The Music of John Kennedy—Thursday, January 12, 2006, 8 pm

Santa Fe New Music presented a retrospective of the work of SFNM’s Artistic Director, John Kennedy on January 12, 2006. This program included Santa Fe premieres of three works from the 1990’s that Kennedy originally presented in New York with his ensemble Essential Music. In addition, the concert featured the premiere of his new work, First Deconstruction (in Plastic), a duo for two percussionists playing plastic recyclables that is in part an homage to the spirit of his early work with Essential Music. The concert included a pre-concert talk by the composer at 7:15 P.M. Kennedy discussed the form of these three early works and how they reflect forms of social organization, and how they are his personal melding of late 20th Century musical styles, including minimalism, open form experimentalism, and new tonality. Featured artists were Kirsten Lear, soprano; Jacquelyn Helin, piano; and David Tolen and Angela Gabriel, percussion. The concert site of the Unitarian Universalist Church was chosen in part to facilitate a performance of Exigencies of Inner Rhythm in which the audience was surrounded by the musicians and audience members had the option of sitting or lying on the floor. (Audience members were encouraged to bring a pillow! Chairs were provided as well.)

Program Notes:

In trying to forge my own voice as a young composer in New York in the 1980’s and 1990’s, my breakthrough creative moment came not from music but from Umberto Eco’s book of essays on art and culture, The Open Work. One of the essays in particular, “Form as Social Commitment,” trumpets that “the avant-garde artist protests through form,,” and that “the real content of a work of art is the vision of the world expressed in its forming.” That spoke to me, and liberated me from the weight of all the suffocating musical debates about tonality vs. atonality, complexity vs. minimalism, detached experimentalism vs. neo-romanticism. The primacy of form gave me license and courage to use whatever musical materials I wanted, contrary to any prevailing “isms”. And it drove me to search for formal designs and structures that would “imitate nature in its manner of design,” suggest social possibility, and perhaps embrace beauty without sounding archaic or derivative.

The works we hear tonight from the 1990’s reveal what I came up with, in a melding of open form, new tonality, and my take on the then-prevalent “minimalism”. Today, I can see more clearly how I integrated my influences. From John Cage, I knew open form, of using time as space rather than as the fixed points in a continuum of conventionally metered music. From Lou Harrison, I knew that scales and chord-spellings had their own organic design and simplicity that took courage to lay bare. And from the “minimalists”, I knew that patterns could be magical and endless – but I preferred to use the fashion of repetitive-pulse as a textural element rather than an essential feature.

• In the summer of 1997, the new music group I had started in New York, Essential Music, celebrated its 10th Anniversary with a 3-concert weekend at The Kitchen. For the occasion, I composed Full Measures of Devotion for the core ensemble of piano and mallet percussion. It is a tonal work with simple quotations of vernacular music, in which the ensemble gradually moves from independent individual lines in open form (proceeding at one’s own pace) to union as an ensemble. The Village Voice said of the premiere that it sounded like “cheesy Caribbean cruise music”. Little did their critic know that the piece was dedicated to my wife Rozie, who I married while on vacation in the Caribbean in 1995.

• First Deconstruction (in Plastic) is a new work and a 21st Century homage to the found-object percussion music and series of “constructions” made by John Cage about 50 years ago. My title alludes to Cage’s First Construction (in Metal). Today, plastic is everywhere, with shopping bags and packing material such as Styrofoam “peanuts”seen in remote wilderness areas, carried by winds and tides. It is an ubiquitous material that depending on its type, decomposes slowly if at all. The sound properties of plastics vary in quality, and one of the challenges of this piece is for the performers to find plastics that make the most interesting sounds and are durable enough for the work – and to recycle them as music. Each player has a set of five plastic “drums” (joint compound buckets to yogurt containers), as well as scraped plastic (such as salad bar boxes scraped with combs), and plastic shakers (corrugated water bottles filled with plastic beads). The work is very challenging and is explicitly composed and notated – there is no improvisation. It centers on a rhythmic deconstruction of the unit of five. The central theme, in 5/8 meter, is in 16th note values: 4+3+2+1. This is then perverted every which way.

• Summum Bonum (The Highest Good) is an interpretive setting of a Robert Browning poem of the same title.  To me the poem is not so much romantic as it is true in its simplicity. It evokes a timeless, animist sensibility in praising the spirit, mystery, and truth to be found in the physical. he piece is quasi-improvisatory and in open form, with individuals choosing among phrase material at their own pace. The vocal part is devoted to the vowels (the core/heart of words when spoken or sung), and the instrumental parts are thought of as providing the solidity of consonants. So, turning the setting to vocalise (melody without words) is I think an extension of Browning’s aesthetic in the poem – that beyond words lies ecstatic, wordless praise. Summum Bonum was composed for soprano Marisol Montalvo and premiered in Charleston, S.C., at the Spoleto Festival USA on June 3, 1994.

• There are many unsuspected sounds in large drums and timpani, which get used in almost all instances with cliché and with only a limited view of their potential sounds. Among these sounds are very soft, gentle, and resonant tones; the harmonics and pulses which occur from repeated strokes on large vibrating drumheads; and the microtonal deviations of pitch on pedal timpani which occur from repeated and increasingly louder play. Exigencies of Inner Rhythm is composed for this wider range of low drum sounds. It is intended for a large resonant space, in which the audience can be surrounded by the performers, and be able to hear extremely soft and resonant tones. The work lasts 45 minutes exactly with four musicians proceeding independently assisted by chronometers. The players go through a series of 27 pulse ratios from as slow as one beat every six seconds to as fast as 11 beats per second. Many extended duration works have been composed in the past 40 years and have been tagged with the label of “minimalist”, aspiring to assist the listener towards a more meditative manner of listening. This work shares this spirit but has the unconventional orchestration of low-pitched resonant drums as well as rhythmic complexity and event chaos.

Exigencies of Inner Rhythm was premiered by Essential Music at New York’s Washington Square Church on June 19, 1997.