"Time Shards" at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
November 14, 2001

On Wednesday November 14, 2001, Santa Fe New Music performed on the "Time Shards" series at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, curated by Barbara Monk Feldman. The program for the evening:

Program Notes

Tonight's program focuses on a consistent thread of Twentieth Century modernism: the persistent desire to explore new and different structures and forms. In this exploration, music has become about much more than melody and harmony; and tonight we hear work which shifts the focus to rhythm, to color, to texture, to music as object, and to architecture and the possibilities of musical space.

These works condense a tremendous amount of energy and idea into short pieces of music. It is worth considering for this program, in these times, some words from one of tonight's composers, Morton Feldman: "Where in life we do everything we can to avoid anxiety, in art we must pursue it. This is difficult. Everything in our life and culture, regardless of our background, is dragging us away. Still, there is this sense of something imminent. And what is imminent, we find, is neither past nor the future, but simply—the next ten minutes. The next ten minutes... we can go no further than that, and we need go no further. If art has its heaven, perhaps this is it."

We open with Anton Webern. Perhaps no other composer in the Twentieth Century has had such a profound influence on the reshaping of musical space into an architectural experience. The Three Little Pieces for Cello and Piano are extremely brief, and they are charged with emotion. As Webern wrote around this time to Alban Berg: "Except for the violin piece and a few of my orchestra pieces all of my compositions from the Passacaglia (1908) on relate to the death of my mother." The Three Little Pieces were written at the height of the expressionist period, when the composer was struggling with form and composition in the context of atonality.

In his words: "While working... I had the feeling that once the 12 notes had run out, the piece was finished... it was immensely difficult." In Webern's music of this time, one feels possibly more than any other period in history the influence of existential thought: the music appears to have been rendered through a sheer force of will, as though relying solely on an act of belief. One is reminded of the lectures on Webern given by Morton Feldman, whose consistent advice to composition students was: "Believe in the material."

James Tenney is one of America's most important and unheralded living composers. A native New Mexican, he was born in Silver City in 1934, and currently teaches at CalArts. He lived in New York in the 1960's, and among a dizzying array of activities, played with the ensembles of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, co-founded the Tone Roads Ensemble, and organized the first continuous public reading of the complete "Finnegan's Wake". Tenney's substantial compositional and theoretical work has been the subject of tributes in complete editions of the journals "Soundings" and "Perspectives of New Music."

Tenney's Crystal Canon for Edgard Varèse and Wake for Charles Ives are part of his Three Pieces for Drum Quartet (the third being Hocket for Henry Cowell for 4 bass drums). Tenney has written: "Crystal Canon for Edgard Varèse is based on the snare drum 'theme' from Varèse's Ionisation. Beginning with an initial fragment only, the complete figure is built up gradually in all four canonic voices. The resulting texture evolves by a process analogous to crystal growth—a process Varèse often compared to his own music. Wake for Charles Ives is a kind of 'round' involving the cyclic repetition of a two-bar rhythmic phrase occurring in several of Ives' works. After every two repetitions, a new 'voice' is added, playing the same phrase displaced a 32nd-note earlier than the corresponding notes in the first voice. As more and more voices are introduced in this way, the original figure is gradually submerged in a continuous series of 32nd-note pulses—its own, ever-widening 'wake' of sound. The piece was originally conceived for mechanical drum, designed and built by Stephen Von Huene, and on permanent display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.'"

Edgard Varèse composed Density 21.5 for premiere by a new platinum flute, and titled the work for the exact density of platinum. In composing a flute solo with a cold, metallic soundworld, Varèse redefined an instrument traditionally associated with pastoral beauty. The final tones of the work are to be played into the sustained strings of an open piano.

As recounted in George Antheil's autobiography, "Bad Boy of Music", the Airplane Sonata was the first of his revolutionary pieces of "Machine Music", and originated from a dream that he viewed as a prophecy. In early 1922, he became enchanted with a sixteen-year-old girl he had met in Philadelphia. One night during their romance, he had an extraordinary dream in which he heard what was his own music, unlike any music he had ever heard, coming from homes in a future world of great peace and nobility. Upon awakening, he wrote down as many of the fragments of the music as he could remember, but found the next day that they were an unsatisfactory representation of what he had heard. Some weeks later, the girl's mother abruptly whisked her to Europe to avoid Antheil's encroaching affection. In frustration, Antheil turned to his dream fragments.

