POMOZART: A PostModern Musical "Wake" for WAM —January 13, 2007

Santa Fe New Music commemorated the end of Mozart’s 250th birthday year with a postmodern “musical wake” in his honor, with contemporary works that carry the spirit of Mozart into the future. The program features homages to Mozart by Michael Nyman, Alexander Raskatov, Alfred Schnittke, and John Cage. The concert also features a performance of Mozart’s own Masonic Funeral Music, presented in Santa Fe’s Masonic Scottish Rite Temple.

PROGRAM:

Notes on the Program by John Kennedy

Mozart’s music has in the past year been played to death in celebration of his 250th birthday on January 27, 2006; and it now seems the right occasion to give his music a wake of sorts, bringing his spirit into the present with music of our time.

Probably the most beloved of classical music composers, Mozart is for many people synonymous with a love of music. To the larger culture, Mozart is a kind of myth, an iconic stereotype of classical music. But musicians and composers remain drawn to Mozart the person, a broke working musician who suffered fools yet incessantly made creative, good-humored and full-hearted music in whatever situation he found himself. For composers today, who have endured hyper-seriousness in the music world as well as their own share of being misunderstood, Mozart is a brother in the lodge of devotion to art. He is the great model of working inventively and playfully in honor of an art we can hope to only partly master and understand. And it seems likely that composers of the future will continue to identify with Mozart, and will continue to pay homage to his spirit for years to come.

We might consider this program in relation to Norman Lebrecht’s 1997 book “Who Killed Classical Music?”, which raised many of the salient issues that plague a backward-looking industry, and sparked a debate that continues. Many people would contend that the music itself can’t die, yet it is undeniable that something in our culture’s relationship to classical music has passed away. Herein is the promise of new music, to serve as the fuel for a wake, breathing life back into the body of a living artform, in which classical and post-classical belong together.

In Re Don Giovanni (1991), by Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman is the leading figure of the minimalist movement from England. In 1977 he began composing for amplified ensembles, blending the sensibilities of rock and classical music. In Re Don Giovanni is a deconstruction of the first sixteen bars of the “Catalog Aria” from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and was one of the first works Nyman composed for amplified band. It was arranged for strings for the 1991 bicentenary of Mozart’s death.

Moz-Art (1981), by Alfred Schnittke
Alfred Schnittke appropriated a fragment of Mozart’s Music for Pantomime (k 416d) to compose this gregarious and charming duo for two violins, Moz-Art. Schnittke’s compositional “sampling” expanded into other versions of this work including his related but different work, Moz-Art a la Haydn.

Music withOut horiZon soundscApe that neveR sTops (1991), by John Cage
The title of this work is a mesostic (a poetic form invented by John Cage) using Mozart’s name. Utilizing chance operations to determine the time of entrances, durations, and spatial locations, brief excerpts of music by Mozart are performed in a collage manner. Cage realized the first performance in 1991 for the bicentenary of Mozart’s death, using cassette tapes. This is the first performance to use live musicians.

Five Minutes From the Life of W.A.M. (2000), by Alexander Raskatov
Raskatov’s beautiful evocation of Mozart is scored for solo violin, string ensemble, and percussion. The piece opens and closes with wind chimes, as if a spirit comes into the room and then departs – personified by the solo violin, who maintains an 18th Century sensibility which we hear with modern ears.

“I have now made a habit of being prepared in all affairs of life for the worst. As death is the true goal of our existence, I have formed these last years such close relations with this best and truest friend of mankind that his image is no longer terrifying to me, but is very soothing and consoling, and I thank my God for graciously granting me the opportunity of learning that death is the key which unlocks the door to our true happiness. I never lie down at night without reflecting that young as I am, I may not see another day.”
– letter from Mozart to his father Leopold

Masonic Funeral Music, K. 477 (1785), by W.A. Mozart
Mozart was 28 when he became a freemason in 1784, an experience which led him to compose a sizable body of “Masonic music” as well as providing much of the basis for his opera The Magic Flute. The Masonic Funeral Music was composed in 1785 for the deaths of Duke August of Mecklenburg and Count Esterhazy von Galantha. Using a small orchestra, this brief and beautifully elegiac work unites stylistic elements of both sacred and secular music.

Drowning by Numbers (1998), by Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman writes:

“I composed the soundtrack to Peter Greenaways’s film Drowning By Numbers in 1987. The director’s instructions for the music for The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) had concerned the provision of a Purcell-based composition for each of the twelve drawings. The instruction for Drowning By Numbers was even more direct: all my music should be derived from Mozart’s - from the slow movement of the Sinfonia Concertante in E flat K364, which Greenaway used in its untransformed form to ‘celebrate’ the deaths of the three husbands each murdered by his wife.

“Peter Greenaway and I had already plundered this music for his 1979 film The Falls where the brief titles music for each of the 92 characters was derived from the gorgeous tune in E flat that ends the ‘exposition’ (bars 58 - 62) with a chord progression - an interrupted I -VI - IV - V - I which marginally links classical music with doowop. For the Drowning By Numbers soundtrack I decided that while I would obviously revisit this favourite theme, the whole of this rich and suggestive movement was ripe for recomposing.

“Like the majority of my film scores, Drowning By Numbers was written for the Michael Nyman Band, and for the chamber orchestra version I have reworked six movements from the original of which half feature solo violin and viola as Mozart does in the Sinfonia Concertante.”

In his score, Nyman “samples” snippets of Mozart’s slow movement in the Sinfonia Concertante, primarily the melody of E flat, C, A flat, B flat. Each of the six movements presents this minimal material as melody and harmony at different rates of speed, with playful use of diminution, retrograde, and inversion.

Nyman’s work proves to be a loving ode to Mozart, and almost seamlessly transforms Mozartian style into a mélange of classical, rock and minimalist music. The American Premiere of the chamber orchestra version was conducted by SFNM’s John Kennedy at Spoleto Festival USA in 2003.

John Kennedy interview with KUNM's Spencer Beckwith on new music (January 5, 2006) [3.4MB]