Over a period of three
years in the late 1970s Edvard Lieber
created an intense set of piano works
inspired by the painted media. He performs
his complete output in this discipline
here with a forthrightness and dedication
that shows something of the strength
he drew from the original imagery.
The works’ form is
pared down to essentials, both in terms
of content and length, with the brevity
of the De Kooning Preludes making
one think of each as a kind of musical
haiku – the shortest is 31", the
longest a comparatively substantial
1’28". Yet for all their individual
brevity the pieces themselves form a
challenging set. The disc’s title deliberately
uses the word ‘music’, though much of
the content would be just as aptly described
as ‘sound art’, as its effect seems
to be to create aural atmospheres in
response to the various visual stimuli
selected by Lieber.
As composer and pianist
Lieber has an impressive pedigree –
he studied the former with Xenakis,
the latter with Horowitz, among others.
Also active as a painter and film-maker
(with a series of films on artists such
as Bernstein, Cage, Rauschenberg, Warhol
and de Kooning), this has led to him
being called "An American Renaissance
man [of] fearless individuality".
His work is individual, though he is
hardly alone in being a composer-artist:
Schoenberg and Cage particularly come
to mind – and one can sense Cage’s ghost
most notably in Small Decoy and
Tomb of Hasegawa. Indeed, all the
works more generally reflect concerns
in visual and music thought prevalent
at the time in the United States.
Should anyone be unused
to such aural challenges as are presented
by this disc, the best starting point
is the booklet. In his text David Giese
takes the reader on a swift tour of
composers through musical history whose
work has been imbued with visual associations,
painters that have contributed notable
works on musical themes and composers
who have responded to visual art. This
is followed by notes on all the artists
that concern us here, together with
their relevant works, which are reproduced
as monochrome illustrations. It’s a
slight pity perhaps that the illustrations
are not in colour, as one cannot see
exactly how much correlation their might
be between visual colours and subtleties
of aural tones and textures. (Also note
that some 24 endnotes are given to the
main booklet text – making the whole
appear more a miniature academic essay).
All of this is not
entirely out of place with Lieber’s
music, for there is much evidence that
his response to the works is as much
intellectually stimulated as springing
from momentary reaction. In 1979 he
claimed that he was "not aiming
at a literal translation. I look at
time as the canvas and sound as the
paint". Any intellectually induced
difficulty in this statement was probably
only to his liking.
Each of the De Kooning
Preludes addresses a different
aspect of painterly technique – line
(Ruth’s Zowie, #9), colour of pinks
and yellows (Pastorale, #24) or their
visual lyricism (Untitled, #6 and 15).
Some also were coloured by a personal
response to the subject themselves (Marilyn
Monroe, #20). Musically the technique
is an interconnection of tonality, atonality
and serialism that is united by a wide
variety of elaborate means (pedalling
being the most obvious on first listening).
The opening barrage of dense chords
leads to suspended clouds and tranquil
spaces that allow, I suspect, for reflection
as well as purely technical playability.
Small Decoy
employs both pre-recorded sounds played
back into the prepared piano during
performance to lend the overall timbre
wooden and metallic facets that correspond
to the materials found in Bonevardi’s
work. Prelude to Jackson Pollock’s
"Autumn Rhythm" responds
to a visual spontaneity in the work.
It also encapsulates intellectually
the nine individual letters of Jackson
Pollock’s name within a framework that
appears innocently as a perpetuum
mobile. Homage to Franz Kline
is notably different in that the response
appears purely architectural to Kline’s
strongly figured blocks of pigment on
the canvas. The apparently random use
of fists on the keyboard to create great
bursts of immutable sound – almost noise
– results, however improbably, from
careful mathematics and illustrative
graphs in the score – perhaps the closest
that Lieber comes to a total fusing
of both the visual and the musical.
Edvins Strautmanis’
Sea Wall has at least some loose
connection in terms of painterly technique
with the work of Jackson Pollock. Both
painted on the floor of their studio,
but whereas Pollock preferred the liberal
fluidity of action painting, Strautmanis
stressed a finer textural quality, here
achieved by using brooms to manipulate
the paint – and it is the roughness
of the bristle strokes that Lieber strives
to capture, in addition to some impression
of the visual composition.
De Kooning appears
again, but this time Elaine’s work is
the subject, and Bacchus himself looms
large in the composition as Lieber employs
a technique similar to the one he employed
a year earlier in capturing Willem’s
Preludes.
In terms of aural effect
produced, the most haunting belongs
to the longest single work contained
here: Tomb of Hasegawa. Tumults
of black sound, metamorphosed out of
all recognition from those produced
by a piano, the work seems more percussive
in quality - and, as Bartók observed,
the piano is essentially a percussive
instrument. The beat predominates over
conventional pianistic tone, which only
makes sparing appearances. The choir
too is changed, dehumanised almost.
The speaker recites the Japanese text
in a hushed, clipped voice before a
general fading from sound to silence.
As music Lieber’s output
is something that (depending on individual
tastes) instantly appeals and demands
an immediate replay or not. However,
what he sets out to achieve cannot be
instantly dismissed and merits investigation
by those with a serious and dedicated
interest in visual and/or musical thought.
Evan Dickerson
Edvard
Lieber (piano, * prepared piano, + electronically
altered piano) 
for
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