"...I suddenly turned to this piece of paper as though there, in its almost unintelligible scratchings, were the hieroglyphics through which I could escape into my true future—if I could only decipher them in time. I sat down at my piano and played them, over and over. Then grabbing a piece of music paper, I wrote as if by automatic writing a whole but very difficult piano sonata, the Airplane Sonata. I called it that because, as a symbol, the airplane seemed most indicative of that future into which I wanted to escape."

Johanna M. Beyer was born in Leipzig in 1888, and lived in New York from 1924 until her death in 1944. During this period she was an active participant in New York's avant-garde musical activities and she became an associate of Henry Cowell. Despite composing over 50 works, her gender, shyness, and relatively early death by ALS have left her in near obscurity. In fact, retrospective concerts of her work by Essential Music reveal that her work may have had a deeper influence on the music of Cage, Cowell, and others than is typically acknowledged.

IV was the only work of Beyer's published in her lifetime, and her name appeared as "J.M. Beyer", apparently to disguise her gender. IV is composed for nine unspecified "percussion" instruments, and is in a constant state of flux in which tempo and volume are always subtly changing. A major article about the life and music of Johanna Beyer was published in the Winter, 1996, issue of Musical Quarterly by John Kennedy.

Dreisam-Nore (1975) by the Korean composer Younghi Pagh-Paan is an evocative study in musical coloring for solo flute. Born in South Korea in 1945, Pagh-Paan moved to Germany in 1974, where she continues to live and to participate in international festivals of modern music. Dreisam is the name of a river in Freiburg, and Nore is the Korean word for song. Perhaps the variations that occur particularly with respect to dynamics and to intervallic patterns are meant to intimate the diverse physical patterns one sees on running water.

There is a relatively free and expressive approach in the composition which is underscored by a contrasting separated mood of concentrated focus. It is this mood of concentrated focus which connects Pagh-Paan's music, regardless of differences in style, to the architectural aspects of musical sound as defined in the earlier work of Webern and as well, to the concentrated lyricism of one of her contemporaries, Claude Vivier.

Claude Vivier was born in Montréal in 1948, and developed a distinctly personal and transparent compositional voice. His very promising creative spirit was cut short when he was murdered in Paris in 1983. Pulau Dewata grew out of his long journey through Asia and the Middle East in 1977, and though it is the least complex of his works, it crystallizes the effect this trip had on his superb development of melody.

Vivier left Pulau Dewata for unspecified instrumentation and open to interpretation. The work consists of a single line, harmonized with no more than four voices and with an occasional second line of counterpoint. The material is a succession of nine melodies, which owe their inspiration to Bali and Thailand ('Pulau Dewata' means 'Beautiful Isle').

Robert Ashley has an international reputation for his work in new forms of opera, multi-disciplinary music, and the use of language in/as music. The White on White Trios date from his work in the 1960's with the ONCE Group of Ann Arbor, which explored the conceptual boundaries of music, performing work heavily influenced by contemporary visual art as well as the Fluxus movement. The Trio II of White on White is governed by the natural duration of the percussion sounds and explores blending the colors and textures of the instruments used.

Christian Wolff lives in Vermont and was a close colleague of Earle Brown, John Cage, and Morton Feldman. Wolff's music, like John Cage's, is very concerned with creating open, non-hierarchical structures. Tilbury 4 is one of five Tilbury pieces named for the British pianist John Tilbury. These works can be seen as Wolff's contribution to the early minimalism of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman and others. Though they lack prescribed pulse, sound motifs come in scales and cycles, coincide and collide, creating harmony and counterpoint through chance and surprise.

Morton Feldman's Projections I is the first of his series of "Projections" pieces, a series of 'graph' compositions in which time is represented by space, and in which the spaced boxes specify register, number of simultaneous sounds, mode of production, and duration. This work is perhaps the first work of graphic notation, and heavily influenced the development of radical alternatives to traditional notation.
Feldman's work, regardless of notational method, is generally pointillistic in its sensitivity to sound, and draws an arc to Webern. Feldman offered this advice to those who would play his work:

"The use of the instrument must be as sensitive as the application of paint on canvas." Feldman had much to say about his work, but perhaps this is most quintessential: "I prefer to think of my work as: between categories. Between time and space. Between painting and music. Between the music's construction, and its surface."

— John Kennedy, Artistic Director, Santa Fe New Music