Samuel Beckett Centenary Concert Featuring Beckett's and Morton Feldman's "Words and Music"— Saturday, October 21, 2006

Santa Fe New Music commemorated the centenary of the birth of Samuel Beckett with a concert of music inspired by and connected to his writing, by composers Charles Amirkhanian, Morton Feldman, and Philip Glass. The event includes electronic music, chamber music, and spoken word, and was preceded by a pre-concert talk with John Kennedy and Barbara Monk Feldman, widow, student, and colleague of Morton Feldman.

About the Composers:

Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) is a noted composer, sound poet, and radio producer. From 1969 to 1992 he was Music Director of KPFA Berkeley, and since 1993 he has been Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Other Minds Festival. Writes Amrikhanian about Pas de Voix:

When asked to compose a piece for an all-Samuel Beckett concert in Los Angeles, I determined not to set a text of the renowned existentialist writer but rather to sample his voice and manipulate the recording to formulate the substance of this electroacoustic piece. Upon learning Mr. Beckett did not permit his voice to be taped under any circumstances, I proceeded to record the lobby of his apartment building in Paris, the open-air Metro stop across the street, a sound poets' dinner later the same evening, and two young girls watching a mime act at the plaza near the Centre Pompidou.

Added to this were the bells of Nôtre Dame Cathedral, the crying of a precocious baby, a sound sculpture, some extended-technique electric guitar sounds and a selection of sonic bodily functions.  The result is an impressionistic cyclical narrative sound-portrait, touching on various aspects of Samuel Beckett's life mentioned in the biography by Deirdre Bair.

The piece was commissioned by Klaus Schöning of Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln.  It was given its first performance at Schoenberg Hall on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, on October 16, 1987.  The broadcast premiere took place on March 1, 1988, over WDR.

Philip Glass (b. 1937) composed his String Quartet No. 2 for Mabou Mines’ production of Samuel Beckett’s prose poem novella Company. Company was presented as a monologue in four parts, acted and directed by Frederick Neuman. Glass wrote the music in four movements, placed in the monologue according to Beckett’s directions. (“I see. The music appears in the interstices of the text, as it were.”)

Morton Feldman is perhaps the composer most closely aesthetically aligned with Samuel Beckett. His extended duration, perpetually soft music is constructed with small motives which undergo gradual and minute variation. Feldman and Beckett established a friendship which included Beckett writing the libretto for Feldman’s only opera, Neither.

Words and Music is a radio play which Beckett wrote in 1961 for BBC Radio. “Music” is written into the play as a character, and in the original production, was composed by Beckett’s cousin John Beckett. When the piece was revived for production on American radio in 1987, Beckett asked Feldman to compose the music. The resulting collaboration unites two major artists of the 20th Century, with the work of each perfectly complementing the other.

SFNM’s presentation of this radio play is in the concert format of a staged reading. For a detailed discussion of Words and Music, and an interview with Morton Feldman, go here.