Kya (1959)
Khoom –
Seven episodes of an unwritten story of love
and death in a distant land (1962)
Okanagon
(1968)
Ko-Tha
– Three Dances of Shiva (1967)
Anahit
– A Lyric Poem dedicated to Venus (1965)
Michael Lowenstern,
clarinet
Elizabeth Farnum,
soprano
Curtis Macomber,
violin
Sequitur
Paul Hostetter,
conductor
Never
has William Blake’s line To see a world
in a grain of sand seemed more appropriate
than for this wildly original voice. Born
an Italian aristocrat, Giacinto Scelsi studied
composition with a student of Schoenberg in
1935-36, but suffered a mental breakdown in
the 1940’s, and as part of his recovery began
to play a single note on the piano over and
over again, examining its properties and ultimately
finding spiritual nuance in this microscopic
universe. In perhaps Scelsi’s best-known work,
Quattro Pezzi from 1959, each of the
four pieces asks an entire orchestra to contemplate
a single pitch – respectively F, B, A-flat
and A – and one of music’s most radical
experiments.
Clarinetist
Michael Lowenstern caught the spirit of the
evening perfectly in the opening Kya
(also from 1959), and expertly conducted by
Paul Hostetter. Imagine a sort of zoned-out
klezmer soloist slowly lowered into a room
with Tibetan monks chanting and you might
– just might – have a sliver of the flavor
of what is going on here. As with all of Sequitur’s
outstanding performers, Lowenstern can only
be commended for his exacting concentration
in music that gives new meaning to the word
"focus."
Each
of Khoom’s seven sections uses unusual
instrumentation, such as in the second, in
which the voice is combined with bongos and
French horn. In an extraordinarily controlled
performance that drew loud ovations at the
end, soprano Elizabeth Farnum often held a
pitch at rock-steadiness, while the musicians
circled around her only a microtone away.
Those familiar with Charles Ives’ song Like
a sick eagle will grasp the problems inherent
in tackling this kind of music, and Farnum
can only be praised to the skies for her eerie,
shimmering work, her voice circling through
the hall like some kind of unearthly airplane.
Ideally
the spare Okanagon is intended to be
performed behind a curtain, so that the audience
is unable to discern which of its three musicians
is producing a particular sound. While no
screen was used here, it was equally fascinating
watching Eduardo Leandro on tam-tam and harpist
June Han (who appeared to be striking the
strings with an orange-handled tuning fork)
plunge into Scelsi’s obsessive territory,
with Roger Wagner on bass making the serenely
throbbing result sound almost like some sort
of stripped-down jazz.
In an
interesting counterpoint to Ko-Tha,
the entire back wall of the theater was flooded
with a projection of what looked like white
corpuscles – globules floating in a sky-blue
pool. When Matthew Gold came out a friend
whispered, "I didn’t know he could play
the guitar!" and it quickly became evident
that this keenly thoughtful percussionist
indeed had not necessarily learned
to play the instrument. As elsewhere, Scelsi
deploys the guitar precisely for its timbral
effects, virtually ignoring pitch entirely.
Sitting on a cushioned platform with his legs
crossed and the guitar resting across his
knees Japanese koto-style, Gold used a variety
of techniques: knocking with his knuckles,
tapping with fingertips, slapping with the
palm of his hand, strumming the open strings
singly or in groups, and occasionally venturing
high up the guitar neck next to the tuning
pegs to make soft tinkling sounds.
The
evening closed with Anahit, for solo
violin and 18 instruments, with Curtis Macomber’s
expertly controlled tone floating above a
texture constantly pulsating like a swarm
of bees. On paper, the violin part by itself
probably looks almost inconsequential, but
when combined with the rest of the ensemble
the composer’s intentions become clear. Beginning
in low registers, the instrumentalists diverge
and reassemble in minute pitch gradations,
methodically ascending to higher ones over
the course of about fifteen minutes, hovering
about each other and the soloist. At times
I felt like my brain was being slowly stretched
out of shape, with my ears constantly recalibrating
themselves to adjust to Scelsi’s tiny demands.
Again, Hostetter’s calm imagination knew just
how to drive this piece, and frankly, it is
not overstatement to say that many conductors
would find this music completely bewildering.
It should
be said that Scelsi in general requires a
good deal of concentration, or at least a
willingness to temporarily abandon all expectations
of what music is "about" and have
the composer lead you into his unorthodox
world. The perhaps surprising thing is how
absorbing these explorations actually are:
just ask the some 500 people packed in to
Miller Theatre.
Bruce Hodges
Readers
interested in Scelsi might like to refer to
the following review written by Peter Woolf,
one of the first British writers to bring
the composer to widespread notice.
http://musicweb-international.com/SandH/2002/Jan02/Cutting_Edge.htm
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