiccola's work, which was already scheduled for the program. I'm really glad that this was presented to me because it has become an opportunity for my compositional processes to go in directions not usual in my work.

What aspects of Dallapiccola’s piece were most intriguing to you during this project?

I began with the Antonio Machado poem he offers as a prelude of sorts in his score. I found a poem with a similar title by Machado, "Una Noche de Verano," and it begins similarly, however this poem speaks of the death of his young wife. This time the balcony door rather than the shutters is open, as in the first poem, and this time, death enters. The first poem, attached to Dallapiccola's work, is evocative of an empty village at night. One imagines the play of light and shadows and the weight of isolation and absence. In the second poem, we are perhaps in the same village, with the same subject, and the same summer night. But we get to know more, see more and experience the absence and solitude of death. With these texts, I went back to the music and decided to work with this idea of absence. Night as death. I thought my interpretation of 'night music' would follow this kind of darkness. I wanted my work to be intimately connected to his and so took the silences in his work as opportunities of expression in my work. Since the Dallapiccola will be played directly before mine, I imagine the sound image of his work bleeding into mine. I bring into the work other ghosts besides his: Bartok's night music and an elegy by Busoni.

How was your approach to composing paralipomena influenced by the fact that SFCMP will give the first performance? What is significant to you about premiering a piece here in the Bay Area?

I think its wonderful to be working in my own community. Since I arrived in the Bay Area five years ago, I've been attending SFCMP's concerts and never actually thought I would be given a commission by them! I have gotten to know some of its members and appreciate the dedication to new music that they have. One always feels trepidation working with new musicians, but I feel rather comfortable because I do know many of them and their openness to experimentation. Therefore I felt free to write whatever I wanted to.

Unlike Dallapiccola’s original piece, yours includes a variety of extended techniques for each instrument. Has your approach to using these techniques changed over time? Are there any compositional elements in paralipomena that you’ve never used before?

I suppose I don't consider them extended techniques anymore, in a way they've become rather standard, don't you think? Anyhow, I know what you mean. They're not making necessarily 'beautiful' noises. There are certain sounds that I gravitate to and have developed very basic graphical kinds of notations for them. Usually it's not until I meet with the musicians that I can actually clarify what it is that I hear. This obviously only works when I know that I will have time and the opportunity to even work with them. I'm sure my notation would change otherwise. There's also this question of over-notating. I feel like I can get the result that I desire by actually slightly under-notating a sound that is unpredictable in nature. As a performer myself, I enjoy the opportunity to interpret more open material.

In this piece, I've never written for harp before. It's a great way to have to learn an instrument, although I still have much to learn about it. Sometimes, one's limitations can actually lead to something really interesting. Well, possibly, I'm hoping this is the case with my harp writing.

In terms of compositional elements, the assignment to write a companion piece has really given me the priority to spend much more time researching and analyzing other music in preparation and to imagine what is a "companion piece"? I was grounded in a way that normally doesn't happen in a more freely conceived work. With this grounding, I found that I could allow some other voices to find their way into my piece. I've also never worked with form in this way before and it provided some very interesting challenges. Overall I hope it's a piece that does not or can not only function as a companion piece, but something that has created its own space, too.

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SFCMP will perform the world premiere of paralipomena, together with the chamber ensemble version of Dallapiccola's Piccola Musica Notturna, on Monday, February 27 as part of Zone 3: inscription.

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